Personal Reflection

This trimester has been quite interesting and I feel I have learnt a great deal about being an effective designer and leader figure. I believe both my soft and hard skills have increased over the past trimester however struggle to recall a lot of what I've learned as it is easy to learn something new and have it fall into your long term memory banks without realizing it has happened. That being said I'll do my best to cover the work I have done over the past trimester and the knowledge I have obtained working on the projects and with the team at the end.

Sorrow

Sorrow was the one week project were players control a character who's goal is to help as many people as possible while running the risk of gaining negative effects to his own mental state.

I am quite pleased with the projects I have completed this trimester. The goal was to overwhelm players with stress of helping others and make them feel bade for taking time for themselves. Sorrow wasn't just a lot of fun to make but turned out as intended. Of course there were a few changes made that weren't apart of the original design and I would have liked to alter if I had given myself the time. The primary one was the ending. By removing an end state players were meant to feel the constant and overwhelming stress of being the sort of person who cares for others but never takes the time to care for themselves. Unfortunately the intended result did not take effect, instead players assumed the game was not finished as their was no ending, even a lose would have sufficed. Thankfully the majority of players understood what the message was so I consider this project an overall success.

I didn't get the proper animations in, although I have made the and they work. Because of the way I made the sprites the animator in Unity did not like me using a single framed sprite with the walk animations. However, thanks to what I've learned about animating in Unity (and animating in general), I now know how to split up animations in Unity via time frames. This means I can have all the animations for each sprite in one Gif and split them up based on the time they begin and end. I am yet to test if this actually works with 2D animations but as it works with 3D I believe it will work the same. This will be useful for the personal projects I intend to start over the holidays, both my 2D and 3D game ideas can use this technique.

This is also the first time I have used separate sprites for one entity. As I needed to change the facial expressions of the player character and NPCs and keep them walking I didn't want to create a massive sprite sheet with variations of the characters' walk cycle with different expressions. So instead I made a sprite sheet for the walk cycles but had the heads separated. I am very pleased with how effective this was and will no doubt use it again in the future. I felt that players would become more emotional when the NPC's died so I took inspiration from The Binding Of Isaac and modeled the characters after the Isaac character.

There were some things I struggled with on this project, mainly the spawn cycle for the NPCs. I wanted to spawn a set amount in random locations over a series of waves. With the help from Ian and Sean I was able to complete this task and learn a bit more about for and while loops.

Apart from scripting, which I always feel I need to improve, audio is the only thing I am not confident about. I made the sound effects for this game myself but they turned out terribly and were unfortunately removed from the final product. I understand how to format audio and use the proper software, but making sound effects to record is not my strong point.

First Horror

First Horror, originally called First Day Horrors, was about a young girl being terrified of her first day of school. It visually shows her emotions as a dark and terrifying forest filled with monsters. The goal of the player is to reach the gate at the end while pushing back the monsters using the light of the child's teddy bear.

I was unsure if this game would create the intended emotion from the players. Thankfully the horror aspect work better than I anticipated. By making the player a young child, having the camera high, creepy sound effects and jump scares players were meant to feel as the child would, frightened, alone and afraid to move forward. I took inspiration from Dead Space after watching a video about how it's effects were created. A lot of the sound effects and sudden changes to the environment were merely meant to scare players and didn't put them in any actual danger. I did this with the sound effects and wolf that runs past the player.  I remember hearing that people, both male and female, are more protective over female children than male,  however I'm not sure how accurate this is, this is why I went with a female child for the player character.

I also tried to incorporate film theory into this game by having quiet moments just before a jump scare or an attack. After attempting this I learnt that in films they actually give the audience a chance to begin a moment of relief before suddenly scaring them. Just something to remember for future projects.

Unfortunately the final scene was incomplete because the teacher animation wasn't working. I'm not entirely sure what the issue was, the animation would run just fine in the editor but screwed up in the scene and builds. I was unable to fix this issue before the final play through.

I was also required to create some of the models for the environment and didn't get the teacher animations until the night before the final build was due. This is when I decided to work on being a better team leader for the third project.

As a bit of an added effect I wanted to create fading transitions between scenes. This gave me the opportunity to learn about lerping the color/opacity of images and use coroutines. There is still a lot I need to learn about scripting but I feel my current amount of knowledge will allow me to create my own publishable projects in the future.

Zurvivor

Zurvivor was the major team project shown at the gallery exhibition. It is a four player non-violent survival game where players are trapped for five days in a zombie infested town. They must gather food and medicine and remain uninfected when help arrives.

The primary goal was to create distrust between players and by giving them a means to back stab one another I believe this goal was met. Although we had some major communication issues during this project I am pleased with how it turned out. Players act as intended, the game allowed them to both use teamwork, work alone or completely stab the other players in the back to survive. The documentation could have been done much sooner, before production started in fact. I did, however, learn a template to use for writing the various documents including the design documents, team and project management, and gantt charts.

I also learnt a lot about enhancing the feel of a game. Like mechanics, there is a near unending amount like particle effects, screen shakes, pauses in frames, color, size and variety of objects. After watching a video on enhancing game feel I learnt that games like Street Fighter actually freeze the game for a fraction of a second when an attack contacts the other player to increase the feel of the impact. I found out that you can use the alpha is an image to create ripple effects on the scene and separate and alter the position of the color channels. These are things that I would like to learn and experiment over the holidays.

I decided to take the time of this project to learn and work on becoming a more effective team leader. Unfortunately I failed to be a decent leader (I may be being hard on myself), but I did learn how morality can significantly affect production and will need to take this into account during future projects as well as making sure that team members are not only skilled at their field but also enjoy the work/learning new things. This I find is the primary cause of why communication failed during the majority of this project.

After attending the exhibition I have noticed that I've become a lot more self confident and sociable, it has become easier to talk to people and pitch the games I have made or contributed to as well as their functions clearly and in a more natural manner.

Since completing Zurvivor I feel video games is one of the best forms of social interaction we have to date. I still like seeing it as a form of art medium but where as television shows and movies develop trust between the audience and characters video games, and games in general, also allow the trust to develop between the players themselves along with in game characters.

