I ran into a lot of trouble in this week’s game, especially with coding and thinking of a theme to go with for the game. I thought it would be really cool if there was an overall connecting theme of the conch appearing throughout the scenes, but then I thought, “Wow, what now”. What was the purpose if this single, existing conch appearing out of nowhere? The first scene was fine when randomly generating. It was when I moved onto the second scene where things got wonky. My plane and object models were very dark. And no matter how much I changed the lighting, they just remained the same. Some of the objects weren’t even taking the color material and I got more frustrated.
I got really disappointed that nothing was going how I saw it to be so it really just bogged down my creativity. In sight of trying to see a bright side to it, I decided for it to be a bit funny, in light of the festivities of Halloween (and soon to be Christmas because what is Thanksgiving? Joking). So I played around with having text appear with you approached the conch (tried to make it something like the magic conch from SpongeBob), and the gingerbread boy.
As Professor Boluk has mentioned in critique, I wish I could have furthered it with some music, and have it lead to some sort of unexpected ending where the player would have to explore the world a bit in order to find it. One thing she mentioned was narration, and having a story, and I think that was a good point, especially in having speech text in my game. Giving them some personality, or having them lead to other objects could have been interesting to see. Also changing the skybox, as Patrick mention, really changes the atmosphere. I think I might try that out soon.
This particular project has been very difficult for me. Not only with the coding, but also just thinking of an idea of what kind of game to build. I was having a hard time deciding what I wanted my game to be about, and what kind of levels my game would have. Since we started building this project around Halloween, I eventually became inspired to do something Halloween themed, or just something spooky looking. I looked on TurboSquid and found some great free models of gravestones and pumpkins, which I will put into different levels of the game.
I also got inspired by Professor LeMieux’s tutorial level with the dark area with dead trees and the open shack. My idea for my game is to be something similar to that but with its own tweaks. Before the Halloween idea, I was considering having some levels with obstacles. Something like a death trap kind of game where you have to avoid all these shapes and objects, and if you touch them you lose and have to restart the level. However, I feel like I’m pressed for time and that would take a lot longer than this current idea. I’m still having trouble with some of the coding so I’m glad I scrapped that idea, however, I feel like that would have been more fun to play. My game is still incomplete (and has no name yet :’D) mainly because of coding issues, but I’m hoping it turns out well.
I like looking at things in games. I’m realizing that as I work through these projects and reflect on how I’ve approached games throughout my life.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Dream Logic is essentially a hide-and-seek game, because I had been approaching it as primarily something to look at, a space to navigate, a scene to explore. The noise-seeking element of the game was intended to create some sense of mystery, intrigue, or narrative, and to ensure that the player would (probably) touch the thing that would bring them to the next level, but I didn’t consider it as the crux of the gameplay in and of itself. I looked at it as simply something to listen to, something to experience, somewhat passively, like the rest of these (mostly) still scenes*.
The opening scene, indoors, titled “home” within Unity.
When I was working on the second scene of the game, featuring the house, swing sets, and too-big stuffed foxes (yes, they were foxes), I changed elements from the code for the first scene one bit at a time to fit my new vision. At some point, I had changed almost all the elements I had intended to be different in this second scene – except for the fox. The disorienting repetition, the way that the organization of objects on the landscape doesn’t seem to make much sense, the fact that the layout changes with each visit to the spaces portrayed (including the one-off objects like the houses and the bed) all read to me as the kind of surreal, nonsensical layout of a dreamscape.
Level 2, called “yard” in Unity – featuring moving water!
In case it hasn’t become clear, I find the idea of being a small figure in a larger, otherwise somewhat ordinary space very interesting. It puts the ordinary in a new context, makes it extraordinary, calls on the player to reinterpret normal objects they might encounter in the game as potentially magic or special. Why else would they be so big, and you so small? Something must be happening here.
The game’s conclusion, and level 3, called “Disaster” within Unity.
Wandering around someone else’s room is a very intimate thing, and, by making the player tiny, a fly on the wall, the experience can almost become more intimate. You look more closely at little things, because you’re right up next to them. You can get into more spaces, see more detail.
