DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 5 Camera work - NO game notice

This week has been extremely eventful so no game this week

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DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 4 Shadow/Network

For this week, not only were we presented with the theme as per usual but a challenge too - a handicap of sorts made for us to focus on coding more than visuals. "This week you are to use only simple shapes such as cubes or squares". This meant no imported assets so any art features are basically materials on simple shapes. Instead of going down the network route of the theme, my partner and I decided to take advantage of the shadow theme and make a horror game. Our initial idea was to have an enemy/monster chase the player down while they walked about in the darkness looking for things to collect.The monster and collecting cards were to make a sound etc. Since we both liked memes we decided to incorporate a lot of that internet culture into it resulting in the following abomination of a game.

What we have in the end: 

- A start screen with the title which plays music

- Player has a "torch" to light their way which follows the camera to fit their gaze. This was created by attaching a spotlight to the main camera 

- First person view
- A monster that awakens on play and follows the character starting from a good distance; monster kills player on touch which brings them to a game over screen

- A game over screen
- Collectible objects that disappear on click 

What fell through: 

- Collision on trees etc - This was removed as the monster would get stuck 

- Monster does not make sounds
- Collectibles don't make a sound on click 

- Game over screen is not intractable - player must press ALT F4 to close game.  

Process of making:

The collectibles were implemented by Toni ->
As well as the creation of the monster, done by photoshop


Similar was done with the different landmarks as well as trees of the world.
The atmosphere was created by using a skybox which changed the lighting of the world to fit (used a stormy clouded day sky) The base of the world is a terrain with part manipulated to incase the player in an inescapable game area, a grass texture was applied to this.

DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 3 Ritual

For this weeks game design theme, we were informed that it was "Ritual" which could take the form of many things. Initially the go to was the religious sort, sacrifice - filled with the likes of witches, magicians, cultists, worshipers etc. On the other hand rituals can also take form of habit which is what we chose to do. Our initial idea was to play around and explore the ritual of transport more so public transport. As students we are well seasoned with the art of catching trains, buses, ferries. We know the habits and hoodwinkery of these "conveniences" so this is how our game to be. "Retro Metro" - a game of buses (alternative name "Bus Dash") In our idea the player would have to navigate through a maze of buildings (much like how our cities are) to get their bus on time. But much like our habit, sometimes our stop requirements change so we would have the buses change their location. 

What we have in the end: 

- A maze of buildings that are solid objects (can not be passed through by the player)
- Buses that spawn but are a random color each round 

- Start menu 

- Game over screen triggered by the player making contact with any of the buses

- Sound of traffic

What fell through 

- A working timer that would trigger game over if the player did not reach their bus on time (could not work out how to do this)

- Buses to spawn in random places (instead they currently stay where they are in the beginning)
- A scoring system for each time the player gets their bus on time

Process of making:

The overall backgrounds of the pieces were "photo bashes" a mix of imagery done by Timothy Noakes

The buses and the player character were developed by Timothy too ->



As our game was 2D and a maze view, I needed to make a bunch of buildings in pixel art form while capturing a top down view. Below is the image I ended up using to take individual buildings from to model off and transform into pixel art format. It was interesting attempting to translate so much detail into 8bit format in such a small scale.

Author's note: The amount of time it took just to get a decent picture of a city from the true top view -.-'' too long...

Exercises: In pairs, choose and work through 2 exercises.

Add Chance

Take a purely strategic game like chess and add an element of chance to it. How does this change
the play experience

GAMES:

Chess

Checkers

Etc…

ADDING CHANCE:

Dice

Coin Flip

Guess a chosen number

Time element

Change the shape of the board

Music

Chess in its original form is a game of positioning and careful premeditated planning.
Add a form of variance in the form of chance and you no longer have a truly equal playing
field in the game. However perhaps there is a way to make this a good thing and could give
the game some unique unpredictability. Changing even the littlest aspects could change game
time requirements as well as bring chaos to its usually carefully timed and made decision game play.
For example forcing the player to flip a coin when capturing a piece to see if the capture is successful
would give their opponent an opportunity to make a capture in response due to the chance of them
making an incorrect guess to their coin toss.

Make it Easy.

