Month: January 2024

Categories
New Media

Blog Assignment #3b – Video Game Review

For this assignment, I will be reviewing the hilariously creative and fun puzzle game, Scribblenauts Unlimited, which this blog derives its theme colors, tab icon, and tagline from.

Scribblenauts Unlimited on Steam
Promotional art for the game.

Originally released in 2012 for the latest consoles at the time, and later to PC and mobile devices, Scribblenauts Unlimited has you control the mischievous, but adventurous Maxwell on his quest to free his sister Lily from a curse after a prank gone horribly wrong.

The premise for the game involves Maxwell creating objects and adding adjectives by typing words into his magical notebook. He explores the environment around him to help solve the problems of the people, animals, and sometimes even monsters and robots in the area/level he’s wandering around in. You also have the option of playing as one of Maxwell’s ~30 siblings after finishing their respective quests in each level.

Screenshot from the mobile version of the game. There’s supposed to more NPCs (non-player characters) around, but they “disappeared” for some reason. I wonder how…

Though the game’s target audience was intended to be elementary schoolers and young teenagers, older players can take joy in the amount of wacky and maybe unintentional solutions that the game will accept. For instance…

The game probably wants you to create a ball or something to throw at the bottles, but I’m going to make this a little more interesting.
Don’t mind me, just practicing my 2nd amendment rights.
KABOOM!!!

If you’re looking for a somewhat educational game for expanding your vocabulary or testing your creative limits, then Scribblenauts Unlimited will be a memorable and very chaotic experience that’s totally worth the $4.99 ($19.99 for PC and console versions, unless its on sale for 75% off) that’s both enjoyable for kids and adults alike.

Categories
New Media

Blog Assignment #2b – Being a Swiss Army Knife

For this assignment, I needed to list several tools that I’ll need to be successful in understanding and using in my graphic design career after graduating from the SCCA.

I am currently proficient in using Photoshop for image editing purposes and generating graphics, Premiere Pro for editing, and animating videos, and Figma for creating mockups for websites and mobile apps.

The other programs I will need more experience in before graduating are After Effects for animating images, effects and video transitions, Illustrator for creating vector art for logos, icons, and infographics, InDesign creating for page layouts, and Webflow for easily creating webpages at a reasonable price.

Some software that I may need in the future, but don’t currently use or have access to are Maya for 3D modeling and animation, the Microsoft Office Suite for being industry stand software for creating slideshows, documents, and spreadsheets, and maybe AI image generating services such as Midjourney for creating concept art for mockup graphics.

I expect to have plenty of opportunities to use the software listed above in the upcoming quarters, so I should be knowledgeable about using those tools by the time I graduate in order to be a competitive candidate in the field of graphic design.

Categories
New Media Weekly Assignments

Blog Assignment #1b – AI Image Generation

For this assignment, I was tasked with choosing a prompt to sketch, describe what it should look like, and generate a few variations from the prompt. I choose the prompt “Fly-fishing for rainbow trout in Montana” because I like fishing, and was curious how a detailed landscaped would look like if it was generated by an AI.

10 Tips to be a Better Fly Fisher | The Fly Fishing Basics
Reference image

The prompt I used was “Man wading in a river next to a forest fly-fishing for rainbow trout on a sunny day in Montana”, which I think is descriptive enough for an AI service to generate an image with.

I used deepai, an online image generator that’s available without creating an account, or purchasing a subscription. I submitted the prompt with the default options and created this image in 3 seconds:

Excellent, acceptable quality on every object (except the fishing pole which is long enough to use as a vaulting pole)

I was satisfied with the result, and wanted to find out how different changes affect the scene. I want to make the person wear a red coat, and have the weather change to snow, so I changed the prompt to “Man wearing a red jacket wading in a river next to a forest fly-fishing for rainbow trout on a snowy day in Montana”.

Decent detail, though there seems to be an issue with the phantom poles floating in the air and the fisherman’s proportions.

This seems stylized like a classic painting, even though the settings were kept the same. The water on the bottom has weird reflections, which is noticeable, but can be edited out really quickly.

Now I want to see if I can add a fish to the image, and use a specific type of tree in the background. The new prompt I used is “Man wearing a red jacket wading in a river next to an autumn forest fly-fishing, successfully catches a large rainbow trout on a snowy day in Montana”.

No fishes?

None of the trees are autumn-colored, and there’s no fish to be seen. It’s not necessarily bad, but it needs a decent amount of editing to change what the ai was supposed to produce.

Deepai was overall, serviceable for simplistic prompts, but adding more details to the prompt confuses the AI into interpreting certain details in unintended ways. I wouldn’t personally use this particular program to create complicated scenes, which have way too many errors to edit in a reasonable amount of time which could be used to generate different images. It would definitely be worth it to purchase a subscription to a more famous service for actual use, but for quick mockups for the price of nothing, Deepai was just good enough.