The Trials and Tribulations of (almost) Computer Science

A Computer Science students efforts in game development

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Assignment 3 Postmortem

What's one thing you'd change about how you developed the prototype?

If I had to return to the start of the development process, I would absolutely change the style in which we developed the solution. Fullerton (2019, p.424) discusses agile methodology and the iterative nature of it. Setting goals for each standup and integrating on them week on week. I would definitely integrate more of these learnings in my development process.

What's one thing you'd change about the design of the prototype?

If I could change a single thing about the design of the prototype, it would be the complexity and size of it that the team tried to achieve. If instead of the amount of weapons and enemies that we set out to incorporate, we instead had 1 or 2 good weapons and a single enemy, it could have proved more successful. Fullerton (2019, p182) discusses the importance of narrowing down ideas and really focusing on them individually before prototyping and implementing them. If I could go back, I would absolutely lean more heavily into this particular teaching from Fullerton.

Was it a success?

Overall, I think there were important teachings for the whole team that came from developing this prototype. Unfortunately, we were not able to achieve our vision of the game that we set out to prototype, but we enjoyed it and learnt a lot about the game design process and playtesting process.

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Assignment 3 Playtesting

For playtesting this application, the development team (and therefore the testing team) tried to follow Fullerton (2019, p292) very closely. In Chapter 9, Fullerton outlays some guidance for running a playtesting session and defines the various types. We decided to use a face-to-face session with a naive playtester in order to get the most informative feedback.

I was in charge of organising a playtest with playtester #3 (name omitted to protect identity). The roles of the development team are on the submitted playtesting document, but there was a watcher, note taker and someone who ran the playtest and read the script (me!).

Through this playtest, we learned alot about the game. Some main takeaways from this (and other playtests) were the following;

Game noise was too loud

Controls were confusing

Enemies moved too fast

These and a few other points will be addressed by adding a volume slider, adding a controls screen and slowing the enemies down.

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Assignment 3 Dev Progress

As you can see from the above video (even though it's slow and stuttery) the current state of the game leaves much to be desired. Another developer has since fixed the movement of the ship but the aim is to fix the spawning of enemies and animations

Animation

After a while of trial and error, I managed to actually work in some animations for the player ships (specifically, thrust and just travelling). I also added animation for the bullets.

As you can see (again, sorry for the choppy video), but there is now a animation with the player ship where the trusters modulate between power levels (I also added an animation for the bullet)

What did I learn

Alongside the animation work, the spawning system (Game Manager) was also improved. What this taught me to do is to use external events, so I can reuse them in multiple spots without having to recreate the logic.

Readings

Fullerton (2019) talks about incremental development cycle, and through this process I've found it to be so important. Creating any of the major game mechanics required lots of incremental development. Adding logic, previewing the game and getting a feel for it, adding more logic or tweaking what was added, etc....

The issue with creating all the logic at once is, if I did that, and there was an issue, I wouldn't know where it was and it was really hard to find.

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Racing Post Mortem

As you can see above, I wasn't able to add much development to this game past what we did in the tutorial. This is due to my time being split between other units assessment being due at this time.

Whats one thing I'd change about how I developed the prototype?

I'd add more custom stuff! I originally envisioned the game to include combat and car chases so I would spend more time adding those mechaniics

What's one thing I'd change about how I designed the prototype?

Maybe not be so ambitious. I often have the issue with these small prototypes that I am to ambitious and make so many plans but unfortunately can't execute on the.

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Assignment 2: Final Design

In both the One Sheet and One Page, I incorporated some blue and orange colouring for a few reasons. The Blue, is a general theme, and will be used lots in the games UI. The Orange, will also be used in UI but I felt it was a great way to signpost certain aspects of the pages. You'll see some headings are in orange, as well as words that should be the centre of focus.

One Page (A3)

One Sheet (A4)

As you can see below, I decided to make a stylistic choice to make it look like the game is being played on the poster. You can see the scrap and kill counters in the upper left and right corners respectively. Also, the gameplay looks like it's happening infront of the planet, instead of being a screenshot of gameplay directly. I feel like this gives off an almost movie like quality to this poster.