Close Out

As stressful as the final half of the trimester was I am happy with the way it all turned out and feel I have learnt a lot about myself and new skills. I have learnt a bit more about scripting as well as new techniques that will help me create more entertaining games including new animation techniques, creating emotion and ways of enhancing the feel.

Holiday Period

Over the holiday period I intend to use what I've learnt this trimester to work on my own personal projects as well as continue working on Virion to get it out on market asap. From what I've seen the games industry in Australia is primarily indie which is why I've been trying to increase my knowledge in scripting, as a designer I feel it is a part of the job description to have multiple skills, or wear many hats as they say. I am still unsure as to how to become an effective world builder but for online games but for now I think I will focus on getting into the industry. I know world building does not just focus on MMOs so I intend to work my way up from indie to AAA and finally create my own team dedicated to creating an immense MMO. I would like to do more research on the lives and work process of current designers of online games to get a better feel as to what I intend to be and the work that goes into building worlds which I will also do over the holiday period.

There is currently an App game I have been working on for a while now but it has been mostly concept work, so I will be making it my primary focus along with Virion over the next two months. I am unsure if I will be attending the Make A Thing this time or if I would use the time to do my own personal Make A Thing where I will focus on getting as much done on my personal project.

The final year is also upon us and so I will need to prepare myself for getting a job in the industry. This means I will need to update my portfolio, online profile and resume over the holiday as well, just so that I am fully prepared and not leaving anything to chance. I have already begun my own itch.io ccount nd may continue using that as my games porfolio, I also have an old art portfolio that I should update. I look forward to a busy holiday period and hope to learn a lot more before the beginning of the next trimester.

Itch.io page : http://rowan-patman.itch.io/

Third Project - Postmortem

For the past six to seven week a team and I have been working on the development of our trust based game Zurvivor. We were tasked with creating a game based around trust and so Zurvivor focused on the idea of distrust between the players of this game. We found that it was very easy to fall into the trap of developing the game around team work as trust and teamwork contain very similar properties and as trust is more easily established between people than NPCs we chose to make this a multiplayer game, however this did make it easier to accidentally focus on teamwork. Although teamwork is involved I feel the trust aspect remained the central point for the primary mechanics.

Overall I think the game was a complete success, all the core mechanics were in will only one known bug/issue unsolved and there were no complaints during final playtests and exhibition. All the main mechanics were essentially complete by week three even though the documentation was incomplete.Having the game functional so early gave us plenty of time to get the assets and polish in before the final exhibition. The map looked good in the end as did the particle effects and audio.

I feel the game gave the intended results. It allowed players to work in teams or be selfish and stab them in the back, it plays out as intended. I think the level of trust in this game is adequate.

Documentation took forever to complete as things were constantly changing and because things were always fluid it made it difficult to keep a solid idea down. The first week was wasted trying to create a decent idea. I imagined my first one to be pretty entertaining giving players the ability to use each other as bait to allow themselves to escape with their loot and the other players’. I’m not entirely sure what the issue was with that idea, apparently the trust aspect was not strong enough. People liked the next idea however I did not. It was nothing more than a re-skinned Ultimate Werewolf, so I went with the final idea but took aspects of the others along with it, primarily the distrust between players found in the first idea and the voting mechanic of the second.

The art assets were never completed. We had one placeholder animation for the player running and placeholder containers. We got the zombie walk animation online and I ended up completing the final versions of the map and containers myself with help on detailing the map. The art assets were our main concern for roughly three to four weeks.

As usual communication was a major issue, either people weren’t replying or took forever to do so. I also think morality was a big problem, with people getting sick and stressing about other work a lot of the time was taken out of this project. Me being pushy probably didn’t help either, however if I didn’t push to get the work done on time then it would never get done, I still need to learn how to be a more effective team leader.

Although all the mechanics were in by the end I feel like some were lacking or needless. There could have been more for players to do during the day stages and the night votes weren’t really needed. That being said it was not bad work for six weeks and work can still be added in the future.

There was one bug by the end. The safe zone would occasionally not register if a player was inside the zone. This wasn’t a major issue, because we added the “drop box” mechanic, where players drop 70% of their resources in a crate, any lost resources would be within the safe zone. The only time this would be an issue is if it was the last/only player to have resources and their was no food in the team resource pool and that player passed out due to starvation. The only other issue was if players passed out on another floor, the arrow on other players would point outside the border because of the way the levels were laid out.

Before production can commence the documentation needs to be complete as do deadlines, risk management and work delegation. Though the GDD will constantly be changing over the course of the project the HCD needs to be completed before so. I need to learn to either stick to an idea or burn it, too much time was wasted coming up with a decent idea. Communication has gotten a little better, the problem wasn’t the sources used for communication and collaboration but the want to do so.

Mortality was low considering the amount of stress everyone was under. This meant very little work was done over the course of this project, I will need to develop better risk management and take moral into consideration in future projects and figure out a way to deal with it. I also think working with 2D animation had something to do with a lack of moral, the university focuses on 3D animation and so very little know how to efficiently create 2D animations causing them to shy away from it, focusing on work involving 3D animation.

Personal - Research Part I : 12-12-15

I've spent the weekend researching and reading chapters about meaningful game design, metaphors and mechanics, along with getting over a sickness. I read some stuff from Rules of Play talking about teaching a player the rules of a game and how completely changing the rule can arbitrarily punish the player and make what the player had already learned worthless. So keep things consistent and don't break the rules unless necessary, same principles apply to film too and I have already learnt this in film at high school. It goes on to say a way to remedy the situation could be by adding visual details that tell the player the difference between to similar objects. This will tell the player between right objects and the wrong objects, "Blue buttons open secret doors. Red buttons unleash fireballs of doom." Again something I already know, but perhaps revealing the difference after the player has interacted with it could be a way to teach the player? After reading this I thought of Fallout and how players require terminals to open security doors or red buttons to open secret doors. This doesn't just apply to doors and buttons though, it could be any mechanic, What attack can be blocked, what enemies can be hurt, what terrain can be traversed, etc. Having the difference between mechanics creates "meaningful play".

