So after some time, using only what I knew I was able to create a single face mesh able to simplify itself and eventually become the 1/6th of my cube mesh face later. This week I was able to test my Idea by applying it to all 6 faces of a cube and although I still need to fix orientation issues for the rest of the cubes Its definitely a start.
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As a Challenge, over the last few weeks I have decided to work on a editor similar to Fez's Trixel Editor/Cube Carver. As an added challenge I have also tried creating this tool without looking to much into different solutions/algorithm to see if the knowledge I have acquired was enough. So far its proved to work, the above gif is glitch but a good glitch that shows the process my algorithm simplifying one of the faces of a Cubil (original i know). From here I have to assign 5 more faces aswell as textures to each face
Hey There! Yes! I am indeed alive, spending my time diversifying myself with different disciplines and learning new and better ways to improve my work and crate higher quality content. As of now however, just finished a diploma in Visual Arts and currently working on a small title with game dev partner from LITH Studios! more information coming in the later weeks.
Future PlansFollowing on from my blog about my aim I plan to start "Design sketching" in much the same way as artist would switch in order to learn to draw better. The above picture is the first steps to what will hopefully be a small chain of game design "sketches" in which I design games to create points or to follow along other games just such as flow, in order to understand more about the creative process before jumping into the Deep end It Creating these chain of small games I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the creative process involved in games development in order to achieve my goals of creative artists like games with enriching experience.
In this Post I will be doing a post-mortem on my recent project Mamaro, discussing the things i've learnt and the good and bad. Artistic StatementMamaro is game designed around the elements of trust, power and responsibility. You take control of the once warlike Robot Mamaro that struggles to keep its sanity by protecting a little girl who acts as Mamaro’s “Humanity”. Mamaro the game is designed to have players think before they act. Where many games of today have no risk involved in being more aggressive, Mamaro emphasises consequences of actions, whether it be good or bad and trusting one’s own decisions in order to keep balance. Much like Jenova Chen’s “Journey”, “Flow “and “Flower “as well as Upper One Games “Never Alone” the game focuses on creating a more enriching experience for the player. We do this by facilitating the player to form a bond with Lucy, who trusts the players choices in order to keep her safe. Along with games such as Never Alone and Journey, inspiration for the design elements of Mamaro came from other artistic mediums such as: the painting “Broadway Boogie Woogie” by Piet Mondrian. Using the painting as more of a conceptual inspiration, I explored connections and bonds as the basis for Mamaro’s mechanics where one affects and forms into another. As our brief was to create a game that revolved around the elements of trust, using the composition of the Boogie Woogie’s solid and connective structured helped to create the mechanics within the game, Lucy’s (the martyr) fate is tied directly with the player’s actions, no action they take isn’t without consequence. Boogie Woogie’s color pallet also played a large part in setting up the main protagonist’s identity as well as following with the mechanics prompt of a haunting like nature. Red and Blue represent in most cases a Good/Evil persona and is something we encompass within Mamaro’s story, this gives the opportunity develop deeper themes that allow for more though provoking experience. And musical inspiration: Arvo Part - Tabula Rasa We used its overall soft, subtle and haunting tone as the basis for Mamaro’s dystopian theme and tone. Keeping with more serious and deeper tone for the games story helps to further encompass Mamaro’s inner conflict-like nature, struggling with old tendencies of war and aggression while trying to keep Lucy safe is a fine balance to keep and Tubula Rasa’s melody helped to focus on this inner calamity. Beginning as a games developer my design intentions were vastly different to what they are today, being exposed to games such as World of Warcraft, DoTa and more competitive games was what drove my vision and design intents when working within a project. Visual arts is another passion, traditional, digital any visual form I always enjoy creating, which is something I always try and utilize within my games. Jehovah Chen was my first real inspiration to create a truly whole experience rather than focusing solely on the visual aesthetics, bringing together my two passions in much the same way as games such as “Shadow of the Colossus” or “Ico” where the game in its entirety is a work of art. My design intent being inspired by great works has led me to create games that are not only fun but a truly wonderful experience. Mamaro the game was is my first attempt at creating a game with a different games design approach, taking steps at refining my vision of creating games with an enriching experience in much the same way “Ico” or “Kingdom Hearts” has done for me. Mamaro : The Good, The BadThe BriefMamaro was created following a brief on Trust, using artistic prompts mentioned in my artist statement to create the Games mechanics as well as the overall theme. During the beginning stages of Mamaro's concept the idea of trust focused around the protection of the little girl lost in an unknown world but this idea slowly evolved and elements of combat and stat mitigation were introduced. As the development process proceeded the game's concept turned to Co-op split screen game, with one player relying on another to achieve an end term goal but as the end term goal didn't follow along the basis of trust the concept finally shifted back to a compilation of both worlds but only as single player. The final concept came in the form of players taking control of a giant robot, whose end term goal is to protect a stranded girl from harm. Splitting attention between combat, stat mitigation and providing solid goals of protection and offensives capabilities caused Mamaro to miss the overall design brief of trust. These elements caused a lot of unforeseen complexities and more time was spent in developing and fixing combat and state mitigation and neglected to meet the core brief of trust in which these abilities would affect the little girl. Meeting the brief would require revaluation on players actions, diluting combat to more primitive actions such as simple punches or blocks or ultimately removing combat completely and focus more on steps players take throughout Mamaro. The GoodSolid game conceptMamaro's conceptual design from beginning and throughout the iterations had very strong ground, with documentation being planned thoroughly and updated as we