Week 1: Chosen area for the report
For the big report due at the end of the semester, I chose to talk about gaming addiction. I think it's a really significant struggle involving this industry, with both players and companies pointing fingers at each other and constantly shifting the blame from one the other. In my research, I aim to find out how many people suffer from this addiction, what are some of the symptoms and how people can change their bad screen time habits, plus how gaming companies can add just a bit more warnings and ways of combating the addiction in their products.
The final essay can be viewed here:
Week 2: Brief ESports Report
2022 Valorant Champions
The Valorant Champions is the annual professional Valorant world championship tournament hosted by Riot Games and is the culmination of each Valorant Champions Tour season. Teams compete for the world champion title of Valorant's e-sports. The tournament was held from August 31 to September 18, 2022, in Istanbul, Turkey, at the Volkswagen Arena, with spectators from knockout stage. "Fire Again" was the tournament's theme song, put together by Ashnikko.
The teams that qualified are:
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EMEAFunPlus Phoenix
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OpTic Gaming
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Paper Rex
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DRX
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LOUD
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KRÜ Esports
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Fnatic
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XSET
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XSERIA Esports
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ZETA DIVISION
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Furia Esports
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Team Liquid
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100 Thieves
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BOOM Esports
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Edward Gaming
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Leviatán
The 16 teams battled for an impressive prize pool of $1,000,000 USD shared between all teams. The group stage took place August 31 – September 8, 2022. The teams were divided into 4 groups of four teams each playing in a GSL-style double-elimination format. Games were held in a best-of-three series. Only the top 2 teams in each group will qualified for the playoffs.
The knockouts were a double-elimination tournament that took place September 9–18, 2022, at Volkswagen Arena, Istanbul. All matches were a best-of-three series, except for the Lower Bracket Final and the Grand Final, which were a best-of-five series.
LOUD score the prize of $300,000, OpTic Gaming $150,000, DRX $110,000, while the 3 teams in the last places got $15,000 each.
The event had an average of 525,817 viewers, with 60,775,626 watched hours, an airtime of 115h 35m and 1,505,804 peak viewers according to ESPORTS Charts.
Week 3 : Livestreaming
After learning a little bit about livestreaming, we were tasked to create our own twitch overlay. Down below you can see one of my streams of Sons of The Forest and my overlay in action. I apologise in advance for the audio problems on my part that I didn't notice until half-way through the stream and for all the screaming XD.
These are my starting, break and ending screens. I didn't really use them in the sream that much as I didn't take any breaks, but I wanted to show them off anyway.
And here's my trash aim in this game just because I find it funny.
Week 4: Games Media
A recent video I watched on YouTube is markiplier revisiting the FNAF series.
In my opinion, markiplier's FNAF playthroughs are extremely iconic. This franchise is how Mark built most of his fanbase that he has now, along with playing other horror games in general.
The content type is obviously gaming. The thumbnail is really simple, just an official render of Freddie, one of the main characters and the face of the frachise. The video, uploaded 2 years ago, has 9 mil views now, while episode 1 of his original FNAF playthrough has over 100 mil views according to YouTube. The community and Mark are still very active in the fandom, with him playing pretty much every new FNAF (original or fan-made) and FNAF-like games out on the market.
I, personally, have found markiplier because of his FNAF videos. His reactions are very hilarious and everyone loves seeing beat as many challenges in the games as possible. After all, he is the king of FANF for a reason.
Week 5: Games Communities
For this task, we had to talk about any games that follow the GaaS model and I chose to talk about Fortnite. It's one of the most popular games, with around 250 million active players each month and has popularised the "Games as a Service" model that monetizes the game post-release by offering the game for free and selling a lot of cosmetic updates, emotes and a pretty rich battle pass.
What makes players really want to spend money on the game are obviously the battle pass and the item shop. Epic always secures some really awesome mash-ups and collaborations for Fortnite. If you ever wanted to play as a clone trooper from Star Wars, now you can! You can even be your favourite singer like Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, J. Balvin, Travis Scott etc., now you can be. Everything bought in-game costs V-Bucks, the game's currency, which can be acquired by either paying £6.49 for 1,000 V-Bucks, £15.99 for 2,800 V-Bucks, £25.99 for 5,000 V-Bucks or £63.99 for 13,500 V-Bucks. You can also earn them by leveling up every now and then if you have an active battle pass (which costs 950 V-Bucks per season). Sometimes there will be special subscriptions in the item shop, like Fortnite Crew, which for around £10 per month, you will get 1,000 V-Bucks, a special pack that usually includes a skin, backpack and harvesting tool and even special loading screens every month, as well as the battle pass, so no need to spend precious V-Bucks on it.
Week 6: Luck and loot boxes
For this task we had to use Machinations.io to create a lootbox simulation. I decided to do a simulation based on the Hextech Chests from LoL.
To win a Hextech Chest, you need to have a ranking of S- or above or play games with someone of that ranking. OR you can buy key fragments and chests, but I'll never spend money on that game so I only took into consideration winning them after games.
My diagram and simulation can be accessed here.
Week 7: Trailer planning
This task is about making a trailer for an already existing game. If I'm being honest, I had a hard time choosing a game for this. With so many games out there, and so many types of trailers you could possibly make, it can be a bit difficult to actually decide on something.
In the end, I decided to do a story trailer for the spooky game Amanda the Adventurer, published by DreadXP and developed by MANGLEDmawGames, on 25th of April 2023. I also plan to showcase a bit of the puzzles the player needs to complete in order to advance the game and collect all the secrets and endings it has to offer.
Week 8: The actual trailer
I edited the trailer in Premiere Pro, using the footage I captured while playing the game. as well as the OST and some creepy and eerie ambience for background music. Here is the finished product:
Week 9: CV revamp
For this task we had to choose to revamp either our CV, portfolio, showreel etc. I chose to redo my CV in a manner that it's tailored for the games industry, specifically for a concept art position. You can access my new, fab and slay CV here: