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.