iterated the design. Everybody understood what the game was about and everybody understood what needed to done. Alot of intention was put towards the overall planning of Mamaro with everyone adding in feedback and contributing to project. Documentation in terms of audio assets will have to be looked over to see what can be improved to better communicate between disciplines what the project requires. Strong CommunicationWith thorough documentation, came about strong communication among team members, using programs such as Skype, Facebook as well as meetings and studio parties (working together in the same room) were able to effectively keep everyone up to-date. Some translations can still be worked on to better communicate between disciplines and fortifying what assets need to be created. The BadMotivationdue to constant re evaluation of Mamaro's design a lot of energy of the game was spent in the overall planning of the game and as the final design was set in stone a lot of motivation for the game had already been spent just on documentation and designing. As Mamaro was delving into deeper themes with very strong emotional context, dropping of motivation begun to bled into the overall spirit of game. Having a game with strong emotion without the creative emotion behind it leads to the games essence becoming very lackluster where the mindsight for development becomes more about getting things done rather than getting things to feel right. Late developmentAlong with motivational energy being spent, the longer creative process left a lot of attention being focused on finalising the documentation rather than the actual game itself. Certain milestones were not met in time and this lead to many things taking longer to create which also contributed to motivational drop. Over ComplexitiesThis could be attributed to late design, if development of mechanics were done at an earlier stage then complexe mechanics would have been tweaked better and contributed to the games core goal and action and reaction. Another solution would have been the dilution of certain mechanics whether the development was started on time or not, more focus on action and reaction would have lead to following along with both the nature of the game as well as the design brief. Things going wrongOne large issue was the oversight of complications, where the game was planned out without taking into account large issues arising and these lead to again to further development core game play loop instead of polishing the loop instead. Future planning will include stages where things can potentially go wrong and have enough time to deal with these issues when they arise. SummaryMamaro's design in the beginning was very strong, and this lead to solid plan on how we would approach developing the game. Documentation for mamaro was very well thought out and will be something ill be continuing to use in future project as a template on what needs to be discussed and what information needs to be conveyed. Learning to finalise design at an early stage would help prevent a loss of motivation for creating the actual project as well as leave time for polish as well as resolve issues. Although many of the mechanics of Mamaro were more complex than needed, Late development overall lead to these complexities not having the finalize polish needed to contribute to the Core Game experience. Future planning would involve designing the game to have more flexibility in case certain aspects need to be removed without leading to the games core being affected. Mechanics dedicated to the actual core of the game, in this case lucy and the cause and effect mechanics would need more priority in order to meet future briefs.
In this Blog I will reflecting upon my design goals, talking about how at the beginning of the tri I had completely separated 2 passions of mine and over time, with it being the overarching goal of the this unit I begun to employ both my artistic background and my games design ethics into expressing myself within a games environment My AimLooking back thru my blog posts it become very clear that I had not yet developed any real sense of a design goal, no real plan of attack on how I would ultimately make a game, the sort of game I wanted to create or even acknowledged games as an expressive medium entirely. Influenced by largely competitive grind style games such as Lol and Wow it was clear that any research I put towards games development was solely in learning how to recreate these different instances. This meant that I never really came to terms with the fact that games design was a medium of expression and expression at the time for me was in the form of visual arts. About halfway thru the Trimester, seeing games such as journey, Never alone, brothers : a Tale of Two Sons, Shadow of the Colossus and Ico had completely reshaped my Idea of a games development process and what they mean to people. This however is not an easy process, learning to create games that create states of emotion, creates points that people learn from or deep themes that people can reflect upon is concept I only recently grasped. This also came about with research into the culmination of artistic integrity and how these games employ artist fundamentals, physiological states and a strong design ethic to create these games that are regarded as works of art. The largest lesson I would take from when I begun this tri to how it ended would be the the solidification of an actual design aim, incorporating my once visual arts goal to invoking emotion threw concept and fusing that into a games design rubric that I follow, creating what I hope one day to something regarded as a work of art much the same as Shadow of the Colossus or Ico and many other Games. Enormous Learning CurveWith my Design goals pointing the right way, the process in which I reached this came at the price of making many mistakes before I acknowledged what I had learnt. This came at the price of 1-2 of my games missing the goal to which I set out, still having evidence of past influences without fully absorbing and expressing my new design intents. It was during the development of Lights Out that my aim begun to actually become clearer, however certain elements still lingered that I would not have implemented now. Large, Epic and Grand was still present within lights out, but elements such as player paths, visual aesthetics, and theme began to show signs of this new design aim and lights Old concept showed evidence of my aim slowly changing. Lights Out was a milestone in learning the process's in creating a game with an emotional background and a milestone in my evaluation in creating games as a whole and as dragon Ball Z has taught us, fusion is not an easy task and takes many attempts before you get it right. In its current state, after looking at my first design, lights out didn't fit the design goal I had intended and as part of applying what I have learnt I decided to redesign lights out, learning from my mistakes and aiming to create an environment composed of fear that will slowly evolve into a sense of triumph. It was during the production of Mamaro, my end of