Month: June 2017

Mid Year Break 3: Start Over

Posted on by Kip

We’ve had a bit of a rough week. A few of the group have gone missing over the semester break, and the rest of us have been trying to come up with revisions, re-imaginings, or reinterpretations of our idea.

We had a meeting with the group members who were present and tried to do some rapid iteration, working through ideas to try to find a new ‘nug’ that we could build the game around.

We were in a position that the game we had was A) not fun, B) not a challenge, and C) didn’t really have any fantastic central mechanics.

Our use of shadow casting was interesting, and we heard consistent feedback that the shadows were cool and interesting. But the only thing that we ever managed to do with the shadows was to build a bridge over a gap to allow the player to ‘run as fast as they could to get to the next obstacle’.

Another element that never really go to the point of being interesting or fun was the use of various animal shadows. It took us a llooooooooonnnngggg time to get these up and running. And in the end, the shadows didn’t really do anything beyond change the pace of the player’s movement, or change their jump height. And once you did have the shadows, there wasn’t any reason to return to using the girl’s shadow.

And finally there was the use of the girl and a Victorian mansion as the setting. The art style was never really unified or particularly exciting. It was very ‘busy’ without adding anything to the game-play or informing the player in any particular way.

So – we got medieval. We cut away absolutely everything that we deemed unnecessary.

In the end, all we were left with was the shadow casting mechanic.

So we had a session of trying to work out what we could do with those shadows, and what sort of gameplay we would end up with.

Following that, we went away and tried to put together some prototypes showing the new game-play.

And here are some examples of what we came up with:

ShadowPlay
ShadowPlay
LensFlare
LensFlare
Project-o
Project-o

 

It’s fair to say that these are nowhere near complete or polished, but we do have some playable prototypes, which is something that it took us a long time to get to with the previous game.

So overall, I’m feeling a little more hopeful at the moment. Fortunately, I can temper that by recalling that we have VERY LITTLE TIME TO MAKE THIS INTO A GAME.

So the next few weeks is going to involve us hitting our straps in a big way to get a proper alpha ready to go for open day at the end of July.

 

 

 

Mid Year Break 2: Take the Lead

Posted on by Kip

I’m going to talk a little bit about what we are focusing on this week, as well as some things that I think our team needs to think about over the longer term. I guess these could also be looked at as things that need to be considered when forming a team, but that we have not done up to this point.

This week: We are continuing our mission to break everything into component pieces and try to find out where our fun elements are. Early contenders are moving various pieces of the world around to solve puzzles and allow progress.

Up to now we have been building a fairly basic platformer in which the player moves through the world and avoids bad things and so on. Think Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country and those sorts of games.

But with our new thinking, we end up with a game that has more in common with Monument Valley or Echochrome in which all of the elements of the world are there to see, and your mission as a player is to manipulate all of these elements into the correct positions to allow the character to proceed.

This style of game is potentially more at home on a mobile device than a PC, and that will be something that we will need to discuss if we end up following this path.

All of this is still up in the air of course, this is just my latest thinking.

The other thing I wanted to discuss this week was defining group roles and using that as a way to convey ownership.

So far we haven’t had much of a structure within our group. As I have discussed previously, I took on a decision making role, but that was the only real defined(-ish) role that we had.

This coming semester, I’m keen for everyone within the team to have a role and title that they can take on and clearly state that that is the part of the project that they are responsible for.

There are two reasons for this:

  1. I think it will help to have each group member to have ownership of a particular element of game production.
  2. It will take some of the load off me!

OK, that second point is a bit of a laugh. But, I think we will be better off if there is more than one person making all of the calls in development, and having a go-to person for different elements will help, I hope.

Finally: back on schedule for this week! Not a whole lot of actual game stuff to discuss, sorry, I seem to be focused more on team dynamics at the moment. I’m going to try to have some proper game news for next week.

I see that there are people looking over these, which is cool. If you have any feedback, disagreements or just want to make fun of me for writing a development blog, feel free to hit me up on twitter @kipslife.

Mid Year Break: Break it Down

Posted on by Kip

First of all – an apology. Clearly I wasn’t able to get a post done at the start of the week. I was thrown off by the long weekend, and I’m still trying to get a proper rhythm going with these things…

That said, our game alpha has been submitted, and Uni doesn’t go back until early August, so there’s nothing really going on now, right?

Well, not so much.

It would be fair to say that we are not 100% happy with the game that we have built to date. While there are elements that work well, the game isn’t really … fun.

Which is not ideal.

So we are going to use the first few weeks of the break to really tear the whole thing apart and try to work out what we can do with it.

A problem that we had last semester was that we never had a lot of time to play around with our mechanics. We took a long time to get them up and running, and as a result pretty much had to build the first idea that we had, without much iteration.

Here is a little example of the alpha that we submitted:

Alpha1Alpha2

You play as a young girl who can shift into a shadow and then interact with shadows as if they were solid. she can also change into various animal’s shadows.

Our basic problem was that we over scoped. *Cue no-one in the games industry being surprised at all*

And the result of this was that we never really got anything working particularly well.

So we’re using the break to right back to first principles.

We had a discussion with our tutor yesterday about the feedback that he had, and we realised that we really needed to pull all of the guff out and try to find the fun mechanics, then rebuild around that.

So out go the girl, the animals shadows, the shifting.

Now our game looks like this:

Prototype1

And the next few weeks will be rebuilding and rapid iteration.

Let’s see how that goes…

 

Week 13: Submission

Posted on by Kip

Bit of a celebration of a major benchmark this week: We submitted an alpha of our game for grading!

Cue fireworks!

But before we got to that, there was a whole lot more work that needed to be done.

I was kept pretty busy getting various game elements into order (mainly relating to UI elements and audio). The other thing I was doing was playing through the game, and getting other people to play through the game, trying to find as many bugs or problems and correct them before submission on Friday.

On the bright side, we didn’t reveal any huge gamebreaking issues. There were a few level corrections, some strange character behaviours, but nothing that we couldn’t handle.

On the less-good-side, we only really managed to get character animations running properly on Wednesday. This took way too long to get up and running, and they never really got to a standard that was really great, just because we never got any time to iterate on them.

This has sort of been the running story of this semester. We take far too long to make a decision, or to get an element running, so once we DO get it running, there isn’t any time to improve or test. So, while we did well to get a functional game submitted by the deadline, I wouldn’t say that we made a particularly great game.

All-in-all it’s a little disappointing.

So now the semester is over and we have a bit of a break before we get back into it. We’re going to take a little bit of a rest from working on the game, but there is going to have to be a fair bit of work still done over the semester break.

This will be anything from improving on the submitted alpha to re-working game elements to totally starting over and questioning everything that we have done to this point.

At any rate – there should be plenty more for me to post about…

In other news: I’m still trying to work out the best day to write these posts. Friday night wasn’t working out so well, and Saturday didn’t seem to be the best option either. So I’m going to try writing on Monday for a few weeks and see how that goes – even though it will be writing about the previous week.

And: I got myself some business cards!