Something I didn't think of is how mechanics, like traps and secret doors, using similar objects could cause players to pay closer attention to their environment searching for anything new that may lead to new mechanics an experiences, as stated in the chapter Games as the Play of Meaning. Players are curious and when they discover something new to interact with they will most likely try it out. If the already know blue buttons open doors and come across a red button, they may press it and learn that it activates a fireball trap that automatically kills them. Curiosity really did kill the cat, but at least it now knows what red buttons do. This could be considered an intentional death by the game or a death by player mistake if the player had a means to press the button through another entity like another player or a bullet, But the player won't know how to do this if they don't already suspect the button to be hazardous. Teaching the player by making them interact with the mechanic could make them frustrated if the mechanic is designed to punish them. Not sure if the author of this book thought of that has I haven't come across them mentioning how to avoid the negative effects of learning through interaction.

I'm going to space what I've learnt across multiple blog posts as it would be too long a read having it all on the one post and also I'm still reading the chapters myself. In an unrelated note I have completed the new helicopter image and will begin working on the zombie eating sprite. I have made the chopper and blades separate so the blades can be spun through script without affecting the chopper.

Third Project - Assets, Final Level Layout : 06-12-15

Still haven't received any new assets from the animators so as a precaution I have made my own containers as well as sprite sheet versions to use while we wait for the final assets if they are ever completed. I have also created new stairs and the particle effects for blood and spray paint fume. The blood will be dropped by players when they are injured by a hazard. The pain fume will appear around the player when they are painting marks around town. The particle is white but will be changed to the color of the player creating it in game.

I did hear from Jo asking if I wanted her to do anything on the final map, I told her that she could make it look a little dirty by adding mud and cracks to the roads, pathways, and buildings and add some abandoned vehicles around the streets. Hopefully this fills the town a bit more making it look like there were more people but have left before the quarantine came into effect. Right now the map looks quite bare with only the houses having furniture.

I've been keeping the GDD up to date and have also created a small "project management" document highlighting communication source, file locations and milestone checklists. It needs more work but I'm not entirely sure what else goes into it, this may be something discussed with Brendan tomorrow.

Third Project - Documentation, New Level Layout & Place Holders : 23-11-15

I created a Level Design Document for Sean covering the new map layout, floors, buildings, resource point locations and items and hazard locations. I believe the everything should now be in the GDD apart from more images and reorganizing, currently I've been working on a story board for it showing what a player will see from beginning to end.

The new level is much bigger than the grey box and has more than just houses. I've added a fuel station, corner store, arms store, warehouses, and a hospital. At the moment there is no interiors or way to make out which building is which, apart from the coloration and size, but this is just a place holder level to use while waiting for the proper assets to be completed. I may change the arms store to another corner store depending on whether or not people would prefer to keep the current melee attacks or have it changed to ranged attacks, I think I'll add it to the Questionnaire for the next play test. Hunger will also be re-added as it will give players a proper reason to leave the safe house. Right now if the players wanted to they could just remain hidden in the safe zone all game and now that we are keeping the zombies from entering the safe zone players may be able to exploit this problem. Also to keep them from running back into the safe zone every time things get too dangerous the players won't be able to enter the safe zone, once they have left, until the final thirty seconds.

I have created place holder assets for the UI and tutorials, they include the inventory box, food, meds, and weapon (melee and ranged) icons, arrows, vote icons (player colors, and sleep) and button icons. Just in case we do go with ranged attacks I have created the ranged icon along with the rest. I still need to create the "straight to helicopter" icon for the end vote as well as a border for the hunger and stamina bars (which will probably be UI scroll bars). I'm still waiting on the other place holder assets from the animators and haven't heard much from them. So far I've seen Ben working on the animations and has completed the player run place holder animation. Hopefully we will have the place holders completed before the next play test.

 

Third Project - Documentation & Grey Box : 15-11-15

The GDD is has become a lot more detailed and practically has everything cover, just a few thing here and there that need tweaking or adding, just answering questions that the animators and programmers have. The assets list is also completed so now we can start delegating tasks and we should be able to start the grey box tomorrow, however I wish could have started sooner but unfortunately I've been a week behind because the game idea kept changing. I think it's pretty decent now though.

I'm not sure if the programmers want to set the grey box up a specific way to make things easier, but I have an idea on how it could be laid out. Because it's all 2D we can have everything on separate heights. The ground will be on its own and the players, walls and resource point will all share the same level. Higher and lower rooms will be above and below the "main floor" level high enough and low enough so that the cameras don't clip through the levels above. The camera should already be fixed to the player so when the player goes up or down stairs the camera will be showing the right room. The underground rooms I think should have a black background (behind the room) to show that it is underground while the upper rooms should remain transparent so the player can still see the outside world, I think this makes it feel more natural (can't see the streets from under ground but you can from upper floors).

Third Project - Documentation : 08-11-15

Finally got to work on the documents after a stressful week of working out mechanics figuring out weather or not add networking. I'm still worried that networking won't work at the gallery but if it does then we will be going down that road. Just in case it doesn't work I've created two versions of the game in one document, one for networking and one for single screen, so essentially I've been documenting two different games based on the same concept. I've also created a card version of both as a paper build to help with play testing the mechanics.

I did a bit of research to understand why the mechanics didn't feel right and thought that they may just be lacking. Originally the mechanics were inspired by the Garry's Mod mini game "Murderer" and what I remember from the social game "Werewolf" but after discovering the card games "Cash'n Guns" and "One Night Ultimate Werewolf" I realized that there is a lot more I could do with my game "Zurvivor". I added a new player type called Suicidal based off of the Tanner card in Ultimate Werewolf who's goal is to be voted and killed at the end of the game. I created a Watcher type based off of my experience with Werewolf but change its mechanics allowing it to see both the Infected player and the Suicidal player but thought this to be a bit over powering and changed it to can only see one chosen player (Will try both types in paper play testing).

There were other type such as the Troublemaker (changes the cards of two other players) and the Hunter (if killed at the end, choose someone else to die with you). I thought of having my Survivor types being like the Hunter type but for now it doesn't have an added perk considering with the card game both styles can be put together, but if this is the case it would create an eight player game with four Survivors increasing the chance of two players dying at the end of a round. This may be okay and should be tested out during play testing.

