Lights? Camera? Action!

五月八日（金曜日）雨
A.M. Game Design - Games Studies 1: Action Games (Trainer: Hattori-san)
Today we had a new trainer, a game designer with 20 years of experience in the industry. Hattori-san started out as a 2D pixel artist, but because of the increase in popularity of 3D in game visuals, migrated to doing game design at the advice of Kawashima-san.

Hattori-san began by explaining that in the west, game genres are quite fixed, and scheduling and budgeting is deemed more important in game development. Also, the pursuit of realism in western games often resulted in the sacrifice of fun factor and new gameplay ideas. In Japan, there is a wider variety of game genres and gameplay styles, and Japanese game creators are always pushing for new ideas and new ways of creating fun in games.

Action games are arguably the most basic form of video game. An action game has three components - Action, Stage and Enemies, and the game takes place in real-time. The Player Character's (PC) actions direct the progress of the game through stages, and enemies character, traps and puzzles offer challenging obstacles to the PC's progress. Real-time handling is required, since game time advances even if the player does nothing. Action games are considered a difficult genre because the player has limited time to strategise on the spot, and his/her skills has direct influence on the gameplay. But because of direct control, the player can also emphatize more with his/her avatar character, and this emotional involvement enhances the excitement of action games.

We had a quick run of the evolution of action games:

• Super Mario Brothers (2D platformer) - a well-balanced game design, the player knows what to do without the need for instructions or explanation
• Super Mario World (2D platformer) - introduced gameplay complexity in the form of friend characters with different abilities, and power up items
• Biohazard (3D action) - cinematic camera views, direction of attack becomes 3D
• Dynasty Warriors (3D action) - introduced multiple simultaneous group battles, with large number of AI characters and enemies
• God of War (3D action) - cinematic action with context sensitive attacks which improves game pacing and breaks monotony

When designing games, action or otherwise, it is important to achieve the following two goals:

1. User-friendliness - the game must be easy to understand and not frustrating
2. Move the player emotionally - give the player an exciting experience, whether it's the exhilaration of speed, horror or humor

P.M. Game Visual 2 - Advanced Game Visual Rendering 3 (Trainer: Kawashima-san), Visual Arts Pipeline for HDK (Trainer: Kawashima-san)
In the first afternoon class, we went through more of what we already know - more advanced visual techniques for the Chidori engine and PA viewer. One technique of particular note is the pre-rendering technique of baking ambient occlusion into either texture maps or vertex color. It is a common technique by now, but I've already implemented it in the games I worked on in Korea 6 or 7 years ago.

Home Sweet Home
The second afternoon class was more interesting. We got to touch the PlayStation Home Development Kit for the first time. Using Home Tools for Maya, we were able to create assets such as environments furniture for the PlayStation Home. Just by trying out the Home Tools in Maya, one see the complexity of the Home environment and the effort put into the development tools. For homework, we were supposed to create a simple Home scene. I created a funny stage, which I will capture some screenshots off the PS3 Debug Station next week XD