So this week we started modeling our characters in 3DI. We had a full day workshop where we modeled everything together at the same time as our teacher. It took a long time, but it was easier than I thought and I’m actually quite pleased with the result.
This is what Quinn is looking like right now:
So far I’ve mostly put work into his torso and upper body, so I’d like to develop his legs and feet a bit more. And as you probably can tell, he doesn’t have a head. Our teacher is yet to tell us how to make a head in the best way, but I might still try to make one on my own during the weekend.
I’ve used up about half of the tris count for this model so far, as the goal is 3000. I suspect a lot of tris will go into modeling the character’s head and hair, so I’m thinking I’ll do that first before adding more detail to the body.
In our advanced game design course we’ve started playing and analysing board games. It’s a lot of fun, but it also takes a lot of time, especially with the more complex games where you have to learn a lot of rules or where you have to set up a lot of pieces before you can actually begin.
When analysing the games we’re supposed to break them down into ”atoms”, or challenges. If you view the entire game as a challenge, you can then break down that challenge into multiple smaller ones, and so on until you’ve reached the stage ”move token on game board” or ”roll a die”. This is interesting and valuable but it’s also pretty hard.
My favorite game so far has been Gloom, which I’ve actually played before. It’s a relatively simple card game where you control a family of characters, and your goal is to make your family as miserable as possible before killing them. You can also sabotage the other players by making their characters happy!
It’s made in an interesting way, because the cards are transparent, and you play modifiers on top of character cards to make them happy or sad, and only the visible modifiers count. The modifiers also all have funny descriptions like ”Was mocked by midgets. It’s the little things that hurt the most.” or ”Was popular in parliment. It’s a good thing the voters are morons.” So I totally recommend it!
In contrast, my least favorite game so far has been Tide of Iron. It’s a WWII strategy game where you can play many different scenarios between America and Germany, and each scenario has a different setup with different maps, units, skills, events and sometimes even rules. There are 200 little plastic figurines, several decks of different cards and dozens of tokens to keep track of.
We’ve spent three hours so far just trying to set the board up correctly and trying to understand the rules. We’re getting there, but slowly. In the end we were all so tired and unable to concentrate that we decided to stop for today and go home to try and read up on the rules during the weekend so that we can try again on Monday. In my personal opinion, this isn’t how board games are supposed to work.
Tova Svensson 