Author: Syfan

This quarter really has been an absolute blast. I don’t think I’ve taken to anything else as naturally with as much investment in my past two years of full visual design classes. There really is just something magical about the art of game creation I guess. It’s a good thing I’m switching to CDM then. This itchio site really feels great; I think it’s going to be a great motivator and platform for me to keep creating and posting art games, and get better until I release something legit one day. It’s a great way to conclude a course but provide a path in the future for delving even further into the field.

Anyways, here’s mine: https://syf.itch.io/4-seasons . I’m really excited to see what games you all make as time passes by, as well as the different design philosophies and aesthetics that everybody’ll uniquely develop into seriously special styles. Stay in touch (my facebook is Steven Y-Fan), everybody, and post your itchios for me to keep up with. It’s been a great class with you all.

It was really hard to try and think of a clicker game that didn’t take after Cookie Clicker or provide something novel that Dark Room didn’t. In the end, I didn’t manage to think of any legit idea I could build an extended game on, and instead just made a short little game that relies on mouse mechanical skill as its key focus. 

My original idea was to randomly spawn a smattering of purple squares among a black background, but time constraints prevented me from nailing a balanced distribution of purple and black squares. I ended up making a pretty barebones game that put all of its focus on just the mouse.

Honestly, I actually sort of enjoy the game as a brief warmup or idle activity. The game doesn’t terribly require active thought or eye coordination, and mainly just helps to accustom the hand to faster movement and timing in the alternation of clicking and moving. If I were to actually build on this idea, I’d probably make the full sides of each screen clickable instead of just a specific middle portion, as well as add “juicyness” for when you start to hit exceptional scores within the time limit.

Though the topics of each post coincidentally lets me make one post for each season, I’m not sure I have anything of worth to say of the summer level. The original plan wasn’t much beyond its title, “a dancing concrete’s haze”, and the starting viewpoint of under the archway of a concrete highway, with a faded hazy yellow sky (helped by my experience messing with the procedural skybox in the winter level). At the time I was making this level, I was already utterly burnt out on the other 3, and was creatively and physically spent. This level being the one level I didn’t have an actual plan for didn’t help either. I think I actually went a little bit insane.

Petal behaviors clearly don’t mesh well with highways.

I’m not sure why I kept pushing for it to somehow work. One idea had bridges that kept floating downwards, and you had to keep jumping and climbing them to reach a goal floating high above. Another idea wasn’t even an idea. 12 seconds after starting the level you’d suddenly just get bombarded by 300 or so bridges coming in at ridiculous speeds from the sky in the direction of the sun. 9 times out of 10 the collision would hit you so hard and send you flying so fast I’d barely even be able to find where the original land was before it disappeared out of render distance. Art games.

I ended up going back to my roots with a sort of bookend. Throughout the quarter, I’d very occasionally use enormous drops as the signature part of a game or level, to the point where Patrick one day jokingly called an extremely vertical level design a “steven drop”. I decided that doing the mother of all drops to end the quarter was strangely apt (and low effort). Having to navigate gigantic cubes so big you couldn’t manually move them made me nostalgic for when I was first trying to engineer the timing of my Descent big drop. You’d eventually fall so long that even the enormous vertical bar on the side of the level would too fade from render distance, and there’s a solid 2 or so seconds of nothing before the first few bits of black petals fly past your vision. I think in retrospect it’s a fun little subversion about trigger happiness for the level restart button that you might’ve needed for the earlier levels. If you were to look down during this time, and luckily land on one of the petals, you’d get what I think is a pretty cool view. Ending the final project of this quarter with a simple black tree, a model I used extensively throughout nearly all of my games, just felt right, and when I saw the “The End” screen, with the tree against the giant faded sun, I felt satisfied with what I had created and learned.