trimester project, that I felt my design began to lead in the right direction. During the conceptual stage of Mamaro constant design interactions caused me to be conscious about my design decisions and eventually lead to researching into different mechanics present within other games. It was during mamaro that I begun to critically evaluate my design ethics and really think about how I would go about communicating this design to the player. Mamaro's production, although had proper iteration, conceptual structure, and prompted me to dynamically evaluate the games design even after delivering still lacked forethought into certain production steps that I had overlooked. But in terms of designing and goals that i wish to reach I felt Mamaro was another milestone in games design aim. Back to Basics : FlowBringing Up games with highly regarded reputations Such as Journey for instance brings with it a lot of amazing design influences but at the same time brings with it expectations we try and reach for (In my Experience) without regard for the time spans involved. Being influenced by these games definitely gave me huge design based aim and inspiration, fusing artistic background with my game design principles with the end term goal of creating more artist like games that shy away from more competitive or violent like natures. To better understand how these games become what they are today, I begun to look at early iterations of games created by these companies or designers, understanding their structures and applying what I learnt. ThatgameCompany's first game flow is a perfect example of how design structure resonates through later projects and was a big influence on how I reached the overly aim that i have today. Taking away journeys 3d aspects, models, lights and focusing solely on mechanics and feel you would quickly find that the two games share the same overly feel. Although I don't wish to shy away from 3D based game designs I feel its important to focus my intention on the overall feel of my games first. As an artist would continuously sketch to understand how to draw I feel I need to apply the same in a games design environment, creating games using different concepts and aim to hone in on my design aim until I gain the same resonant game design structure that Jenova Chen uses or follow on the same path. RedesigningLights OutLooking over my thought processes from the beginning of this trimester and typing this blog in the end, I find from Mamaro I developed a sense of dynamic design evaluation. Looking at my older projects I felt that did not meet design brief I had intended, I had overlooked complexities and felt the content still incorporated a lot of my older more, aimless design approaches and as part of proactively evaluating my projects I have decided to redesign lights out entirely. My focus at the beginning seemed to involve large scale exploration, dungeon like adventure themes and epic scale boss battles, something that sounds very familiar to older influences and something I wish to address. The largest design change would ofcourse be the the scale and the interaction, I wish for players to feel like the monster is present, causing a sense of unease and base the entirety of the game on personal experience where in most cases people would try for a mad dash to the lights.
Like the title of the post points out, its the end of the trimester, final week to get all our LO's ticked off for end of tri marks. Self reflection is the one of the many reason we do these blogs, well as keep everyone informed about what our progress is through the trimester. MamaroAs this is part of of my reflective blog i will be going into a more in depth look into Mamaro, its Mechanics and the type of things that went right and the direction I took and How that influenced the creation of Mamaro overall. If Anyone would read my Artist statement on what Mamaro's intentions were they'd quickly find that the mechanics did not reflect properly how I had described it on paper and why many factors came into play as to why that was. That is why i'm breaking this up into 2 different blogs so as to explore the different reasoning for why our mechanics did not meet the brief or resemble my artist statement Expressive ReflectionOver the Trimester, I have learnt a whole lot more than other trimester so far, more so on the expressive powers that games has, being one of the most powerful forms of artwork out there to engage players and create an emotionally stimulating experience. In saying that I have decided to reflect in a more artist game designer approach by creating a game named MakeMe Game. MakeMe Game is my reflective Game project where I take on all the experience ive learnt learnt over this trimester, Creating and planning mechanics as well as Summarising the entire Development process and how teams strengths are crucial for a game to function. I hope to finish Make Me Game over the next few days and present it along with my reflective blog.
Its the final week of development for team Shoulder of giants and our project has come along nicely, coming a long way from conceptual ideas to final product. Its been A crazy few weeks putting it all together with me overlooking the project as well as creating the visual aspects of the game as well as the levels and Scene's. The Learning!Like all projects I work on I always learn a whole bunch of new things from software, asset creation, design techniques and a whole array things that help me in future projects. Most prominent skills for mamaro was encompassing my design goals in which to create a rich experience for the player. By this I mean one of my biggest dreams was to create media that got people thinking or feeling something, creating things that had depth and meaning and at first and this seem to only occur for me within an visual approach but with Mamaro and earlier games this trimester this is become a goal for every part of the game, from second to second interactions to the overall look and feel of the level and the story behind it. As I carry on to make more games I will be sure to better create an experience for players, tackling areas I am not so good at, technically and mechanically wise is two areas that I need to still improve on. THE IMPROVING!From playtesting a lot of things become pretty clear, one aspect was conveying what I conceptualized and this was very clear when mechanics weren't too clear and one of the main characters wasn't even known about which makes it pretty hard for people to understand what is going on within the game. Another was the functionality of different parts of the game, such as the power cores, very important in conveying our point but very little was known about them. Ways to Solve itSince these 2 among other areas of the game are core, we had to make sure that we were involving them into the player's core game experience, lucy was given a lot more attention, as at first so was just a tiny ant with a red wig we happened to tie her in to the actual experience of the game. And for the cores our approach was to explain at the very beginning what exactly they were and how lucy ties into all this.
