combatAndCoding

Welcome to the blog of Jacob Knights. QUT student n10604596!

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

We managed to get 6 people to play our game which was a fair effort. Overall the from the player surveys and spoken feedback people really loved playing our game. The big positives were that people loved the pace and the art style of the game, they thought it was simple to learn and hard to master which was exactly what we were going for. The main negatives were the hitboxes could at times be a bit off which is a perfectly reasonable critique and that sometimes the enemies spawn on top of you which is completely fair. I think if we continued to work on this game (we are seriously considering it) with a few minor adjustments we could really make a fun game that harkens back to the old flash days. The final title for the game is 'Drill Till Still' which I think is catchy enough.

I am so happy with how the game turned out. If you had told me by the end of this unit we would have a playable prototype of a game that almost everyone who play tested it enjoyed I wouldn't have believed you. We told play testers that 10 minutes was the amount of time we would like them to play it for, almost every play tester played for 15 minutes and tried to beat their last score and we had one person (who was not in our class) like it so much they played for close to 45 minutes. That to me told me that we have a game is either enjoyable or at least addictive to play. Play testers kept mentioning that "I can't believe you managed to make a game like this in a few weeks" which was a huge pat on the back and people scored the art style of the game quite high on the player surveys in order of what you liked about the game so the from scratch pixel assets did not go unnoticed which was really rewarding to hear.

All in all I have had a blast making this game, this unit has been so interesting and fun and I was blessed to be part of a games dev team that ran like a well oiled machine so thank you to Will, Kelvin and James, this project has been the most hassle-free and fun group project I have completed in my uni career so far and I think it's in big part to you blokes so cheers you absolute legends! Thank you to everyone who play tested Drill Till Still and I am hoping we can maybe tinker it some more (sort out the enemy spawning system) and add some more levels at some time in the future! Thanks for reading my development blog. I attached an image below of the game in it’s final iteration and all it’s glory!

GG!

[combatandcoding]

So from the playtest last week the changes we needed to iterate were: -The alien is too fast. Players don't get enough time to respond. -The kraken did not have hitboxes and the tentacles were not as distinct. -The controls are not clear. We need to add a tutorial screen. -The enemy ship colour is green, that makes the players think that it is an ally not an enemy. -The enemies populate too quickly. -The players had no idea how they gained score (should put that in the tutorial screen) -The objectives are unclear. -Players had no idea where the health bar was. -Players wanted more levels.

Some changes we implemented were: -Ship changed from green with red highlights to red with yellow highlights to emphasis that they are in fact an enemy. -I created a modified a number of assets so it looks like the ship takes damage just to give the player more indication around level of health remaining. -We added a tutorial screen that told players the controls. -We told players on the tutorial screen that the goal was to collect gems and beat the final boss. -I redesigned the Kraken so the tentacles were more distinct and we added animations so that after taken damage the tentacles actually get blown off (which I personally loved). -The crystal design was changed from a tear drop looking design to a precious cut gem so that players associated value with it. -We increased the shooting frequency of the enemy ship and decreased the spawn rate of asteroids so there was less on the screen but still enough to think to keep the player engaged. -We decreased the number of gems the players needed to collect to spawn the final boss as we found only a few players even go to see the boss.

Overall once the changes had been implemented the game played much smoother when I tested it out. I found that you could actually strategize more while playing it as you are not bombarded with enemies and things to do. I found my skills in the game increased as well and I was able to get to the final boss so we made a game that does allow for skill progression and the deaths don't come as hard and fast. I am excited to do our final play test and see what people think of it.

