Bobak_M

Hey it's Bobak, but you'll usually here me called Bobby. I think I might have wrote too much =/

Favorite Site: Youtube.com lately

Studying: Simulation and Digital Entertainment

Favorite Game: My favorite video game may change based on my mood at the time, but more often then not, I'll probably say Secret of Mana for the Super Nintendo. I've played through it at least 4 times. Secret of Mana was a top-down Action RPG set in a glorified medieval fantasy universe. What really made this game shine was the fact that it was one of the few three player (using a multi-tap) SNES games. I may not have beaten it a single time if it weren't for this feature, or at least a 2 player mode. Secret of Mana was the reason I learned to read at age 5. My brother could understand what was going on play by himself when I wasn't around, but I couldn't because I couldn't read. I clearly remember how frustrating the first town was while I tried to go through all the necessary character interactions by memory, not understanding the letters on the screen. From that day forward, I studied flash cards with my mom tell I could play that game by myself and understand what was going on when playing with others

Goals: My goals are slightly ambiguous at the time because I like several different aspects of the game design industry and because of the background I come from. A few idea of things a could accomplish are as follows. Become a game graphics designer? Currently I work in photography and graphics design and this has I believe gives me a unique advantage in the grand scheme of things. I have a pretty good idea of what “looks” good on screen. Become a game mechanic designer? In my free time I spend many hours running numbers on games I play and games I’ve made looking for new and unique strategies that can be game breaking. Become a usability director? Specifically I'm also good at customizing interface and making things usable in both a visual and for lack of a better term “eye-hand coordination way”. When I play games with customizable interfaces, most people I know that have seen my user-interface copy my keybindings and layout.

So, one, or all of those are my goals in the field of game design. I try to stay diverse so I can be needed in several different fields. I doubt there are open positions for a full time “usability director” or something similar to that, but if I enter a job as graphics designer/editor and can dip into the user-interface field, I wouldn’t mind switching rolls or doing both at once. Same goes for game mechanic changing.

My final project is a small game, similar to one of the Lunar Lander. Accompanying it will be a paper covering how certain topics we covered in class matter when related to this game. One of the focuses of the paper will be about how in this age we've all become authors. A small exploration will be made into the idea that freelance small game design may be to big game companies as blogging is to the large news media.