I think my winter level definitely had the smoothest creation curve. What I mean is that the usual initial period of faffing around, unsure of how to start and get a cohesive aesthetic going, was fairly short, especially when in comparison to the rate at which I was soon able to get pretty solid looking things into the level. For reference, my winter and summer levels both took roughly the same amount of time to complete (4 hours), and my summer level is definitely not my best moment in game creation.

That’s not to say my winter level was actually objectively easy to create though; I still had a pretty terrible period of realizing that my initial vision was not going to work at all. Originally, I’d wanted to have the snow be extremely low poly and fairly flat, with only a bit of a depression to indicate the path to take; the setting was supposed to be utterly colorless, with a pale grey flat snow land reflecting the darker grey snowy sky. As the player walked for a short while, hopefully induced to feel longer from a combination of silence and colorlessness hitting abruptly after a super bombastic ending to the Fall level, a string of decrepit building skeletons would eventually come into view, while the title for the level would appear in thin black sans serif font all artsy fartsy like in the top left quadrant of the screen.

It ended up being impossible to make the path short enough that you could see the flat horizon all around while deep enough to convincingly feel like the only direction to go. Additionally, my attempt to create grey snow and skies was absolute junk. This was the first key for what would be my actual winter level, as I once again took out my frustrations on the custom skybox feature and threw around its variables to the max. This time though, I tried beating up the procedural skybox feature, and suddenly found myself staring at an absolutely enormous pale sun/moon with a pitch black sky. To hide this reveal, that meant the player had to start in a cave, and so I spent a while transforming the original path into a much more dramatic start.

I’m pretty happy with the appearance of the cave, though I’m not sure what’s up with the rendering. The final game I released lacks the darkness and rendered shadows, and is garishly glossy and overexposed as opposed to what I was seeing in test runs above.

Definitely the highlight for me though was the construction of the big secret, though my efforts seem to have mostly been put to the side. I spent a huge amount of time adjusting the terrain of this mountain so that from a certain angle it would have a noticeable giant unnatural landmark carved into the mountain, but not simply just look like a bunch of giant spikes right next to each other. This was part of the reason I made the entrance covered in actual giant spikes, both for dramatic effect and to hopefully let the player notice the contrast.

I’m pretty sure I failed though in my attempt to hint at the connection between the two secrets in their landmark though, as this actual glaring hint, the giant mountain illuminated by the moon when you first exit the cave, really does just look like two giant spikes next to each other. I definitely want to make sure I find a better balance of obscurity and detectability, because I think this is by far the most fun secret and gameplay moment in my game.

It’s funny how wildly time-consuming the most inane seeming parts of a game plan can end up totally taking over and result in a totally different final game. In this case, the total inability to actually capture the lighting of twilight, where everything is faded but nothing is actually dark, caused me to go mildly insane and start throwing the skybox into the far extremes of lighting. Near total darkness was ok enough at the time, as it at least allowed me to put in some strong lights to direct the player’s view, as well as establish something of an atmosphere. The original intent was to create a not too large but extremely detailed brick building, where you could interact with items on a desk and examine carefully composed furnishings. The building was to be abandoned and without lights; ideally, my planned twilight lighting would’ve allowed for emphasized areas via window illumination, while the rest would’ve had subdued lighting but been navigable.

What ended up happening was that none of this got done because I was struggling with the lighting so much. Additionally, it became harder and harder to create a forest with the right dimensions and density so that the brick building would break into distant view after walking down a fully covered path for a short while. By the time a lecture pretty late into the final project timeline came around, the one showing Footnotes, and all of the secrets, all I’d had was a hastily thrown together building that was just steps to a second floor with a window, and a small and dense forest. That one lecture made me realize that my current building/forest was more or less passable, and that I had bigger priorities for overall gameplay. Namely, secrets.

This Fall level was the first, so I decided for it to also be learning practice with the terrain tool for my intentions for Winter and possibly Spring. I created a huge area of terrain underneath the main area, and decided that I wanted to finally do what I never managed in my very first project: create a hidden path on a giant tree branch that you could walk on. I thought it was a good, easy way to overall boost the depth of the level, without having to waste too much time on visual/placing details that would bog me down.