Old crystal design:

New crystal design:

Old Kraken:

New Kraken:

New player ship damage assets

New enemy ship colouring:

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 3 Playtest

First of all I am so stoked on how the game looks and plays. For a game scraped together remotely in two weeks I think it's great. The guys did a great job with the programming and scaling the assets but there are still some difficulty issues with it. I botched the Kraken design as suspected so I will have to make a design that is easier to designate hitboxes to. The two people that played it had almost the exact same feedback which is great because it gives us a clear list of thinks to refine in time for the final playtest and submission. The main problems with the game in it's current state were:

-The alien is too fast. Players don't get enough time to respond. -The controls are not clear. We need to add a tutorial screen. -The enemy ship colour is green, that makes the players think that it is an ally not an enemy. -The enemies populate too quickly -The players had no idea how they gained score (should put that in the tutorial screen) -The objectives are unclear. -Players had no idea where the health bar was. -Players wanted more levels.

Positive takeaways -Players loved the art. -Players liked the controlled ricocheting bullet mechanic. -Players liked the theme. -Players liked the fact that it was fast paced and stressed you out a little bit but that once you worked out what was going on you could get quite good at it.

All in all I thought it was a successful first playtest.

[combatandcoding]

The pixel art for the project we are currently deeming "Let's Kill Space Gods" is going well. For our prototype we are going to slowly introduce cannon fodder enemies in an escalating frequency until there is eventually a boss battle against a giant Space kraken so I have made a kraken, enemy ships, an beholder-esque alien and some asteroids. I am worried the Kraken isn't malleable enough in design as I think it will be hard to put hit boxes on each of the limbs like we wanted in it's current iteration but we will see at playtesting. It is going to be a little rushed to make a giant space kraken boss with flailing arm animations in the space of a week and a bit but we shall see. I am really happy with how the asteroids turned out. The bright pink glow with the dull grey/brown of the asteroid I feel with draw the players attention in a good way. I hate the alien design but I am going to chuck it in the playtest and change it based on player feed back. My team members like it so we shall see.

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 3 Group Formation

Our group of four has decided to make a mash up of my Titan bolt idea and a SHMUP that another team member made. His design is really great. It's asteroids-esque however instead of repeatedly shooting projectiles we are going to use one projectile that you send out and can then control it's trajectory as it pings around the screen like Yondu's arrow from Guardians of the galaxy. The team really liked the assets I made for TitanBolt so I am going to start making a bunch of space assets in pixel art style as oppose to the cartoony style the SHMUP has at the moment. I am really excited to play test this idea as I think it will either be a fantastic dose of eyeball heroin in the style of tetris effect or way too much to handle to make it playable. Either way it will be a fun tool to study other class member's feedback. Here is the look of the SHMUP at the moment.

[combatandcoding]

Racing Development Post

My racer took a backseat to assignment two. I don't really like the game mechanics of it at all and I struggled with making assests that conveyed the top down perspective well. I think I will probably stop all together. I think I could recycle my assets from assignment 2 into almost any assignment 3 project as I have constructed enough weapons and sprites of differing designs so we will see. R.I.P Cellmates I hardly Knew Ya.

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 2 Final Design

As I was making the titan sprites I thought of a great idea to incorporate into the game to keep the player on their toes and reduce the repetitive-ness. I am going to keep the idea of all the Titans being different with different looks and attacks but I have created a bunch of little mythical monster sprites and Olympian god themed weapons. The player can pick up the weapons to change Zeus' attack, so this will force them to change tactics or decide whether they actually want the powerup on this boss fight. Some weapons are ranged some are melee so it will be up to the player to do trial and error. I also incorporated a god call mechanic (a mechanic I adore from Hades) but instead of calling a god ally once the player has collected three goblets the player can then call upon a monster from Myth to assist them in the boss fight for a short amount of time (to be determined after playtest). I have done up a centaur, cyclops and medusa and they will all have different attacks and abilities. I think this will make the gameplay loop of constant boss battles exciting as with differing weapons, boss abilities and mythical allies each boss battles will fell brand new. I have attached some weapons and monster designs.

