Month: July 2017

The last week has been all about pulling everything together and getting our game ready to show at the Swinburne Open Day, which is the coming Sunday.

This is going to be our first big public show of LVL² so this is all quite exciting. And also a little scary!

We have three levels ready to go, and all of our mechanics set up and ready to play. We still need to do a whole lot of polish cos everything is in a very raw state at the moment.

Due to the fact that we have scrapped our previous game and started over from scratch over the winter break, we are essentially 12 or so weeks of development behind the other groups in the class. I think we’ve put in a pretty good effort to get ourselves back up to speed, but we are going to be showing a game that is significantly less polished and tested than our colleagues.

I’m going to be doing my best to keep this in mind as people play our game, but we’ll have to see how I go with that.

But before we get to that, we need to pull everything together.

Really all we still have to do is connect all of our levels together, test them, get some new audio and sound effects, make sure all of our art and assets are in place, build and implement a new UI system, get all of the menus and sub-menus plugged together and test everything as many times as possible.

Easy right?

Ahem.

The thing we’re going to have to concentrate on this week is making sure we know exactly what jobs need doing and exactly who is going to be doing them. On reflection this was a real problem last semester. A lot of times we would meet up as a group and find that various people had not done their tasks because they were waiting on somebody else to do something else, or they thought that it was someone else’s tasks, or any other number of excuses.

I’m also pretty concerned that a few people appeared to have just tapped out altogether. Now, whether this is a result of it being mid-semester break and them taking that 100% seriously, or whether it’s a case that they are just done with this project I don’t really know at this stage. Regardless, we pretty much have to move forward under the assumption that they are no longer contributing to the project and it’s on the rest of us to get everything done.

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In other more cheery news (this under the line bit is quickly becoming my favourite) I have officially published a game!

It’s a narrative adventure that I made in Twine last year.

You can play it in your browser by going here: https://kipslife.itch.io/babel

It’s called Babel and is about an ill-fated archaeological party searching for the site of the Tower of Babel.

I also created my first ever Twitter bot. @Towns_of_Aus is a bot that tweets out facts about little known Australian towns twice a day.

It’s probably still a little repetitive at the moment, but I have some ideas about how to make it a bit better. It kinda reads a little bit like a Dwarf Fortress summary at the moment, so I’m gonna have to do some work to make it sound a bit more natural.

I made it using cheapbotsdonequick.com and it was really easy to set up and get running. I would recommend giving it a try!

OK, no more wallowing in self reflection, this week I’m actually going to talk about making some stuff!

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This week I’ve been working on our main menu.

I posted a pick of our logo last week, but if you missed that, here it is again!

I’m using this as the basis of the games main menu, with each of the letters being a button. The first “L” will start the game, the “V” will display the game controls, the second “L” will access the credits, and the “2” will quit.

Our artist made all the parts into separate assets so that I was able to build the landing screen in Unity so that it looks exactly the same as the logo.

Then I set up each button to load the respective menu page, or to load the game or exit, or whatever. It did the job that it was supposed to, but it wasn’t particularly exciting or pretty.

One of the key concepts of our game is “Levels within Levels”. Within each level, the player can enlarge certain objects and enter them, to find entire new levels within. Basically, rather than finishing a level and entering the next, the next level is within the level currently.

So to step into this mindset, I made an animation to draw the camera into each button as it is pressed – like so:

That made the buttons feel a little more dynamic, but the info on screen was still a little static.

Here is the instructions page as an example:

This page would just appear once you entered into the “V” in the logo. This time, I decided to animate all of the icons jumping up from the bottom of the page and settling into place in a kind of cascading effect.

It ended up looking like this:

Which looks pretty nice I think.

Obviously these are all works in progress, and are likely to change before we are done, but it’s a pretty simple addition and adds a bit of pop to the game when we have people come and play and show it off.

Clearly, we still need to make the actual game. That bit is pretty important.

But to close – here is a GIF of everything added together:

Disclosure: I am not a UI designer and haven’t had any specific UI training. This is just a record of my bumbling through the process and learning to make something that looks good. Feel free to take whatever lessons that you want from this, or to quietly scoff at my amateurism.

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Whew – feels nice to actually be talking about making something.

So, if anyone has looked, I had a bit of a boo-boo over the weekend, and the last post has been lost. (If anyone is downloading and saving posts as they read them it might be recoverable? That’s probably not happening…)

Anyway, I now have an SSL certificate installed and have set up some security measures as well as automated backups.

Kinda learning/making this blogging thing up as I go, so it might be a rocky trip but we’ll end up somewhere…

Hey, so I did some messing around with the site over the weekend and managed to lose last week’s post completely.

BUT: the site now has a proper security certificate so I’m gonna call that a win.

I can’t really remember what I wrote about, but I do recall that there were links to the new website and twitter for our group’s new game, so here are those links again if you wanted them:

LVL²

Twitter: twitter.com/LVLsquared

Web: lvl2game.com

 

The last week was rough.

(And I know this is a bit of a theme of late, but this one was particularly rough).

We’ve been plugging away trying to come up with a new game idea, following the failure of our previous effort. There have been some interesting mechanics floated, and there have been some good efforts from some group members to find a new path forward, and that has been great.

However, during our time at The Arcade this week we spoke with Ken Wong, who has been tutoring us this semester.

Ken was interested in the mechanic that we had, but pretty much tore all of our game ideas apart.

And this really knocked me for six.

Hearing Ken say that we were again heading down a road to a rubbish game just left me questioning everything that we were doing. I was basically unable to do anything productive for the rest of the day, because I was just left unsure that anything that we were doing was any good.

And that’s pretty much where I have been all week.

I’m not sure that the new idea that we have is super solid either, but we don’t have any time to work through any other ideas. So we just have to hit this one as hard as we can and try to learn from this whole experience I suppose.

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Now that that cheery reflection is done – what’s coming up for the next week?

We need to get our web presence up and running again. This is going to need a whole new website, as well as twitter and facebook accounts.

We need to really bed down our new design documentation, and work out precisely what is required in order to have a proper game up and running for open day at the end of July. This will include artwork, mechanics, levels built and tested, new UI, menus, the lot.

Time to get cracking.