continuing on from last week's blog, and and the shoulders of giants team progress further in creating that Mamaro game, and as noted from the previous blog emotioneering and fun and dynamic experience for the player. Creating the FeelFrom last weeks playtest, one thing already become clear, its alot harder to create and sustain a level of emotion that we are after, and create a the world and how the player interacts with. Of Course more steps can be taken to tackle unforeseen hurdles but we were still able to gather some feedback and take steps to overcome these hurdles. And this week be and the team strived to develop the mechanisms that facilitate the martyr mechanics where players become reluctant to be aggressive and instead try to protect lucy more, balancing risk and reward and ultimately rewarding the player not just with an end term goal but progressively as they chug along the game. FlowAs Jenova Chen was a huge influence to my current design direction I decided to start doing some research into earlier games that he created, one game named flow explored the basics principles ironically of flow with a games design aspect. Based around DDA (Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment) where players where varying skill levels can enjoy the game at their own pace without taking away from the experience. It became clear after playing flow for a bit and seeing how flower was created it was pretty clear what his initial design direction was, and is a aspect I hope to refine and base my future projects on. Lights outAs we begin to Wrap up Mamaro, creating a deep player experience revolving around the aspect of trust I hope to implant and refine the idea of creating mechanics that revolve around different, this year I have learnt so much and have found my initial game design slowly changing as i become more influenced and more experienced by amazing games. When Approach is to completely rethink my design of idea of lights out, a concept I feel is very strong, but my previous design approach was flawed in the sense that I still created around look instead of Feel and so the design of the game and what the player will experience was rethought. When thing that still stuck around from older approaches was RPG style Grand Epic Questy Explory like nature, I made the levels huge, I made players explore, but completely missed the design intent that I was trying to capture. Simply put, its about a boy, trying to be brave in the face of his fear (Personified), The game would have players battling the "monster" aided by courage, this if redone properly would have nearly an instance arena like environment.
Redesigned concept Players would start within their room, the monster gradually appearing but players unable to fight back, before he can "Eat/defeat" the child some sort of block will fend him off but not for long. This leaves players understanding the power roles, understanding there end term goal but this does not fit into a more DDA style approach that I am very fond of and so this brings into concept the area based idea, players will found themselves trapped within this veiled shadow like area , protected only by a dimmed light "Nightlight" with darkness pooling underneath their feet, the light keeps the dark away but only sparsely and players avoid the cracks in between the light. The monster himself will be the main antagonist trying his level best to bring players into the shadow being repelled only by this light as players either make a dash out from this shadow place or ultimately fending off the monster till dawn. Like the title of the post would suggest, and as we further progress down into the development of mamaro, we begin to break down A mechanics system that involves players being conscious of the things they do and how it might affect them and things around them. Mamaro MechanicsWithin Mamaro the game, the premise is the theme of trust, and Shoulder of Giants answer to this was to create a game where players to control of a newly reactivated construct of war, Mamaro a 50ft giant robot. As the players quickly learn, the reason that mamaro is functional again was thx to a little girl that accidently switched you back on, and before a malicious robot is able to harm her mamaro saves her in time which then prompts the beginning of the game. With this new found purpose and seeing as the world is still a hostile place mamaro takes lucy with him to find some form of home for the little girl. Mechanics BreakDownWith this quick bond created players then begin the game and is quickly prompted to attack a stone wall, as they do lucy begins to get frightened. This Becomes the basis for for the game where players actions directly affect lucy, with more offensive attacks frightening her and more defensive moves calming her down. With this Martyr system created players will begin to have choices on how to react in different situations trying to keep a balance between keeping themselves safe as well as keeping lucy safe. In turn Lucy keeps players from reverting back to their original programming, as lucy plays around with Mamaro's wires in order to keep things event from happening. Players who don't pay attention to lucys current state will find themselves slowly losing control of mamaro and eventually result in losing the game as mamaro turns hostile. The way players keep lucy calm along with defeating enemies along the path will ultimately come down to how players mitigate their stats, with more aggressive buildings leading to stronger fights making it easier to scare lucy and more passive builds leading to a calmer lucy but ultimately unable to defeat the enemies and keep lucy safe. As a test and triggered in the beginning to signify their meaning, certain enemies will drop large power cores that will enable players to gain more stats the use, this however causes mamaro to snap to the brink to a point where there software is booting up rabidly. This event is illustrated with players looking threw mamaro's eyes with lucy just in the front, as mamaro's software nears completions players can see his hand gradually moving towards lucy in an intent of harm. The power cores serves as a medium of power, giving players the choice to risk harming lucy even further and ultimately pushing towards a limit. What the mechanics intendThe Mechanics design intent is to make players think before they act, trusting in their abilities and choices and ultimately live with the consequences of these different elements Level Designing and Story TellingSo with the mechanics testing players sensibilities and balancing their ability to trust in their skills and protect lucy players will need an environment to suit. With leading the teams direction in terms of art and feeling and as posted last week i have been tasked with creating the level that players will be moving around in.
