Month: October 2017

This was my first time ever to design a video game by using this such complex software, unity. I had not only experienced a hard time figuring out the functionalities of each component in the interface, but I also felt frustrated, especially when I saw my First Person Controller wasn’t working the exact way I wanted to.

<Figure 1>
The image above (Figure 1) is the 3D model of the environment of my game. I created many cubes and modified their shapes to create the stairs in my game environment. I had also dowloaded a few 3D models of castle online so that the visual aspect of the environment can relate to the title of my game. I was inspired by a video game, called Monument Valley, so I tried to recreate its visual scene and make my game’s environment look abstract and geometric, just like how the game, Monument Vally, looks.

<Figure 2>

Figure 2 is the final result of my game environment. I like how colorful it looks and the stairs I made in the game. However, I would definitely increase its complexity if I had more time to work on it!

I was surprised that I had learned so much just by looking at games made by other students. Because we all have our own interested genres of game, we build and explore the types of game that is based on our own interests. In this class, I can hear different opinions from other students and know more about the types of game from the diverse perspectives. I think it’s a good way of learning and can help me advance the complexity of my game that I will be creating in my future classes.

Elle

When I started making this project, I was debating between a lot of ideas that seemed like it could be cool, but would be pretty difficult for a beginner like me to do. I fiddled around and ended up going back to the roots of it all, which was good ol’ rocks and sand.

From there I started building, like a child would build sand castles in a sandbox. I layered rocks and rotated them to give it some different variations. At this point it looked like a barren wasteland, so I decided, “Why not desert it even more?” I added the planets and “stars” in to make it seem like a universe had fell apart, showing that this is the remains of empty, desolate worlds.

There was a real struggle when I rotated the textures on the spherical surface because there were patches of black from the png. file that I tried to cover up. Getting used to moving things around on the right axis was definitely the most time-consuming part of the whole process. Having everything placed in the right scale, and then wondering if it was enough, was a heavy thought that chewed at my mind. I wanted people to feel like they are alone and trapped, mindlessly wandering around to see if there are any inhabitants lurking about. There were so many mistakes I made (especially getting it into a zip file) but I know that just means that there is more room for improvement.

Also a sidenote, since I did not present yet, I had my roommate test run my game and her and thoughts about the environment were that “it would be cool if there was some sort of way that the character could walk to the underside of the plane, since there could possibly be another different kind of world set up there” (as seen when she fell off the world and looked up). It made me think more on having different planes, and whether it could curve or teleport the characters so that they ended up in a different setting (like in 30 Flights of Loving where scenes were jumped).

I have always been a big fan of zombie or horror games. Games such as Amnesia, Slender Man, Outlast series and The last of us are my favorite type of games thus far. With those games as my inspirations, I obviously created a horror game that had to deal with walking around the creepy forest and of course, zombies are involved.

First and foremost, I did not intend to create a horror setting in the first place until I realized what genre of games I loved the most. It all started with a tree, then another, until it looked like an actual forest. The red forest textures were edited on adobe photoshop then when I implemented on the planes, I used shader:sprites/ default to make the lighting more brighter and clearer. The red circle in the middle of the forest was suppose to be a defending point from zombies, the red light is suppose to be a safezone which the zombies cannot touch but the it is attracted to your flesh at the same time. (I got the zombie 3D model from the asset store which Unity provided) The characters can run away from the zombies but it will be more harder as the levels progresses because more zombies will be summoned.

Creating just one environment for a game proved to be a lot more difficult that I had anticipated. The process was a bit frustrating, but I think that was mostly due to my lack of unity skills. I was a bit unorganized with my materials and assets so that made this project take a lot longer to build. I’m a fan of RPG games so I wanted to emulate something where there were multiple paths and hidden treasures to find. Since this is a small project I just added a fork in the road with two paths. I’m not particularly pleased with the finished product however. When I look at it I wish I made the plane bigger so there could be more room for exploring. But for what it is I think it ended up ok as a first game. I haven’t had anyone critique my environment yet, but I hope that they notice the hints I left for the right path to take. I tried to leave subtle hints like a different colored tree trunk and an off colored patch of grass to signify the right path to take. Some challenges I faced were adding all the trees to emulate a dense forest. Because I kept adding so many, it was hard to place the new trees and edit their shapes and sizes. As I was building this environment, everything just felt so cluttered. But when I simulate the game I actually wish I added more. Again, my main gripe with this end product is that I wish I made the plane bigger, but aside from that I think it turned out ok for a first attempt. 

You start out on a table. You are small, maybe metaphorically, definitely literally. You know this because, well, you’re on a table. And you’re standing in front of a giant rose, at least a couple times your size.

I love art that depicts something intimate and personal, slice-of-life stuff. I love walking around and looking at things, piecing information or narrative together as I go. I love seeing ordinary objects altered in a way that makes them extraordinary, puts them in a new context (like Claes Oldenburg but also like Chibi-Robo!). I also (like many artists) love controlling how people interpret my work, but I know full well at this point that it’s pretty much impossible to do that. Davis’ design program teaches us how to guide the viewer, how to give your work the best chance of being understood the way you intended it to be, but purely visual work is inherently up for interpretation. I struggled for a while to decide exactly how and where I wanted to limit the player’s movement in Narrative. I wanted to make sure people saw the letter, the chocolate, the cake that is much more visible from the table than it is from the floor. But I also wanted players to be able to explore more than this one surface, to be able to peer into connecting rooms and hallways. But if they could get off the table, unless I cranked up the jump height and totally changed the tone of the game, they had no way to get back up and see something they missed.

