Game Design II - Week 3 - September 25, 2012

                Third week of the semester already, currently in class one, and we’re all pretty much talking about our upcoming Prototype presentation, which in my opinion is a lot cooler than last year. Since we’ve all been put into GDW groups we were allowed to work on this as a team. We were assigned to design a level using the Portal 2 Level Creator. We managed to get this done very early since a few of our group members were really enthusiastic about the game. I personally dislike the Portal games and I’m not a huge fan, I know this usually gets me very bad looks and judgement because apparently this game is super fun and cool… I’m sorry, not for me. ALTHOUGH, creating the level with the team was actually pretty fun… I’ve always been a huge fan of level design and it’s one of the areas of game design that I wanted to specialize in.

                Last year in our GDW project, since the programming in our group was not the greatest, we could really implement good levels, however since I am in fact at the 4^th year level, I was fooling around with Maya and created a farm for our game Medium Rare so I could include it in my Demo Reel. One of the things I failed to realize was that I should have focused on areas that I wanted to go into when I one day join the game development world. Now in our current GDW game, which we still hasn’t named… there are a lot of things that I should think about. Especially since we’ve chosen the first person adventure genre. We are supposed to make an assortment of different levels… some which I feel don’t really apply to our game; I’m currently sitting here with my sketchbook trying to think of ways to challenge the player… I think my mind state while doing this is very bad… because the whole time I’m designing this level, I’m thinking of how to make this as hard as possible to pretty much challenge the player to the max. Maybe it is a good idea for me to give the easier levels to another group member, so I can do the final ones and provide a really hard challenge for those hard core gamers out there. Rather than our dark horror theme I would have preferred it if our game premise was a bit brighter and colourful… as a somewhat artistic individual I really enjoy creating textures for different objects and planes in Photoshop. This is something I should probably do on my own spare time sometime next semester when I have much more free time. If you have no idea what I’m talking about right now, you should probably head over to the Team RoGUE development blog on our game.

                Anyways, our Portal 2 level presentation is tomorrow…I can’t really remember what I was supposed to say… the downside of sitting near the back is that you miss some details the prof says. Some of my group members are confusing me saying we need to make a PowerPoint while the rest of them are claiming we just have to demo our level… I hope I don’t have to because I really dislike Portal 2 strongly. Don’t hate. Today we got our homework assignment which was to create a game with a board that was given to us. Our requirements were: Romance theme, a Social Experience, a Race, and a turn-based game. We got this at the end of class, but I already have a pretty cool idea. Last year for Game Design I, we had to make something similar, and we recreated Romeo & Juliet as a paper prototype… during that time I had brainstormed one for the Shakespearean play the Tempest… one of my favourites, and that game idea can kind of be implemented into this… we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Game Engines - Week 1 - Starting with Ogre..

I am not normally a programmer, yeah I know we've all taken the courses, but not everyone's great at it. So this semester we have to take this Game Engine course, and I do understand that it is very programming heavy... so I'll probably have a lot of problems and things to talk about here...

Starting from our first tutorial, we were able to install the Ogre3D game engine as a class. A lot of students had a lot of issues but I believe mine is actually working correctly... this is a good sign!!

The tutorial the week after, we actually started by creating a basic program, without the use of Ogre ofcourse, but this was done in order to set up our Repositories which is still VERY confusing to me... I uploaded my repository for the first time on my own, using the program I made on my own.... ofcourse I used the TwoLoc project loader and also recreated what I learned from some of the sample programs that were provided. Alot of the homework questions we received seem to be very hard, especially for someone like myself with a low programming ability. Shockingly enough, I visited office hours with my fellow GDW members, and we clarified a couple things that DID infact help with me getting to the point I am now...

About the program, originally I looked at the third question believing it to be very easy.. but I didn't realize I actually had to strategize which assignments I do because the EXP values decrease and some of the harder ones require me to upgrade my easy question... which in the end does not really help with the increasing of EXP (which I think is very poorly designed for a course like this).

