Month: November 2017

In Prototype A for The Search of Oinkers, I focused on getting the scenes to change once your character came into contact with another. I think the hardest part was getting the text with the box to pop up. I was deciding between getting it to be a mouse click action or a collider that enabled it to show up. It was a very troubling process, because I was trying to follow a YouTube tutorial on how to get a dialogue box to pop up on mouse click command. For each element, I had to create a separate object and layer them so that they did not block another element’s view. So in the order of the background, the foreground with the characters to stand on, the box image (which I will change later on to a text box format) and finally the text itself in the front. Right now it is set up so that when you collided with the yellow sphere, the box and text will enable, and by pressing Enter, it would change to the next scene. I tried playing with the UI Button tool, but quickly got lost in the mess of using the mouse to click and moving with keys. Hopefully the next step is to create the story text, along with set keys to choose to advance, and finally putting in the art!

This week I focused on trying to get the game play working correctly. So far I was able to get the player to change the color of the square and the colliding action of the game. I did come across a few errors. First, when I tried to compare the colors the collider code stops working and the main square is able to run through the rest of the squares. Another error I keep coming across is that the camera does not capture the complete background so it looks like the square goes off screen.

As for next steps, I will be troubleshooting the comparison code, adding the score board, editing the squares to be the hold cloud materials, editing the text, and continuously randomly generating more squares.

Something I am excited to learn about is adding facial expression to the square by using two textures and once the game is working adding juiciness. However, this idea is a bit more difficult than I thought it would be but let’s see how it goes!

 

 

Greetings folks, in this game “Comida,” I set out to create a game that made you share the food you ate throughout the level. As sharing is essential to life, so is not being greedy. If you eat to much in the game, the game will not function as it needs to. If you don’t eat you will die, especially if you try to share when you have nothing to share. But you also have to be able to feed your loved one by sharing. When feeding your loved one, while sustaining your health, you will win the game.

One way to lose the game is by sharing with the wrong person. If you share with the wrong character on this game you will slowly die and if you give the wrong character all you got, it will be a wrap. So essentially share wisely.

The playing field of the game is meant to represent the obstacles life will have in place for everyone. In this particular case, these obstacles are meant to make it hard for you to succeed, but once you continue to persevere through the obstacles you will succeed. I choose to use earth like colors to make it feel more relatable or grounded but I know I can do a better job.

Dreams

 

I want to create a space of illusions. I was inspired by images from outer space and the ocean and I want to incorporate the feeling of vastness and ambiguity, but I want to describe them with detail and care. The mysterious feeling we have regarding our dreams and our psyche are feelings that we cannot quite describe using words. Sometimes, even the visuals we see everyday cannot illustrate the strange images we see in our dreams. In order to capture this feeling, I will create several spaces that tell an environmental story itself. The player will be able to look into some of my dreams and the randomly occurring visuals produced by my mind.

 

The goal is to create 20 spaces that are so different from each other, but hold similar symbols and thought. The player will have to search for a piece of fruit that will lead them to the next dream-like environment. When you bump into the wrong fruits, they will speak nonsense poetry to you.

 

Though my game is still in its premature stages, it already poses many difficulties. When I added the collider to the fruit in each level, it stopped responding to my collision with the fruit. Also, the rooms started to look very similar to one another so I had to get rid of some of them and recreate more abstract and absurd rooms. Creativity is much needed in order to convey this strong visualization. I feel as though I am running out of creativity and so I have decided many nights to sleep on it in order to let my dreams inspire me throughout this process.

There is a tool in Unity which I have fell in love with, and that is the Terrain Engine. Unity’s Terrain system allows the users to add various vast landscapes. If you want to add a Terrain to your scene, select GameObject > 3D Object > Terrain from the menu. In addition, Unity provides you with number of tools you modify with, such as the height tools, when you paint with this tool, the height is increased as you sweep the mouse over the terrain. The height will add up and accumulate if you just hold the mouse in one place, on the other hand if you hold down the shift key, the height will be lowered. Of course one of my favorite are the brushes, which you can create a variety of effects with it, such as if you want to create a different shapes of cliffs, one with the round edge would be the soft brush while the hard edge brush is responsible for cutting steep cliffs. Now we’re on the texture part, which is a lot more easier. You can simply add or drag the texture images to the terrain to create the details of the terrain. Terrains are large objects, so it is better to have a texture that repeats seamlessly.

