Game Design II - Week 7 - October 19, 2012

So this week in our second class we had to talk about audio and design an audio based interactive game in class. A little confusing? I’ll explain how it went. We walked into class, and the professor did not speak, instead he played an audio clip of himself talking about sound design in games. We were then given an assignment to create a sound based game in the class using only audio cues and the people and room around us. I was a little unprepared with this… me and my group members had a real hard time thinking about ideas on how to create this… since we didn’t have tools to work with. At the end of the class, we would decide on one game for the professor to play and if he liked it, we would not have a homework assignment and would receive full marks for participation.

One group member was also my partner in another class I took last year called Special Topics in Game Development, with Dr. Bill Kapralos. In this course we heavily discussed the development of serious games and many other topics relating to them. As a final project, we had decided to create a digital game in unity for the visually impaired. It sounds complicated I know, but we worked together to create a sound maze involving the use of 3D sound cues coming from different directions. The maze consisted of different switches that would give off sound and the player would have to hit these switching and head towards the end of the maze where a victory sound cue would be playing. Though it sounds very basic, we discussed that we would have to keep it simple to due players possibly getting frustrated while playing the game with no vision.

Completing a similar interactive sort of assignment in class was kind of difficult because we only had 30 minutes. We came up with a similar idea where the player would have to navigate to the end using sound cues that each person would emit. Our game wasn’t really chosen in the class because of course, due to us not knowing anyone, nobody even asked us about our game. A similar game to ours was chosen oddly enough, it was kind of strange, I guess it was a very basic idea. The professor sure didn’t like it… maybe it’s because we made him hop over desks? Haha, I guess not. But we as a class were lacking in certain areas such as a reward system and a fun entertaining factor. So now we will have this assignment as a future homework assignment, we’ll see what’s in store next week.

On a side note, the most annoying prototype assignment I’ve seen so far in both game design classes has been troubling me and my group for quite some time now… A wedding proposal level and game. This has really stumped all of us, because it is such a random and bizarre topic to make a game about… I understand it’s supposed to be digital which is a lot worse I feel… our group has decided to create a musical game similar to something like dance dance revolution… but this I don’t think is very good. I’m currently working on a model to be “dancing” but I’m having a lot of issues with the skeleton and animating it… especially to create in such little time after completing my midterms... I was excited for a lot of the assignments we had received, even the upcoming board game homework, but this…. This is something else.

Game Engines - Week 6 - Midterm Recovery...

                There was no class this week simply because of the dreadful midterm. Now a lot of students in this class were probably laughing at what was on it for whatever reason, maybe because they are smarter? Or maybe because they studied harder…I’m going to assume a bit of both. Since I had my 4^th year Artificial Intelligence exam 2 hours before, I knew things were not going to be too good. I had seriously hoped that there would be a fire alarm or something to delay the midterm, but I finished… 8:30 maybe? I feel like I did really bad because there were a lot of simple things that I had just blanked out on, such as simple definitions and math. I was able to get most of the math questions done, and even the question at the end regarding the scene graphs didn’t seem too bad, I think most of my marks are actually going to come from those sections.

                A lot of the questions on the general section were really simple; I had just simply forgotten how to explain most of them, which I think has screwed me over… I am now hoping on a good GDW mark and these blogs and assignments to keep my mark at a somewhat decent level. I think I’m going to take off the rest of the week from programming to complete a lot of my other assignments for other classes, since I’ve really been neglecting those in terms of quality. Medium assignment deadline is approaching… which is really nerve racking since I feel like theres barely enough time to work on them. In my opinion it is a little unfair, I can imagine the students in the current year juggling a huge workload from the modelling class, game design 2 classes (HEAVY WORKLOAD) and whatever else they may have.

               I myself have to deal with Artificial Intelligence, another programming course which is starting to give me some serious trouble… we’ll see how I do when the marks come out? I’m not sure which assignments im going to tackle next, I’ll keep updated.

Game Engines - Week 5 - 23 EXP OBTAINED!

