Academics

Hello, one and all! My name is Jonah Gutow and I will be adapting William Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a video game as part of the Odyssey Scholars Program. These past two months have been quite eventful. When I first entered the program in August, I did a complete U-turn on my subject. While my original plan was to write a play about video game development, I soon realized that my interests lay in the complete inverse: video game development based around stageplay!

Armed with this new direction, I got to work. After completing my elevator pitch, I got in contact with a game developer whom I plan to interview. Arnold Brown, the stage combat teacher/volunteer at Prep, agreed to help me make sure the gameplay was accurate to real sword fighting. To top it all off, I made a level in DOOM (1993, id Software) in order to practice my level design skills (photos of the level are below). I plan to get feedback from the DOOM community on what the level does well and does poorly, thus allowing me to gauge my current level design ability. All in all, this was a pretty productive two months!

Hello again, dear readers! Just as a reminder, my name is Jonah Gutow and I will be adapting Macbeth into a first-person hybrid hack-and-slash and stealth game. This month was not quite as successful as I had hoped it would be, due to circumstances both beyond my control and fully within it. Much of my time has been occupied with rehearsal for Noises Off, and what little time remained seemed to disappear before my eyes as my ADHD got the better of me. Despite this, I was still able to get a little work done this month.

During this month, I met with and interviewed Thomas Burton, an animator who works in the game industry. He has worked on such games as God of War: Ragnarok, Spider-Man 2, and the yet-to-be-released Death Stranding 2. Currently, he works on Fortnite. I was able to gain valuable insights into the work put into animating, and using that knowledge, I have decided to abandon my plan of fully animated cutscenes, instead opting for a textbox-with-character-portrait approach, only animating the super important cutscenes. Said character portraits and scenes will likely be outsourced as I have little to no artistic ability when it comes to animation and illustration.

This month was pretty productive for me. I managed to complete one interview with animator Thomas Burton, who is currently working on Fortnite. I also got basic movement implemented in Godot as a test project. I have joined the Discord of the Albuquerque Game Designer’s Guild and plan to meet with them as part of my community observation. In addition to this, I also have a second interview lined up.

This semester was my first in the Odyssey Scholars program, and it was a bit of a shock. The workload was far more than what I had become accustomed to, leading to a large amount of procrastination and dragging of the feet on my part. I also had several other things happen in my life this semester, making it even harder to work on Odyssey. I was in the fall play, which was an amazing experience that I don’t regret at all, but it did make me fall behind on most of my work, including Odyssey. I also came down sick in late October, and I still have not recovered. We’re not entirely sure what I have, but it’s made it very difficult to focus on work.

I also had some trouble with my annotated bibliography. The course requirements stated that I needed 10 sources, at least 5 of which had to be scholarly. However, game design is a field that is very rarely studied in a scholarly setting, and most of the studies do not relate to my project at all. Late into the semester, I decided to instead only focus on popular sources for the annotated bibliography, rather than do a lot of research that wouldn’t help me with my actual project. This made it far easier to add sources and keep a solid working pace.

My biggest problem was just a general lack of motivation and pleasure from doing or completing work. I tried my best to maintain a solid work ethic, but often I would just sit at my computer for hours, staring at a blank document, not doing anything. I just couldn’t fathom doing anything when I felt so unmotivated. Luckily, poor grades are scary, and fear is a heck of a motivator. I managed to get everything done by the time they were due, despite my hesitance.

So what exactly did I get done this semester? Well, I completely restructured my project from the ground up to better fit my interests, for one. In the months of August and September, I worked on my elevator pitch and presented it, wrote my research question, and designed a level in DOOM. This is something that I now feel was a bit of a mistake, as level design is something that should come far later in the process and DOOM is not very similar to the game I intend to make. In October, I worked on some of my annotated bibliography and made a lot of decisions. I decided to use the Godot game engine, due to its open-source and community-driven nature, as opposed to Unity, which has recently made a lot of anti-consumer decisions. I decided how I wanted the game to look, run, and feel, and I decided the structure of the game.

I also had my first interview this month, with the animator Thomas Burton. Mr. Burton has worked at Blue Skies Studios on films such as Ice Age and Rio, and at Playstation Studios as a senior animator, working on games such as Spider-Man 2 and God of War: Ragnarök. He is a prolific animator with years of experience, and it was such a pleasure to speak with him. I learned a good deal about animation and gaming in general, and I got a feel for how I might implement animation in my game. Following this interview, I decided not to continue with my original plan of creating fully animated 3D cutscenes. It’s already going to be hard enough to get this game out in two years as is without also trying to learn animation.

In November, I didn’t get much done. I was not in the best emotional state at the time, and that really exacerbated my lack of motivation. I completed some annotations here and there over Thanksgiving break, and I also got in contact with another potential interviewee, but by and large, I got very little done. I did, however, play around in Godot for a little bit, and managed to figure out some of its quirks. It is very different compared to Unity, and I might struggle a bit to develop games in it. However, I also feel that it is far more reliable for an indie developer who is not able to afford royalties (something that Unity was planning on implementing).

Lastly, during December, I finished up anything that I needed to. I did a full annotated bibliography, wrote an 8-page literature review on my sources, created a movement system in Godot, and completed everything else. I think that the first semester, while not quite as productive as I would have liked, was still quite good. I hope to actually get more progress on the game done next semester.