Homework 7: Game Engine

I decided to make the prototype of the movement engine for our game this week. I just couldn't wait anymore.

I added mouse movement with the widely available mouselook.py script. Now in first person mode the player can look around and turn with the mouse, move around with WASD, and jump. I parented the body to the first person camera and a third person camera to the first person camera. That way the player can switch from first person to third person with the 1 and 3 keys.

I animated the player's digital camera using a placeholder model. The digital camera will raise or lower when the right mouse is held or released. I still need to move the view to an in camera view once the camera is raised. The digital camera is parented to the body so it moves with the player. The camera flash is activated by left click which triggers a point light parented to the camera that goes from energy 0 to 10 in a 10th of a second.

The merry-go-round now has a hinge joint in the middle so that it rotates freely on its Z axis. This way I can apply a force and let it slow down over time rather than have it rotate at a fixed speed. Also this means I don't need to rely on it being held in place by another object's unpredictable collision box. Maybe there's a better way to do it but for now this works well. The player can sort of ride it and by ride I mean get flung off violently.

Lastly, I made a simple jumping puzzle to see how well the jump movement works. The cubes are at various heights to see what jump height seems most natural in first person. Jumping on top of the cubes leads you to a yellow floating plane. Jumping on that activates a near sensor which triggers an animation raising the plane into the air.

Homework 6

1. For each of the four elements of the Tetrad, explain how it is addressed by your game. If one of the four elements is not used, please state this.

Mechanics: The main mechanic is taking a picture of an object. When the flash goes off the object changes into an old functioning version of itself from the past with people around it. Also the camera may be used to get past puzzle elements. For example, in the real world a bridge is washed out, but looking through the lens of the camera it's repaired and the player can cross it.
Story: The story of the community in this town is told indirectly through ghost images of townsfolk appearing in photographs and through old signs(Danger:Mine Collapse) and newspapers.
Technology: The blender game engine will be used for the game.
Aesthetics: We've already decided our game will be low poly and muted colors, the photographs will reveal a brighter, more colorful, happier time.

2. Do the four (or less) elements work towards a current theme?

I think the story and mechanics support the theme more than the other elements. They both drive home the feeling of discovery and slowly reveal the story. Hopefully the player will enjoy learning bits and pieces of the story and putting the mystery together in their mind.

3. In your own words, describe the meaning of a "theme", and how does it differ from an "experience" (see book for examples in Chapters 2 and 5.

An experience is the way a particular person plays and reacts to the game. It may be different depending on the type of player they are but can still be taken into account when designing a game. A designer should have a certain experience for the player in mind.
A theme is a unifying idea that you want to get across to the players. It's what the game is about at its core and should be supported by all of the game elements if possible.

4. What is your game's theme?

The theme is discovery through curiosity and how certain objects and places have a history to them. The main character is a photographer so they see a composition of a scene and to them it's a story. So our game actually shows this story through the camera lens. Someone just passing through the town and not looking closely would miss the history of this abandoned place.

5. What are the elements in your game that are meant to reinforce this theme?

The mechanics of the camera, the sounds of children laughing and voices heard in different photograph spots, the ability for the town to rebuild itself, and the surprise ending that's still a secret.

6. What is it about your game that you feel makes it special and powerful?

The slow discovery of the hidden, long forgotten community that only appears as kind of ghosts to the player depending on how they play, and the nature of discovering this by playing rather than being told the story.

Homework 5: Game Engine

The purpose of this homework was to learn how to move objects around in the game engine and to add objects dynamically. I first updated my merry-go-round to make it more uniform. Instead of making the bars one at a time I duplicated them, rotated the scene 120 degrees and moved them there. That way they would have perfect symmetry.

I then added the merry-go-round into a scene and had it rotate when you press W. For now I kept the merry-go-round as a static object that has collision because the cylinder in the center caused problems if I made it a rigid body. You can also move the whole scene up and down with X and Z.

I wasn't happy stopping there so I added an invisible empty cube that rotates and moves along an animation path. As it moves it randomly drops leaves that are stored on a second layer. The leaves were made using a subdivided plane and can distort when physics is applied. They have an alpha mapped texture of a leaf which allows the non-textured parts of the object to be transparent. I then added random forces and velocities to these leaves so that when you press Q the "wind blows" and the leaves fly across the plane. Also if you spin the merry-go-round with W the leaves on it will scatter around.



Initially I created the leaves(cloth), wind, and particle system in the Blender Render engine only to find out none of that is supported in the Game Engine. So I had to try to fake it with soft bodies and random forces. Overall I was pretty happy with the version I have. I think if I modify the leaves a bit I can create a modular set of objects that can be used anywhere in the gameworld. The merry-go-round itself is a key feature of the playground, one of the main areas the player is taking photographs in.

Homework 4:Teamwork

1. Do you love your project/game. If not, how can that be changed? I do indeed. All I want to do is work on Blender now but I have all these other responsibilities.

2. Does the team as a whole love the project? If not, what can be done? I think so. Some team members seem very excited about the game. If they turn out not to love it then hopefully they can find a specific aspect of the development to focus on that they do love. Maybe modeling or animation?

3. Are the team members communicating with each other? Yes.

4. Does the team have a regular meeting schedule? What is that schedule? Yes, Monday at 1 and sometimes Wednesday at 1 as well.

5. Describe the modes of communication between the team members. We communicate in person, via email, and are getting used to communicating via the Google doc.

6. Regarding game documents, what must be remembered while designing your game? The project schedule will most likely be the most important section. If we can keep up a consistent level of shared work there will at least be something produced in the end(no telling if it will be any good).

A consistent art style. Since most of us are contributing models it would be ideal to have 1 person work on making them all look like they belong in the same world.

Keeping in mind how the player will react. Designing a game from only a developers point of view can make it pretty easy to get caught up in details like getting some silly animation to trigger. The important part to remember is the gameplay from the player's perspective. What tasks are the most important to get done in this limited development time that will directly enhance their experience?

Homework 3

For this assignment I designed a playground merry-go-round/roundabout. This is one of the objects that you will take a photograph of in our game. There will be 2 versions of this object eventually: one rusted and destroyed and one that looks new. Whether you view the object with your eyes or through the camera determines which one you will see.

I built it mainly out of cylinders and bezier curves. The cylinders were flattened to make the disc floor parts and the bezier curves were used to create the curved pipes. After making the bezier curves in the correct shape I added a mesh to them and joined them to the other objects. The pipes were extruded to make them meet the torus in the center.

Images and city building games

Here's a couple of images I drew when storyboarding the video below. I'm not an artist so some of the images didn't get used because they were too tough to redraw on a whiteboard.



This is a close up of some collapsed buildings and rubble.




Two games that involve city building are Minecraft and Bastion.

Minecraft is a very popular building/survival game where everything's made of cubes. This may seem like a limitation at first but many players have nevertheless built incredible structures.

Bastion is a kind of top down brawler. The game takes place after "the calamity" where some unknown force destroyed the world. The player travels across the remnants of the land left floating in the sky and as they proceed the towns and cities are rebuilt on the fly.

Game Design Video

Here is my first video for the game design course. I created a video describing my idea for a photography game. I used storyboards and shot it all in one take. Then I edited and sped up the footage to have it be around 3 minutes.