With mechanics having deep ties within protection against hostile elements and the theme is set after in an apocalyptic environment I need to be able to construct the level in such a way that it conveys the story to the player as well as be engaging and overall enjoyable As we finalize our our games core concept the team and I all went ahead and started constructing our games, with my focus being on directing the Games direction and feel along with creating the environment assets for the game. Mamaro's RefinementAs Mentioned above we finally decided upon a the direction of the game that will encompass the overall feeling of trust, before we had 2 player's working side by side in order to achieve a sense of trust which proved to be more considerable work in implementing the right elements that give players trust in each other so instead we went with a Single player style game. Players play as Mamaro, and there tasked with protecting little lucy from the dangers of the world, this goes back to my initial idea for the game but now has a lot more involvement, with the major focus of trust being within the player, trusting in the slaves in order to protect and trusting there better judgments whether be for good or bad. Tried and TestedDuring Planning of Mamaro and continuing on now, I recently begun venturing into many unfamiliar territories, Both Conceptually and during development. DesigningBecoming more entrenched in the creation of a game from the very beginning, fluid mechanics in terms of really sitting down and breaking apart what is going to happen and how i'm going to achieve this. Me and the Team Went through many iterations in order to reach a point that we felt the game would be enjoyable, challenging and ultimately play upon the theme of trust as the core driving force of Mamaro, using themes of power and humanity to test the players and see if they can achieve the goal of protecting Lucy the harmony within the game. Development of Mamaro along with games prototyping has taking me a long way from my original idea of what goes into a game in terms of its structure, its design intent as well as its impact upon players and the team developing it. SculptingOne area that is completely new to me in terms of pipeline development is the introduction to 3D sculpting, something I've been meaning to do and saw the perfect opportunity to learn as it has proven to create amazing organic structures that Mamaro so happens to need. Sculpting has helped streamline a lot of environmental that I found i struggled to achieve, assets such as Rocks, Cliffs, tree's and many natural assets that required a lot of smaller details become a lot more easier to handle and manage thanks to learning these new techniques. OptimizingOne main thing to always keep in mind though when creating these assets and pre level planning helped point this out really quickly was the amount of detail the game is rendering at a time, along with pre production assets such as Occlusion Culling and Fog Set Testing Another form of optimizing and of course is a big one when developing was the optimizing of of meshes, lowering poly counts and still find a Balance to allow for detail, one method of doing so was with using Normal maps which along with sculpting I was able to utilize. This Allowed for drastically reduced poly counts and still able to achieve a nice looking model without pushing a computers limits to the max, this technique also opens the door to a lot of different techniques i will be utilizing to streamline the creation process. Enviromental DevelopmentAnd of course putting this all together, keeping in mind what players will see, rendering powers, what will be see and what not, how much time i'll be spending on particular assets and so on I begun working on games base environment working to create all the base elements needed and then in the coming weeks polish it along if needed.
This week along with proper some serious project planning is the week we start putting together our ideas and become development of Mamaro! The picture Above is a placeholder for the run down city I will be modeling in the given weeks. Level DesigningOver the last few days and as my primary task for this project along with being the art director and overseeing the development of the game itself, i'm also left with creating the terrain that players will see. One lesson I have already learnt was to definitely not wing a level layout, over the weekend from start to finish i constructed the entire map that players will be seeing and a lot of benefits already came this. Camera Angle testingThe First Benefit of this was testing the camera angles, how the player will be viewing the world, this led to helping our coders figuring out where to place different angles and from an design and visual perspective gave me a lot of information on what to create and reduce viewporting . Scale and ScopeAlong with Viewport issues, this also helped to visualize what is possible in the given frame of time and what isn't, using simple movement scripts I was able to go from the start to the finish, testing Frames, level sizes, seeing what will be viewable, creating Occlusion areas and ultimately figure out what I will be creating and how long it will take. Testing GroundsSo now that the level has been roughed out, this gives the opportunity for team members to come in and test their different creations within the scenes and see how that would look within the game this also helps me with visual approaches, going back into the game and seeing what needs to be added and how that would look immediately without second guessing I Gantt Get Enough of DocumentingAnd Following from last weeks hefty conceptual work me and the team refined all the documentation, adding in tasks and breaking them down into smaller bits to we can finally map out what needs to be done, how long for and also overview tasks that either done need to be done or need to be redistributed.
Taking AdviceLike the Post Title suggests, me and the team have begun further refining our ideas, as this is focused on the basis on trust, we all come together to incorporate this fundamental within the entirety of the game. Some Problems that were brought up prompted me to sit down and reavaluate some process's I go through when creating and implementing my ideas and forgetting key fundamentals that are crucial to bringing my idea to life. This Blog Post is purely dedicated to my understandings of Development of a game from the very beginning, taking on board what people suggested in terms of how I go about designing my games and so I had a sit down and break down the process's I go through. Refining, jumping off visual train for a secondMore Questions!Tackling a Few issues I have when designing a Game Areas such as Player interaction (how they feel, how long it takes, what is the overall goal and feeling we want them to have) Game Flow(Where are they going, why are they going, is the players going to care? can we make them care?) Less Looking more Questioning is basically the conclusion. Player's RolesOne Aspect of the development process that came to light was the players role, Lucy's interactions with both the world and Mamaro, as well as Mamaro's Initial role . We had at first Point Mamaro Unable to do anything without lucy, which created a large power shift and not a trusting bond and this correlated directly with lucy's role. Along with this large power shift was activating different key components of mamaro, simply put, her getting to places would create huge play gaps and that is also a large issue and if i'm imagining it i can see maybe 5-10 seconds (In game time thats massive) of getting to places instead of doing things. So The Problem in a nutshell is that lucy's role doesn't feel supportive as much as it does "Puppet Mastering" and so the element of trust is destroyed and frustration builds up from voids of gameplay and power. Addressing this VoidSo with Questioning, came the realization that despite things looking good, things won't feel so good, so ive decided to look at games that have the same player role hierarchies' and how they went about dealing with these issues and incorporate within Mamaro to create a fluid element of gameplay World of WarcraftThe Design Goal - We want player's to work together evenly taking on different roles to accomplish a goal...Sounds alot like a game i've played before. This Game of course is wow, Theres a Tanking class that protects the teammates, theres the Supporter who makes sure the tank doesn't get torn to shreds and theres the Damagers who take kill the bad guys, all working together for a common goal and sounds alot like my design goals. Mamaro's Role revised At first we had him as a complete puppet, waiting for lucy to do something and if not then he'd still be stationary, this approach is definitely not what we had in mind and taking on board what ive learnt from team player based games, mamaro needs to be given more freedom and choice, we like the idea of needing lucy, but we don't like the idea of relying on lucy to have fun. This release of the collar type deal also promotes a system of punishment "You could go and kick his ass, but if you don't wait up you're gonna get mashed" Mamaro's Design intent - Protect your teammate, Of Course my reevaluating and questioning things prompted me to to share this with the team, the team needs to be all the same mindset, when creating something we all need to project the same underlying theme into what were creating so the game feels seamless and whole and not a giant soup of mechanics , sounds and visuals. Taglines Shoulders of Giants needs taglines, we need questions that we can ask ourselves, how would we feel playing this? what if this all was real for a second? what do you want players to feel and experience? Mechanics Definition and RefiningSo with digging deeper and research, discussing with our programmers we were able to properly define both players roles, ensuring (at least in theory) that we were able to create a sense of trust between to different players sharing the same goal and able to do so with with balanced control.
