Author: Victoria

Finally finished the game! (At least one route!)

After changing some of the routes and character choices, I decided to just run the city route, which should go throughout the appropriate scenes and finally end with finding Oinkers. After hearing critique, I came to the understanding that this journey has been rough, but in the end has taught me to try and take things in baby steps before jumping into giant projects (that feel like would be cool to make, but probably only do-able when I am more experienced and fluid in constructing good stories).

For the final game, the run-through is that of the storyline, which you control with the arrow keys or WASD. The cutout scenes, which tell you a bit more about the clues you receive. The inventory, or “backpack”, which holds all of your clues. And finally the title and end scenes that complete and loop back to the beginning. I had some errors when it came to the backpack inventory, but eventually I figured it out when the loop was going to the wrong scenes. Also getting the items to be lit and unlit, I had to change the item to a cutout instead of changing the unlit color (stumped me for a long time I don’t know why D; Probably the late-night zoning out).

Getting everything in order was extremely difficult, and at the start of this all I had approximately 40 scenes including all the cut scenes. Yeah.. It was a lot and more than I can handle with my couple of weeks to get everything finished. It was a good lesson learned, and it was still enjoyable to make these routes and draw the characters.

Here are some of the art, and the link to my itch.io page!

https://blumberberry.itch.io/the-search-for-oinkers

 

It has been a fun class with you all 😀

A slow but steady pace. More routes have been added! All the dialogue is currently being added into the scenes and I am thinking about the things Patrick said about having small secrets to the game to further enhance the playing experience. A huge chunk of my time when to figuring out if the scenes and text would move together to the correct other scenes and I finally got the mechanics down for adding the text in efficiently. I wanted to have some sort of system to add clues for the players (inventory) to look back on and carry with them throughout the game so I will definitely work on for this upcoming week. Talking about it with Patrick really cleared up some thoughts and concerns I had thinking it was a bit too complicated for my level.

Story-wise I settled on a humorous subject with underlying themes within society. Not to spoil too much and just in case I decide to change this last minute, but I want people to think deeper into the characters they meet and what it all means, therefore I am trying my best to make them as captivating as I can. The paths so far all lead to separate endings depending on who you meet and what clues you gain, so hopefully after putting in some art in the full pictures will come together. I think a bit, it is like I am taking chunks of the themes I have been implying throughout the quarter, but I guess that it is how I like to get my messages across. With enough time I do want to make some simple music, so we will see if that will work out. Juiciness, got to have juiciness.

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!

For my final game I chose to expand on the second project’s text-based game, but with more visual elements to enhance the story. I really like the look of a story book, so I wanted to hand-draw everything so that it looked a little bit traditional. I was hoping to have rich characters that would either convince or compel the player’s decision towards their search for Oinkers. Every interaction will be unique, which would take you to a different scene for different outcomes ahead.  One thing I thought a lot about was that because this is a texted-based adventure game, it might be complicated with all the possible paths. At one point I was thinking this might be really hard to pull off, and was questioning if I should really go through with this. For now I want to try and see what outcomes I get before putting the idea down, just to see how far it can go or if something interesting might pop up. Patrick had mentioned layering the background, the art, the characters, the foreground, the text box, and finally the text above. Sounds complicated but hopefully not impossible. I am excited to start this project, hopefully this energy can carry through in the weeks to come.

Steven and I went to the event together on Saturday, and to be honest we had no idea what we were going to expect there. Once we arrived at the venue, there was a huge line coming out of the building. VIPs were those who bought the Humble Bundle, so they got to go in an extra hour early. We walked in and there were many monitors displayed around in the hallways and in the rooms. There was one large screen at the front where the champions of Gangbeasts fought for glory.

We walked around and were able to listen in on what the game developers had to say. Most of the time, we stood around to listen in on conversation while waiting in line for a chance to play a game. I was able to play Riverbond, Gangbeast, and Small Talk. I saw someone playing Bennett Foddy’s “Getting Over It”. There was on game that really caught my eye because of its art style; it was called Mineko’s Night Market. Erica and Steven were nice enough to wait with me as I tried to get in line for a turn to play. Basically you farm cats and it looked like you ran around a set world as the story unfolds.

There was also a lot of Red Bull going around. People were shuffling to get in line to play games, listen to live music outside, or just talk to other people. It was a festive atmosphere, and I would definitely go again with a more concise plan on which games I want to wait in line for and overall for more time to play the games.

