Month: December 2017

Love Hotel is live! Still mind-boggled that this project actually reached it’s culmination; coming into this class I knew I wanted to create a game set in a Love Hotel, but I didn’t know what the story would be or the concept behind it. I remember wanting to make it exclusively a murder/mystery game where the user plays detective but what’s the fun in sticking to one genre?

This project definitely has a lot more room to evolve. There’s tons of other mechanics, models, and tiny touches I want to add. Also, there’s a few bugs that I need to fix. I still find it hilarious that I forgot to put the ceiling on the room and only realized during presentation. Also the collider on the bed is really glitchy, because if you walk into it too much you get stuck there and have to jump away or restart the game to get out. I’ve tried playing with the size of the collider to see if it helps, but it doesn’t so I’m not sure what to do about that. Nevertheless I’m pretty happy with the outcome and really appreciated everyone’s comments about it during critique.

Choosing the music for the game was one of my favorite parts. You know how sometimes you’re on Youtube watching video after video and you get so lost in the sauce that you end up finding really dope 1970s Japanese broody yet badass love songs? Well that’s exactly how I found “Wandering” by Hako Yamasaki. I have an entire playlist of weird/beautiful/unknown music I’ve found on Youtube but I listened this one and suddenly everything makes sense. Music completes everything, truly. I was also originally going to make an hour long mix of songs and edit it with crackle so it’s more old-vinyl, but of course time was the enemy and I had to sacrifice that. Perhaps that will happen in a future update.

Hi everyone,

I successfully published my game Illuminated on itch.io.

Here’s the link to my publication page.

https://elluo.itch.io/illuminated

Here’s the link to the trailer on Youtube.

I quickly made this trailer and edited it using After Effects. It’s an awesome tool for making motion graphic or animation based videos.

For the publication process is fairly simple. I took several screenshots and added a few descriptions of my game. I also uploaded the zip file that contains the APP and EXE files.

Feel free to download my game if you’re interested in playing it! 🙂

Also, on The Play’s The Thing Day, it was really exciting to see other people playing my game and was interesting too to see how they were trying to figure out how to solve the puzzle I created. I felt really proud of myself afterward and felt I have accomplished something big this quarter. I’ve really appreciated the Professor for giving us this opportunity to showcase our works in this exhibition. I feel amazing seeing people interested in my game. I just want to say thank you to everyone who helped me before and gave me feedback so that my game can be improved and become a better one.

Thank you, everyone.  🙂

Elle

 

 

Going to be unloading a lot of these posts, so bear with the incoming flood. I really regret not keeping up with everybody’s posts and thoughts, as they’ve all been seriously interesting and amazing.

Returning to my 2nd ever project, the text based game, was nostalgic. It was pretty funny to compare difficulties I had or things I straight up didn’t know that I could easily take care of now, as well as the depth of coding I got into with the choice trees that I didn’t really cover half as well at all in my final project.

At first, I was utterly lost for what exactly to do with a text-based game. The examples we saw in class were wildly varied, and each showed a crazy amount of potential mechanics down their unique paths. This total creative block ended up actually being partially why my project was late. In the end, I forced myself to start from somewhere and just slapped down my favorite color, pale lavender, as a placeholder background. The awkwardness of the actual color in comparison to the text felt stifling, and in that moment of non-text influenced atmosphere, I decided that I’d make a largely atmospheric, story-like text game (as opposed to like, a massive scale land with interconnected landmarks). I deadened the color to a much more ominous shade, and decided to try for a tense, mysterious feeling in my writing.

I realized that, to accentuate an actual feeling of tension, I needed to include a time-based element to the games. If it weren’t for this, I would’ve probably spent a tenth the amount of time I actually ended up pouring just to get the damn thing to work.  A huge problem I faced was that when you reached the time limit in an area enough for the danger timer to show, hitting the danger limit again in a different area would “move” you back to the first scene the timer appeared in, with all of its specific choices. This meant a scene lock loop that would be unescapable per play run, and really made it hard for me to test the playability of later parts in the game, which was the other issue. I’d decided to contextualize the timing element as breath – if you ran out, you started from the beginning, but it’d refill every time you made a choice and entered a new scene – and had a lot of trouble balancing it between having no effect on urgency and making the game an unplayable level of difficulty (some scenes would reduce your maximum “breath capacity”).