Finished my solar system that I showed you a few weeks ago! I found that upon programming this assignment that this stuff can get really repetitive, and sometimes I really looked for a lazy way out, but that usually somehow requires more work and gives errors. I’ve been able to gain the proper EXP needed to write the midterm, and based on what I’ve been programming so far, I’m not quite sure what to expect on the midterm… I know we were given a midterm review in class this week, but it did not focus too much in general on anything, we were basically told to know everything except a few things like the rendering pipeline. 

                On the plus side, I started the semester not expecting to even be able to write the midterm since I’m such a bad programmer. I received a lot of online help and guidance from the samples provided from the TwoLoc engine. In order to make my solar system work out, I used that sample from the raypicking, that really helped me on getting a mouse function to click the objects with a function called PickObject(), which I recreated in my own program, cheap I know, but it worked! Taking this further, I added a few if statements that would display text boxes based on the object picked, so basically I finished this assignment. It was simply a matter of me adding information on the planets and recreate moons.

                This doesn’t seem bad right? Well wrong, upon creating moons to orbit around the planet, I ran into several issues and ended up staying awake really late for no reason. The simple problem was basically with the nodes and the confusion between all the parenting. My moons were rotating around the sun for some reason which was annoying… upon asking a friend about the issue, I was told that it would be simply easier to create another node for the moon to move around instead of using the planet entities. These nodes would be placed where the planets were. Once this was fixed… everything worked out. What a stupid little mistake I made, but I guess that’s how we learn?

Game Engines - Week 4 - Almost there...

                So I’m currently working on the Skydome program. But before that! I have actually made an amazing discovery along with my other GDW group members, we obtained an online pdf book called Pro Ogre 3D programming, and suddenly a lot have things have become much clearer. What I’m really wondering is, why isn’t one of our course books like this? I understand the whole idea of learning on our own, but we should have had some help, especially for people who aren’t strong at programming, I mean I’m sure I’m not the only one?

                This book gave me a nice read on working with sky domes and even billboards, which helped me, gain an idea of how I’m supposed to go about creating another assignment. I’ve managed to obtain the knowledge to create the actual skydome in my program, but I’m not too sure how I’m going to go about animating it… I have an idea that may work derived from my previous assignment and the parenting sample used in our examples. 

UPDATE:

                I’ve managed to get it animating by creating separate nodes and treating the skydome like one of the planet examples, through this I was able to get it rotating along a certain axis which has given the effect of the sky dome animating and best of all! I do not see a pinch in the texture. I believe that is the main difference between using Ogre’s sky dome function and simply texturing a sphere. I also created a plane at the beginning of the assignment to represent grass so that the sky dome scene would not look stupid.

                With the approaching midterm, I am very curious as to whether or not the exam will have programming questions. In order to complete most of my assignments, I’d have to research and look at other examples. Theoretically I understand what’s going on, and I understand most of the lecture material… I probably will have to go over my math for the 3^rd time since taking Computer Animation. I hope the methods and stuff have not changed since I first took it 2 years ago. This is the one side about being behind in this program; teachers change everything every year, so if I repeat a course I’m dealing with a whole new experience level. We’ll see what happens.

Game Engines - Week 3 - Bad Habits

We didn’t have an engine’s lecture due to the thanksgiving long weekend, this I would say is somewhat of a good thing because I assume, and we will just have less material to study for on the midterm? We’ll see, as of right now I think I will be able to successfully write the midterm, though I’m pretty sure I will not do too well. I am a very weak programmer, and the easy assignments of this course alone have actually given me quite a struggle. 

I have successfully completed two of them so far, the first one with the rotating lights, and also the recreation of the robotic arm. This second assignment was a frustrating time because there were a lot of issues with me finding the proper positioning and rotation points for each of the arm parts. The fingers were probably the most complex due to their small size; it’s a lot harder to move positions around when working with small decimal numbers. If I was smarter, I probably should have made everything bigger so I’d be working with whole numbers… but something I noticed was that once I’m too far into a code, I just stick with it, instead of going back to make the proper modifications. Well anyways I managed to get that completed. I now have….9 EXP… just 11 more to go?