Homework 8

Is the space in your game discrete or continuous?

There are two parts to our game at the moment. the levels themselves are a continuous space because there are no boundaries imposed on the player. The floor loops such that if the player were to move left constantly, not accounting for obstacles, the player would never hit a boundary. The second part of our game, an intermediate level, is used so that the player can navigate between levels. For now, this space is discrete and has a left and right boundary imposed on he player.

How many dimensions does your space have? 

Much like the pool table example in the book, it is easier in some respects to think of our game in 2d. This is because the player can only move forward and backwards and up(jumping). However, all objects including some obstacles that the player can interact with are in 3d space. 

What are the boundaries of your space? 

The boundaries of the levels include only a top and bottom. For example, the player must navigate the floors of a building, where the goal is climbing to the top floor. However, each individual floor is set up in a loop much like the monopoly board example in chapter 10. The player will eventually be unable to ascend floors as well as be unable to descend floors (bottom floor of building) which make up the boundaries of the levels.

How many verbs do your players (characters) have? What are they? 

Interact: the player can press an action button that will make the player interact with a close object.

                   This verb is vague because the same action button will be reused depending on the situation.

                   examples are: unlock (near locked door), purchase (near vending machine), search (near desk)

Jump: the player can jump 

Collect: The player will be able to collect objects throughout the levels and add them to their inventory.

Shoot: this verb is still under consideration from the group for a final boss battle using projectile weapons.

How many objects can each verb act on? What are these objects? 

By far the action button (Interact verb) acts on the most objects. Read the previous question for some examples of this. The jump verb will interact on objects in the game that are static like floor and platforms. Collect will interact with diary page objects that are the goal of the game (to collect them all). The collect verb will also interact with certain objects such as health, gun pieces, etc. Shoot will interact only with a boss enemy towards the end of the game.

How many ways can players achieve their goals

The game under construction includes puzzle elements in order to beat levels. Depending on how levels are designed, there may be more than one way to beat the game or progress the story. For now there is only one way to achieve the goal of collecting diary pieces. That is to traverse the level and search for them. There is a degree of freedom on how the player searches because of how freely the player can move through each level.

How many subjects do the players control? What are these subjects? 

The player can control only one subject. This is the main character of the game.

How do side effects change constraints. 

As previously stated. The way levels/puzzles are designed may impose constraints on the player. For instance, not having access to what is behind a locked door imposes a constraint on the player that is later removed when the player unlocks it.

What are the operative actions in your game? 

Move left

Move right

Jump

Action (interact)

Shoot

What are the resultant actions in your game? 

Unlock

Dispense

Open

Take Damage

Collect

What actions would you like your players to do that they cannot presently do? (based on your current knowledge of Blender)

Right now the interact verb between the player and multiple objects is something im unsure of how to implement. Without testing this, my first thought would be to simply program a near sensor and keyboard sensor and tie them together in the logic editor to produce desired result. This may prove difficult as the objects in the game to interact with become numerous.

What is the ultimate goal of your game? 

Collect all diary entries and find/fight the bad guy.

Are there short and long term goals? What are they? 

The short term goals include solving the puzzles that block your ascension up each level. Collecting one of many pages of the diary at the end of each level could also be considered a short term goal. Long term goals really just overlap with the ultimate goal in the previous question.

How do you plan to make the game goals known and understood by the player? 

We are still deciding this within the context of our story. Perhaps this information will be plainly delegated to the player at the start of the game. as an alternative, the player may start with one diary entry which will hint on the next goal of the player.

What are the foundational rules of your game? 

Foundational rules in our game include health meter, diary pieces already collected,  inventory, and level state. Level state meaning some obstacles within the level may have already been cleared or new paths have been opened which changes the overall game state.

How are these rules enforced? 

Rules such as when and how the player will lose health are enforced by the computer. Diary pieces and inventory is enforced by the game space, because they are only available at locations predesignated by the designers of the game. The level state, in particularly how it is changed, is enforced by the computer as it will keep track of obstacles cleared and new paths that have opened within the levels.

Does your game develop real skills? What are they? 

The puzzle element and level design promotes critical thinking in how to achieve the objective of reaching a location (the end of the level) that does not have an obvious pathing. This can be considered a real skill the player needs.

Does your game develop virtual skills? What are they?

As our game stands, there are no virtual skills. The player is not given any odd skills that the character in the game knows yet the player only knows as a button. Depending on how our puzzles are designed this may change. For instance the player may attain the virtual skill of chemistry that the character in our game will perform through mixing liquids in a certain order.

Homework 7

Links to files used:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70122009/concept%20play%202.blend
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70122009/vending%20machine%20(3).blend

Parenting:
the camera is parented with the cube which is being steered towards the player. This makes for the camera effect in levels that our game wishes to achieve.

