Week Two - A dot, chasing another dot

Well usually when ever I think of the first games made, I just think of pong, and space invaders, oh how wrong I was. The obvious thing about early games was graphics were not what was important, how things seemed to have drastically changed, and when I read that the first concept was done on an oscilloscope I almost wet myself....almost. Although saying that in science at school when we got the oscilloscope we had tons of fun moving that dot around the screen. So this “first game” involved 8 crt's and allowed the user to change the trajectory of a missile by adjusting the dials, sounds fun. But after this people did start to play with the idea of games on computers, but these were only things such as tic-tac-toe and checkers and so not much new in a way of games. It wasn’t till 1958 that William Higinbotham created another game on the oscilloscope called "tennis for two" (sounds like the start of pong to me).

Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope!

So that's technically the birth of the video games, but then came the use of really using a computer for video games, and in 1962 Steve Russell created, "Spacewar!” a game to go down in history. Steve Russell was a computer programmer/computer scientist many argue he actually gave birth to the industry of computer games, and it wasn’t just the fact he made one of the first games, he made such a great game to set it off that it’s no surprise the market is as big as it is now.

The Orininal Spacewar!

Then along came Ralph Bear, who some say pioneered the video game industry. Ralph actually first hypothesized playing games around 1950, but it wasn’t till 1966 that he actually managed to start making his idea a reality. With a Bachelor of Science degree under his belt and working for Sanders Associates, him and a small team set work on making a game playable on a TV set, and then completed it in 1967. The game again was fairly simple, involving a dot, chasing another dot, around a maze, (hmm this sounds like where Pacman may have came from). This then evolved into the first home consol, but lets save that for another random dribbling.

http://spacewar.oversigma.com/ - a link to a java game that is pretty faithful to the original game.

Week One - Whats with all this blog malarkey

Blogging, I’m starting to see a general trend within peoples opinions of blogs, nobody actually likes them, but yet it’s fairly easy to rant on about random stuff, I mean that’s all I’m doing right now, and I’m sure I’m suppose to have some sort of task, of something, of a kind…

Honestly I don’t like this week one task, how the hell am I meant to randomly surf the net and find a blog I like and then write about it, it’s not going to happen I’m telling you. And that’s because I don’t like to read about peoples randoms in there life, and yeah okay there are lots of different types of blogs, not all of them are about how some guy woke up and had 3 pieces of toast instead of his usual 2, but how am I meant to stumble across something really good that’s going to interest me by random lurking.

So anyway it sounds as if my opinion isn’t far from most peoples then, and now I’m going to do the typical top gear thing where I start saying how bad it is, but then actually it’s a good thing all these things happen. The fact you can rant on about something is pretty good, even if no one reads it, normally you would have all these thoughts flying around inside your head with no order, I suppose putting them down sorts them, and also makes you think, I mean I’ve always had 2 pieces of toast at a time, why not have 3, I mean do 2 pieces really fill you up. Anyway I’m not going to dribble on as I would imagine this is probable getting boring now, but I can see my self using this blog from time to time to dribble on, and if not, well it’s not the end of the world now is it.

So blogging, yeah randomness at it’s peak. And I’ve just read back what I’ve wrote, and damn it’s awful lol, but I’ll keep it there to remind me what not to do in my future blogs, (and the fact I don’t want to start again lol), so yeah I bet your all looking forward to my next blog now lol,

Jason.

First Impressions of Game Art

So it's the start of the third week of the course and it looks like it's shaping up to be a damn good 3 years. I like the idea of doing a blog assignment every week instead of a thousand word essays as I’m useless at them, so thought I'd just give my first blog a go now, do enjoy!

There is a lot more of the artistic side to the course such as observational drawings and concept art on Photoshop, which I wasn’t actually expecting but I’m really happy it's there as I was staring to miss 'proper art' lol. But saying that as much as I enjoy doing drawing and the like, I can see it being a lot of work, Chris has already emplaced his fear lol, but as he said it's all work worth doing to develop further in the course and the industry.

I think the first things the second years told us was "3DS Max, you will probably hate it right away, but learn to love it over time", lol I can already seeing this becoming very true. The water cooler project showed us this, as last lesson we were all shouting at our pc's for it not doing what we said, but I think we all came out with something we were proud of.

So yeah it's all shaping up nicely and I look forward to some more game art mayhem in the coming weeks, Jason.

P.S. I thought you'd all just like to know (especially Mike) it's my cats birthday on the 5th of November, she's called Nala and she'll be about 14 years old, enjoy the picture!!

Nala's the ginger one on the right, the other one is keema.