Overall, this project ended up actually being a lot of fun, and I’m happy for the basic foundational coding it taught me for later projects and onwards.

I didn’t know what this event would be like or how it would go, but I’m really glad I went. The room was kinda small, yet so many people showed up! Unfortunately I had to leave before the discussion started, but I did get to stick around for about an hour or so. It was a lot of fun checking out everyone’s games and talking to people and fellow classmates at the event. I even saw my radio professor Jesse Drew at the exhibit and we talked a bit about the games there. I loved watching people attempt to play my game. However, something happened with my game where the mouse wouldn’t show up on the start screen whenever someone restarted the game, so that was a little annoying. However, that didn’t stop people from playing. It was interesting to see that nobody was able to get past level 2! Even though the players found it challenging, I saw them keep going at it to try and try again, and it made me feel proud that I made a game that people enjoyed playing, even if they lose at it. This whole event and class was a great experience for me and I’m really glad I took it this quarter. It was really fun to see everyone’s skill level grow since week 1 and see what games everyone produced in the end. What I thought was very interesting was that everyone had their own unique game. No game was alike and I love that. It showed everyone’s creativity and just what they’re capable of creating.
I didn’t get a chance to play everyone’s game at the exhibit but the ones I did play I had so much fun playing! I’ll definitely be trying out everyone’s game when I get the chance.

Man I can’t believe this game and class is done! This whole quarter was definitely an experience for me and definitely a challenging one. There were times where I just felt completely overwhelmed with the workload plus with all my other classes, I questioned whether or not I would be able to handle everything this quarter. There were times when I felt like dropping the class, but I’m really glad I didn’t. After finishing this game and getting through this class, I feel really proud of myself for sticking through it all. The fact that I finished this game along with my other class projects makes me feel super accomplished. Even if I feel extremely exhausted lol.
Now about the finished product of my game, I didn’t get to put in everything I wanted, but for what it is, I can say I’m proud of it. There is still a little issue with the scoreboard but it’s very minor and it shouldn’t be too distracting to the player since it doesn’t affect the overall gameplay that much. I also wish I put in music and sound effects, but due to time constraints it wasn’t possible. Maybe if I plan to update it in the future, that’ll be the first thing I do. However, I’m not too eager to get back to coding on this game right away. I’m really glad people seemed to like this game, and that they enjoyed the new additions to it. I knew I wanted to make a simple yet challenging game and I can happily say that I accomplished that. It’s even hard for me to play this game sometimes. When I was testing out the coding I had to cut down on the times just so I can test out the levels. I was honestly surprised I got through 7 of the 8 levels when I demonstrated the game to the class. Speaking of the 8th level, I wish people got a chance to see it but basically it’s a level where there is no time limit and the player must survive through all of the challenges they faced prior, while trying to collect coins to score points. It’s honestly a mess of a level but I kind of like the chaos of it all. Here is a preview gif of what the level looks like (as you can see even I have trouble with this level haha):

Also, it was really fun seeing everyone’s games! Everybody did a fantastic job and I was impressed with all of them. I can’t wait to try them out for myself. I hope you all enjoy playing this game, if you ever feel up to the challenge. 😉

Going to this event was better than I expected. Although I didn’t really know what I was going to be attending, I was in an environment that was all about the games. The people were friendly and open to discussing the games being presented. There was a strong presence from both staff of the University but also from the students.

It was nice seeing the creativity of the other students in the doom class, seeing what modifications they chose to create to the game DOOM. I have a friend named Daniel that created a mod that shot rockets at enemy robots that looked like Star Wars machines. There was also some sort of a robot attached to the ceiling of the game that shot lasers at you, forcing the player to shoot back to continue the game. I thought he did a nice job of adding a “Collision Detection” like interactions in the game. For instance you also had to navigate through the level to find keys that eventually open certain doors. On top of that whenever the character came close to the door, the door told the player which key was needed to open the door, this was well executed.

Daniel also created a game object that changed the state of the game after touching. Making the game trippy, changing the way the game looked. Altering the color scheme and I think he also added new objects. The lady next to him had an interesting mod as well as the objective was to collect apples. Not only was the aesthetic of the game interesting but the song choice that accompanied the game was pretty funny and fun. The song was like a kid song singing about eating apples. I found this to be a nice touch that complimented the gameplay.

