The first few days of each quarter at Scad are easily the hardest ones for me to get through. It’s the point where I feel the most unprepared, behind and daunted by the work load. I know I’ll hit my stride by the second week, but getting a story line, a game level and a research paper thrown into your lap all at once doesn’t seem very manageable time-wise. Then I take a deep breath, realize I have ten weeks to complete everything and jump in full force.
One of my classes is Narrative Content Design, taught by Brenda Brathwaite who is cool enough to have her own Wiki page. The course focuses on developing a storyline for a game, complete with characters, quests and all that jazz, and then building a playable level at the end. So far my idea is the young main character starts having these lucid dreams that are influenced by experiences he has. For example, as you meet people in game, they might start appearing in your dreams, or if you acquire a certain item through gameplay you might be able to use it in your dream. Eventually your dreams become so strong they start to influence the real world, in both good and bad ways. You have some cool powers as a result of this reversal, but your nightmares start to leak into reality and you have to take’em out with your sling of spiffyness. Hey if David can take out Goliath with a well placed rock, nightmare creatures should be no problem. I’m really looking forward to where this idea could go as I spend more time on it.
My second class is Environment and Level Design, and I’m trying to parallel my level design to my storyline from above. I’d like to build some sort of temple burrowed into a mountain/cliff side, perhaps with some sort of stream running through it, a really pretty meditation area and some gorgeous decorations. It’s hard because the class is geared towards guys and making FPS deathmatches and capture the flags, whereas mine is meant to be a level out of an action/adventure game and not necessarily intended to be balanced or symmetrical. I might ask to build my level in the Oblivion CS instead of the Unreal 3 editor, although I would definitely like playing around with Unreal regardless.
My third class is Art & Spirituality, which won’t be too bad despite the 12 page research paper. I don’t think I’ve written one that long since high school so I guess I’m due. We meditated for 15 minutes today at the end of class and I constructed a fly-through of my cliff temple the whole time. hah.
I made an awesome concoction of Skyline chili yesterday with Mike (my bf) that included spaghetti, chili, oyster crackers and tons of shredded cheese. YUM. Almost as good as cheesy biscuits but not quite, as the cheese was mexican and not straight cheddar. I feel like a cheese racist?