Day of the Devs was a really great experience, as I have never been to any kind of gaming convention before.  Next year I would block out my entire day to go to this event again, because there was so much to see and I didn’t even get to see a fraction of the games there, let alone test play them.  There was a lot of waiting in line or watching others play, as they had already been playing for a long time and weren’t sharing the controller :/.

In particular it was nice to see how people of many ages attended, although most were in their 30’s?, I also was not expecting there would be bars at the venue or food trucks!  There were like 60 games total, even from game developers in other countries.  Some of the games I got to see were Luna, Mineko’s Night Market, Gang Beasts, Anamorphine, and Pode.

I liked this room at the venue.  The ceiling lights were out except for a few lights on the walls as well as some colorful lights on a different wall.  There was a place for people to draw on the wall, and this room also had actual places to sit down, which was refreshing since the event attracted quite a crowd.

Luna was a game in this room, a VR one which attracted many onlookers.  I didn’t get to play this one because I didn’t want to wait in line for the 2+ hours it would have taken.  Many games shown at Day of the Devs were short demo reels while others had timers for each test-player.  However due to the crowds the game devs probably didn’t want to keep enforcing 10-minute limits and would rather talk to people about their games.

This video of the game Pode is short but shows a way the developers smoothly integrated split screen into a two-player game (that usually has a shared screen).  This can definitely eliminate a lot of arguments that occur with co-op games…. haha.  It was interesting the difference in engagement between single and multiplayer games here.

Finally, Gang Beasts, a 4-player wrestling game, captured a lot of people’s attention.  It was placed at the center of the largest room, and each game had one champion.  The champions during the late afternoon were able to challenge each other while standing in a small ring on the main stage.

Overall, I’m really glad I went to Day of the Devs.  It was fun to meet up with my classmates/friends outside of a classroom setting and I wish that I had stayed longer.  I’m definitely going again next year!

-Erica

A friend who took this class last year told me sometime over the summer that I should follow Pippin Barr on twitter. His GAME IDEA’s are pretty incredible, almost always funny, and sometimes very sweet. (Here’s a link to a bunch of ’em. There’s a list of them on his website here, but the format is maybe a bit better on that first link.) Inspired by how short (but great) his game ideas were, I started a file on my phone of game ideas. They’re nowhere near as funny, and quite a few were written at 2 in the morning (and you can tell), but I have actually used it to document my early concepts for a lot of the games I’ve made for this class. When I mentioned during my pitch presentation that I was trying to decide on a concept from a list of 6, all 6 were from that game idea file.

Some of the ideas in that file are half-formed. Some of them are just dumb jokes. Some of them turned into games I was pretty happy with. In design, we’re often encouraged to experiment a lot with ideation, to write down ideas that have nothing to do with our project, to take a break and then return to the project fresh, to explore the ideas that seem unlikely or over-the-top. I have boxes full of post-it notes on which I (and my classmates) scribbled ideas during ideation sessions in classes I’ve taken over the last few years. Some of the ideas didn’t fit my concept, some fit perfectly, some were coincidentally exactly what I’d been thinking about already, some are dumb jokes or drawings left by friends in the class, and all of them were useful. In one of those classes, I ended up making a video game for my final project. It was called “Little Critters,” and it was a cutesy video game made in GameMaker Studio, designed to, in the words of two different people I interviewed in the course of the project, “trick people into agreeing with [me].” I remember that project, that I was so excited about, with a significant amount of regret. I don’t think I should have made a video game to address the problem I was researching. Maybe, somewhere in the hundreds of post-its and messy sketches, a better solution is hiding, or a piece of a better solution.

Am I going to make “game where everybody runs like they’re wearing a backpack?” Who knows. Is it a funny idea that I might remember years down the line and incorporate somehow into a future project? Again, who knows, but I’m glad I’ve got it written down somewhere.

