Truth be told, I wasn’t able to get as much work on my thesis as I wanted to this semester. With that said, I am happy with the bit of work that I did get done. As a reminder, my thesis project is Play My Life, a playable resume/auto-biography (in case you’re wondering, the title is still tentative).
What is Play My Life?
Play My Life is a way to better market myself towards potential employers. In conjunction with a traditional resume, this game would be sent to any willing employers so as to not only see my skills listed on a piece of parchment, but also get a genuine, playable experience. The game is structured as a museum with two separate exhibits; the resume exhibit, and the auto-biography exhibit.
What’s Done?
I came into the semester with the intent of knocking out most of the assets I would need for the project, so that I could spend all of next semester working strictly with the coding side of the project. Here are the assets that I’ve done so far:
The title and menu would be overlaid on top of this art. Given time, I may opt to animate it so it isn’t just a static image.
This is some experimentation with the player character, making some different expressions (who says pixel art can’t be emotive?) This may or may not be final, only time will tell.
All of the art was created through Piskel. As the work is finalized, the assets will become public through my gallery.
What Needs to be Done?
Plenty! At the very least I wanted the player character fully animated, and as of now I don’t even have a proper idle animation set. As you might guess, this is a problem. Through winter break, I plan to catch up on the asset creation I was unable to do during the semester. This will allow me to use the majority of the spring semester to focus on the coding half of the project. By halfway through the semester I will also need to have outsourced some of my more musically-inclined colleagues for assistance with music and sound effects.
Any Problems?
Honestly, I’m having a bit of trouble conceptualizing the resume half of the game. I have a clear picture for the auto-biography half of how I want it to play out, but nothing is really sticking as far as the resume goes. The initial thought was to make WarioWare style “micro-games” for any of my marketable skills, but after doing some more research I don’t think that style would fit well with a resume. They excel as simple games that can be easily understood via a one-word command prompt, and I can’t think of an appropriate way to summarize a resume in that way. As of this point I’m willing to put more thought into it, but after a certain point I realize I’m going to have to cut my losses with the resume portion if I can’t think of a good idea soon. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that.
Anything Else?
Not really! If you’d like to know some of the more “nitty gritty” aspects of the thesis, you can find my full proposal here. There you’ll find some historical context on the videogame industry, some major players in the field, and a lot more. Stay tuned during the Spring if you want to know more!
Hi Mendez, I’m excited to see how this comes out, the idea of a playable resume always sounded like such a fun idea. I think the assets you have so far are good, I especially like the sprite sheet you have. An idea for the resume side of your game, you could include a clip of your different projects (like a recording of you playing the game instead of having the ‘interviewer’ playing it). As for skills you could have a point-and-click style game where the player has to ‘find’ your skills. Like they click on a computer to find your coding skill for example. Good luck with your thesis!