With playtesting happening within the next few weeks, seeing all our hard work working on defining Mamaro the game as a whole will be a lot of fun and feedback will be most welcome. Following along from last week me and my fellow classmates have begun our next projects in which we are givin a brief using different media for inspiration and constructing a deep game based on that. In particular with the visual choice of the brief I went with the above picture and taking from it compositive inspiration, Getting strong Vibes of Bonds and connections which facilitates the core of my current projects underlining roots. Mamaro!With Inspiration set and entwined with the overall theme of trust me and 6 others going by the name "Shoulders of Giants" have begun planning and constructing the Game Mamaro, a Co-Op that has player one as a giant asskicking robot Mamaro and player 2 as the Genius 15 year old Mechanic. With Lights out I learnt a lot more in depth about the benefits of really thinking something through, however it still was not enough and with time constraints a lot of things didn't make it threw. and learning from all this I went from To and first Plan!Like the title of this post suggests, a lot of this weekend and last week was dedicated to properly planning out the entire project. DocumentationWorking together with team we all sat down and discussed in detail how we would go about creating a rockin stompin Co-op Game, from Art Style to terrain mapping to make sure everyone including ourselves have a good solid idea about what Mamaro is all about and what our overall structure and design of the game will be like. Concept ArtAlong with extensive and thorough planning of Mamaro I went ahead and started to visual how we would see how main characters, from concept I did on the fly helps me play around with different designs, going along the premise of planning Mamaro out this gives a general visual understanding of how our characters will feel when players are to play them. With the past couple of weeks although I understood proper fundamentals are a great need for any creative process, with lights out I find myself starting to really understand fully the ideas behind fine arts, studying different art forms and experimenting with that to see what I get. ResearchWith anything good research into the type of game or media being created always benefits everyone and since were basing our games artstyle on the Game rime, and went and found as many pictures as I find and begun breaking down how they went about constructing their game. Much of my research concluded that overall many of the software used and techniques used was already something me or people within the team were familiar with, however from past experience when it comes to constructing landscapes specifically landscapes with a much more carved feeling to it there was 1 step that I had missed. So I delved deeper and found that there was software specifically used along with maya and Max, and so i started learning a whole new software ZBrush and after some struggle started to learn how to properly construct a more natural and carved style of landscapes, which has been something i've always wanted to construct but up until now never understood until now. PrototypingAnd Of Course with researching comes testing, a lot of the ideas the team had we were fairly confident would work, but there were still a few areas such as modeling and animation sides that needed some further testing. Previously I started playing around with dynamic modular models and rigging, and although i understood the theory testing would still clarify a few things and so Along with getting more practice in speed modeling/Rigging I was able to test my idea as well as create a Prototype mamaro that our coders can work with.
As playtesting comes to an end and I read and learn from the feedback about lights out, me and my time begun to plan out next game, A deep game focused around the areas of trust, where we must draw inspiration from a different artist mediums and apply that to gain inspiration into constructing our new game that will in the end be publicly displayed. Learning From Lights outLights out was a huge Game changer for me as a games developer, there was so many elements in this game that at first i never really considered, this is also a follow up from the previous weeks where concepts of fine arts and creation of games started become more entwined, and after putting this new knowledge to practice found that the art of emotioneering, mood creation and player experience creation are more complicated than I first thought. Fine Art DevelopmentThe elements to create a mood and setting for lights out proved both a challenge and extremely fun and engaging, I love making games but it wasn't until Lights Out that I truly understood what it truly takes to create a engaging experience for players and lights out introduced me to to a whole list of new elements that I never really played a part in (Specifically being more art oriented i focused on the creation of assets) and from lights out i can take onboard a wide variety of new concepts, skills and focus on areas of games development that needs improving to better my development in creating rich and fulfilling games. Environment Creation Creating Environments was never really my strong point in development, and after lights out is something I will be revisiting as its a area i definitely must improve on , paying attention to scales, mood and lighting among other area's is something I need to refine as taking from feedback players found the environments quite huge, but also they understood the overall theme which is something ill take onboard as well. Character Creation and Player ControlsCharacter development was also an area that at first wasnt all to clear to me, but after my first attempts with lights out, the concept of creation has become a lot more clear to me, from feedback a lot of focus was down to how the character felt as players played along with how the character itself looked, two things that needed improvement but of course the overall concept was easily understood, But controls weren't very well defined interactions were hard, which goes along with needing more in depth feedback. Mechanics and feedback and ControlsThe 3 Areas I need to improve upon most, along with environment the implementation of systems is an area that i will be focusing a lot of my studies on, areas that are the core of games development. Lights out once again had a huge array of firsts for me, Ragdoll systems, physics application systems, proper mechanics breakdowns including scripting large scale