TCS110 – Experimental Games

I had a wonderful time looking at various kind of games that was presented during this conference. It also made  me consider joining the Doom mod class which was very interesting. One of the developers for Doom machine mod actually brought his cassette tape player and made it so the player can use the tape player as a controller. Our games from the class were also presented to the public, which made me  pretty nervous because it feels like they are comparing our school project to the other famous indie games that they played. When this one individual was playing my game, I actually jokingly said “Oh wow, the graphic looks so nice in this game, and oh wow look at that the mountain, look so beautifully created.” (Trying to hype my game up you know)

This conference was very interesting. Our professor and author LeMieus Patrick and Stephanie Boluk both talked about their experience in video games, the philosophy behind them, the future of them and also  the book in which they both collaborated on. It is called “Metagaming: Playing, competing, spectating, cheating, trading,making, and breaking videogames (Electronic Mediations) which can find here : https://www.amazon.com/Metagaming-Spectating-Videogames-Electronic-Mediations/dp/0816687161

Treasure Hunt actually looks a lot better after much fine tuning, and adding different types of trees and bushes. ultimately the goal of the game is to collect the coins that is on this island, 10 coins would be the objective. The hardest part were the coins. Making them rotate with Vector3.left*Time.deltaTime*Rotatespeed was no problem, but having the coin sound like super mario and disappear after the player touches it? harder than I thought. I had to make sure it has OnTriggerEnter and having several game manager scripts such as passedObject.GetComponent<Renderer>().enabled passedObject.GetComponent<Collider>().enabled = false;
        Destroy(passedObject, 1.0f);
        score = score + passedValue;
        scoreText.text = “Score: “ + score.ToString();

But 1.0f was a little long therefore in the Final project, I made it 0.5f.

I also changed the sky box to a much more fitting environment, it is actually surrounded by ice mountains and the sea. Making the players feel like they are actually on the island. Although the game’s objective is to collect coins, but I want to players to actually enjoy the journey that they are having, each coin was carefully thought out and placed in areas that has the view of the game’s scenery.

In the beginning this game was called the “gift” but honestly it sounded to cheesy so I changed the name to treasure hunt which makes a lot more sense and it is straightforward. The player gets to collect the coins on this mysterious but beautiful island. With the help of the terrain tools I got to make beautiful mountains and hills. At first, it was just a small island but since I switched my workstation from my Mac lap top to my PC (A lot more processing power) I get to make this enormous map. Making the mountains was the most fun, with the pointy summit of the hills, it reminded me of the HuangShan mountain in China. Honestly, it was a happy accident as Bob Ross would always say.

In terms of the dirt road, it was actually fairly simple. I used the brush tool,added in the dirt color material, figure out a route like map, and drew it in while I change the sizes of the brush, so some dirt road are a lot more narrow than some of the other routes. Overall, the environmental foundation for this game is solid thus far, and definitely takes a lot of processing power on the PC.

This quarter really has been an absolute blast. I don’t think I’ve taken to anything else as naturally with as much investment in my past two years of full visual design classes. There really is just something magical about the art of game creation I guess. It’s a good thing I’m switching to CDM then. This itchio site really feels great; I think it’s going to be a great motivator and platform for me to keep creating and posting art games, and get better until I release something legit one day. It’s a great way to conclude a course but provide a path in the future for delving even further into the field.

Anyways, here’s mine: https://syf.itch.io/4-seasons . I’m really excited to see what games you all make as time passes by, as well as the different design philosophies and aesthetics that everybody’ll uniquely develop into seriously special styles. Stay in touch (my facebook is Steven Y-Fan), everybody, and post your itchios for me to keep up with. It’s been a great class with you all.

I personally felt that this event was SO much fun to attend!  To see all the games taken into an exhibition format, shown on big screens in front of classmates, instructors, and other faculty and guest panelists… Amazing!!!  Also the ModLab it self was really neat.

From being a gamer since childhood to making my own games and exhibiting one was kind of unreal.  I think I’m headed in this direction now in terms of what I want to study and do in the future.  This quarter was only my first glimpse at actually developing games and each new project was so exciting, and to see myself actually start projects before sunday night was also a surprise and makes me think I must be somewhat passionate about it to be doing that…  Really nice to see it all come together, and then to hear professors during the discussion talk about the books they’ve written on games.  It’s always interesting to hear people talk about things from their own background of study and see how they all approach the same concepts.