Also I got to take a picture with someone who cosplayed as Cuphead. It was pretty cool! (Photo courtesy: Steven Fan)

After watching the demo games in class like Cookie Clicker and CandyBox, I was quite excited to learn how to make a clicker game. Building something like the world in CandyBox was awe-inspiring, but I know it would be extremely difficult for a starter like me. I just went with something simple as a topic for the game. I don’t exactly know what drew me to choosing a mouse and cheese, but it was funny when I was thinking about how to make this happen. I wish I had more time to spend on this, as a lot of the feedback I got was how I would further the game. I would definitely want to have multiple endings, and more options on the screen to click as time goes by. I got some funny suggestions to do a fart explosion ending, or like when you over worked the mouse, they would show up on the screen (not that dead animals is funny, but the irony in it). I got many comments on the icon I chose for the game, and in all honesty I was just lucky on Google Images. 

Coding this game was not an easy feat either, and I ran into some trouble, especially when I was trying to get the text to pop up when you hit 10 cheeses, for a mouse to work for you. There were also some issues when I exported the game and the text were not the right proportions on the screen so I had to fiddle around in replacing them.

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.

I thought a lot about what story I wanted to tell in this week’s game. The fact that we had to make a game without visual representations like people or textures made it really good for an abstract sort of way of looking at how objects can mentally take effect on players or viewers.

TRUST was based on my own experience as someone who is always on the search of achieving certain goals. But is that the end? Making this game made me think about exclusion, and the reality of trying to “get into your own social circle”. Whether you are accepted or are neglected into wandering on your own, the contact you make will (sometimes) change you. I played off of the concept of “friend cliques”, and how exclusive some could be. As the title states, basically, do you trust those spinning squares, those colorful dots, or the game itself to provide a way for you to win?

I liked the feedback that I got for the game. I was interested in how people interpreted the relation of the squares to the circles, and to them spinning around circles as a “cultish” move. One critique I got was that “you don’t know which one will screw you over and which you will not unless you play it over and over.” There was a sense that you had to collect all the black squares in order to “win”, but in truth, you could not. There were always going to be black squares that “hurt” you no matter what you do. Just like in reality when you meet someone, you never know if you can get along with them or not until you have had a couple fights. Essentially, your trust in others is on the line.

Coding this though, was painful. I got accidentally ended up with this donut that opened and closed, which was pretty cool so I left it.

This was my first time coding something and having it work. I was so nervous because I was afraid that something would go wrong, and I wouldn’t know how to fix it.  I had the tutorials on loop the whole weekend, trying to catch everything as I started to form my story. Everything seemed alright at first, but when I went to save my scripts in Sublime Text 3, A LOT of errors started popping up.

I was panicking. I went back to every line to check that the semicolon “;” was there and made sure everything was spelled correctly. It was only when I checked and ran it in Unity did I find out that, surprisingly, the game was okay. No errors were in Unity, but they were all in Sublime. It was strange, but I just ignored it in Sublime because it didn’t really do anything to the game. Understanding that was the main struggle.

I think just getting everything plotted out and labeled right (which room to which path) was the most time consuming part of making the game. In the end, it was worth it to read the responses and find out that people thought the story was cute and funny. Many if/ else statements were used in the process of scripting.

I like playing story-based games (like Undertale or Beyond: Two Souls), so I was excited on the storytelling aspect of this project. Someone had pointed out that the “scheming flower” reminded them of the evil flower from Undertale, and I’m not going to lie, I thought of it too. I was inspired by it.

I wanted to put something that we all knew and related to, and my first thought at 2AM in the morning was “SQUIRRELS”. Because who hasn’t seen these fluffy critters around? And why not amp up their role in our walks on campus to being equivalent to that of Gandalf the Grey? Midterms are around to corner, so I thought that it would be great if this game could make someone laugh from its absurd silliness.

When I started making this project, I was debating between a lot of ideas that seemed like it could be cool, but would be pretty difficult for a beginner like me to do. I fiddled around and ended up going back to the roots of it all, which was good ol’ rocks and sand.

From there I started building, like a child would build sand castles in a sandbox. I layered rocks and rotated them to give it some different variations. At this point it looked like a barren wasteland, so I decided, “Why not desert it even more?” I added the planets and “stars” in to make it seem like a universe had fell apart, showing that this is the remains of empty, desolate worlds.

There was a real struggle when I rotated the textures on the spherical surface because there were patches of black from the png. file that I tried to cover up. Getting used to moving things around on the right axis was definitely the most time-consuming part of the whole process. Having everything placed in the right scale, and then wondering if it was enough, was a heavy thought that chewed at my mind. I wanted people to feel like they are alone and trapped, mindlessly wandering around to see if there are any inhabitants lurking about. There were so many mistakes I made (especially getting it into a zip file) but I know that just means that there is more room for improvement.

Also a sidenote, since I did not present yet, I had my roommate test run my game and her and thoughts about the environment were that “it would be cool if there was some sort of way that the character could walk to the underside of the plane, since there could possibly be another different kind of world set up there” (as seen when she fell off the world and looked up). It made me think more on having different planes, and whether it could curve or teleport the characters so that they ended up in a different setting (like in 30 Flights of Loving where scenes were jumped).