Author: 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:

 

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.

 

 

 

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…

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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!

Yesterday (Saturday) I attended this pretty excellent series of talks put on by APRA AMCOS (A music and musicians representative body – learn more about them here: http://apraamcos.com.au/).

The day involved a series of four talks from musicians and composers that work in the games industry and was all about informing music creators what they needed to know/learn/find out in order to start getting involved in games.

I attended as a game developer hoping to learn a bit more about sound design and implementation. So I didn’t really end up getting what I thought I was going to get out of the day.

But, what I did get was super informative and totally worthwhile.

The first talk was given by Meghann O’Neill. Meghann ran us through a series of games showing progressively more complex music management systems that reacted to the player’s actions in more creative ways. These ranged from simple stings that were triggered by player death, all the way up to systems that would track the game state and play specific pieces of music in response. It was really cool to see some of the examples that she showed using sounds and music in different ways to give feedback to players.

Meghann also went into a fair bit of detail about the Australian and Melbourne gaming scenes. This included statistics of what roles are usually within game development teams (lots of programmers and artists, few producers and audio people).

After morning tea we heard from Jared Underwood and Ash Ringrose of SMG Studios. Jared is a musician and composer who creates music for Ash’s game development studio. Ash described it as a ‘monogamous collaboration’. This talk covered some really great info on creating a brief for a composer, as well as how to respond to a brief and how to work through the feedback process.

It was great to see this conversation from both sides. Ash made it pretty clear that he wasn’t really across all of the musical lingo, and Jared emphasised how much more useful it was to receive a brief that referenced a mood. As someone not trained in any sound design, it was good to hear that a useful brief can still be generated without requiring any particular level of knowledge.

They also covered how important is was to be honest and open in the feedback process. Responding to a brief is an iterative process and it is extremely rare to get the exact sound you are seeking on the first go. It’s important that you give honest feedback to get the best results.

Following lunch we heard from Maize Wallin. Maize went over a lot of the software programs that are used to implement sounds into games, as well as the programs usually used within game development teams. I was particularly interested to get an idea of the third party plugins that are used to provide greater functionality for audio in Unity. I’ve only worked Unity’s built-in audio functions before, so seeing what could be done with the plugins was an eye opener! I’m definitely going to dig a bit deeper into these.

Talking with a few of the other attendees afterwards it became clear that the majority of the programs that Maize had discussed were totally new to them. I gave a couple of people quick run downs of Slack and Trello and very basic explanations of Unity and Unreal. It was interesting to see how these tools (which I kind of take for granted now) were completely new to the rest of the audience. Maize pointed out how beneficial it was to have at least a working knowledge of all of these tools if you wanted to work within game development. Being able to sit in a job interview and say that you already know how to use all of these programs would be a huge benefit.

We ended the day with a Q&A session with Neal Acree, a composer of video game soundtracks. This talk was more about his experiences working to make music for games and game trailers and his history within the industry. It was interesting to hear about the various briefs and instructions that he has been given over his career, and the degree of freedom or explicit direction he had been given to develop music for games.

All-in-all this was a really good day and I learned a lot from it – even though it wasn’t exactly what I had expected it to be going in.

If anything, I would have to say that this event was a real lost opportunity for the game development industry. I was one of very few game development people in the room, and as a result I had a whole bunch of people wanting to talk to me in the breaks about game development and how I talk to, and about, music and audio.

It is clear that there is a huge pool of audio people who are keen to make contact with and work with game developers. If something like this happens again I would highly recommend that game development folk attend.

As a final note – it was great to attend a series of talks where half of the presenters were women. Great work APRA  AMCOS.