Author: Rui Long Zhao

In the last week’s presentation, I have been amazed by many projects that other students created. Especially when I saw those amazing visual and graphics that other students are able to create with unity, I was really impressed. I realized we are already able to do so much with everything we learned this quarter. However, what I have done was very simple and using very little of what we learned. I should have spend more time on developing something more complex and have more content. It would be great if I could change my game into many mini games that players could pick in a menu and play it. I could add my other projects into it too since they are pretty similar in some ways. Maybe I just like to make games that let people feel nervous or something.  I feel like those games really enable players to focus and it will be more excited when you finally beat it.

Overall this is a very interesting and helpful class. Hope everyone have a good year:)

In prototype B, I have added two level into the game. One require players’ jumping skills. As I was designing and testing the levels, I have figured out some tricks to play this level. You get more control on your character if you just rotate your mouse without clicking A and D to jump left or right. I think the process of finding out tracks and improving your skills and score is pretty interesting in this level. Also I have added some unnecessarily blocks to distract the  players from focusing.

In the third level, this level requires players to think about how to find the key before the time run off since it is impossible to run through it in 5 seconds. Especially after the first two levels, which just require players to just try to run as fast as possible, players most likely would not expect to run backward in the third level.

 

When I was brainstorming about the final project, I was planning on building a game where you could have interaction with NPC to get clue and solve problems. However, designing the gameplay was much harder than I thought. I was not able to come up with a good story or good design on the level. So I decided to rework on my project 1 – to build a maze but with a timer on it since it’s much easier to design a maze rather than something that require problem solving in a game. For my prototype A, I have builded a maze that has using the similar color as my project 1.  Somehow I feel like the black and pink color combination in a crowed space gives a very strange feeling. With a timer, the gameplay experience gives much more pressure to the players, especially when you watching the time running out but you still can’t find anything. I should have added background music to it, I think that will help a lot. I am also planning on building more levels on top of the maze, to make a series of games that require players to rush through to beat the time.

For this week’s project, I have created a game that let players try to mouse-clicking as fast as possible in ten seconds. At first, I was worried that my game was too simple, however, I saw some classmates have got tried pretty hard to get a good score and had fun with it. I realized that sometimes our games doesn’t have to be complicated to be fun. Sometimes, we could use simple mechanics and logic to build something fun and additive for players. 

In this week’s critic , I have got many good suggestions or review for my game. I am inspired by many good ideas. There are many things that I could do to make my game’s content more interesting. My game could be make for multi-players. Allowing one player to complete with another could be interesting. Also, I could make different game mode, such as in certain time, if the player achieve certain score, the player could be rewarded or given bonus time to keep playing. Also, it’s important to keep players’ highest score. Players could feel much more rewardable if I could set up this function. All in all, I think this could be a great game that I could extend on.

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.

 

I feel regretful that we didn’t get the time to play through everyone’s game this week. This week’s project involves more difficult coding. At the beginning, I have a lots of ideas that I want to put it into my game, such as creating buffs that change the ground size, buffs that offers a shield to block, buffs that increase movement speed, and etc. However, the coding part is much harder than I thought. I wasn’t sure if it is better to put the script in a holder or put it into a object to achieve certain purpose.  I have some problem creating bullets that randomly generate from all angels around the plane. After this week’s lecture, I think I should be able to fix the problem.

Though the game turns out to be “playful”, it’s satisfying to see some of the features works pretty well, for example, the rotation of the character, the size change on the character. All these functions could be very useful for other projects too. After this week’s project, I feel like it would be helpful to draw a layout of the game first and clear up all the relationship between game objects and script before actually start doing the project.

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

I have been a video game players for many years. It was a very interesting experience for me to build my first game in life using Unity. Since recently I have been a little bit frustrating in life, I want to make my games to make people feel annoyed. Therefore, the game’s color is a little bit dark and cold. Also, the player is trapped in a maze with very narrow walkway.

I have set up some puzzles for players to solve. However, because I have made the jumping mechanics a little bit too hard for this game, I was not able to show them all in a 5 minutes presentation. For example, when the player reaches this bridge, the players have to be brave to jump into the wall in order to get through since the wall actually has no collider and there is a bridge behind the wall.

We could see the design from the bottom of the maze. 

Also, it is a little bit satisfying for me to see the maze that we get out from.

However, there is not a real exist from this place.

After seeing other students’ work, I realize that I need to improve my skills in storytelling, and using light to set up the mood of my game. Also, I need to shorten my game in order to show all the content in 5 minutes next time. I am very excited to learn more and be able to do more with my games.

-Rui Long Zhao