Materials:
Nothing special about this yet. We still need to go over the look and feel of the levels in our game so for this demo I simply added colors to better differentiate the four sides.

Linking:
linkings biggest benefit is a smaller blender file. I imagine this will better serve our game since we can have different in-game objects linked from several group member files. This will give us the ability to split up the modeling work and still have the programming edit the scene properly.

Animation:
We predict for there to be several animations in our game instead of leaving things to physics. This includes doors. In this demo I reproduce an automatic sliding door but this may change depending on the setting of our game.

Homework 6

Four each of the four elements of the Tetrad, explain how it is addressed by your game. If one of the four elements is not used, please state this. 

Mechanics: This is described by the book as the means by which we direct the player. How the game tells the player what he can and cannot do in order to achieve the ends we (the designers) have set out. We adress this in our game by instilling popular limitations found in most platformer games, just as set gravity, and only enough tools to clear obstacles. We impose limits on where the character can and cannot go to some degree.

Story:  Plot current plays the biggest role in our game as it influences the mechanics (Obstacles are in agreement with an office-type setting) and aesthetics (How the world looks as a commercial district in a big city).

Aesthetics: The aesthetics in our game is influenced a bit by the medium by which we are creating it; Blender. We are trying to create a "ghost town" scenario that takes place in a city, so the look and feel of our game looks right now to be industrial (The look and feel of the streets and buildings as close to reality as we can make them).

Technology: The medium by which our game is being made is blender. This part of the tetrad is not so much addressed by the game itself. Of course the game will reciprocate the feel that it can be done in Blender as we have no plans to implement anything outside Blender's capabilities at the moment (even in python).

Do the four (or less) elements work towards a current theme? 

The theme of our game is "What happened?" We are trying to create a story and experience for the player that makes him/her genuinely want to reach the end of the game. While popular FPS shooters advertise infinite online experience and RPG games try to instill the thought: "I must train to be stronger than my opponents." Our story and mechanics are working towards our theme to get the player to the end of the platformer.

In your own words, describe the meaning of a "theme", and how does it differ from an "experience" (see book for examples in Chapters 2 and 5. 

To me, the key difference is that Theme is the over-looming goal that every step you take must satisfy. A theme is a more broad notion while the game can have many different experiences if it fits the overall theme. An experience is the detailed who, what, where, when, and why that gradually reinforces the theme to the player.

What is your game's theme? 

To me, the theme is "What happened?" Our game follows the traditional rule of old style platformers that the player is collecting something in search for the end of the level.  In our game in particular, the player is searching for missing pages that tell a story of unknown events prior to the game's setting and unknown to the player.

What are the elements in your game that are meant to reinforce this theme? 

The collectibles in our game as well as the sparse information and sense of mystery surrounding the events that happened prior to the game. These elements hopefully will make the player want to collect everything and reach the end to see the fruits of his/her labor.

What is it about your game that you feel makes it special and powerful?

The story has to be powerful as it is one of the driving forces behind what is keeping the player interested in getting to the end. In addition, we plan on including puzzles. Puzzles make a game special to certain audiences who recognize that although different games have similar puzzles, every puzzle's answer is unique and has its own merit worthy of the player taking time to solve them.

Homework 5

I was trying to test some features in blender I thought would be favorable for a platformer.

rotation/hovering (collectibles)
Jumping
Moving Platforms
Camera Tracking
Collectibles Counting

I want to eventually have it so that maybe when the cube hits the long hallway leading into the screen the camera perspective changes and the player now faces the new side.

This video describes what I thought the game could look like to better illustrate the perspective of the camera and how we can incorporate 3d elements in a game where the player can only move on a 2d axis (forward and back).

Homework 4

Homework 4

1. It is a little too soon to tell if I love the game we are making. Our group is still in the middle of negotiations as to the direction the game will go in. More specifically, we do not know how complicated we want our story to be and what perspective we want our game in. No matter what we choose, i'm sure it will be a compromise everyone is happy with and I will enjoy making the game.

2. The team as a whole is also deciding what our final approach to the game will be. No one is in love with the game just yet, i'm sure. What can be done is bringing all members together at the next meeting and coming up with more ideas.

3. Our team members are communicating with each other through the notes document. Email is also used but everyone in the group seems to check the end of the notes document at least once a day and gives their input.

4. Our team has agreed upon a Friday meeting time which fits in to everyone schedule. We also know that certain members might use that day to leave town early. Those members will be absent from the face-to-face meeting and have to be contacted via email or simply by giving their input on the meeting agenda we put in the notes document.

5. The modes of communication between the team members are: Google Notes Document, Email, and Meetings. In case of urgency everyone has their phone number listed as back-up.