boss fights, but due to the short amount of time and the large variations of areas that was working in lead to many bugs and scaling issues. Henry gonna have some seriously defined calves after this Teddy kinda gave up on the whole thing at this point. Path Leading, a crucial part of a game and a harsh lesson learnt. Clearly one bug check could have avoided this among other things that lead to the overall lights out experience very hard to get immersed in. Taking it on boardIn the Past, many games created were sorted left as is, taking on lessons learned and moving on, however this is not the case for lights out. Lights out was extremely important game for me on a developer's point as taught me quite of few lessons and how structures of Game function and to me feels like a stepping point towards something grander, prior to lights out my idea of games creation followed along with a hero's tale, world of warcraft style games but after listening to jonava chen, playing journey and rehashing over older games it came to the realisation that there's a lot and I mean a lot more to it. So working with feedback, learning from my mistakes and incorporating things I have realized and things I have studied, i will be working on polishing a lights out Prototype that will later be viewed public and shared to my friends and family to share. Area's Already being Improved Taking from what i've learnt in the past, studying fine art and animation on the side helped with redefining the main character, creating his persona threw the the use of animations, this also goes along the same lines of proper character control as a smooth player control is Vital for immersion Character DesignAs character movement, aesthetics and overall persona are important i spent some time refining henry, improving upon his pillow for example, making him less static, recreating his aesthetics to give him a more scared little kid look and of course eyebrows. Gold Shire EffectScale of both the character and the environment were also areas that needed improvement, and taking a lesson both from lights out and World of warcraft i begun applying a "Goldshire Effect" that comes from Wow's early development where towns were created to actual scale, but due to time and budget constraints everything was shrunk drastically but not to much that it felt off putting. Looking to the Future Part 3.As stated I plan to refine lights out, using the game as a basis to better development core development structures instead of starting from scratch, this approach will help refine how I handle tasks in the future, understanding what is needed, dividing my time better as well creating more tantalizing games.
This Week following along on from last week where I explored the application of fine arts concepts within games design I begun to apply what i've learnt in order to create a more rich and fulfilling experience. This was no easy task and and creating an emotional experience took a lot research and understanding of theories associated with aesthetics, mechanics, psychology and how a games design can affect these 3 different areas among other things. AestheticsFrom the Above are some Examples of my attempts at creating an overall game design feel that the players will experience, from beginning on top a hill, to dark forest area to mountain top, all created with an evaluation and decline in mood and have the level follow along with the player and vice versa MechanicsAn area that I never put much effort into in the past, but with more focus and understanding I find even just testing the mechanics makes me feel better immersed, From creating a buddy system, with along with the aesthetics creates a mood contrast against the game itself, Creating a boss fight with an overly large monster and a hunting system, a battling teddy friend and much more to help create an interactive environment. Implications of DEEP developmentFrom last weeks Eureka moment where my different disciplines clashed I found my development process completely shift, paying close attention to even small details to and broadening my influences down to even the documentation. After Listening to the talk done my Jonava Chen, and researching into different games I found that my dream games that i've always wanted to create started to slowly shift, or more so I wanted to improve upon games in the past applying newer elements that have deeper ties.
Following on from last week, we were tasked to create a game that creates an emotional narrative. For my game lights out i'm designing a game based around fear and the path that leads to conquering that fear. Players play as a 10 year old boy called henry as he struggles to fight off his fear of the dark and ultimately triumph over it. Taking NotesWhile planning and Designing my game we had a look at a discuss by the creators of journey, as they were aiming for the same basic principles that this current project follows. Create a sense of awe and wonderment as players play as a nameless hominoid as they track towards their destination. As the header points out they way that they developers tackled journey greatly helped with my understanding of constructing a game. Where in the past id focus solely on the artwork of the game, I myself focusing my attention to all aspects of the development process. Understanding how the game is setup is a step in the right direction to creating a more fulfilling experience for the player and again journeys development process shed a lot of light into how this is achieved. Fine Art of Game Designin the previous week I had to give a speech on aesthetics and choose the topic of aesthetics in game design. Researching the Topic gave me a huge perspective shift as to how I Approach creating my future projects, as the above pictures show I have started focusing more on foundations instead of rushing into it headfirst. The Topic become hugely relevant to my current project, projecting what i've learnt in fine arts not only to create compelling game artwork and models but further extend that knowledge into the entirety of my entire project, from documentations to level layout I have kept what i've learnt close at mind. Taking on board what i've learnt I have completely reversed how i develop my projects and working with Angelica, Jon (Animators) along with musical input of Sam started to design my game focusing on the experience as a whole Meshing Around on the sideof course on the side i've been playing around with meshes, pushing further towards ultimately applying a Hodgman sutherland algorithm or algorithms with the same unique abilities to create different and unique game mechanics.
