The year is actually 2020.

August 2020 - Making the best of this wonderful year, I signed up for the summer-exclusive game design course CSE 490 in the wake of my summer plans being cancelled. Taught by industry veterans Dave Hunt and Natalie Burke, this was the course I had long sought to fill the gaps in my self-taught knowledge of game development.

It covered a basic pipeline from two perspectives: development of a single character and development of the world they exist in. We conceptualized, prototyped, and finalized each while learning about tools and techniques unique to them. The class also encouraged a degree of creative freedom unlike anything I had ever seen— the only requirement being that the character was humanoid. It was far and away the most work I’ve put into any course but also the most fun and rewarding experience I have had with my studies.

I designed a project based in my deepest loves of video games: an enormous, detailed open world, beautiful real-time cinematography, deep visual narrative, interesting characters and gameplay that far exceeded the scope of the class. In my typical fashion it was ambitious— I wanted the final product to be a blockbuster, E3-demo quality experience— however the greatest challenge of the project quickly became coming to terms with reality. Trying to stuff a Destiny-level-of-detail, AAA production into a ten week class as a one man development team just wasn’t realistic. I came to accept that the final product wouldn’t reach the fidelity I wanted, but I still tried, just… creatively.

I found inventive solutions to build the large and believable world I wanted in a relatively short amount of time, like importing a heightmap of Boulder, Colorado so I didn’t have to manually sculpt a mountain range at that scale. I also designed the city modularly, building the skyscrapers from a handful of blocks that I modeled and using pre-made assets to achieve decent detail at street level. The final product isn’t the AAA game I originally envisioned, but I am still so proud of it. It is an embodiment of every new skill I picked up from the class, an evolution of everything I had previously learned, and a testament to my creativity, gumption, and work ethic. This experience also has me thirstier than ever to work in a team, as a tiny part of an enormous production.

Developing the Character

CSR-377 is a barista robot in the year 2557. She was manufactured 7 years prior and is assigned to serve in New Denver. She goes by "Cassie." Cassie hates her assignment— the humans get mad at her over the smallest inconveniences, frequently throwing coffee at her and calling her robotic slurs. When she is at work she is sad, which is ironic because the expression fabricated on her face is an idiotic smile. She enjoys hard rock and EDM, art (specifically on masks and helmets), and any chance she can get to charge (sleep). However, all of these dwarf in comparison to her one true passion— hover bike racing. She spends every second she can blasting through the countryside at hundreds of miles per hour, racing against other robots and humans alike. It is a highly illegal activity— if caught perpetrators are terminated— so she wears masks, ornaments, and a signal scrambler while racing to hide her identity.

The class led us through drawing concept art, block modeling, gray modeling, adding ornaments, texturing (very simply), rigging, and animating the character. The assignments were geared toward organic characters so I frequently had to think about how the instructions translated to my situation. For instance, the modeling assignment was very specific about what edge loops to place where in the interest of having the topology line up nicely when connecting it all together, but since I was making this metal-framed machine those instructions weren’t very applicable. However by communicating with course staff and leaning on previous experience I determined the crux of the assignment was the intelligent placement of vertices to make the model easy to connect into one continuous mesh. I found this internalization of the important concepts in each assignment a very enriching aspect of the class.

Evolution of The world

The world side of the class followed a similar pipeline to the character, however it came with a whole different set of concepts and jargon. We conceptualized, white-boxed, Texel-checked, textured, shaded, and lit the world, as well as explored Unity’s terrain building tools.

The thing I found most interesting about this part of the class was learning about concepts of level design that I had never heard of before, like that players will inherently go towards the highest point in view, follow lighting cues without thinking, and the goal as the developer to strike the perfect balance of guiding the player while making them still feel in control of the experience. When we were learning this I had just finished The Last of Us Part II, and mentally scrubbing back through my experience I found it remarkable how present these concepts were and how masterfully they were applied.

I am no Naughty Dog (yet) but I did try to apply these to my level as well, presenting the player leaving the coffee shop with the option to go towards empty boringness in one direction or tall, interesting buildings in the other. I also placed spotlights to guide them to Cassie’s apartment where they would find the hoverbike and ride out into the countryside where the player direction was much looser. I wouldn’t call it impeccable level design but I think it was a good first effort and I’m excited to try again.