In Cash'n Guns each player has a set of five lives and start off by putting their chosen amount of money into the middle of the table (as you would in Poker) and then pulls a gun out on another player at the end of the cycle. They can then choose from a limited amount of cards each player has to either shoot their chosen player three times (loses a life and can't shoot another that cycle), shoot them once (only loses a life) or shoot a blank (nothing happens). The mechanic of all players shooting each other at the end inspired my decision to let the players (all but the voted player) pull out a gun and try shoot the voted player (sort of a gimmicky style) with unlimited ammunition. The round would end if they killed the Infected player, if they didn't then they lose their guns, the Infected player turns and begins chasing and devouring the remaining players. All this is player controlled and add an extra level of entertainment. It could also work for both versions of the game.

I still need to write up the HCD and TDD as well as create a mood chart so the animators can get a sense on the art style I'm going for. I too will be working on assets but most of it may be personal work to increase my skills especially with animation (both 2D and 3D).

Third Project - Brainstorming : 1-11-15

Spent Wednesday talking about ideas with the programmers and some of the animators after brainstorming "trust" with them and the audio students. We were thinking about networking but came to the conclusion the it may work at the gallery but would be too complex for itch.io in the time frame we have, I'd rather have the programmers helping in the games production rather than sorting out networking. We were also discussing what the animators are good at and what they need to accomplish, by the sounds of things their theme is mythology.

With this in mind I have come up with  few ideas that have no theme / plot and are mostly about the mechanics so that way they should be flexible enough to accommodate any theme (Norse mythology, Greek mythology, aliens, etc.). They should also be flexible in terms of art style, any of these ideas can be in 3D or 2D, toony or realistic styles.

I managed to come up with the first idea that day (technically it was a few days before this but was more refined on the Wednesday). I was originally thinking a 2D top down, two player survival with friendly fire but now I think it would look better 3D with the camera fixed forward on an acute angle. The players are able to stab each other in the back by shooting each other, when their health drops below half they become very slow and could be used as bait for the monsters in order to escape difficult situations. There would also be multiple levels to help establish trust (or lack there of) between the players.

The second idea I came up with on Thursday is more of a strategy game with some turn based aspects. What I mean is both players have AP and use it to build up little societies but need to give something to the other player in order to refill it. The idea was to be a race to the moon theme where players start in the Middle Ages and work their way up to the Space Age but can attack each other to reduce population or resources the opposing player may have. The trust aspect was mostly just trusting the other player to be making weapons for mining rather than war.

I decided to try a single player game for my third idea where the player is guided to the end goal by an NPC but the NPC kills them in the end. The player put their trust in this NPC just to be stabbed in the back at the end. This was sort of Bioshock inspired, more specifically it was inspired by the "Would you kindly?" phrase. The player is lead down the path thinking their choses are good and their own but reveal they were under the control of another.

The forth idea went back to a two player idea but instead of trusting the other player not to stab them in the back I decided to try something with trusting the other players abilities. One player would run through a dungeon killing stuff while the other rigorously tapped on traps and doors to keep them from activating or closing and screwing over the first player.

The final idea is pretty short but involves a lot of real world communication. One player would be safe in a bunker with enough provisions to last them several years (lets say ten) and the second player would be outside (maybe fighting off monsters) trying to convince the first player to let them in before the time ran out and nukes would drop (so not Fallout 4 inspired). The problem is player one doesn't know if the second player would shoot them or not. If they both survive then the provisions will only last them half the time (so five years) but if player one doesn't let player two in or if player two kills player one then whoever survives will have all the provisions to themselves.

At first I was pushing towards my first idea but now I'm liking the forth one more (shows why multiple ideas are better than the one), however I would like to work on the first idea as a side project. I may start doing this whilst working on the primary project or over the holidays. I already want to continue working on First Horror as well as VIRION during the rest of the trimester so I may leave the new idea for a later date.

Second Project - Play Testing : 27-10-15

Play testing was different this week, we were in 2.4 with all the lights out to help emphasize the dark eerie and horror feel of our prototypes. I got a lot of decent feedback from 'First Horror' and found a bug and a missing aspect that are now fixed. The "bug" was when the player ran into the left border the camera was supposed to stop a little before it but instead it jumped to the opposite border, this was fixed by changing a number in the Camera Controller script. I also added the players light disappearing when they collide with the golden gate to keep them from removing the monsters when they are supposed to capture the player at this point.

Second Project - Finishing Up : 27-10-15

Unfortunately there were things missing or broken with the game. The monster hissing and new children screams weren't created in time, the wolf animations weren't made and the teacher animation was severely broken. I spent the weekend waiting for the models, animations and final sound effects (which didn't show up). I had all the scripts complete and so worked on completing the particle effects for the golden gate and wolf object as well as the level by, creating textures of the ground, adding place holder trees and moving around the triggers. I was originally originally going to have fallen trees to block the player and help guide them but decided to make some broken stone walls instead, I could have put some more detail into the wall textures but as I still needed to add them into game (as well as the other models) it was a bit rushed. I did however take a bit of time with the Limb sprite, I wanted to make it look like the branch of a tree but still look like an arm reaching out towards the player. There were some other objects I wanted to add like bushes and rocks but decided they were desirable and would add them in if I had time (turns out I didn't).

Cartography : 20-10-15

I practiced creating a map today in between working on the scripts for the current Studio project. It taught me some things I didn't know about Photoshop like creating an alpha channel and the threshold layer, I'm not entirely sure what the threshold layer does exactly but for what I was doing it changed the layer beneath it to be pure black and white, I also used the cloud filter which is something I'm not used to using. I want to keep making maps like this and I'm also going to start worlbuilding as a side project, this will mostly be documents on the world, society, characters, creatures, history, factions/religions, etc.

Second Project - Finishing Monsters : 20-10-15

So today and yesterday I've been working primarily on the Monster script. Originally I was going to have one script for the lot and have functions for each type, then I thought it would be easier if they all had their own scripts. Now I've gone back to my original idea because their may be four types of monsters but there are only two types, the attacking and the jump scare. Having it all on one script is also more ideal for the player script, when the players raycast hits a monster it has to call a function in that monsters script and would be harder if it has to check the type of monster and grab different scripts. The jump scare monster just has to run past the player at a high speed, I could have done a separate script for this to keep the two types separate but it was simple making it all one script and works fine.