It was not.

Anyways, I hope I made the entrance to the secret not too obscure, but still satisfying to notice. Please lemme know your experiences with it, if you decide to play my game.

I had a bit of an issue with coming up with a good idea for the randomly generated project, so I ended up coming up with my final project idea first and then backtracking it as my project 4. While lighting and appropriate terrain design were large parts of my focus, the key to the aesthetic (RWBY) I wanted to capture relied on coding a convincing petal drift behavior, as well as its random placement and distribution on the randomly generated tree positions.

My first finished build of the petal/tree generation ended with about 1500 petals. I was genuinely surprised that the game was perfectly runnable, but I feel like that stylistic choice to make the petals unlit color textures actually helped ease the need to render reflections and shadows. I ended up creating different distributions for each tree, as my decided limit/range of 50-300 petals per tree wasn’t enough for the small thin trees to look convincing (they just looked like they had a loose ball of red particles floating above them).

Coding the actual drifting behavior was difficult, but in a different way than the tree/petal generation, which was mainly just large, complex, and took a lot of lines. The drifting behavior is technically only 8 lines or so; however, it took me a really long time to find good exact numbers for each rotational direction, as well as speed ranges for each movement axis, for the petals to actually feel like petals, and with a satisfyingly stylistic flow of movement. I ended up using a function called deltaTime, which is a measure of the time in between frames. Trying anything else, even the lowest possible float of 0.01, wasn’t small enough for the petals to actually drift, and not blast off into the horizon as if shot from a confetti cannon.

I’m still far from my original ideal, as I wanted the petals to have actual easing in their movement, where they dip and slow, and fall in a pendulum-like swinging rhythm. In the current build, the petals simply move in a certain direction for a random amount of time before changing directions, making hard angles and abrupt changes in speed. I actually abandoned my original plan for springtime, which would’ve been a lone tree on a vibrant green grassy hill with a bright blue sky and puffy white clouds, as it relied heavily on this lazy drifting behavior. Honestly though, I ended up actually really liking the way these petals drift in a purposeful direction alongside the golden cube while you’re running along the bone white structure (which I came up with pretty late into the actual final project development). I still definitely want to refine the drifting code; there’s a lot of aesthetic potentials I can feel that I’m nowhere close to yet that I want to be able to use.

I’d always felt my focus in games was on strong settings and surroundings, so it was a really interesting struggle to figure out what to do with a 3rd player game, where such a large part of the focus is on the appearance and abilities of the protagonist that’s perpetually near the center of the screen. I didn’t think I had the time to both create a compelling-looking character and an actual narrative environment, so I focused the game on the player (a cube) character’s ability to interact with the terrain to progress.

The idea I eventually settled on was a 2d side scroller, as it would be a bigger departure from my previous first person 3d games than a 3d 3rd person one. Because the first step in creating a 3rd person perspective was modifying the camera, I decided to have some fun with this new camera variability and construct levels with the illusion of different gravity directions. Getting the camera distance so that the character cube had an appropriate feeling of being lost in a large oppressive setting was especially difficult, but making everything extremely dark helped a lot. Based on these original decisions, I came up with the idea of letting the char be able to move along the “invisible” axis of depth, introducing the puzzle/navigation element of the game.

Overall, while I was happy with the initial idea I came up with, I feel that I definitely could’ve done way more with it. The first two levels really only introduced the ideas of nonstandard gravity and depth changing as tutorial levels, and only the 3rd level resembled anything of an actual level to work through. Even then, many parts of the level lacked coherent design, and you can pretty much just fall all the way to the bottom by just brainlessly alternating between the two degrees of depth every time you hit another wall. I definitely want to explore this idea in better depth in the future, and possibly include more degrees of depth for advanced difficult levels.

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 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.

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(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.

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.