Congratulations to everyone on making AMAZING games, every single one is incredible to look at and I’m really happy we all got to exhibit together.  I can’t wait to download everyone’s games on itch.io >:)

 

I really enjoyed the tiny  amount of time I spent at this event, though I wish I could have stayed for the QA. I was really looking forward to seeing what the other courses were creating. I was especially interested in the Doom mod class. I got to play a particular mod that had the player interacting with a cute illustration of a dog while your environment was full of flowers and trees, incredibly cute. I asked what the motivation was and they replied saying that they wanted to see how far away from the original source material they could get. The game reminded me of Proteus. Proteus is a procedurally generated walking-simulator that is incredibly low res, but the music and world is simply amazing; there are plenty of screenshot moments. Another game, though I was not able to play, was the modded Doom game that used a cassette player to interact with the game. I found this incredibly fascinating especially since they used an Arduino to achieve this. This motivated me to think about implementing alternative controls or input devices for my future projects in Unity.

This environment was very beneficial and I believe allows for others interested in the D.I.Y. attitude to pursue what they want to create. I had previously heard of ModLab, but I will try and see what else this group of students are doing. Did anyone notice the Vive lighthouses? Do I smell a VR Game Jam? Yo, where are the modlab moderators put me in touch!

Thank you to all the speakers who came and congrats Patrick and Stephanie on the book!!

*Ohmygosh* I never thought I’d be making a video game this quarter yet alone ~publishing it to the internet~ but here it is!   aerica.itch.io/aerium

With only half a month left of this year I’m really happy that I can say I’ve actually made a video game that’s been published online.  From being a gamer since childhood to now making games in University this feeling is pretty strange and unreal.

I want to say THANK YOU to Professor LeMieux for all the help and being a really awesome instructor!!  I’m pretty sure none of my games would be functional without his help debugging anything and everything.  Also thanks to all my classmates for making this class really special, it’s something that has really had an impact on me and will influence my future in many ways!

It would be really nice to keep in touch on instagram (erica.cherri) or facebook (Erica Cherrington) so don’t be a stranger!!

– Erica

In the fashioning of a final, working game I expanded the game with levels.  Each one requires the collection of a golden orb, which advances you to the next level, and collecting all three golden orbs lets you achieve the quest of “saving your world” :).  I also added pink orbs in levels 2 and 3 that are necessary for manipulating your environment and jumping up to collect the golden orb.  I lowered the gravity and increased the jump height/speed so that it’s a bit of a “floaty” jump, which works well with the atmospheric space that is Aerium.

Continue reading “Aerium – Level Design”

It was really hard to try and think of a clicker game that didn’t take after Cookie Clicker or provide something novel that Dark Room didn’t. In the end, I didn’t manage to think of any legit idea I could build an extended game on, and instead just made a short little game that relies on mouse mechanical skill as its key focus. 

My original idea was to randomly spawn a smattering of purple squares among a black background, but time constraints prevented me from nailing a balanced distribution of purple and black squares. I ended up making a pretty barebones game that put all of its focus on just the mouse.

Honestly, I actually sort of enjoy the game as a brief warmup or idle activity. The game doesn’t terribly require active thought or eye coordination, and mainly just helps to accustom the hand to faster movement and timing in the alternation of clicking and moving. If I were to actually build on this idea, I’d probably make the full sides of each screen clickable instead of just a specific middle portion, as well as add “juicyness” for when you start to hit exceptional scores within the time limit.

Finally finished the game! (At least one route!)

After changing some of the routes and character choices, I decided to just run the city route, which should go throughout the appropriate scenes and finally end with finding Oinkers. After hearing critique, I came to the understanding that this journey has been rough, but in the end has taught me to try and take things in baby steps before jumping into giant projects (that feel like would be cool to make, but probably only do-able when I am more experienced and fluid in constructing good stories).

For the final game, the run-through is that of the storyline, which you control with the arrow keys or WASD. The cutout scenes, which tell you a bit more about the clues you receive. The inventory, or “backpack”, which holds all of your clues. And finally the title and end scenes that complete and loop back to the beginning. I had some errors when it came to the backpack inventory, but eventually I figured it out when the loop was going to the wrong scenes. Also getting the items to be lit and unlit, I had to change the item to a cutout instead of changing the unlit color (stumped me for a long time I don’t know why D; Probably the late-night zoning out).

Getting everything in order was extremely difficult, and at the start of this all I had approximately 40 scenes including all the cut scenes. Yeah.. It was a lot and more than I can handle with my couple of weeks to get everything finished. It was a good lesson learned, and it was still enjoyable to make these routes and draw the characters.

Here are some of the art, and the link to my itch.io page!

https://blumberberry.itch.io/the-search-for-oinkers

 

It has been a fun class with you all 😀