Halo and What It Means To Me

Earlier this week I mentioned a game franchise called Halo being important to me, and today I'll be expanding on that. I was originally going to submit something similar to ageofgratitude.com which is a website that was put up where people submit "letters of gratitude" for Halo becoming so important to their lives. I may still submit this to it, and if I do I'll make sure to share it here.





Now, I could go on and on about the story of Halo and how engrossed I have become in the lore, but I'm not here to do that right now. I'm here to talk about how Halo as a franchise has affected my life and steered me towards a different destiny. Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic, but it has definitely altered my life in more ways than I could have imagined.

I was never much of a gamer when I was young. I played Pokemon on my Gameboy, I went to other peoples houses to mess around on their Nintendo and Sega systems. I owned a Playstation and later a Playstation 2, but I didn't use them that much. I went outside a lot and did other things.
Fast forward to late 2003/early 2004. Halo was released in 2001 for the original Xbox, but I had not known this at the time. Xbox was relatively new compared to Sony and Nintendo, and I didn't play games that much. We had the TV on in the living room, and a commercial came on advertising Halo 2. I thought it looked really, really cool, but I unfortunately didn't own an Xbox, as the commercial clearly stated it would be exclusive to. I figured I had time since it wasn't coming out until November of 2004, and I wanted to play the first game before that anyway. Aside from my PS2, I also played a couple of games on our PC. It wasn't great my any stretch of the imagination, but I enjoyed it. I played my first RTS, Dune 2000, and that got me into RTS games, but that's another story.

So I went to Walmart, not thinking about Halo 2 being exclusive to the Xbox, and went to see if they had the first one on the PC. My story could have well and truly ended right there, but unknown to me at the time, Gearbox Software ported the first Halo game to the PC in 2003. If they had not done that, my story would have taken a different turn.

So I bought it (well, my parents did), and I booted up our crappy PC. The graphics were horrible because of it, but I couldn't have known that at the time. The point is that I was instantly hooked. The story, the gameplay, it grabbed me and didn't let go. No other game I had played before had done that. I played through the story until about halfway through, where the parasitic organism known as the Flood was introduced. This introduction was both intense and terrifying, and I took a break from the single player as a result.

Since I didn't want to face the horrors of the Flood in single player, I decided to try out the multiplayer. This was the first game I had played online against people that weren't in the same room I was in, and it was an interesting experience. If buying the game and getting hooked into the story was the first step, the multiplayer experience I had with the first game definitely sealed the deal. I was a Halo fan for life after that.

Now, you might be asking, how does becoming a fan of a game change your life in the way I'm alluding to? Several things happened: by playing Halo's multiplayer constantly, I inevitably made some friends. One of the first people I met when I started playing online was a girl who went by the moniker [DA]kits. I met her in 2003/2004, and we became best of friends. Later we ended up dating; we've been together for almost 3 years now. I joined a group of people, called a clan, through a guy I met who went by Coyote. This clan used names of animals as identities, and I assumed the Cobra persona. Through Coyote, I connected and bonded with this group of people. The clan might not be official anymore, but most of us are still good friends to this day.
I got an Xbox  for Christmas after Halo 2 came out, and I got both games and became addicted even more. My dad wasn't convinced about signing me up for the online service, so the PC version would have to do for now. I played Halo 2 constantly, splitscreening with some of my friends from school. In both games (Halo PC and Halo 2 on the Xbox), I became rather adept at the multiplayer, much to the fear of my friends, both online and in person.

One day in middle school during a field trip that I didn't go to, one of my teachers brought in his Xbox so the few of us that didn't go had something to do. He played Halo 2 online about as much as I played Halo PC online, so I was the only match for him. Obviously PC and Xbox are different, so he kicked my butt up and down the street, but I was the only challenge for him out of everyone, which I thought was funny. He told me he was impressed with how good I was with no online experience.

I didn't play many games other than Halo and Command and Conquer (RTS games are part of my gaming roots, too), but that changed when the new Xbox came out. I finally got the online service, but the newest Halo game, Halo 3, wouldn't be released for another year at least. In the meantime, I got into other games, such as Gears of War and Far Cry: Instincts. The wait for Halo 3 made me realize how many other good games there were out there, and as I got older, I had more money and could buy these games and enjoy them.



So there you have it. Almost 10 years ago my life changed. Before becoming an avid gamer, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do when I grew up. I threw around the idea of joining the military (which isn't a bad thing), but I ultimately didn't know. Now I have a pretty good idea. I love playing games, and I want to try my hand at making them for a living. Obviously any game developer would say that the two aren't the same, but if you don't have the passion for video games, I doubt you would be a good developer.

As a side note, if any of you were wondering what those words meant from Halo related piece in my portfolio: Spartans are genetically altered super soldiers that are central to the games; ODST's, or Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, also known as Helljumpers, are special forces that drop from orbit in single man capsules. 34 is my favorite number, mostly because there's a Spartan who shares my name who's number designation is Samuel-034. Now you also know how I decided on the name of my blog!

I'll talk about why I like Halo another day. For now, I hope this was some good insight into why I've embarked on this path to becoming a developer.

2D Design Portfolio

It's been a bit since I've posted anything, and today I'm going to do something a bit different. I haven't taken any classes that deal directly with designing or developing video games, but I am taking the prerequisites. Last semester I took 2D design. This semester I'm taking Drawing I, but that's a topic for another day.

Anyway, the following is some of my best work that came from this class. It was my first studio class, and it was tough in the beginning, but in the end it was enjoyable. Keep in mind I have no natural artistic talent (in the visual sense), and I had really no prior experience.

Since this is a video game related blog, I figured I would start with the one piece that had to do with video games. This is a "contemporary synthetic cubism" painting done on panels of matte board using gouache paint. I started by painting very abstractly onto a small piece of matte board using the assorted colors you can see, and then cutting it into pieces, and pasting it onto a larger piece of matte board. I then used stencils of words that I had created and painted over and within the panels.

The words are all related to a video game franchise called Halo. Spartan, ODST, Helljumper, Xbox, and the number 34. I can go on and on about the significance to Halo to me, so I'll leave that for another day.

This next piece is a watercolor painting focusing on an abstraction of Gothic architecture with an inclusion of gargoyles. This was the second painting we did in class (with the previous being the third and final), and I had an easier time with watercolors than I did with gouache.

This is the first painting we did, and it is a gouache painting with a focus on values. I had a hard time learning since this was the first painting I ever did, and I had trouble with the technique - especially the details and different values. However, I feel I did a very good job considering.

The last three pictures are from a series involving shapes and sharpie markers. We were instructed to make about a dozen sketches using squares or circles exclusively, following a central theme of a word, such as "direction". The first piece we did was to take our four best sketches and combine them in the above composition. The words I used, from left to right, starting at the top, are: cluster, asymmetry, symmetry, and direction.

The next one we were instructed to take one of our sketches and make a similar composition, but this time using the sketch and its mirror image into the four corners. This is my direction sketch; I really like how it came out, especially how you can flip it 90 degrees and it's almost completely different.

For the last one we were told to take one of our sketches and create a repeating tile pattern. I used my symmetry sketch. This one was the most time consuming of them all - especially since I had to shrink the original sketch down to half of its size and then repeat it 24 times.

All in all, it was a decent class. I learned to have fun with it and I made some friends. The shape series was probably my favorite due to its simplicity and focus on composition. I'm not much of a painter. The very last project we were working on was a perspective piece, but we never finished it because the semester ended. I really want to go back and finish it some day because I think it would turn out pretty cool. Plus, we were just working on perspective in Drawing, and it should help a lot.