Summer and Vehicles

Ahh summer. Soaring temperatures, free time, and (my personal favorite) Summer Camps. I've had the privilege of administrating and teaching at the Ferris State University - Grand Rapids Digital Animation and Game Design summer camps for 3 years now. As one of the adjunct professors said to me the other day it would seem I have been bitten by the "Teaching Bug." I'm not going to lie, I really enjoy passing on my knowledge to high school students who have a genuine interest in making games for others. There was certainly never such a program when I was their age and thus it took quite a bit of time for me to get where I am today (I'm almost 28). It also helps confirm to me that I know how to do this stuff. I primarily teach Storyboarding and Story Development, basic poly modeling with 3d Studio Max and slightly more advanced Unreal concepts such as lighting, particle emitters, and importing your own textures and static meshes into the engine. It's great to see what the students come up with by the end of the week and you can always tell the students that are going to go far. They are the ones that took their projects home every night and continued to work on them and I do everything I can to help them be successful.

Now a lot of my free time as of late has been swallowed up by the Unreal 3 Editor but strangely enough not on level creation. I have fancied myself more of a vehicle designer lately and have designed a few things meant to compliment the gameplay in my WAR-Piracy map. All these vehicles are currently in the concept art stage and I am studying the process of how to get them into the game once they are finished. The first is a simple boat to get players from one warship to the other if they did not want to use jump pads or flying vehicles, just a simple troop transport with one weapon. The second is a flying troop transport that would allow the players being transported the ability to shoot out of it, kind of like a futuristic VTOL aircraft. Lastly, my pride and joy, the Axon Chimera. This is a wheeled mech vehicle equipped with a powerful chaingun and a shield. It is designed to make a single soldier powerful enough to take on light vehicles and massed infantry and serve as a maneuverable counterbalance to the Necris Darkwalker. That and I'm a sucker for mech combat. I hope to design a couple maps that pit a number of Chimeras versus a Necris equivalent which I am designing as well.

Lastly I would like to talk about the Diablo 3 Petition to change the art direction of the game. The folks who have signed this petition feel that the new art style for Diablo 3 does not conform to the previous games that are basically filled with the color black. Now considering the last game was in 2000 and the pace of technology computers can handle much more color these days. The concept of drawing nothing outside the players light radius may have been a technological constraint of the day disguised as a gameplay mechanic. Current graphic technology can now handle vast amounts of enemies and expansive environments being drawn on the screen at the same time. Also the new art direction may represent lessons learned by the Blizzard Art team. The final point to make is that games are a form of art that is being created for the public to enjoy and that some people will not like it. The number of people who have signed this petition are but a small part of the fan base Blizzard has for its games all over the world. The game will not suffer from a few dissenters on the internet. I say to Blizzard keep providing us with your art and I will keep enjoying it for many years to come.