I tried to use font size hierarchy to sort of point the readers attention to the most important stuff, "Captain Zenith" is the focal point as well as the gameplay elements below it, followed by the "commits a war crime" subtitle and the "Bend the rules, break the law. Because space cops don't exist (yet)" slogan.

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Racing Development Post

What have I been trying to achieve

The hardest thing about making this game (in my opinion) is the controls. It's very hard to get the feeling of driving right with the keyboard.

What was something you learned

How to give enemies a path! Also, grouping object into a group makes it easy to apply logic to them all at the same time. These mechanics in GDevelop will be great in the final assessment prototype.

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Assignment 2 Progress

Title

Finding a font was a big decision for me. I wanted to find something 'authoritative' and 'imposing' to sort of let the user know the "Captain Zenith" was a revered captain. Below are some examples of fonts that I was playing with

I think I settled on a font called "Futura Display" for the name and then having 'Commits a war crime' in a different font, almost as a sub-title. This font was called "Mokoto Glitch 1".

Inspiration

I always loved the imagery of Star Wars: A New Hopes intro with the big star destroyer flying over the camera with the planet in the background (image below). I would love to use this as inspiration and draw from it if I can. In fact, you can see in the first example of fonts that I did manage to find a planet background like this.

(George Lucas, 1977, 2:15)

I would also love to use a futuristic interface style, to signify that it is a scifi game

References

Lucas, G. (Director). (1977). Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. [Film]. LucasFilm

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Asteroids Post Mortem

What's one thing I'd change

I think I would spend more time on implementing the enemy \ working on how they work mechanically. Unfortunately, I didn't quite have time to get the enemies doing much other than run toward the player.

Animation! I think animation is so important to the perceived value of a game, and adding some simple animations to the player and enemies would definitely be top of my list.

What would I change about the design of the prototype?

If I could change the design, I would make it more of a tower defence and less of a game where the player roams. Unfortunately, in space, there isn't much scenery. So it doesn't feel great to drive around \ move from the players perspective

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Racing Game Elevator Pitch

Name & Description

"Shift Happens" is a topdown action game where players have to upgrade & buy new vehicles to act as getaway cars for heists. Shift happens will rely on a points system that represents dollars. Having a more seamless escape with few collisions will result in the player keeping more of their 'loot', whereas having lots of collisions with police or traffic will result in the score dropping with each one.

Control Scheme

Primary Mechanic

The main mechanic of the game will be using countermeasures (oil slicks, caltrops, etc...) to force pursuing cars off the road.

Setting \ Style

This game will rely heavily on a 'cartoony' style. The car designs won't be overly extravagant or realistic. Currently the idea for a setting is something somewhat of a retro 80s sort of setting, harnessing the use of bright colours, neon and synthwave aesthetics to bring this game to fruition.

Audience \ Demographics

Obviously, since this is a heist game with destruction of police cars it can't be said that the demographic is children. With that said however, this game will be focusing on a younger demographic.

Selling Points

Shift happens will allow the player to upgrade the getaway vehicles in detail, also allowing players to choose their favourite cars as getaway cars!

Shift happens is in the style of a top down flash game, allowing the players to become acustom to the controls and setting easily.

The players will be challenged in their getaway driving skills, giving a sense of fiero

Inspiration

In the week 7 lecture, Madison spoke of penalties and rewards, talking about the sort of rewards and penalites. That made me really think about the penalties that should be used in this game and removing something advantageous struck me as a fun mechanic.

Of course there are other reward systems, doing cool things on the road and escaping unscathed (or with little collisions) will also grant rewards.

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Asteroids Development Post

Enemies

Implementing enemies was decidedly harder than I first thought as you can tell from the video below (note the low FPS is due to Tumblr .GIF size limitations.

If you notice, all the enemies are sort of "skating" around the player, not really moving toward. Also, they aren't even facing me! The video in the "Health Bars" heading will show what the enemies looked like after some tweaking, still a bit skatey but definitely an improvement.

Health Bars

I want this game to use a health bar instead of a counter in the top left. The logic is similar to the counter in the top but the implementation is a bit more complex as is shown by the video below

The issue I discovered I was doing is: not having individual animations for each state of the bar, thus making it "fill" at the start and stay that way. Getting the bar in a more appropriate spot and actually making it count down with each hit gave the game a much better look.

What was something you learned?