Coming the end of our First project which focused on a particular point we were to express in the form of a game, although the time was limited I had loads of fun constructing a world that expressed my jump from small town to a large open world. This Week We will be preparing for our next project that involves the invoking of emotion in the form of a game, where we create and structure our games in order to create a sense of ambience around a certain theme to provoke particular emotion. LIGHTS OUT!For my second project, Lights Out I will be focusing my game around the theme of fear and Power, the game is set at what begins as a child about to go to sleep, as the mother turns the light of players instantly get sucked into this otherworldly realm, filled with nightly creatures and a monster that the players, with the aid of their trust stuffed toy will have to defeat in order to conquer their fear of the dark. The Theme of the Game will Centre or draw a lot of inspiration from much of Tim Burton's style of artwork and movies, where I aim for a thriller esque experience but still keep a light hearted feel to it, something that Tim Burtons work has always had the ability to do. For the Style that the game will be set in, along with the overall theme of a "Nightmare before christmas" like feel i will be drawing a lot of my inspirations for lights out's overall structure on the 3-D modeling styles of David O'REilly whose style already employs a-lot of tim burtons aesthetics with the added bonus of already being set in a 3 dimensional space. I choose David o'reilly's model style as the models themselves are low resolution but still able to communicate a lot of information which I find to suit a game's project very well. To follow along the Overall look of Tim burtons films and also begun investigating that will give more of a rough dough like appeal to assets created within the game to give it a more fantasy like appeal. On the left is Standard diffuse material and the Right is the Oran-Nayar shader that is a diffuse material with light scattering. Look Back at HorizonWith Horizon Development coming to an end I step back to reflect on what I find to be certain recurring issues as well as talk about things i Found I handled better. Things to Improve UponFeedBack and HuD With the time constraints of just over a week to create horizon, creating and implementing assets for the game proved a challenge and with that some things that are needed wasn't able to be worked more upon. One Such Instance was overall GUI layout and Feedback prompts that if worked on more would improve the overall quality of the game hugely, without proper feedback people playing horizon would be confused as to what it is there meant to do or to follow the overall plot. Prior planning and structuring The Overall base that horizon was constructed on wasn't at first properly set out, this caused a lot of small things to clash or things that would make the game overly more understandable and fun to play. With prior planning of game layouts such as quest structures,level layouts and code hierarchies the game development would run alot smoother and is something i will be keeping in Mind in future Projects. Things that keep upContent Creation despite the constraint that was set, I still managed to create the assets I wanted for horizon including extra's that helped to overly theme my game. The mentality I followed was to avoid viewporting as much as I could and be satisfied with the overall communication of the models which is something I will incorporate in future projects. Composition As with last year where I begun studying more artistic theories to improve my illustrative/concept design, I find that the more I understand the more I begin to incorporate into not only initial project concept art but with the overall layout and aesthetics of the game itself, from asset creation to level layout all improved the more I study. ConclusionAlthough the Game's Asset's were all created ontime, with extra assets created to help with overall theming, more time could have been spent with overall game mechanics/Feedback and Layout which will have created a better experience for the player. Creating assets for my games is always my favorite part of development and is something i'm passionate about but that should not come at the cost of games experience and carry on with my studies I will be looking and techniques that will help improve player experience, player feedback and generally just divide my tasks evenly to ensure that I am creating an experience and not just walking simulator. Reversing my development strategiesIn the past. I would favour creation of the overall visual aspects of game projects, which in teams would work out fine, but as we begin working on more solo projects I had to find ways to learn from my mistakes in previous projects such as game mechanics or player feedback. One solution was constructing a project template, which including Basic scene's that all projects would feature such as Hud layouts, start screens, music managers, characters controls, camera controls and other generic scripts that I found I would reuse. This approach came about with the end of horizon where id spend bulk amounts of time on asset creation and left the games structures for last which created many issues and i'm hoping this approach will help give more time to fine tune feedback systems and Game structures. Meshing with meshesAlong with studying concept and illustrative theories, I also begun playing around and understanding how 3D model composition works, from Vertices to Triangles that are connected to them i'm slowly demising how meshes work and without that free some limitations for future projects
As the Title of the this post would suggest, for the first 2 weeks me and my fellow game designers were tasks in creating a game reflecting a personal opinion of our. This at first proved difficult for me as I never really thought about projecting myself within my own work. HorizonHorizon is a Game I created that centres around my own personal experience prior to studying to become a games developer. Where my life felt very secluded and inside what felt like a bubble up until I started traveling where my perspective and view on things completely changed. The game's Style is heavily influenced by crossy roads as the style was easier to accomplish in the short amount of time that I had will still holding onto the basic idea I was looking to achieve. Another aspect that I borrowed was the art style of David O'reilly, famous for his low poly and while animated films and is someone id very much like to follow on with in terms of art styles. Speed ModelingAlthough this task was set for only a week I still decided on created a fully 3D world, but still hold onto basic cartoon like aspects to give it a more light hearted feel. Due to the short time period this set up a huge risk in completing the game but still decided on it as I felt confident that id be able to finish the game on time. This time pressure helped me achieve faster asset creation, putting my modeling skills to the test while still holding on the same basic art style that the game followed. Magic Cube!While chugging away at my game, learning to apply Composition, layouts, lighting and set the overall mood to convey my message of isolation to expansion, I begun researching the ability to create, handle and deform meshes. This I felt if i'm able to get downpat, would greatly improve what im capable of doing in terms of gameplay, not being restricted by static objects but still have high dynamic meshes that react with the surroundings. The above Images is a Cube mesh constructed purely from C# code, and while creating that I tested out more refined collision system that detects more precise points of where a object comes in contact with another object, and this is small steps to creating more reactive meshes within future projects Rigor Mortis II Prior to and during my holidays I begun learning how to do rigging with Maya and Max, Learning the basics and building upon them to help in future projects. The Gif Above is a Dynamic Compound Model with parts that can be swapped out, this is the same basic system that Games Such as World of Warcraft and other MMO's use to create customizble characters
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AuthorHey There, my Name Is Eugene Martens and I am Currently a Student at Qantm College Brisbane Studying as a Game's Designer Archives
July 2017
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