Playing Giana and Mikes games both showed interesting gameplay objectives. Giana’s gameplay was underestimated by a few people, as they it was going to be easy to evade the randomly generated  enemy bots. But people still had fun with her game, including myself. For Mike’s game, I though it was cool how you had to find a coin located on this massive map. A dope detail he implemented was the Chinese writing on the coin. The map layout was also pretty fun to navigate around. Hopefully I can provide some music to yall’s game.

For this second prototype I wanted to trim down my amount of levels from 10 to 7 levels,  being I feel that is a number of completion. I ran into the issue of the scenes not being able to go all the way to 7 then. I would be able to advance to the third and then 4th level, but I would not be able to go to the fifth. Once I got to the fifth the game would go to the 3rd level rather than the 6th. The first few levels began rather easy but as the game goes on the levels get modified and the user is pushed to work harder to complete each puzzle. I also needed to make changes to the color scheme. The first few prototypes were to bright, I needed the colors to be more earthly and a bit flatter. I felt as if the strong colors had no soul to them.

One way I wanted to juice this project up was by having the enemy characters either follow the main character around or move around randomly, creating a harder level to pass. I initially had the main enemy character move around in its area but I didn’t feel like it worked to well. So now with the implementation of additional enemy bots I want them to move around like fellow classmate Giana’s dodgeball game.

One addition I failed to create was a score that had the current amount of points plus the amount needed to reach to advance to the next level. This would be cool for the user to be able to see, “ok I need to see how to get this score and I’ll be finished with this level.” As a stylistic choice I would have went with a natural hand write style font, with a bit of a wiggle to it.

Another idea was to have a timer implemented into the game creating a sense of urgency to figure out the puzzle. Without the timer the game is to easy. If you think about this life we have currently indulged ourselves in, it runs on time. I know currently I have to make decisions based on time, so I felt I would benefit the game to implement that.

A bit more polish would’ve been added to the main character with the addition of a code that would make the color of the main character change when the user moved the character. A slow wave like change of color would take place if I was able to obtain this task. There was also the addition of a sound that would be heard every time the player collected food, and passed the food to the lover. As well as sounds heard when the player touched the enemy. Both of these sounds would have been different from each other; one being a Mario like coin sound, and the other being a deep buzz similar to the sound a Mac makes when you hit a key that currently isn’t allowed.

Revisiting project three has been real cool. Outside the fact that I liked the assignment, this project allowed me to take a basic game to the next level. In doing so I initially planned to have multiple levels that one will go through by the location of the player. Say the player runs in to a certain object, this object would propel the player to another level. Although this idea was cool it didn’t last once class critique came. Instead the idea evolved to the game changing levels once a certain score in that level was achieved. The new objective of the game is to now complete the puzzle of each level to be able to advance.  Now the game will begin simple and progress in difficulty as the player plays through the game, while being able to learn how to win.

With my initial idea of being able to change levels, mid level, I think I will try to implement that into the game at later stages of the progress of the game as the puzzles get harder.

I also had want to try an experiment with sound in this game. So far I’ve placed music on the title screen and music on each level. Currently I am having an issue with the music restarting after each level is started. What I want to do is have the music play once the first level is begun and continue throughout the levels. If the user is still playing when the audio is finished I want it to loop.

The nice thing about this project was learning that this clicking interaction can be applied to many different types of games. I had the idea that there would be a player playing a basketball like shooting game where the player had to precisely click on an area to shoot and score. Now thinking about it, this code would need some physics to measure distance as well as the arc of travel from the character to the placement of the basket.

All I was able to create for this game was the basic tutorial the professor walked us through. But I made a stylistic choice of not adding any animal icons to create a sense of button smashing. This game is essentially that, whenever the user clicks the buttons a small click sound is heard. The score also adds up each time the user clicks, after the amount of clicks hits a certain number the user can by another button. One but needs ten clicks to add the count of those those buttons. Another button needs one hundred clicks to add to that button count. I find it interesting how I was able to set up a game that is able to play with numbers. Thankfully it is in the code that I am able to subtract and add. This gameplay feature can be used best with puzzle games.

Now thinking about it, it would’ve been better to replace the click sound with a 808 boom. Or if the four buttons all held a different sound that could be played when clicked, this could create a dope game. The other sounds could be a clap, a synthesizer stab, a vocal chop, something interesting and space-like.