Today, we started off the day with a unique and exciting site visit to Glass Egg, A Virtuos Studio that creates certain aspects of games for their developers. More specifically, Glass Egg focuses on the design and production of in-game vehicles, for games including PUBG, Apex Legends, Fortnite, and Forza. What is more surprising and intriguing to me is that, in the same Virtuos Studio and in HCMC, Sparx, has worked on League of Legends. Being a part of such a prominent and successful studio, there is no doubt of the quality on Glass Egg’s projects. In a ranking of the top 10 best car-racing games in the market, Glass Egg had contributed to 9 of them. Thus, I believe that a big component of the company’s success can be contributed to its high quality work, especially its unrivaled skills in car design and replication. During the tour that the company gave us, it was clear to see how highly the employees in the offices valued detail in their designs; they worked on the most minute details and used multiple references to create the best replication of the items. I was thoroughly impressed by their work, and in awe of their opportunity to be able to create new add-ins for some of the most popular games on the market. While the site visit to Vina Capital yesterday was the most touching and impactful, I thought that Glass Egg was the most exciting and interesting company yet. I would love to be able to work as a part of the company to contribute my own ideas to my favorite games, but unfortunately I do not have the art skills for that!
Glass Egg mentioned the potential threat of AI use in the future for art design. While this could become a problem as AI continues to advance, I think that there will be a pushback against AI developed games, since it will lack the authenticity and originality that can only be created by human developers. For me, I would definitely prefer a game with creative and detailed art designs over something that is generated with the use of existing art from other games. If all the games had similar elements in their designs, I am sure it will get boring quick and the games will die out on their own.
I felt that time flew by during the visit. Afterwards, we ate pizza, pasta, and fries for lunch, similar to a few days ago. Then, we went to UEF, where we were surprised with Vietnamese pastries and coconut milk for dip. I particularly liked the green sticky one. It reminded me of a similar pastry that we always ate in China, called qingtuan! After the pastries, we played fun Vietnamese games with the UEF students. One of the games we played was “banh đũa”, a game where we had to bounce and catch a ball while picking up chopsticks. It was fun but also a good challenge!