On Monday Sean and David help me with completing the monster movement and as a bonus help me with the camera shake when monsters get too close to the player. That means the camera script is complete and essentially so is the monster script, I just need to get the player light raycast finished before I remove the space bar control from the monster script.

Most of the scripting is complete, a lot of the audio is done and Erika has finished. I just need to finish the scripts before I start working on texturing the map, Erika and Ben will start skinning and animating the models and Felan needs to complete the audio. Felan told me that he has other assessments due so the SFX may not be perfect but as long as he gets them all finished and hand them over then that's fine.

Current Trello board for 'First Day Horror'

Second Project - Slow Weekend : 20-10-15

I didn't get as much done as I would have liked last weekend. I managed to get the triggers working and added the sound effects Felan gave me. The player movement was a bit glitchy, every time the player character rotated while walking the light would shake, this would be a good feature if the shaking wasn't so strong. Unfortunately it's also a bug and I would prefer it if I could change it into a feature just in case it leads to other problems. The monster spawn points work the way I intended, monsters spawn at random positions around the player character just outside the screen before they run in towards the player. Right now I just have the space bar pushing them back as a way to test their movement, I still need to add a raycast to the player so whenever the player character was facing a monster they would move backwards towards the edge of the screen then disappear.

I didn't hear anything from Erika over the weekend but I'm sure she's working hard. Felan has sent me ll the ambient sound effects, music and the player character voice overs, now I just need the teacher voice overs and monster sound effects and that would be the audio completed. Still need to add the player character's voice overs, I may do it the same way I did the ambiance by adding them to the audio triggers. I think I'll also change the ambient sound effects to play at random times as the player may stand in one spot for long periods of time without any sound effects playing. I could also do this with the player characters voice overs but I want certain ones to play when the monsters appear and when she is caught and don't want to have her saying one thing then have the voice over randomly say something else over the top. But the monster counter on the Game Controller script could fix this, just play the random voices when the counter is zero.

I was a bit distracted over the weekend, I spent a lot of time reading articles on the world building school website. I learnt some interesting things about cartography, fantasy languages and things to consider about creating the universe of an MMO like the cosmology, creating religions, how they change or interact with each other, and how the world itself could evolve. I'm going to practice worldbuilding during my breaks between working on the current Studio project.

Burn The Witch!... After The Dance : 20-10-15

Went to a lecture at UQ on Thursday night about visual imagery of witches. The lecturer focus on the visual aspects of the witches actions and behavior rather than their physical appearance as I was expecting. It was interesting and made me think more about someones behavior. A character could have a very dark and threatening appearance but this would be misleading to the player if their actions were joyful and none threatening, what the player may have thought to be a bad guy could just be an eccentric ally.

The images shown at the lecture could have been misinterpreted as old festivals until they realize something not quite right, like half a man hacking another in half or someone kissing the backside of a goat. These subtle actions can reverse the viewers interpretation and is something to look out for, you don't want someone to disconnect or hate a character you intended people to care about because of a simple action, even a sentence or the way something is said could be dangerous.

First Project - Up Online : 13-10-15

Finally remembered to put Sorrow: A Space To Hold up on itch.io. I did have to fix a few things though before putting it up. I didn't realise that by having the NPC movement animation run it wouldn't change to the dead and saved sprites when I needed them to, so I ended up removing it from the game. I also added the arm movement for the player, now when they are next to an NPC and can interact with it the player characters arm will change (different arm for either side). I like the new sound effects too, using bits of instrumental for the death and saved states works pretty well. I also added background music but it may be a bit louder than I would like.

I may end up re-adding the animations and introducing more (for the state changing and player arm movement) but if I do then I will need to use the animations for every part of the player and NPCs and remove the use of sprites due to my previous problem. The instructions page could use some work too.

seabrisbanegames.itch.io/sorrow-a-space-to-hold

Second Project - GreyBox and Scripting Plan : 13-10-15

I now have two animators and an audio student helping me complete the next project, I've filled them in via the HCD, assets list and mood pitch document, now they all know their work load and dead lines. I began working on a greybox today and all i need to do now is the scripts before the others have completed their tasks and I start implementing them into the scenes.

Sean helped me polish my TDD on Monday so now I have a pretty decent idea on how I want to lay them out. I'll have scripts controlling the behavior of the player and monsters, camera positioning, audio and spawn triggers, and a game controller. I want the monsters to appear at certain times so I've created trigger objects that will spawn a certain amount and different types of monsters within a given time frame, same with the audio triggers which will play some ambient sound effects to hopefully frighten the player.

Originally I was going to make the player controls the basic vertical and horizontal inputs with the mouse as rotation but Sean thought that having a mouse click as movement would keep thing simple and create more stress or anxiety for the player (being forced to stop shining light at the monsters to move around), so I will give that a try to see how it feels.

I think the only issues I will have will be in the monster behavior script and some desirable actions (like having the camera shake when monsters get too close to the player), no doubt I will come across bugs and other functions that I will need help getting passed but I will worry about them when they reveal themselves. The amount of scripting involved with this project doesn't appear to be overly immense and should be fairly quick to get though (a couple of days or so) which will leave time for polishing and allow me to help the animators with texturing (and modeling if they need help there).

Second Project - Pitch : 10-1015

The pitches went well considering I didn't have a voice the entire time. After the first pitch Christy and I change the original story from child running from parents fighting to a child running from their first day of school. The player is no longer guided by a spirit and instead has to make their own way through a maze like forest using a lantern filled with fire flies to ward off the monsters. At the end instead of a house there is a large golden gate that turns into the school gate and the monster turns into the teacher.

Unfortunately my voice worsened before the second pitch so I'm not sure if the audio student's became interested in helping out or even understood what the game was going to be like. Apparently a few of the audio students were interested but I am yet to hear from them and Hayden has told me the same. I'm a little paranoid that this will turn out the same as last trimester. I may end up using text instead of voices but I wasn't expecting to get any voice overs to begin with, the sound effects will be the harder task.