Ultimately, I decided to embrace – and lean even farther into – the fact that, no matter what, I ultimately could not control what the player was going to do. This decision influenced many of the decisions that followed in the design of the game. I added more narrative elements on the floor and connecting rooms, so that, even if someone immediately jumped off the table, they could still formulate some kind of story from their surroundings. The story would change depending on what objects they focused on and what objects they ignored or missed, but the story was going to change, anyway, from person to person, even if they were restricted to the tabletop. Some people might read into the cake, some might find more meaning in the mug. I can’t control the backgrounds they’re bringing into my game. I can design a game that gives my own interpretation a fighting chance, but that interpretation is still my own, and the design decisions I make that, to me, clearly point towards Interpretation A are built on my own experiences, my own baggage that I’m bringing to the gameplay. Someone else could look at those same design decisions and see a neon sign pointing directly at Interpretation B. There’s no way to wholly control the interpretation of any piece of visual art, so I leaned into that fact. You walk slowly, painfully far away from things you might want to examine, and you have time to reflect on what you’ve seen. To fully examine certain objects, you have to walk around them, really taking them in. What you choose to dedicate time to determines your experience of the game. I could say something here about that mirroring the experience of life, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life cringing. I will say, however, that the idea that you can’t control how people will think of your work (or you) is an idea I’ve been engaging with a lot lately. It can make you feel powerless, and it can also be embraced and help you make peace with yourself and your “image,” at least a little bit.

Creating this game has been a very frustrating experience for me. There were so many images in my mind that I could not execute due to my lack of Unity knowledge. However, the game I ended up creating felt like somewhat of an accomplishment when I watched a classmate play through it.

My game consisted of all of my alter egos, whom I have drawn on paper and on my computer. My game looked like a sketch book or a gallery space where they lived. The most challenging part of creating this game was getting the downloadable 3D objects. I would download 30 models only to find out that 4 actually work for my game. I also had to download the app called Archive Utility in order to unpack the rar files. Sometimes these models came with an entire package which consisted of a background or a floor.

Another challenge I came across was keeping everything organized. I started to misplace my items and importing them in random folders. I had 3 different materials folders, but these folders also held different textures and unresponsive files. This made it especially difficult for me to locate all of the textures I wanted to use in that exact moment. This stalled my process continuously.

For my next project, I want to be more intentional with all of my choices instead of practicing and improvising with what I knew, or what I felt was comfortable.

As someone aspired to work in the gaming industry, I challenged myself to use only my own models for this first project. I opened up a shrine I modeled before and started doing the UVs, but I quickly realize I don’t have enough time to do this in a week along other courses, so I settled on the auto UV feature for many parts of the mesh. The first screenshot is an optimized UV I created myself, and the second screenshot is an example of an auto-generated UV in Maya, which is not ideal, but usable.

I downloaded textures from textures.com, also created my own texture for the roof and the lamp in Substance Painter. I modified them in PS to made sure they are consistent in style.

To make the overall environment more natural, I added some default trees from unity assets, to give the sense of the shrine’s solitude in the woods.

Most of my previous works are rendered in Maya with Vray, mostly  aiming at achieving semi-photo-realistic characters(work-in-progress render above). I have no experience in creating optimized textures and models for a game(limited poly-count, resolution, cached simulations etc.). I was excited about learning in-depth optimization of models and textures in Unity(including caching and real-time simulations), but I realize the class’ main focus is on assessing interpretations of the gaming experience and designing experimental games that only touches the surface of the technical aspect. For me personally, the common mysterious and abstract designs of experimental games is a cover-up for the lack of technical/artistic skills or lazy game-making, but I do recognize most of these games are independent. For me, experimental games are like modern art, overly praised for the effort put into it. Although not exactly what I was expecting, the class offers experience in Unity, which I am looking forward to.

I’ve always had a strong interest in designing narrative environments and settings; I often draw or work on them in my spare time (and work time), and want to be in jobs like storyboarding or relevant fields. This was my first time creating a 3d game level, and though I was initially intimidated, I immediately felt a familiar sense of excitement from times in my childhood when I’d try to create board games or design cool environments. From the moment the assignment was given, I held an interest in the idea of having the player fall down what was supposedly an underground series of rooms and end up on an extremely high bridge (the fence model but really really big). Changing from a tall bridge amidst clouds with beaming sunlight and a blue sky to halloween trees was mainly because I wanted some tangible form of reward at the end (originally just a tree on the final platform), and also because I was in an October-ey mood.

One particular bit I noticed was interesting during my level creation process was the fact that it was almost entirely indoors, and relied heavily on alternating pure darkness with directional lights. This meant that when actually changing and playing the level, I’d constantly have to slide away a face of the current room I was working on to change the internal mechanisms, then often forget to slide it back and enter a room completely filled with sunlight.

In terms of player feedback, I was slightly surprised that Jesse actually was suspicious of the false green goal and looked down; until that point, I’d myself never actually seen what the “Hell” drop looked like looking down from the top. I’d even designed the fall distance to have a certain amount of pitch blackness staring at the wall before the red light gradually transitioned in. Overall, I was decently happy with my result despite the lack of technical knowledge; the main goal I had was seeing if I could establish a decent semblance of atmosphere. In the future, though, I’d definitely want to include sounds, as well as fix the random lighting that started to bleed through the walls as my level gained complexity beyond a single room.