TCS110 – Experimental Games

Puddle is published on itch.io! Check it out here:  https://b-payne.itch.io/puddle

I hope it works and people can download it! I actually have not been successful at downloading an playing it off of itch.io, so i think idid it wrong. (T-T) I hope it works at least for Mac users.

Wow video game making and distributing is quite a difficult task, but we did it! Go us! I’m so happy to have this finalized and published! xD

I want to make more poetry games or games that include poems as prizes or rewards for players.

I’m pretty happy with the cinematography of the game, ^  i think it came out nicely.

Also I’m so in awe of everyone else’s work–WOW–so many talented game designers in our class! I wish you all the best over the break and hope to see you all around next quarter! <3

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.

The Plays theThing was such a vulnerable space for me because so many people were playing my game as if it was a regular game. It gave me a weird feeling that people were interacting with what I created. I always had this feeling during our crits, but it felt more real and more vulnerable during this event. So many people asked me questions about my game, first asking me if it was even a game. I explained to a couple of people who were especially interested what I did with my game and how I collaborated with different mediums and projects. The talks and my short conversations with different people really opened up my mind about creating future games. I never considered making more games, but again, “Ouroboros” wasn’t really a “game.” I am interested in wrestling with the concept of what a game is for my future projects. This event really helped me to see that these ideas that only live in my mind can be potentially enjoyed by other people. I am so grateful to my classmates and to Patrick for watching me grow during this short amount of time. I had so much fun creating and wrestling with my mind in this class.

 

For my final project, I tried to manipulate and play with the spaces I created to make it replicate the spaces the scenes that were displayed and shot in. I wanted the viewer or the player to experience the film in a similar, but completely different way.

While finishing up my video game, I realized how slow my computer was getting. My game was a huge file because of all of the videos I was using. Each scene had at least two videos and some even had as many as 14. At one point I had 20 videos in one scene, but every time I played it, it would glitch and go crazy so I shortened it to 14 videos.

I am now trying to publish it on itch.io, but my game is 4GB and the website only allows up to 750MG. I have started to re-export all of my videos to reduce the size. However, Unity on the school macs and my computer are different and I am realizing that I can’t open my project file on my computer without it having it break my project.

I am trying to think of the reason why the versions of Unity on the school macs and my computer are different. I’m wondering if I need to re-download Unity on my computer. If you have any advice, please contact me.

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.

  

The Play’s the Thing was a fun event. I had never been to a student game exposition.  It was great being able to see all the different types of games each student came up with using the principles we all learned. It is crazy to think about how the principles can be used in such a vast variety. It was awesome to see. I knew creating games was difficult but now I definitely understand why it is so difficult. There’s only so much you can do in a limited amount of time and today there’s just so many games that you never know what will be work and won’t work. You can have a one idea about how the game will be but the player will also have their own idea about the game. It was great being able to see people play my game and seeing their reaction. It was also nerve racking because knowing that the players did not know you their feedback was going to be honest and unfiltered. Something the truth can hurt. haha However, over all I think my game received good comments. The most commented being that it is a difficult game.