[combatandcoding]

Assignment 2 Progress:

Assignment 2 Progress:

I have decided for assignment 2 that I will take the theme of my Asteroids post (Greek Mythology) and make it into a boss fight platformer instead. I really like Cuphead so I think I am going to go for a game where the main character just does a series of 12 boss fights (one for each Titan). I have to think of a way to make that no repetitive though so I might have to change the boss design or at least abilities for every level (a la Cuphead). The titans will have to be way bigger than the player sprite to ensure they get that epic boss fight feeling you get when playing something like Cuphead or Castlevania. The first Titan I am going to do is Oceanus. I like the idea of a giant snake-man warrior type. I am going to have to be wary of time constraints though as a pixel art sprite that big might take a bit to churn out. I will attach some sprites I am going to use in my one sheet here I have already done the background so that makes it easier.

[combatandcoding]

Racing Elevator Pitch

Title: Cell Mate Pitch: You plat as an immune cell going through the circulatory system magic school bus style. The player as the cell has to avoid various pathogens and environmental hazards, such as clots. At various stages through the race the cell can go through different powerups that would allow it to change it's shape and pass through certain gates and passages that it wouldn't be able to without the power up. A running tally of time the cell has survived will be at the top of the screen and will be used as a proxy for player score. I think I would be able to find most of the assets for this game online and if not I should be able to make them. They highway asset can easily be modified to be part of the circulatory system. I do have to be mindful of the size and scale of the assets as lots of the programming is current pixel location dependent.

Control diagram: The player will only be using horizontal movement to avoid obstacles and get powerups so only the left and right arrow keys will be used.

Unique selling points: -Obscure theme -Could be somewhat educational about the immune system and biology. -Instead of being a point based reward I have turned it into somewhat of a survival game.

[combatandcoding]

Some very basic sprites of Zeus from Titanbolt, some Titans and my current iteration of the Mount Olympus background.

[combatandcoding]

Asteroids Postmortem

So the sprites I made for Titanbolt seemed to go well. They are fairly basic but if I dedicated anymore time to them I would be chipping into my other uni work. I do like doing pixel art though, I find the colouring of tiny squares quite soothing. I was able to make most of the sprites I set out to make. However I am not completely happy with my colour use in the background as Zeus as a character is fairly lightly toned so I might need to change the background to make it bolder. However I am fairly happy with the titan designs so far. While they are simple it means they will be fairly easy to recreate and animated if I want to do multiple animations. I sort of went with the elemental versions of the titans so one fire, water and wind. I am still tinkering witht he Earth titan so maybe if I continue to develop this game I will attach it in a following post. Overall the playtesters said my game was fun to play. They liked the theme. A few suggested I tone down Zeus' fire rate which makes sense as it was still set on the Asteroids fire rate meaning Zeus is throwing thunderbolts at rate of a baseball pitching machine. Another good suggesting was to create lesser titans that the larger titans could splinter off into once they are hit. Currently they just disappear but if I have more time I might make smaller titans for them to change into. I have attached various screenshots of the game and titans in their current form. Cheers for reading!

[combatandcoding]

Asteroids Dev post

I ended up going with my original asteroids game idea, involving Zeus fighting the Titans. I am thinking of naming it Titan bolt. It’s hard though as there are so many mythological based games so I have to do something a little original. So I set about to make a number of assets on the pixel creation software Aesprite. I took a course on Pixel art on Udemy so I am hoping it comes in handy for this. I have the movement, lives counter and collisions sorted for the game so really I just need to create the various animations so that I can depict the theme I am going for. I am setting out to make: -Zeus riding a cloud from various angles -Changing the bullet to a thunderbolt for Zeus to throw -Make some Titans for Zeus to fight against. -If I have time a background of Mount Olympus.

If I can manage to make them I will attach them to the Asteroids postmortem post. Wish me luck!

[combatandcoding]

Asteroids Style Elevator Pitch

Elevator pitch: You are Zeus fighting the titans to take over Olympus with your brothers and sister. Skewer titans with thunder bolts all while collecting power-ups and avoiding being squished under the might of your monstrous relatives.

