Post by illdiewithoutpi on Oct 16, 2016 0:44:57 GMT -6
I have two posts worth of content, so I'm going to make a second post tomorrow (probably) about the super cool story I have from this class. This is the half-story-half-rant bit about the bad part of it.
It's a long-un, so be prepared! Hopefully my sentence length and paragraph spacing is varied enough to mitigate monotony :P
I'm lucky enough to happen to go to a high school that offers a video game development class, but it's taken me until my senior year to get into it because of silly schedule issues that delayed me quite a bit.
I've had some friends who have taken this class before, so I entered knowing a few things about it. This is the relevant info:
1. We use game maker in the class, which is great for me since I've been using it for years.
2. We use game maker 8.1 because the old tech guy who was too stupid or lazy to block the proxy site I used to watch anime at school was apparently unable to unblock GMS on our school's security system for some reason. Not so great.
About a week ago we wrapped up miscellaneous game related projects and started using game maker. On that first day, we were told to spend the class period playing through all of the games people turned in as final projects last year. I was actually a little excited, until... well, until I saw the games.
Out of all of the 10 or so games, there were only 2 that were good to some extent.
<This paragraph describes the good games and why they were good. If you want to get right to the train wreck, skip this paragraph>
The two somewhat successful games had about the quality you would expect to be average from a project like this. The best was called "Derek the Chicken" and was a game where you played as a chicken and collected eggs that randomly spawned in a large room while avoiding weasels that ran through it. It was actually fun to play, starting off as a square room with one easily avoidable obstacle, but slowly increasing the complexity of the layout and introducing more challenges as you played that were interesting and... well, fun. Even with the really bad controls, the game was definitely enjoyable to play.
The other game was a helicopter game that, if I remember correctly, was called "PRESS SPACE". The creators knew their limitations and thus used a minimalistic black and white art style that actually looked pretty appealing (at least, compared to the others.) You controlled a small circle and avoided other circles that came towards you from the right (the way a basic helicopter game would be). It took a second for pressing or releasing the space bar to reverse your direction, though, which meant that you had to plan ahead in order to properly avoid the obstacles. Because of that, it became much more interesting than you would expect. It didn't have any increasing difficulty or complexity so it became dull very quickly, but despite being a very simple game it was still the second best game in the bunch.
Excuse my french, but what's next is something that I can only describe accurately as a total shitstorm.
First off, there were no games whatsoever that had competent controls. Even the simplest top-down perspective made me question whether the keyboard was properly plugged in. (The only exception was "PRESS SPACE", but a one button helicopter game shouldn't get credit for nailing its controls.)
There was a fighting game where all of the characters played the exact same and all of the normal mechanics of a fighting game were butchered to the point where it had no real interest. The only kind of interesting thing was that it had crappy trump sprites in it a lot, but even when the game was made 6+ months ago that had already stopped being funny.
There was an rpg that was probably planned to be way bigger than what it was as a final product. Every random encounter was completely meaningless since they incorporated an ability that pretty much full-healed your team AND dealt damage to the enemy, making you completely invincible. Just to make it even worse, the overworld navigation was horrible. It might have been confined to the paths on the ground, but I really don't know since the controls were so inconsistent.
There was some game that didn't really have a genre, or if it did it was completely obfuscated by the fact that the player could barely move anyway.
There was a platformer that just couldn't achieve cohesive controls or anything, so they did that thing where you make a bunch of purposefully bad assets and music to pretend that it's unplayable as a joke. Needless to say, it wasn't funny.
There was another platformer that had the same problem as the last except they didn't even try to salvage it.
etc, etc, etc.
I quickly became aware that, while this class may teach (or at least give opportunities to learn about) good theory, people were severely limited by their inability to actually use the program they were building their games in. And just a few days ago, I learned why.
We have been assigned tutorial projects that are supposed to teach us how to use game maker. there are 5 in total, and having almost completed the 4th I can confidently say that they are all complete garbage. (Just as a side note, the teacher didn't make any of these, she probably had to try to find a good tutorial for GM drag and drop, something rumored to be seen in the shadows but suspiciously elusive)
The obvious problem with these tutorials is one that a lot of game maker tutorials have, where they try to teach you how to make a game by just listing off instructions for what actions to drag where and completely forgo the step where they explain what they're trying to do.
That's sad on its own, but this is done to a painful, almost laughable extent.