6. What must be remembered when designing your game is communication. Written communication is highly praised by the book and that is what purpose the game design and notes document serve. It is also important to remember there is no perfect design document; nor template. Things may get messy but that just means that someone (or everyone) needs to clean it up. There will come a time where everyone has a job to do and objectives to achieve. Even when struck by a brilliant new idea or come across interesting exploitable blender features we must first ask ourselves if it serves the purpose we are setting out to do; and if so, run it by everyone else.

Homework 3

 The First Object I made was a ladder. Unlike traditional ladders, this ladder has prongs on the top so that it can be transported and attached to flat plane surfaces above. This kind of ladder makes an appearance often in platformer games. The reason I would guess is that it is easier to program the physics of the ladder and person using it if the person can only move up and down instead of at a diagonal like stepladders.

How I made this in Blender: I made this in blender using a cylinder as the base, flattened. I used this over a box for the simple fact it looked smoother and less rigid and a ladder of all cubes. Next I re-sized the steps by making a single cube and scaling in the X direction. After a single step was created and placed on the ladder, I copied the step to the object clipboard and pasted it several times, each time manually moving it a fixed distance below the last step. As for the prongs, I used the subdivision tool on the step at the top of the ladder in addition to the extrusion tool.

How this may be used in our game: As stated above, ladders are often seen in platform games in all sorts of variations (Ropes, vines, missing Bricks). I tried to make the ladder generic enough to snap onto the side of any flat surface and with a little effort the ladder can be extended as needed without stretching the object.

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The second object I made was a vending machine. Although at first I thought this to be a simple subdivision and extrusion of cubes, fir the same reasons as the ladder I found using curves and rigid bodies in tandem create a more realistic looking vending machine.

How it was made: The base of the object is indeed a cube. After breaking up the front surface into subdivisions, I selected several boxes in the lower half of the machine and extruded them inwards in order to act as the dispenser. the coin return dispenser was also made in a similar fashion. After the dispensers, a quick scaling of a cylinder was used for the coin return. and placed next to the part that accepts bills. Next, a cylinder was flattened and scaled a bit and inserted/merged halfway into the machine. After using a copy of that cylinder, I was able to make the other buttons in correct proportion just like with the ladder. the most complicated part (and not complicated at all), was the part that takes in the bills. I inserted a cube about halfway, divided the front face once, and then proceeded to edge-select mode in order to create the triangular shape simply by pushing the edge into the machine.

How it will be used for our game: We have not gotten many details but what we do have is a woman lead character in an abandoned city. It would not be uncommon to see a vending machine or two around and would give the level some personality. Perhaps the vending machine will later be voted on to be used in some sort of way like as a save point. Many games use similar "oddly plain" objects as save points (Couches in ICO and Bathroom stalls in Dead Rising). With what we are learning in class about spontaneously generating objects, we could also have the vending machine dispense cans easily and perhaps the player can actually use them. We have decided that the player will be collecting something throughout the levels. If that something turns out to be a form of currency like most platformers, then maybe it can be spent here.

Harvest Moon (Original SNES version)
Innocent Life (Sony Original PSP)

Above are two links to games that are apart of one of my favorite franchises in gaming; Harvest Moon.

Harvest Moon in its most basic form (first link is an older version of the game) is a simple farming simulator which includes building upon your farm and house to make your land prosperous. That really is the objective of the game, and you are given a 2 year time limit to turn your weed infested, one room house farmland into a thriving business.

Innocent Life is a very recent take on Harvest Moon. In some of the most recent Harvest Moon titles, in addition to the formulaic plot of tending to your farm, you can also build and profit from the nearby towns. Whether it be for the sake of love, money, or both, you are given the option to fund peoples business ventures and buy land that shapes the future of the town in a fashion similar to another well known game, Animal Crossing.

These pictures are a representation of the 3 step process I often use when making original 2d game images. I am very fond of 2d games as they let you create enticing new concepts and twists without a lot of manpower that I expect these 3d, more robust, games to take. The process is as follows:

1. Draw images by hand (or use some tool on the computer)

2. After scanning my drawn images, I crop out each individual frame and touch it up by adding the colors and smoothing out any details I need. I need to make sure the frames all are inside an imaginary box where the box dimensions are such that the biggest frame just barely fits inside. I then place the boxes side by side with one frame per box in the appropriate order. This step is by far the majority of the work unless you are bad at drawling like me.

3. The result of step 2 is what 2d games refer to as a "sprite sheet," which is a big image of every individual frame the game needs. The programmer may need to create his own animation algorithm that fetches and uses each frame in the way the final product was envisioned. However, if you are comfortable with the GIF libraries that many 2d engines support than you can animate the frames yourself using some image processing tool (I use GIMP). The result of step 3 is the third animated image you see above.

This is a video of me playing a game that I often play in my free time; such as between homework assignments or while waiting for a download to finish... I have come to like certain rhythm games such as Patapon (Sony PSP) or DDR (Arcade/Various consoles). In the video I play one song while talking about some small aspects of the game.