Game Design II - Week 6 - October 11

Another week of game design passed by! And for once in this class I’m actually satisfied with where it’s going, this is one of the few classes I can actually enjoy sometimes because we talk about interesting things. I personally hate programming, because I just don’t understand most of its complexity… but areas like level design, and game design in really intrigues me. I remember last semester when I was making level for fun for no apparent reason. Even though the levels I made were for my game, I didn’t actually get a chance to implement them. Little bit of random useless information I guess?

                First lecture we got to talk about reward systems and things like that. It was interesting to hear the different views on what people said in class, but of course my voice was silent. I began to doze off as usual, and thought about New Super Mario Bros 2, for the Nintendo 3DS, and how there’s like barely any reward! Like really? What the heck can one do with an infinite amount of coins and lives? Nothing, but yet this is a super successful game that people get strangely addicted to. I love it, I bought it on the first day, especially since I work at a gaming retail store, I get tempted really easily to buy these simple games. Then I think of my PlayStation 3 account and how whenever I buy a new game, I try my very hardest to get as many of the trophy achievements as possible and complete the game 100%. I do it a lot of the time for almost every game that comes out… I think honestly that’s probably my best reward, the ability to show off and boast when I platinum every Sonic game and all the God of War games.

                Yesterday was a little different, didn’t get to go outside! I heard the whole class didn’t like when we did that… which is really dumb IMO because it forces us to be interactive and have fun and learn something. I was disappointed… BUT then it got even better, we got to do an interactive activity where we basically analyzed different games and I got to do my favourite childhood game. Banjo-Kazooie! This game was probably the best game ever on Nintendo 64. Some of the important things about that game were that it was one of the first 3D platformer adventure games to come out in addition to things like Super Mario 64. It implemented a very colourful environment and an assortment of themed levels, my personal favourite was the one that took place in the winter level. That particular level had all of the abilities used to their fullest and also contained many mini-games… I really want to play it again. 

Following that exercise in class, we had to design another game with random requirements. These ones actually really stumped me and I was completely clueless. To be honest, I cannot even really remember what we came up with… We used a checker board as our board with a checker as a game piece that was to be protected by the player. Our requirements were that we needed to have a Sci-fi game with a game mechanic that involved protecting a location. We were also required to make the game have stars that would be collectable and a game reward with money. That’s pretty much it for today… we’ll be working to finish up our Unity level for the first homework assignment. It seems a lot simpler to create something with this engine.

Game Design II - Week 5 - October 7, 2012

Thanksgiving weekend is finally over and I’ve realized that I haven’t really been updating, so I’m going to talk about last week before I simply jump to this week. 

Last week was actually one of my favourite moments in this school. After being here for four years, the stereotype of game developers being bookworms and computer nerds was broken and taken in a different direction. We actually got to go outside for our second class and participate in an interactive game design assignment, which was super fun.

 Of course this was on the second class day; our first day was a simple lecture that informed us once again on various components of level design… I remember while being in the class not participating and getting that ever so scary ball of death that will probably smack the brown off my face one day… that I was thinking of how I personally want to make super hard levels and don’t often think of myself as the player for the level. I know I mentioned this before, but it is pretty important and can be a problem if I was planning to be an actual level designer. After the Portal 2 assignment where my team and I started making a super complex level, we each got to test it and I realized I was getting more frustrated than having fun, and I never wanted to do it again. This is not something I believe that game developers in general want to push out to consumers. 

For the second time this semester, I had a little reality check when trying to create our outdoor game. Upon entering the class, we were informed that we were going outside; to be honest I thought our class was simply moving to a more useless room like the gaming lab which is very small. We then went outside to the big field area, and we broke into teams of 4 -6, of course due my social status in this game development program, I know nobody, except for the GDW group I was put with. We then received volleyball, a small plastic ball, and some rope; in addition to this we had a set of guidelines.

 A sheet detailing the different roles of the battlefield soldier classes was also given to us, and we had to incorporate at least two of these classes into our game, easy enough. We call it, Ultimate Battle Ball. Here’s what that looked like:

The game layout looked like this:

Our game consisted of a Recon soldier and an Engineer soldier on each team. The main objective of the game was for the engineer to put the small plastic ball in the opposing team’s net. The Recon class represented the goalkeeper, and they would be in possession of the large volleyball. Their job for the game was to protect their net with the ability to throw their ball at the opposing team’s engineer. The engineer was the main goal scorer and would be traveling to the enemy net to try and throw the small ball in the net past the enemy recon.

The rules are as follows:

• Engineer and Recon player are allowed to use their hands and feet.
• Recons are not allowed to leave their net.
• If Engineers are hit by Recon’s they have to stay down for 5 seconds before they can run back.
• The Engineer can only retrieve the big ball for the recon soldier, and can also only possess one ball at a time.
• Recon soldiers can throw their ball to the engineers while defending if they choose to, but the engineer cannot move while in its possession. (this is similar to the rules of basketball while if you’re near the net you can pass and move on pivot points)
• Players can switch roles after ever round.  Each round begins with the small ball being placed in the center and both engineers race to it from their net.

Upon creating this, I was trying to make it more complicated with my group members, but one important lesson I learned was that complex game design can sometimes really suck. When it came to play testing time, I really struggled to play and I was really tired….it was pretty funny. Can’t wait to see what happens this coming week.

Game Engines - Week 2 - Frustration

So this second week of my game engine blogs, I am proud to say that I’ve officially completed my first easy question which now leaves me with 5 EXP… I’m pretty sure I still won’t finish on time for the midterm because these easy questions are providing me with a huge challenge, and the values of them depreciate after each one I complete, meaning in order to write the midterm I would have to complete… a lot, and they’re due next week! Doesn’t help that I have my 4^th year AI assignments as well… The midterms are scheduled on both days and I am very concerned that they are back to back. The assignment that I completed was the first assignment. I know in my previous blog I posted my creation of the solar system with the textured spheres for the third homework assignment, but upon creating this I thought of a very simple way to complete the first assignment and was able to submit that to the TA last Friday.

Currently I am trying to figure out how to complete both the sky dome question, and I have started creating the robotic arm with A LOT of difficulty… I understand this is a programming course, but I’m not too sure why it’s catered to strong programmers, and does not provide enough assistance or help to the weaker ones. On paper, the mathematical aspects that we have been learning in class such as the matrices and all the linear algebra stuff is bringing back a lot of memories of my first year, back when they didn’t really teach much game development associated things… I am at a huuuuge disadvantage, but I did retain most of this mathematical knowledge, so if I do get to write the midterm things won’t be as bad as I think.

My current issue with the sky dome program is that I am quite unsure how to add the animating texture without the pinch factor. By attaching a texture onto a sphere, it creates a pinch at the top and bottom of the sphere, and ever by animation it looks very strange. I was reading online that there was actually a simpler way of creating this in Ogre, but the online help that I’ve been trying to seek REALLY has not been helping me out at all. It’s been giving me ideas that I’ve been trying to implement but I’ve honestly been having no luck with this at all. It’s all so frustrating. I haven’t updated my repository with it yet because I don’t really know what I’m doing at this point… We’ll see what happens... I’m holding off on the solar system assignment as of now because it’s one that can be upgraded and I’m not too sure how that works yet.

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?