Something I Learned

Readings

In Fullerton (2019, pg. 265), visualisation of the interface and 'natural mapping' is discussed, and specifically what makes a good health bar. This specific reading inspired me to change from a life counter, to a health bar. As it would be better 'natural mapping'.

I have no illusions that the health bar I implemented in my asteroids game is no doubt a step below the classic 'Quake' health meter that Fullerton used as an example, but I think it was definitely an improvement over the life counter.

References

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

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Platformer Postmortem

What Readings Helped Inspire Me?

Fullerton (2019) discusses 'Business/Cost Resrictions' in Chapter 6, page 186. In this chapter, Fullerton discusses how whilst brainstorming and ideation can and should include ALL ideas, the initial design of the game should take into consideration the scope of the development teams abilities.

Unfortunately for me, the development team is just that, me. Because of this, I had to massively cut back on the development of this platformer, and this chapter in Fullerton (2019) gave me the confidence to do that regardless of the fact that I'd planned for a greater game initially.

What's One Thing I'd Change In Development Process?

Iterate!. The idea of iteration, iteration and more iteration is discussed endlessly in this course and throughout Fullerton (2019). I obviously hadn't headed these warnings and spent alot of time on just doing something once.

If I could go back and change something in the design process, I would introduce more iteration to every aspect of the process. I would spend more time iterating movement, as well as more time iterating enemies and possible combat solutions. Spending a little time on ideas initially to see if it's worth pursuing, instead of going all in on one and sticking with it.

What's One Thing I'd Change In Design Of The Prototype?

Unfortunately I don't have in class content or readings to talk about here, but the answer is quite simple nonetheless. I would simply spend more time finding and implementing assets. Since the development of this prototype, I've discovered that simply by replacing alot of the assets will make the prototype feel more finished and complete, even if the technical state of it is not different.

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Asteroids Elevator Pitch

I'll preface this post by talking a little about the seed that inspired me to create this pitch. The seed that first interested me was a particular mechanic that isn't too uncommon these days; bullet hell\heaven. I think there have been a number of games released in recent memory that have harnessed this mechanic \ theme to create a compelling title. I intend for this game to iterate on this mechanic with a setting that I don't think has been properly explored before and I think players will enjoy in a bullet heaven style game.

Title

Captain Hoolahan Commits a War Crime (CHCWC)

Elevator Pitch

Captain Hoolahan Commits a War Crime is a sci-fi roguelite bullet heaven style game set in deep space. The player is compelled to push themselves through further and further rounds by upgrading their ship with scrap gained whilst navigating the endless waves of enemies. Story isn't the main focus of this game, a cool soundtrack and endless alien killing is.

Game Play

CHCWC provides fast paced, incredibly disorganised gameplay. The point of the gameplay isn't for the play to perform cool combos or sick tricks, it's simply to navigate deep space and avoiding getting hit by enemies and their weapons while simultaneously allowing the players weapons to kill as many enemies as possible.

Target Audience

CHCWC offers fast paced, quick casual gameplay for people who enjoy a challenge. With the nature of the title, I would consider the target audience to be 16+

Players role

The player controls a ship that is navigating deep space. The camera is centered on this ship with the enemies being spawned on the border of the game. These enemies will move toward the player, presenting a challenge. It's the players role to fly their ship through the hordes of enemies and give themselves enough space to allow their weaponry to kill the enemies.

Genre

Bullet heaven

Roguelite

Top down shooter

World \ Setting

CHCWC is set in quite a simpe setting. The player controlled ship is simply in endless space. This allows the player to maneuver around without obstacle.

Unique Selling Points

Fast paced gameplay

Cool metal soundtrack

Fun scorekeeping

Self-propelled progression for the player

Mood Board

References

Belistner. (2019). USS Discovery [Render]. https://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/cite/qutcite.html#apa-works-artwork

Dickenson, J. (n.d.). Discovery Klingon designs revealed in John Dickenson concept art [Digital Painting]. https://www.thetrekcollective.com/2017/10/discovery-klingon-designs-revealed-in.html

Elen11. (2018). Landscape in fantasy alien star flaming with galaxy background. [Digital Artwork]. https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/landscape-in-fantasy-alien-star-flaming-with-galaxy-background-elements-of-this-gm1053166148-281373415

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Platformer Development \ GDevelop Experimentation

Laying Foundations

This is the first time I've worked with GDevelop so I took this game as an opportunity to get familar with the mechanisms of the platform. Below, you can see a rudimentary platformer that I created by following a guide.