Think about you favourite game and what would make it easy to achieve the game’s goals,
think about how the game designer used constraints to make the goal fun to pursue

M: Favourite game currently: Bungo stray dogs mayoi inu kaikitan

Since the game is very much chance already as it is, increasing drop rates would make character card
acquiring significantly easier. Same can be said if a trading system was implemented, it would be
easier to get what you want. This would cause a loss in money making though for developers.

As for gameplay if an auto play was added that allowed the correct direct attacks be used this
would also make the game goal very easy to achieve instead of a slow game play with a team
you know would beat the levels. The designers made these constraints to keep that hook of the
thrill of the gamble in the game which provides a love hate relationship with the game.

T: My favourite game at the moment would probably be Overwatch

The game has recently turned into a complicated form of paper, scissors, rock as characters have
now been created in a way where certain ones would exploit the weaknesses of the other. Because
of this it now encourages people to play a range of characters in the case their chosen character is
being targeted by another on the enemy team. The choice of characters and the fact they all have
their own unique abilities makes players of all types gravitate to a certain playstyle or role in their
team based on their interests. By giving each of these characters constraints by having them all
be weak in certain areas means the players are forced to work together and rely on their team for
challenges that their character cannot manage alone. This somewhat forced teamwork ensures the
players are all pursuing the goal of winning whilst making it fun to excel in areas their chosen
character is designed to excel in when pursuing the goal.

DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK 2 Tactile

This week's theme was Tactile and I collaborated with a fellow classmate of mine to complete the task. Overall the theme was the most difficult part, to make a tactile game... we thought about it for a good while after referencing the definition a couple of times.

tactile

/ˈtaktʌɪl/

adjective

of or connected with the sense of touch.
"vocal and visual signals become less important as tactile signals intensify"

perceptible by touch or apparently so; tangible.
"she had a distinct, almost tactile memory of the girl fleeing"


designed to be perceived by touch.
"tactile exhibitions help blind people enjoy the magic of sculpture"

We found an idea in the word blind, what if the room was invisible? Our idea evolved into a invisible art gallery between the two of us where via sound, players would have to find the clickable points and click to reveal each piece of art. Making the click boxes ensured a more time occupying experience which made the player really have to look and listen for the points in order to locate them. We made sure to include a homescreen that would ensure the player was aware that the game has started since the gallery itself is invisible. The experiences from creating the last game came in handy as for coding. All art in the game is drawn by my classmate and I in our own respective styles.

DIGD701 GAME DESIGN, GAME A WEEK: WK - 1 10 seconds

First post of 2019 hello everyone :)

It's been the first week of 3rd year and yep really feeling it already 😓

Let me introduce you to the first task- Game a week. With this week's theme being "10 Seconds"

Idea: A russian roulette styled finger guillotine where the player will pick one rope at a time and try not to make the blade fall (gameover). 10 secs will put pressure on the player to pick something.

Concept Art~

Original Visual sketch before pixel art

Reflection:

This game was (almost) what I wanted, but definitely out of my limited coding knowledge. But a prototype is a prototype. For me the easiest part was creating the art as I am more of an artist than a coder but i tried my best with a bit of help. I made sure to get what i knew out of the way first, setting the ingame cursor - since this game would be running on cursor controls (point and click) rather than key movements like in my past games/experience. Secondly I got the click to destroy function down, this function would ensure that visually the game would destroy the rope when "cut"(clicked). I made sure that when drawing the design up that the controls/colliders would be either numbers or little pluses below the guillotine machine as placing the colliders on the ropes themselves could make the player misclick due to the designs rope spacing's. My game's main mechanic was the most problematic and required the most assistance. For the games main mechanic I needed the resulting rope clicks to have one that triggered game over. This was difficult as I had never tried making a randomized event situation before. It would be a pretty cool mechanic if better used in a more graphical context. The next problem encountered was the gameover pop up it took a few tries before finding the cause of the errors and a few change ups of lines of code before it was functioning as wished. To not show when the game initializes first but to show when the random rope was clicked (different every round, and completely chance). From then on the rest was pretty smooth - I made sure to implement a countdown that counted down the milliseconds from 10 to 0 as well as a easy restart button for the player to click when they perished. Overall this game was a challenge most definitely due to my limited knowledge but I have most certainly learnt a lot from making it. If I were to polish it up in future, I would potentially add more pop ups - for the event of the player winning by not cutting the game over rope, as well as general things such as sounds, better animations etc.

I still have much to learn.