Summary: It's a top down view, where the player can move 360 degrees and throw thunder bolts at titans. Lightning bolts can travel outside the boundary of the screen and come out on the adjacent side. Titans have varying sizes and abilities. Zeus can reach power ups that allows chain lightining and to split thunder bolts in two. Players have a timer to see how long they can survive the onslaught. The art style of the game will be pixel art.

Unique selling points: The game is extremely fast paced Has different titans with different attacks Has three different power ups.

[combatandcoding]

Platform Dev Post

Due to an error neither I or the tutor could solve we were unable to get my enemies to change direction in accordance with hitting the delimiters of the platform. They would hit the delimiters and sail straight through. However weirdly the collision worked for every other object in the game. I tried a number of appraoches such as deleting the delimiters and following the workshop protocol again but to no avail. I would have redone the slimes again but I ran out of time in the tutorials before play testing. The jumping on enemies felt satisfying according to my playtester and he believed that the floating slimes actually added quite a bit comedically to the game.  So I am taking the Bethesda "it's not a bug it's a feature" approach to games development for my platformer. One of his recommendations was to add more slimes all around the map so that the player just spends the whole time dodging floating slimes. In the same realm as his recommendations I think I might also be able to add a crouch and double jump mechanic. So that maybe the player would be able to go from platform to platform ducking and jumping slimes adding absolute chaos and a sense of vertical traversal. Maybe even having slimes of different sizes and speeds to change the tempos of the gameplay.

Things I would like to add to the game: -More biomes and platforms -A double jump to really add to the vertical traversal -Crouching mechanic -A nifty animation for when the slime dies maybe a fade out or a flash then fade -Slimes of different speeds and sizes to change temp

[combatandcoding]

Elevator Pitch

Title of game: Snake escape

Motivation: I have a snake called Zero and really enjoy platformers that have odd mechanics such as braid, Ori or Cuphead.

Elevator pitch: A side scrolling platformer where players take on the role Zero the snake. Zero must traverse a world full of enemies, and spatial puzzles to escape a wildlife smugglers boat. Zero can swallow enemies for power-ups. Different enemies give different power-ups. Zero can ‘slither’ up ladders, periscope and stretch to reach different platforms however when you stretch you lose your powerup. I would have to be very careful about where to place the powerups to fine tune the difficulty.

[combatandcoding]

About Me

Hi all, 

My name’s Jake and welcome to my blog. This is where I will be exploring and reflecting on my journey through game design and development.

A little bit about me: I enjoy gaming (both board and video), reading horror books and comics, rescuing animals, AFL and combat sports (I am currently an amateur Muay Thai fighter hence the name combatandcoding!). I have worked as a backend developer for a blockchain start-up, a Microbiologist and am currently an NDIS support worker. My goal is to get my Comp. Sci. degree and go into programming games/apps that bridge skill gaps in people with physical and intellectual disabilities. If you are here you are probably interested in gaming and my current navigation through the world of game design so let’s get back to that!

I love games. I have always loved games. The first game I got obsessed with was Crash Bandicoot on PS1. I truly loved the character design, crazy level ideas and the ridiculous barks that they gave to Crash (WOAH!). From there my brother and I started to colonize my family’s PC to play games like Age of Empires, The Sims (thank you Pizza Hut), Unreal Tournament 2004 and Alien Vs Predator.

The games I tend to play most are turn based strategy games, horror games and at the moment rogue-likes. To get some idea on my interests here are 10 games I would rate as masterpieces:

The Witcher 3

Hades

Total War: Warhammer 2

Civilisation 5

Unreal Tournament 2004

Bioshock (all of them, in the words of Gimli: “still only counts as one!”)

Don’t Starve Together

Batman Arkham City

Until Dawn

Fallout New Vegas

Thanks for taking the time to read my About me. If you ever want to chat about any of the games/hobbies I have mentioned please feel free to hit me up I love talking to people with the same interests.