Month: October 2017

A little late but here is my dev log for my text based game. Coding is not my friend and it definitely didn’t like me when attempting to build this game. No matter how closely I followed the tutorials, something would go wrong or some error would pop up that I just didn’t know how to fix. With the multitude of errors I was receiving and with some family issues that was happening over the weekend, I had little to no time to work on the assignment. And with the time I managed to get to actually work on the game, errors would just keep popping up. The coding was becoming so frustrating that I eventually gave up so I could work on the current game (project 3). What I wanted to make for my text based game was basically a locked in a room type of game. Essentially the player would wake up in the middle of a room with a locked door. The player would then find a key, however that key doesn’t open the door. Instead, it opens a chest or a drawer that opens and they find another key (which also doesn’t open the door, but something else in the room). Essentially it was going to be a series of finding different keys that would open different things in the room and then eventually the player finds the key to open the door. The game would then end with the player opening the door only for them to wake up again in the same situation from the beginning. I thought it would be funny to make the player go through all these tedious events just for it to all be pointless. Too bad I never got a chance to finish it. Oh well.

For this game, I’m glad I learned more about coding in C#. I tried to code infinite spawning from an empty Gameobject, but can’t get the code to add on a script to the newly spawned objects. I only later knew about creating prefabs for this, which could made it possible. However, the infinite spawning would eventually overload the system since the total number of objects could only get larger, but making the spawning stop at a certain number of objects could prevent that. I learned online how to make objects follow an object in the scene, and trigger an event upon collision or when a target exceeds certain coordinates. The responses I got in class was pretty cool, some struggled at first but they eventually could outrun the spheres. The game was not meant to be winnable, sort of like you can’t please everyone in the society. There are always people who have different opinions or values. I wanted to make the spheres collide with each other but couldn’t get the ‘convex’ to work on the spheres. I was also afraid the system would overload with that many colliders, also the game would be a lot harder.

While I was creating this game, I was often flustered because I would change something really small and it would mess up my game. There weren’t any errors in my code and I followed the directions listed in the tutorials, but my game definitely had a bug. Once the game started, the smallest movement I made would make the game end. I thought it had to do with the destroy function that was listed at the end of my code. However, I soon realized there was a different problem.

I met up with Patrick during office hours and he showed me how the collider was a lot bigger than my actual 3D object. Also, the camera following my first person controller was not centered on the controller.

These small and unexpected things made it very difficult for me to complete the game. However, when I saw how my classmates played through my game and interacted with it physically and mentally, I was so surprised. The way they interpreted the game was very interesting. I also received some suggestions such as adding a timer and having the gold chips swing back and forth. These critiques inspired a couple of new ideas that I could work on for future projects.

Though even the smallest mistakes can affect the creation of my games, the end result of fighting through them is extremely rewarding.

As someone who honestly doesn’t have a lot of interest in video games in general, and next to no experience playing video games, this has been quite a challenge for me.

Also, I think game design is a very personal thing for me because it can be a beautiful way to express oneself when other methods fail–as we learned from the Beginner’s Guide. I like that CODA seems to be using game design as a way to process feelings about life. I decided to make a game about the first thing that came to my mind and that was my first day of school worries and one for me is how I’m going to get people to call me by my pronouns. I think it has taken me so long to do the DevLog, at least in part, because I don’t want to discuss this concern of mine because I know some people don’t care and that is really hurtful. My hope was to simulate what it is like for me when introductions on the first day of class don’t include asking what everyone’s pronouns are, and I feel it was pretty successful. IDK. I liked how when Mike played the game and read the first message out loud he backed the player out of the room and fell into the abyss below. I felt that was successful because of the message it conveyed: on some level I feel like I’m falling into an abyss when I realize that I have to stand up for myself or else get ignored.

I didn’t played a lot of text-based games before, so I was a little bit frustrated when I was developing the concept for my game project. I am glad that I have taken game theory class in the summer because there are many example problems that I find out could be really interesting to build into a game. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a very famous case in game theory.