I found a page on Gamasutra that could help Hayden and I induce fear in the players.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/172168/fight_or_flight_the_neuroscience_.php?

It has given me a few ideas on how and when to show the monsters and how to use sound effects and the atmosphere to to create anxiety during situations where the monsters are away.

Second Project - Brainstorming : 10-10-15

Started brainstorming for our next project on Friday and tried something different. Usually I would just research games or themes based on the topic but Christy brought in cards and dice with images on them to help us come up with more unique ideas. At that point I only had dot points and pieces of ideas but over the weekend I cane up with a few different game ideas that I wasn't happy with.

First one had to do with the player being in the point of view of a creature just hatching from an egg in a cave, they have no idea what they are as they escape the creatures trying to eat them. When they get to the end they see the cave is on a cliff overlooking a beautiful forest and the creature they play as flies away. I believe this idea would have been too far out of scope.

For the second idea the player controlled a young monster in a town of monsters under siege. The goal of the player was to guide the young monster through danger and terror to find its parents. Simple point and click but I don't think it would have induced fear in the players.

I ended up creating a red riding hood styled game where the player controls a young girl being guided by the spirit of a dog through a dark and dangerous forest as she is being hunted by dark monsters. The player can use the light of the dog to scare away the monsters by holding it and pointing it in the right direction. At the end of the forest the player comes across a house, but when they get too close the house changes to one that has been burnt down, the spirit disappears and the monsters reveal to be the girls mother trying to comfort her.

First Project - Play Test : 10-10-15

In my opinion the play tests went horribly. For the first half of the session my game, 'Sorrow', was broken. For some reason the most recent build was messing up, the NPCs faded to black way too quickly and the player's ray casts were too long. Half way through the day I had to tinker with the timers and lower the length of the rays. Unfortunately the game was still not at the level I wanted it to be at this stage, the audio was rushed and so wasn't implemented in the final build and the sliders on the title screen were running too fast.

I think the biggest disaster was that half of the feedback was based on the broken version of the game. Surprisingly a lot of the feedback was still what I was looking for. Most people understood the message, felt overwhelmed and picked up the controls... somewhat quickly.

Christy showed me a good site (Incompetech) where I found some instrumental music that I could fiddle with to create the sound effects for the player and NPCs. I've also been creating sprites for the walking animations of the player and NPCs, I've changed the models of the player, now the head and body are separated so that when the player gets close to an NPC their hand will stick out towards the NPC but the head will remain what it originally was. I am yet to try it in game and am unsure if it will work because it may conflict with the walking animation.

First Project - Art Assets : 27-09-15

I was inspired by The Binding Of Isaac when creating the characters. Originally I was going to do a jrpg sprite style (like Gameboy pokemon games or something) but I decided that it wouldn't have enough detail in the faces, the faces and the change from "okay" to "overwhelmed" expressions is the main mechanic that will tell the player the message; being the one helping everyone else and not helping yourself will leave you overwhelmed and mentally drained.

I want to animate the sprites and have already completed a couple, the problem is the amount of frames I will need to create. There will need to be a sprite for each facial expression as well as the endgame animations. I may need to leave this for version two, I would like to continue working on this over the tri.

I also need to texture the ground and walls and create the main menu background, I still have two days to complete it so I'm not worried about getting it completed. I want to create sound effects too, because I'm new to creating sound effects I will focus on that tomorrow after uni before I continue working on the visual assets.

First Project - Scripts : 27-09-15

I was focusing on the script writing this week and got a lot of useful help from Sean. I spent too much time trying to fix the NPC's movement script before contacting Sean, the problem was the new vector with a random x and z position kept changing each frame in the updates function. Sean managed to fix it by changing the vector to its own function.

I also had an issue with reading a script in an object being hit by a ray and transforming the position of a UI slider to match the position of the player character. The first one was easy to fix just by showing hit.collider.gameObject.GetComponent under the raycast if statement, but I had to create it twice for the left and right sides of the character. Sean sent me a blog post that greatly help the problem of changing the sliders position.

blog.manapebbles.com/world-space-overlay-camera-in-unity/

I now have most of the scripting completed, just need to fix the current bugs and create a main menu script.

A New Trimester - Meaningful Games : 27-09-15

Back at uni starting Studio 2, this time it's all about emotions. Only been back for a week and I've been enjoying it so far. I would have written this blog sooner but I've been hooked on completing the first project.

We have been looking at meaningful games lately, or games that send a message. Personally I think most games have a meaning or secret message behind them. We played some games about personal issues early this week, I don't remember ever playing a game like these, they focused on telling a story that sends a message. I tried an RPG styled game about gender... bending? Transgender? (I'm not entirely sure what it's called, probably has a new name now), but it wasn't until I left the house and ran into the NPC's that I realized what it was about.

Thinking about it it looked like the designer was trying to show that this could be a male being female through stereotypes. The female side included changing into nicer clothing (dress) and putting on makeup (need to take a bath before being able to do this) and the male side included possibly playing video games and sleeping in. I didn't notice that these could be stereotypes because it all feels like something a woman can do, it wasn't until I started thinking about "there's a reason for everything" that I came to this idea.

The game may also be about being yourself and not changing to fit society. The player character got the  same negative reactions if they wore the lesser clothing and no makeup or change one of the options but got entirely new positive reactions if the wore the pretty dress and makeup (the player character also gets noticed by the guy she like in the end of this event).

I would like to try making a very artsy game in the future that sends out a meaningful message but I think I would make something a little more cryptic, something that focused more on the art than telling the player what it's about.

Post 25-08-15 : New Career Goal And Working Towards It

For a while now I knew I wanted to make games but I didn't exactly know the details. Today I have decided exactly what I want to do, become a World builder. As I have only recently discovered this job title I don't know much about it and it seems like World builder (after seeing a few job descriptions) focuses more on level design but from what Sean has told me and from what I've researched it focuses more on the details of the in game world (aesthetics, locations, creatures, genre, players, social aspects, etc.). Talking to Sean today put it more into perspective, he pointed out a book that should prove to be very beneficial called 'Designing Virtual Worlds'.