Approaching this project with my design education behind me is a little complicated, because so many design classes emphasize experimentation, ideation, and multiple, unrelated prototypes, and the timing of this class doesn’t allow for that. Ideation sessions (the more I type that phrase out, the more it feels pretentious – I’m talking about brainstorming, but the design department seems to have an intense love affair going with the word “ideation” and it’s been used in pretty much every design class I’ve ever taken – many many times) are one of my favorite things in design classes. I love pulling out a big piece of paper and writing down some more thought-out concepts I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and also a bunch of gibberish that, if nothing else, can function as comic relief during more emotionally-draining projects.

I’m not positive what my point is, beyond that I’m really happy I started that game idea note on my phone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to add to it. I’ve started tweeting out “Davis gothic” sentences, little weird microfiction things about Davis, and it’s making me see the appeal of tweeting out game ideas, too, if they’re good or sad or funny enough.

Here are a few of my favorite Pippin Barr GAME IDEA tweets. These ones, also.

Also, apparently, there was a game jam where people were invited to make games based on his tweets!

I’m still debating a few ideas for the final game, but they’re all in the game idea note on my phone.

I went with Victoria, and outside of being excited to see Darren Korb (composed for Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre) live, I had no idea what to expect. When we arrived at the opening time for regular free tickets at 1, we were first already taken aback by the size of the line, though it passed into the venue surprisingly quickly. We were greeted by free tote bags, with tiny pins/badges and free Red Bull to hoard everywhere. I still haven’t finished my stash of the latter. Though this was likely bc the majority of people would end up arriving later in the day, we were both still instantly surprised by just how many people there were at each and every stall, and in general. The event was spread out through 4 or so rooms filled with stalls, including one larger central warehouse with a large screen where most of the games were. Most of the stalls were just a monitor and controller with a sign showing the game’s name on top, but a couple had gimmicks (and actual devs present) such as ringing a bell and giving winners a foam wrestler’s belt, as Gang Beasts did.

Eventually, near the end of the event, all of those who owned winning wrestling belts went to the large screen in the front of the room in a tournament of champions. It was pretty hype.

The quality of games present was wildly varied. Some felt almost like flash games from Newgrounds, while others felt like future indie hits with amazing production value, polish, and art direction. Some of the most notable games that come to mind (none of which I was actually able to play due to long wait times) are Anamorphine, Bernband, Floor is Lava, and Mineko’s Market.

Lastly, being able to watch Darren Korb and Ashley Barret perform familiar songs live was amazing. They played mainly songs from Transistor, likely because it was the most reliant on singing, whereas the other soundtracks used heavy bass and beats and Darren had opted to only bring his acoustic guitar.

IMG_3927

(I think this is a download link for some reason, might be too large for built in browser player.)

Overall, Day of the Devs was enormously fun and inspiring, and I see absolutely no reason to not continue going every year from now on.

Hi everyone,

I went to the Day of the Devs event and it was so fun!!!! This picture is me with my friend holding the map of the conference!!  I really like the design of the map because it’s really cartoony, colorful, and unique! I really like the design of each weird figure with their own unique identities that makes me think creatively because it would be really fun to design a game that has these weird figures in the game.

Here’s the picture of the CROWD watching the players playing the video game meanwhile they are also waiting in line to play this game. You can tell from this picture that how crowded the conference is. But, I am still glad that I made it to this event.

In the conference, I had played this game (showed the picture below). It was a really fun experience. This game is about four boneless figures fighting with each other and whoever dies the last will be the winner of the round.

I had played four rounds and lost 3 rounds……  Still, I didn’t regret playing this game because it made me keep laughing for at least 10 mins. It was really a fun game. In the fighting mode, boneless figures kept having weird postures because they are boneless. I really like the concept of this game and the scene of each round. This game is one of the most popular games in the conference. There’s another VR game which is also very popular. People waiting in lines to play the games they are interested in.

In summary, I had enjoyed this conference a lot and yes I will absolutely go back again next year. I love the overall atmosphere of the conference. It’s really crazy and fun. Also, I can tell that there’re a lot of passionate gamers were there in the conference. I can see the passion from the player’s eyes. It’s a wonderful event and should definitely be hosted again next year!

Elle