Here is a diagram explaining what prisoner’s dilemma is.  Besides from the 4 outcome in above,  I also add a few different outcome, such as you could choose to not help your friend at the beginning to make the game more interesting.

After I read the comment from other students, I realized there are a few problems that I need to fix in my game. I found that there was a bug in my game, which does not allow players to choose “No” in one scene. Also, my game is missing the ability to re-start after the game is over, which makes my game not convenience to play. Additionally, I should make more creative ending for this game, and probably should explain which choices lead to the ending because I feel that the connection between our choices and the ending is not clear or strong enough. After playing other students’ work, I am very inspired by other people’s choices of colors and font on their product. The text-animation really amazed me too. There are a lot of things that I could improve on my game.

 

-Rui Long Zhao

Math is one of my weak subjects since high school, that is my excuse for not being sharp when it comes to coding. I settled on creating a short animation for week 2, and since the “if” function is the only one I know of C sharp, I used only the “if” function. As a result, I animated based on the simple technique of one if statement per frame, which resulted in numerous lengthy strings as huge blocks of text as shown below. The “if” statements are triggered by a single variable Time, which is set to increase at a specified rate endlessly from the start. There are definitely other functions that could execute the same thing more concisely and efficiently, but only with the knowledge of “if” functions, I’m glad I got the animation to work with lots of Copy Pasta.

 

I also thought a text-only animation was a little dull. That’s when I thought of text art, otherwise known as ASCII art. I watch Twitch streams frequently so I thought of using Pepe the Frog, which fits with the random text I inputted. I was glad many classmates recognized the meme and shared the reference, while others simply enjoyed the animation.

Hi everyone,

This is my second blog post! Hopefully, you enjoyed reading my first one! 😛

Here’s a screenshot of my text-based game. At first, my game set you in an empty dark room where you can only see a trace of light in front of you. I like this setting because it creates a mysterious feeling to the story. And you only have 3 options to choose in the beginning. They are “Stand up and walk around.”, “Go check the light to see where it’s from.”, and “Utter a loud call to see if anyone is in the room”. I like the beginning very much because it’s mysterious and the color theme matches the overall atmosphere created in the game.

However, I really need to work on the options for this game a lot more. Because I realized I have a great start of the story, I didn’t make more options to continue to tell the story. It seems an interesting start but has a bad ending.

For the Coding Part:

I had encountered a lot of bugs and syntax errors in the process of making this game. At the end, I had to ask the professor for help to debug my code. It’s an interesting process to see how we have a great idea in mind about the way we want our game to look like versus to think about how we actually need to code it, like turning it into the reality. We can have a great idea about the overall flow of the questions to the answers in the game. However, the game might be limited by our poor coding skill or technical skills (especially me :P) so it’s harder to perform well.

Here’s the screenshot of my code in the void update section…

Also, I was amazed by how other people made their games. I think it’s really creative and has a range of diversity. I think it’s really cool. I had a great time test playing their games. 🙂

Elle

Game Description  

You’re at a party! Gone out of your mind. A person approaches you super excited to see you and calls out your name. They obviously remember you but you have no idea who they are. Before you get a chance to ask who they are the person starts talking. Hey remember that one time???

Can you play it cool? Try getting through this conversation without upsetting the person.

Background 

All in all I am pretty satisfied with the outcome of the game. I received a few comments stating it was pretty funny which was nice because I wanted it to be a funny spin on what can be an awkward situation. When it came to creating the game I found that a brainstorm bubble chart was helpful to map out the responses for each question and a nice way to keep track of what I was doing when I was coding. Especially, because once I started coding it the code was very long and repetitive. Another helpful tactic I used was commenting out groups of code when I could not find the errors within the code. I later found most of them where syntax errors where I left out a ) or ;. Those aren’t very easy to see. I also found that the most challenging part in creating the game was making sure the text did not go off the screen and button controls. Ideally, I just wanted to have the user to pick between answer a or b. I soon found that I did not know how to do that. As a work around I decided to use different letters. If I were to edit this game I would make it visually appealing by editing the text formatting and font.