I know I have  lot to research which will be done over the holidays. I need to look more into the development process, social dimensions, story and level progression, virtual economy, level design, skill sets, character generation, combat systems, a lot of witch I can learn from this book. I should also research sociology, psychology, economics, and politics, I believe this book covers a bit on these topics but I will need to look elsewhere for a more in depth look at these subjects. Sean recommended this book to me so I imagine it's pretty decent and judging by its size I think I will get a lot of useful information from it, but you can't learn everything from one book.

I think story boarding may be the best starting point to get to the position of world builder so I want to start working more towards that goal, I've decided that I'm going to do story boarding as my elective (pretty sure it was a class I could do the last time I saw the classes).

I need to look up blogs and interviews from current World builders (or past) like Chris Metzen as well as companies who have made or focus on making MMOs. It's all well and good to have the knowledge but knowing what it's actually like in the industry would also be beneficial and would make starting out less scary.

I would be a good idea to also keep to my previous... research schedule? I need to get better at writing documentations (more detailed documentations) and leadership skills as well as getting better at pitching (the more I do the better I'll get). All this I can focus on in Studio 2 but I will also work on it over the holidays with Virion and personal projects. I also want to look at creating bestiaries and atlases for virtual worlds, another thing to research.

I currently only know how to use Unity and need to learn new software so over the holidays I will look more into the Unreal Engine to start off. I've tried using UDK before and wasn't too pleased with it, but considering I was rushing a bit there were probably things I missed.

So that's my preparation plan for this title.

Holiday:

• Virion
• Read 'Designing Virtual Worlds'
• Research World Builders (Chris Metzen, Jeff Grubb)
• Companies creating MMOs
• Level design
• Practice writing documentation
• Practice scripting (help be more useful in Studio 2)
• Learn how to use Unreal Engine 4 (blueprints)
• Learn new 2D/3D art software (e.g. Maya, 3DSMax, MudBox, Illustrator)
• More writing (fictional, fleshing out my worlds)

Tri 3:

• Documentation
• Project management (workflow, work allocation, time management)
• Art assets (what I'm currently good at, what I can give to the team)
• Level design
• Anything else that I learn over the holiday (including scripting if I'm confident with my ability or am required to do so)
• Fictional writing

Post 22-08-15 : Project 3 Lowering Scope, And Focusing On CIU And Planing Career Path

We ended up taking a lot out of Sugar Crash. Now there is no stashing, inventory limits and trading scene, dropped the amount of houses down to six, the amount of candy to three and lowered the overall candy amount (still tweaking the amount), trading is now done with a button press, and bullies are used as restrictions the player has to pass. The value tree and the moon timer are no longer necessary as the game ends when the player reaches the final goal and candy has no value, only liked or disliked, so they have been removed too. The goal is still to eat as much chocolate as possible but there are two goals to complete which are "treasure stashes" that the player needs to get to to finish the game.

I plan on starting a company so Sean told me it may be a good idea to focus on project managing, so I need to get good at documenting and hold the "vision" for future projects which is what I've been doing for Sugar Crash. I also want to try getting into concept art (as it was my original career choice and may still be what I want to do) so I've been thinking about doing something artistic for my elective, I was thinking about doing fundamentals of art but as so many people have told me I am apparently already a decent artist so maybe 2D animation instead.

Sean and I spent most of last week working on the CIU project. We chose to do a character creator simulator which I thought would be too over scoped for the amount of time we had. I managed to use an old model I made for the male and female body types (just changed height and width to make them look different) and I also created a script that allowed the player to change between these to models. Unfortunately (and thankfully) the work I did wasn't required because Sean found something called UMA which gave us models that we can alter and scrips to help us do it. We still needed to create the scene and UI which meant more scripting. I created the script to control the cameras position when switching between changing the body and changing the face. I also created the face UI adding buttons for each category (forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) and the sliders for each of those. After Sean created the function for altering the character's mass I was able to do the same fore the body height and all the facial features. Players can now change gender and body type, alter mass and height, and change arm and leg shape, head size, forehead shape, eyes, nose, ears, mouth, cheeks, and jaw. I was surprised and pleased that I managed to get the facial features to work properly, good to know that I'm not completely useless at scripting.

Over the holidays I plan on working on my scripting and art skills to make sure I can do more than documentation when we work on VIRION. It is also something I want to do for personal projects in the future. As I plan on making MMOs I also want to research companies that have made (or focused on) MMOs as well as MMO games to learn more about what goes into making one, the programming, currency, marketing, etc. I under stand I have a lot to learn and a lot of games to make before I can create an MMO but hopefully VIRION will be my first step in reaching my goal.

Post 12-08-15 : KPI, Pushing Play Test Back, Opening Day

Had my KPI meeting last week and got a lot of good information from it. For a long time I've wanted to be a freelance concept artist specializing in character concepts but for a couple of years now I have wanted to start my own company and have a larger end goal, creating an MMORGP. I understand that this will be a difficult goal to achieve and still have  lot of work to do before then. I still want to try my luck in the competitive world of concept art but it is no longer my final goal. I still need to research current concept artists and read blogs about game companies but lately I've been very busy with the CIU project and the current studio project to make up time for personal work.

Unfortunately we had to push the play test day a week ahead because neither team was ready, but it did give us an extra week to work on it. Since then we have made a playable game, we did, however, still have issues with communication. It took forever to get the assets we needed from the animators and we still don't have a few (tree, bully texture). Jo had made 14 different houses but because some of them have a lot of curves in them where we need to put in windows and doors it will be a bit difficult to work around, perhaps we will just use those ones for the background houses.

On Saturday the 4S1 team (placeholder name for the Virion team) attended the Opening day ceremony, first time I've been their as a presenter (can't speak for the rest of the team). Unfortunately Hayden couldn't make it because he had to deal with a possum problem, oh well. I was a bit nervous and anti-social at first but eventually got over it and started to help others and show off Virion. The Oculus was in the same room and everyone was into that making it a bit harder to get people into our game. Luckily we got quite a few groups playing and enjoying themselves, I never heard a single complaint about our game and ended up having a 40 minute match with one of them. It seemed like we have reached our target audience but we also noticed that the younger generations got hooked into it too.

