Blog Post 9 - Course Reflection

Over the course of this semester I've gone through a quite some troubles in truly finding what I want to do in life. As a member of the animation/illustration department I've been working for the past 5 years looking for a way to break into the job industry. However I ran into some personal problem and inflections when trying to figure out my life.

This class in a sense helped remind me what it is that I love and like to do. I love playing games. I love tinkering with the rules. Finding things out, and discovering new ways to entertain. I truly believe that games are the media of the future and the product and the industry will only continue to grow.

This class helped me find that. What I want to be in the future, I'm still unsure of. But I definitely know which direction I want to go to.

This year I created two different games. Unfortunately one was put on hold for me but I do what I can to provide input. that game was

Lazercat y Laser Dog. The first game I ever made and one of the few things that I was personally proud to be a part of. This project is still underway and I'm hoping to make it into something big.

The second game I made was the Love Live fan game Umi Run, the one I personally designed for this class. Though I ran into some issues with my partner I developed something on my own. Problem solved and every step of the way had a blast.

As silly as the game is I'm proud to have made it myself. This class offered me lessons in a different manner. And reminded me of who I am and what I like to do.

In retrospect the class lacks some form of urgency. Unfortunately there are those who take it seriously and some who don't. The random RNG in the middle of class with the group projects and the group making themselves were really my main turnoffs. Twice I got placed into kind of difficult to work with groups. However that's just the luck of the draw I guess. Everything is a game, but to keep playing is the real challenge. I don't really know what else to say about this class. A lot of the information and knowledge was mostly known to me. but the hands on experience with creating a game was definitely the best. I'll keep in touch through game dev and such!

~Neal

Blog Post 8 - Final Project Update

For my final project I decided to take the code and the assets from our small group project and expand and complete the game Umi Run.

So far I've just taken the feedback received from the play sessions and included the 4-axis movement
and fixed a few bugs that I found. The game is way more balanced and I've continued to include more of the "girls" from the source material.

Really its just a matter of pushing forward and finishing it off. Ill update this as I go along.

I've released a version to a small site to get a bit of feedback and am slowly incorporating the ideas given to me. However its still much on the down lo for now.

http://otonokizaka.org/showthread.php?tid=220 - the thread in which I posted. If you try hard enough you may even find my post on a certain subreddit.