The best example is in the 4th tutorial, where you create a Pacman game. The tutorial has you create the ai for the ghosts through paragraphs that simply list every action to drag and every argument to find one after another, in a way that sounds like it was poorly translated from Russian. But the worst part is this: after soullessly listing every start and end of a code block, it has you repeat every step 3 more times (for all of the other directions) not by saying "Now do the same thing we just did, but change the numbers to this:" but by instead listing off the exact same paragraph three more times. After finally completing the step event of the ghost, I took a long sigh, thinking I was finally done.
Nope!
In a collision event with the wall, it tells you to add the exact same code by listing off the same four paragraphs AGAIN. I had to sit there and drag actions for what was likely 45 minutes, simply because half the time I almost felt like I was actually going to vomit on the screen.
The worst crime of all, however, was the presentation of absolutely abhorrent conventions.
Even if the tutorials don't teach, the people reading them will still pick up ideas through osmosis, and these tutorials seem like they are purposefully made to steer people in the wrong direction. The first two are fine, but things got suspicious when the third dropped the "obj_" at the beginning of object names. The pacman tutorial even had a sprite called "monster_afraid" go with an object called "scared", and "coin_sprite" go with "pil".
That's not what the pacman tutorial does the worst, though.
The pacman game has 4 levels. The first room speed is 20, and they each increment by five.
Why?
Because that's their method if increasing difficulty.
It's simple, and some may not care, but in terms of creating games with some semblance of professionalism, it's awful. I may be the hardest judge on this decision, as I hold framerate to be very important, but doing this is just objectively lazy. Could the tutorial makers not just use this as an opportunity to teach you about variables? Just increase mySpeed by 1 and plug that in instead? Anything would be better, but they had to use the game's clock speed. -_-
Hopefully I'll be able to talk to my teacher about this, but it would be very easy to come off as rude, so I want to be very careful. She's pretty knowledgeable about the game industry from what I can tell, but she's primarily a graphic designer, so maybe she just doesn't really know code well enough to identify/create good tutorials. I want to say that it doesn't matter, but it honestly does if people going through this class are hoping to be able to learn and apply anything from it. I'm honestly tempted to just ask if I can make my own tutorial projects based on Wiz's old videos or something.
That isn't to say that this class is a waste, though. I still have another post to write about something awesome that happened in the class. Plus, later on, I'll still get to do a group project, and if I get grouped with people who have no idea what they're doing I'm definitely going to insert myself as the leader. Hopefully we'll be able to make something at least as good as Derek the Chicken :P
It's a long-un, so be prepared! Hopefully my sentence length and paragraph spacing is varied enough to mitigate monotony :P
I'm lucky enough to happen to go to a high school that offers a video game development class, but it's taken me until my senior year to get into it because of silly schedule issues that delayed me quite a bit.
I've had some friends who have taken this class before, so I entered knowing a few things about it. This is the relevant info:
1. We use game maker in the class, which is great for me since I've been using it for years.
2. We use game maker 8.1 because the old tech guy who was too stupid or lazy to block the proxy site I used to watch anime at school was apparently unable to unblock GMS on our school's security system for some reason. Not so great.
About a week ago we wrapped up miscellaneous game related projects and started using game maker. On that first day, we were told to spend the class period playing through all of the games people turned in as final projects last year. I was actually a little excited, until... well, until I saw the games.
Out of all of the 10 or so games, there were only 2 that were good to some extent.
<This paragraph describes the good games and why they were good. If you want to get right to the train wreck, skip this paragraph>
The two somewhat successful games had about the quality you would expect to be average from a project like this. The best was called "Derek the Chicken" and was a game where you played as a chicken and collected eggs that randomly spawned in a large room while avoiding weasels that ran through it. It was actually fun to play, starting off as a square room with one easily avoidable obstacle, but slowly increasing the complexity of the layout and introducing more challenges as you played that were interesting and... well, fun. Even with the really bad controls, the game was definitely enjoyable to play.
The other game was a helicopter game that, if I remember correctly, was called "PRESS SPACE". The creators knew their limitations and thus used a minimalistic black and white art style that actually looked pretty appealing (at least, compared to the others.) You controlled a small circle and avoided other circles that came towards you from the right (the way a basic helicopter game would be). It took a second for pressing or releasing the space bar to reverse your direction, though, which meant that you had to plan ahead in order to properly avoid the obstacles. Because of that, it became much more interesting than you would expect. It didn't have any increasing difficulty or complexity so it became dull very quickly, but despite being a very simple game it was still the second best game in the bunch.
Excuse my french, but what's next is something that I can only describe accurately as a total shitstorm.
