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

Post 11-07-15 : Play Test 2 and marketing Virion

The play tests went fairly well, it was a pretty busy day. There were five or so in 2.6 and around four computers in use in 2.9 but we ended up setting up more computers as more people showed up to play our game. Unfortunately I ended up coming in about an hour late so I didn't get to help set up most of the computers and see what levels they chose. There were a lot of people coming in from the other room expecting a different game which made me wonder if people were actually enjoying it. I still need to look over the answers to the questionnaire and watch the recordings so I may be overthinking this.

Apart from the play test we met some animators and got our new brief. I was happy to meet Hamish and Jo and I look forward to seeing their skills, as for the brief I was surprised to see that we have to make a prototype about a child. Or not necessarily about the child but the player has to operate a child character and feel wily. We started brainstorming but kept thinking of what can a child do to feel wily, until we started thinking that it's not the child that needs to feel this emotion but the player.We came up with the idea, among others, that the player has to get their child character into as much trouble as possible, it's an interesting idea but I'm not sure where we can go with it so I don't believe it will be our final decision.

I look forward to working on this project but I feel that the last half of the trimester will be extremely busy considering the game Sean, Adam and I are making for CIU and the possible job as a freelance artist for a small indie group that I have applied for. Hopefully the work load won't put me under too much stress over the next seven weeks.

Sean, Hayden, Nick and I also want to start working on VIRION as a professional project and start an indie team together. Apparently this will take more money to accomplish than I was expecting which is why I applied for that job. As exiting as it is, start a small company is also very scary and I'm paranoid about how successful it will turn out. We still need to have a meeting to discuss this as well as what we need to continue doing for VIRION, I was told that we may be having that meeting tonight but I haven't heard or seen anything about it as of yet. I would like to talk about this as soon as possible to work out time and task allocation. the new prototype 3 group also needs to have a meeting this weekend to work out what we are going to do for that project.

VIRION Postmortem

What Went Right?
VIRION looks really crisp and runs exactly how we wanted it to. All the bugs we came across have been fixed and the scope was met as well as a few of the desirable's. We all worked really hard and got a lot done early giving us more time to polish and create new maps. Practically everyone who played VIRION liked it, more than I was expecting, which has given us the motivation to continue working on it.

The models all follow the same sharp design and fit the computer virus theme as does the hexagon tile grid and colour palette. All in all this is a game we are proud of creating.

Even though level design was mostly focused on what looks cool rather than game play, we did gain a lot of knowledge from it.

We spent around a week on paper play testing and it was very useful. Because our game could be played as a physical board game it was a lot easier to create a paper play test. We managed to specify the rules and the unit abilities because of the play test.

What Went Wrong?
Our original idea was broken and we ended up scrapping most of it on the day of the pitch. Luckily there were a few salvageable aspects that we carried on to the current design and VIRION turned out better than I imagined.

Communication could have gone a lot better. The only time we really had meetings was during classes and the few times we met up on Skype. We talked a lot on Facebook but not as the entire group, most of the time it was just two to three of us on at any given time. Communication was our weakest point and is something we need to fix for future projects.

Documentation was not kept up to date. This was because no one wanted to write it and after a while it lost its usefulness.

Level design wasn't very efficient, yes we made a lot of maps but we didn't think about overall gameplay when designing them. When selecting the final three (or so) maps we pretty much only considered which ones looked cool. In the future we need to take gameplay, player stories, and strategies into consideration.

Future Changes
We need to move away from Facebook and find new alternatives to discuss and hold meetings. Using Skype was a good start but there were very few Skype meetings. We should allocate more time each day for meetings on Skype or other means.

In order to keep documents up to date we could have those focusing on particular aspects of the game work on those parts of the documents.

There is a lot we need to consider when designing the levels rather than aesthetics alone. Creating level design documents before creating the levels will be really useful in designing more elaborate and entertaining maps.

Post 04-07-15 : Virion Play Test

The play tests for VIRION went a lot better than I was expecting, everyone who played enjoyed themselves, Tony and Steve both liked it and it's given me the motivation to continue working on it and hopefully put it on Steam or the app store. We still have a lot of polishing to do. Textures, better sound effects, animations (though I'm not sure if we are still adding animations), new maps, a unit selection screen, and more detailed instructions still need to be added, witch is what the next week will be focused on.

We covered a few things after the play tests about why people were saying that the Trojan and Spyware were overpowered. They only appear to be overpowered because it's a new game, no one knows any strategies yet and the style of the map may have caused the Trojans to appear to be more of a hassle than they are worth. We decided that we won't change the range or abilities of these units, except for the Spayware's ability to pass through other units, and instead design new boards to see if the layouts change anything. Allowing people to choose what units they want and where they sit may also change gameplay and strategies.

I've started working on a small side project of mine but I think I need to find a better way to animate sprites other than making each frame on Photoshop. I will also start writing up documents for it too. I should also go back to working on my previous personal project but I'm not sure how successful it will be at this point. I should write up some documents for this game too to keep me from getting off track and making a mess or making it too complicated. Perhaps I will keep this one for the holidays, my new idea feels a lot more simple if I can get the sprites complete, They may be able to go towards my LOs as well.