Anyways, I managed to recreate something that looks like our actual solar system! Take a look:

How real does that look? (Mercury and Pluto are very small) I also managed to pull up realistic textures from the internet of the different planets, and yes I know I DID forget one of the planets (Uranus) but I will be adding this in after. I currently need to work on the lighting and getting this to rotate around, I also plan to use this solar system as my medium and easy assignment for the solar system in another project. So the next few days I'm gonna have to figure out how to get the panning of the camera, and the lighting to work... although I'm pretty sure I can fix the lighting today to complete my first EXP project! this will get me one step closer to actually writing the Midterm.

Game Design II - Week 2 – September 18, 2012

           This week in the first class we actually had a pretty fun thing going on. We were given a bucket and a rubber ball and we were asked to design a game that involved putting the ball in the bucket and we were able to use everyone and everything around us as tools and resources. I was put in the second team at the back of the room and we came up with a pretty cool idea to turn the game into a foosball remake using real people. 

I’ve noticed that it was a lot harder to communicate with everyone on the team when trying to throw out ideas… That and also the fact that I barely even know any of the 3^rd year students. I started to think after a while, that in the gaming industry, the teams are much larger than this… how is it possible for people to get their ideas out? Even if they are assigned certain roles, in a large team project it must be quite difficult to work things out… when we did this in class, everyone was kind of just screaming random things out whether they were heard or unheard. At first it seemed like our side was kind of unorganized because we were mainly focusing on how we could make the game fun, unlike the other team where they focused a lot more on how the layout of the level and stuff was going to work. They had chairs on top of the table and had a much more interactive game where the players would have to stand on the tables and jump across while trying to get the ball in. To be honest their game kind of reminded me of a modified version of lacrosse. 

Back to our game with the foosball, it was pretty simple; we would stand in rows with the offensive side facing one direction and the defensive side facing the other. The bucket would be placed in the center and each person was allowed to move one step to the left or right and could bump the ball once. If they let the ball hit the ground, they would have to throw it to the other team. If the ball were to fly out of bounds, one person would be designated to throw it back in randomly to the playing field, similar to the rules of foosball. It was really fun actually, and normally I don’t really participate in these things just because I don’t know anyone…

Since a lot of the focus on what we’ve been talking about has been relating to level design and stuff, it probably would have made more sense to focus on that for this game but oh well, it turned out fun. Speaking of level design, this whole Portal 2 level designing thing is starting to confuse me, I’m not a huge fan of the game but making these things are really fun and I often lose track of time while doing this… I feel the same way about modelling. We’ll see what happens tomorrow I guess. 

On a random side note, I still haven’t got my Kirby’s Collection from Future Shop… when will I find time?

Game Design II - Week 1 - September 12, 2012

 A fresh start to the new year and suddenly I’m actually enjoying this class a lot more than last year, so far the idea of this class being split into two different days is working well. I’ve noticed that towards the 2 hour mark of most 3 hour classes, I’m already distracted by a thought or something online. This year seems like it’s going to go well in this class since we will be focusing less on those paper board games… which I guess WERE fun at times, but there was just way too many of them. We were talking about level design and I randomly thought about how I used to spend hours making levels in LittleBigPlanet a couple summers ago. Even for some of our GDW projects before, the level design aspects was actually one of my favourites. 

For this week’s classes we were asked to take a favourite sport in groups and change one environmental aspect that would make the game more fun and keep the same rules. This was kind of challenging… a lot of the sports we talked about were played mainly on a flat surface with two teams and two sides of possession. I noticed most of the people around me chose Soccer even though I chose soccer also. It didn’t really matter, since we were all supposed to have our own unique modifications. 

What my group and I decided on was to change the environment to become similar to a dome, where the field would change to be circular rather than square as shown in the diagram. The field would then be covered in a giant mesh like net so that the ball could not go out of bounds but simply be in play all the time… this in our opinion would make the game much more action packed and could be really fun. Although this idea now that I think of it wasn’t really the greatest… it could not be played on a professional level and I was trying to keep it realistic even though the groups around us did not really stick to that... can't wait to see what happens in the future of this course

NEW BLOG

It appears I've forgottem my password to my previous blog, so I've made a new one, here is the link to the old one: http://cpereragamedev.blogspot.ca/