First off, there were no games whatsoever that had competent controls. Even the simplest top-down perspective made me question whether the keyboard was properly plugged in. (The only exception was "PRESS SPACE", but a one button helicopter game shouldn't get credit for nailing its controls.)
There was a fighting game where all of the characters played the exact same and all of the normal mechanics of a fighting game were butchered to the point where it had no real interest. The only kind of interesting thing was that it had crappy trump sprites in it a lot, but even when the game was made 6+ months ago that had already stopped being funny.
There was an rpg that was probably planned to be way bigger than what it was as a final product. Every random encounter was completely meaningless since they incorporated an ability that pretty much full-healed your team AND dealt damage to the enemy, making you completely invincible. Just to make it even worse, the overworld navigation was horrible. It might have been confined to the paths on the ground, but I really don't know since the controls were so inconsistent.
There was some game that didn't really have a genre, or if it did it was completely obfuscated by the fact that the player could barely move anyway.
There was a platformer that just couldn't achieve cohesive controls or anything, so they did that thing where you make a bunch of purposefully bad assets and music to pretend that it's unplayable as a joke. Needless to say, it wasn't funny.
There was another platformer that had the same problem as the last except they didn't even try to salvage it.
etc, etc, etc.
I quickly became aware that, while this class may teach (or at least give opportunities to learn about) good theory, people were severely limited by their inability to actually use the program they were building their games in. And just a few days ago, I learned why.
We have been assigned tutorial projects that are supposed to teach us how to use game maker. there are 5 in total, and having almost completed the 4th I can confidently say that they are all complete garbage. (Just as a side note, the teacher didn't make any of these, she probably had to try to find a good tutorial for GM drag and drop, something rumored to be seen in the shadows but suspiciously elusive)
The obvious problem with these tutorials is one that a lot of game maker tutorials have, where they try to teach you how to make a game by just listing off instructions for what actions to drag where and completely forgo the step where they explain what they're trying to do.
That's sad on its own, but this is done to a painful, almost laughable extent.
The best example is in the 4th tutorial, where you create a Pacman game. The tutorial has you create the ai for the ghosts through paragraphs that simply list every action to drag and every argument to find one after another, in a way that sounds like it was poorly translated from Russian. But the worst part is this: after soullessly listing every start and end of a code block, it has you repeat every step 3 more times (for all of the other directions) not by saying "Now do the same thing we just did, but change the numbers to this:" but by instead listing off the exact same paragraph three more times. After finally completing the step event of the ghost, I took a long sigh, thinking I was finally done.
Nope!
In a collision event with the wall, it tells you to add the exact same code by listing off the same four paragraphs AGAIN. I had to sit there and drag actions for what was likely 45 minutes, simply because half the time I almost felt like I was actually going to vomit on the screen.
The worst crime of all, however, was the presentation of absolutely abhorrent conventions.
Even if the tutorials don't teach, the people reading them will still pick up ideas through osmosis, and these tutorials seem like they are purposefully made to steer people in the wrong direction. The first two are fine, but things got suspicious when the third dropped the "obj_" at the beginning of object names. The pacman tutorial even had a sprite called "monster_afraid" go with an object called "scared", and "coin_sprite" go with "pil".
That's not what the pacman tutorial does the worst, though.
The pacman game has 4 levels. The first room speed is 20, and they each increment by five.
Why?
Because that's their method if increasing difficulty.
It's simple, and some may not care, but in terms of creating games with some semblance of professionalism, it's awful. I may be the hardest judge on this decision, as I hold framerate to be very important, but doing this is just objectively lazy. Could the tutorial makers not just use this as an opportunity to teach you about variables? Just increase mySpeed by 1 and plug that in instead? Anything would be better, but they had to use the game's clock speed. -_-
Hopefully I'll be able to talk to my teacher about this, but it would be very easy to come off as rude, so I want to be very careful. She's pretty knowledgeable about the game industry from what I can tell, but she's primarily a graphic designer, so maybe she just doesn't really know code well enough to identify/create good tutorials. I want to say that it doesn't matter, but it honestly does if people going through this class are hoping to be able to learn and apply anything from it. I'm honestly tempted to just ask if I can make my own tutorial projects based on Wiz's old videos or something.
That isn't to say that this class is a waste, though. I still have another post to write about something awesome that happened in the class. Plus, later on, I'll still get to do a group project, and if I get grouped with people who have no idea what they're doing I'm definitely going to insert myself as the leader. Hopefully we'll be able to make something at least as good as Derek the Chicken :P