Monday, March 30th

Class Hours: 10:05 – 2:40
Mr. Bohmann | wbohmann@ewsd.org

10:05 Today’s Notes & Attendance

Today is the official start of Quarter 4 (dramatic drum roll)
Today is the start of Week 26
Three full weeks then vacation
NTHS Ceremony is scheduled for Thursday, April 9th @ 6pm
Vermont Highway Safety Alliance results should be coming today – keep an eye on those emails

10:07 Mail Check

10:10 What do Game Designer’s Do?

Poppy (Lead Programmer) from Mythic Quest – courtesy of Polygon.com

There are lots of areas of expertise in the field of game design. Three primary roles/categories encompass this career path. Those roles include:

Game Designer
Game Programmer
Game Artist

Some of those categories broken down into specific roles include:

Lead Game Designer – defines the game, establishes the core concept and features of the game – big picture person

Level Designer – designs the layout, flow, layout and placement of props, maybe even some scripting

Assets & Environmental Designer – works with the creative director to model the worlds, assets and builds

Content Designer – comes up with the quests, the story, the dialog, the missions and in game material

Systems Designer – determines the collection of mechanics that controls the outcome, combat system or inventory system, magic systems – you get the picture

Economics Designer determines the award system, costs of items (like swords) awards, level ups, damage, etc…

Creative Director – sets the creative course of the game and holds to overall vision together

Game Producer – ensures funding and different roles are working together to produce a high quality game on time

Let’s take a quick dive into the life of Environmental Artist David Lesperance. David creates the rich, lifelike backdrops for games such as World of Warcraft, Halo and Diablo. Check out David’s work on Artstation.

What is is like to be a level designer – skills and process of a normal day

How about working in Japan as a game designer (called game planner)

How about working remote and game dev

Activity: Career Exploration

Open Google Classroom and look for the Assignment called Game Careers. Explore several jobs (anywhere on the globe) that are hiring in the field of game design or development. Some places to look:

Look at several jobs to get an idea of what kinds of work you might be interested in. Then, answer the following questions.

What types of jobs are there in the game industry?
What types of jobs in the game industry did you look at or find most interesting to you? What did you like? Why is this job interesting to you
What kinds of qualifications are necessary for the jobs you looked at? Where are a lot of the jobs located? What kinds of skills would you need for this job?
What career search engines did you look at? Which did you like the most for career exploration?

10:50 Morning Break (10 minutes)

11:00 Working with Singletons

What is a singleton? The Singleton pattern in Unity is a design pattern used to ensure that a class has only one instance and provides a global point of access to that instance. This is commonly used for managing game-wide systems like audio managers, game managers, or inventory systems.

Game Manager object that will not destroy as we move scenes, levels, players, health. Our game manager will manage logic that needs to persist across the game (score, health, etc…)

Let’s begin in our new pinball game (you should have bumpers, flippers and colliders set at this point) with a Game Manager and some starting code.

First we’ll begin by making a Game Manager Singleton on an empty object.

We create a script and place on that empty game object. Then turn into a PreFab (best if using the game manager in each scene)
To create a basic Singleton, you use a public static variable to hold the instance and a check in Awake() to destroy duplicates.

// 1. Static reference to the single instance
    public static GameManager Instance { get; private set; }

    private void Awake()
    {
        // 2. Check if an instance already exists
        if (Instance != null && Instance != this)
        {
            Destroy(gameObject); // Destroy the duplicate
            return;
        }

        // 3. Set the instance to this object
        Instance = this;

        // 4. Keep across scenes if using more than one scene
        DontDestroyOnLoad(gameObject);
    }

    // Example global method to get a score
    public void UpdateScore(int points) 
    { 
      /* logic */ 
    }

11:55 Lunch

*Creative Commons Attribution 4.0* – Animal Style Burgers from In-n-Out

12:25 The Worst Video Game Ever Made

Let’s listen to a short podcast and respond to a few questions. Episode 387: “The Worst Video Game Ever” from 99% Invisible. Link to Podcast.
In this episode you will learn a little history about the video game console, Atari, and what happens when you don’t consider your primary user.

Sometime this week we’ll extend and look at the origins of video games, esports and classic games like pac man and space invaders as well as a very cool game designer’s journal in the Netflix Series High Score.
– Episode 1 Boom & Bust