I’m not sure if I will want to revisit the idea of being a small figure in a home or room in another project this quarter**, but I have always gotten a lot of enjoyment out of exploring a space with a lot of detail, with Easter eggs and narrative. A person’s physical environment can say a lot about them – or nothing at all. Right now, my room is full of boxes of old things, bags of old clothes. Some of them are going to be donated or reused, and others are just going to live with me now. Clean and dirty clothes are scattered all over the floor – or, what little is visible around the boxes. My desk is messy, practically unusable, with piles of fabric scraps and loose pins covering it. A tiny figure in my room might see barber sheers, old car keys, notes to myself that are written over and over because I still haven’t gotten around to them. Right now, those details of my physical environment can definitely tell a story, maybe more clearly than I would be willing to share verbally in certain contexts. If I do revisit this concept, though, I would like to include the suggestion of human presence. Maybe a coffee cup with steam still rising from it, or an open door and a barely-audible conversation happening in a nearby room. The light might change to imply the passing of time, some movement in this universe, or maybe music or a talk show plays from a radio somewhere in the room.
*The water in the second level animates.
**In another class I’m taking this quarter, one of my professors said that she thought being a designer or artist was often about having some idea in your head, and just working on it again and again until you’re satisfied, full-up on the idea, and can move on to the next one.
Lollipop Madness is a timed game where your goal is to collect has many lollipops before time runs out.
Background
The main goal of the game is to have a nice pop candy land game with marshmallow and chocolate bars there to help. Unlike the other projects this had to be a random self generated game. That came with a lot of kinks and slips. I found having a game where it randomly changes every time interesting. It is like throwing the dice every time you play to make sure to works appropriately. However, it is very cool because you can feel like an actual player who has never seen that level before it is different every time. (I would not want to be the QA person for this sort of game.) Another effect of this game is that in order to get to the next level you must have a certain amount of lollipops before time runs out or the game ends and you have to start over. Lastly, the last component of this game is that the user needs to jump with little gravity to hold you down. Not only does this add to the change I believe it helps the game feel a more dream like.
I was not able to think of much interesting concept for this project, so I went back to build what I like the most – trap in a narrow space. In summary, my game is about a person is getting trapped in a narrow room. With each refresh, the room would look differently. Sometimes, you would be trap by barriers, sometimes, you might be luck enough to get a door in ur room. There is no much interaction with the room because the room was so small that you simply have not much space to move.
By using Random.Range, each object has different possibility to be generated in the room. When I was working on my project, there is some bug that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. Every time when I reload the game scenes, the objects and the floor would turn into some weird white color. However, this won’t happen for the first time you start the game. I was not sure if it’s my computer’s problem since I have not tried to run it in a different machine.
This is our 4th project – Randomly Generated Game Design. I was amazed by how many varieties the games we had designed for this project! I really like the games our classmate designed, such as Three Waves and Infinite Fitness. They are really cool and have the great concepts!
My game is unfinished so I just call it “Untitled”. My goal for this game is to create an unrealistic look in my game environment. Here’s the look of my game! The origin of my game concept is from Alice In Wonderland so I used this checker pattern plane as the ground for my game, and the ground and objects above the ground are all randomly generated.
In the process of making this game, I feel the hardest part is the technical aspects of the work. My code often doesn’t work exactly as expected and I also have a lot of problems with working in the Unity interface because I’m still not so familiar with all the tools. In every project, professor introduces us some new tools and code functions to build a new type of game. I think it’s cool but there’re so many things we need to learn for each project. I feel this class is constantly challenging me and pushing my boundary in terms of workloads and the complexity of each project. The biggest mistake we can make is to start the project a day before its due day because it takes so much time to build a game and you wouldn’t be able to finish it if you don’t start it earlier.
Go back to the topic of my game environment!
I really like how surrealistic and weird my game looks like, especially the flowing ponies. 😀 I’m glad I made the sky pink and chose to generate this weird type of trees so it looks unrealistic and unique!
Last be not least, I feel great seeing so many great examples of games created in this class. Each time it motivates me to work harder and to think creatively so that I can do better next time.
Also, now I noticed that each game we created has its own unique identity. I think this is great and really cool!
For this week’s game, I spent most of my efforts on figuring out the code. The inspiration of this project came from a horror game I saw some streamer playing on Twitch, where the player goes through an infinite loop unless a condition is triggered. I initially planned to have doors on each room, but that requires some more coding I’m not familiar with yet, though the main reason is short on time.
As on how I got the code to work, I calculated how much distance I have to advance among the Z axis to create the next room, and generate the whole scene again upon colliding with the trigger at the door. A variable keeps track of the times of new rooms generated, so each time a new room is triggered, the whole scene is pushed forward by (fixed distance*how many rooms generated so far) along the Z axis. As for the furniture in the room, I have them placed within a random range of the current room, and assigned them different ranges among the X axis to avoid overlapping.
The feedback i received are good ideas to polish the project further, and I would definitely try if I had enough time.