The above gameplay shows a simple enemy design with the player having the ability to control the player character.

Polishing \ Scorekeeping

Next, I decided to tackle the problem of scorekeeping. I had no idea how this worked and after some experimentation discovered that objects can hold variables. Initially, I followed this design pattern to increase the score object variable when the coin was collided with. However, upon further research, I saw that there are also global variables that actually are more suited to using.

Along with scorekeeping, I added a noise when collecting the coin (not audible in GIF), and I fine tuned the animation changes when the player is controlling the character.

Making Pretty

With time running out, I decided to try and add a background which was successful. As you can see in the GIF, I was unable to anchor the bush, but I did anchor the clouds.

I also attempted to create a parallax background in order to make the movement of the game more enjoyable, I did not succeed.

Smoothcamera was also added to the player character, making sure to track the X position but not the Y.

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Platformer Elevator Pitch

Title

Eggheads Adventure of Self Discovery (and unimaginable loss) (EASD)

Elevator Pitch

Eggheads Adventure of Self Discovery (and unimaginable loss) is a high-octane action platformer. The player has the ability to use multiple melee weapons, all with different attributes to eliminate enemies as efficiently as possible throughout the modern day setting. EASD relies on a score system that rewards the player for not only enemy kills, but chaining them together. At the end of each level, the player is ranked based on those kill chains and their score achieved throughout the level. EASD provides a fun casual experience for busy gamers who want a pop-in and pop-out gaming experience.

Game Play

Fast paced action platforming. The player will have the ability to use weapons to destroy enemies in the level. Each enemy destroyed will increase the player score. At the end of each level, the player is ranked based on cool combos and the amount of score achieved throughout the level.

Target Audience

EASD is a fast paced casual game that allows pop-in pop-out gameplay, given that each level is only a few minutes long. This is perfect for the casual gamer that doesn't necessarily have hours to enjoy games. EASD will feature gore and uncensored deaths, so the target audience is 18+.

Players role

The player controls Egghead, reeling from his pregnant wifes cracking, egghead has returned to his previous life to send a message to anyone that might be responsible: "You've made a big mistake". It’s the players role to send these criminal losers that message, using different melee weapons available in game to achieve this.

Genre

Action-platformer

World \ Setting

EASD is set in a modern day environment, focusing on grimy streets and criminal settings.

Unique Selling Points

Interesting setting

EASD will have an interesting soundtrack

Fast paced platforming gameplay

Interesting scoring system making players want to improve on their own past scores

Mood Board

References

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.

Newel, C.H. (2019). The Walking Dead – Season 10, Episode 5: “What Is Always Is”. Fatheronholygore.com. https://fathersonholygore.com/2019/11/04/the-walking-dead-season-10-episode-5-what-is-always-is/

Onefivefour, (2019). Rainy Night Alley [Photograph]. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/onefivefour/49475341728

Pieters, L. (2019). A moment in Time [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/people-walking-on-street-during-nighttime-WpUOPwkswpw

Stahelski, C. (Director). (2019). John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum [Film]. Summit Entertainment

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About Me

I'm a Bachelor of IT (Computer Science) student that's been studying since 2018. After many health complications, I'm slowly completing the degree I set out to finish years ago. I'm currently working at one of the largest mining related software companies in Australia as a Software Tester. My day to day involves writing automations in JavaScript to regression test the user interface of my development teams largest products. I also involve myself with the DevOp side of development, being responsible for the integration of said UI tests into the Development CI\CD process.

Interest in Game Development

I'm taking IGB120 as a part of my User Experience minor. I am seeking to understand what makes games so enjoyable and interesting and bring that knowledge into my future software development (especially in mining) in order to better enhance the User Experience that software.

Aims & Objectives in IGB120

I realise that only taking a single game design unit does not a Game Designer make. My aim for this unit is to learn the fundamentals of game design and playcentric development to better enhance my other Software Development endeavours. I aim to achieve high marks in this unit and harness my knowledge and experience as a Computer Science student & Software Tester to do so.