I wish we could have gotten at least one audio student in on this project, I am not very good at making sound effects but still managed to make all we need before Thursday. The children now have voices, screaming, laughing, knocking on doors, footsteps, and eating sounds to go with their animations, sometimes making games makes me feel like God. I have also completed the bush, fence, and trading box models and added them to the scene, players can now properly stash candy and trade with the NPCs. I also completed the background and sides filling in the empty space with streets and houses, it now looks like a proper neighborhood. There are still a few things we can do before the play test tomorrow but I think we are ready with what we have now.

Post 01-08-15 : Project 3 Lowering Scope

We have dropped the scope of 'Sugar Crash' again by removing the fake candy. I never thought that the fake candy was really necessary in the first place so I don't see it as a serious loss. I still need to alter the GDD to match the changes made on Thursday but that will be done this weekend.

The animators have their jobs and from what I've seen have begun working, I have my schedule to do before Tuesday and made a start yesterday and Sean has done a lot on the scripting part of the project, I believe he just has the AI and candy values left. I am still a bit worried about whether or not we will have everything complete by the first play test (mostly audio stuff and maybe animations), but I don't think I'm the only one. Even if it isn't complete by Thursday it won't be the end of the world and we will need to focus more on work flow and communication (always the biggest problems).

I've started working on 2D assets (tree house, moon, candy icons, etc.) and should have them completed by tomorrow morning before working on some of the 3D assets and textures. Then on Monday I will begin getting audio assets and finishing the GDD. Hopefully we will be able to get someone from audio into our group to help complete the project before the second play test.

I haven't gotten any info on what the others have been doing since last lesson but hopefully I will hear from then soon to know where we are at and what should be done next. Until then I will keep working on what I the GDD and assets.

Post 27-07-15 : Project 3 Grey Box

I've been feeling sick and sluggish, on and off, for the past week which has made working on anything harder than it should be. Thankfully I have completed the grey boxes and the moon/timer script completed by the deadline I set for myself. I know grey boxes usually don't have color but it made things easier by color coding everything.

The blue capsule is the player, yellow is the bully and pink is the NPC child. Colored windows indicate the type of candy that house is giving and the colors on the "tree house" indicate each candy type though is yet to show their order from most valuable to least. The bushes, pumpkins and trees are also inactive at the moment.

I believe I have all the assets listed on the Trello board ready to be allocated to people and I know I still need to write out the different sound effects needed in the GDD, something I keep forgetting to do. I haven't heard anything from Hamish or Jo this weekend about modelling but I think they have been waiting for the assets list to be completed so they should be more active next week.

Other things I keep forgetting about is the CIU project (character customize simulator) and polishing my 'Palette' game for the opening day ceremony. I have contacted Adam, the third member of our group, and he has been working on the model and base clothing and should have them completed some time soon so I can begin working on more clothing styles. For 'Palette' I just need to add a bit more fanfare and decrease the difficulty a bit, shouldn't be much of a problem.

Next week I will be helping with the modelling for 'Sugar Crash' as well as updating the documents and possibly helping Sean with scripting how ever I can.

Post 21-07-15 : Prototype 3 Brainstorming

Brainstorming went well...ish. We went through so many ideas before coming up with what we have now. Our main problems were the wily emotion and coming up with an idea that's scope was doable in four weeks. Our current idea is the player is a child on Halloween scamming the "candy stock market" in order to get all of his/her favorite candy (which is randomly chosen at the beginning of the game). I'm paranoid about people not feeling very wily by doing this and may get bored if it goes for too long. I am in charge of level design and to keep play time at a minimal fifteen minutes I've shortened the map. I need to look over Nick's level design document from the last prototype to see how he wrote it up in order to get a better idea on what to put in my own.

Unfortunately my alarm didn't wake me up this morning so I missed class. Hopefully the others get the task distribution done and talk to me about it tonight so I can write up a gantt chart. Still kicking myself over missing class today but I guess these things happen, just need to think about what we need to do now that the documentation is set. Still have the gantt chart to write up before anything else and I'm sure I will be working on scripting and texturing for this prototype. I may also work on anything else that needs to be done if we start running low on time as well as keeping the documents up to date.

VIRION Contribution

With the VIRION game I unfortunately contributed to less of the programming side than I liked, I managed to write up an enumerator list and a template main menu script for Sean to work with. Apart from that I also helped write up the documents, did concept art for the models, built one of the three modes, animation and texturing (which didn't end up being implemented), UI design, logo design, and sound effects.

Considering the list of different asset types we have in the game it doesn't feel like I contributed enough, but it was all very time consuming and for the four weeks we had to build this prototype I was kept fairly busy.

I was sad that we didn't get to add the textures and animation, as these did take quite some time to make, but we will most likely be adding them in at a later date before promoting our game.

Because the model (Malware) is made of very simple shapes it was fairly easy and quick to build. Animation took more time than I thought because I had to re-teach myself how to do so in Blender and the texturing for the model was also made up of simple shapes and very little color so it was pretty quick to accomplish this task.

I designed most of the UI, again simple colors and shapes, as well as the color palette, logo, and images for the HCD and GDD for the different types of tiles.

Audio was the major issue for me as I have never created audio assets before this project. I had trouble finding sounds online to mix together and also had the idea of turning dubstep for the sound effects. Luckily I found a site called glitchmachines which gave me exactly what I was looking for. I really like the way the sound effects turned out but I'm unsure about the ping noise Sean added for the button swipe and unit/tile selection.

Audio I created was selection confirmed, unit movement, unit respawn, player turn start, and game game end. I also did an attack and killed sound effect but because the attack, kill and respawn all happen at the same time only the respawn was needed.

There is still a lot we can add and change to make VIRION better like textures for the units, lighting, fiddling with the sound effects, ambiance and background music, and recreating the UI.

 

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B-8gYUBC50Pqfi1wREJnR2JnUW1yQXctMk04emk4OVhyQmhHaXRjZ3Q0U1NmRDlFZ0g5Vmc