Dan Studdert

Sometimes designer, Sometimes chef, oft times rambler

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So it’s Been a While

But have been hard at work with a project that is coming together and I have a fair bit to talk about. So for now here is a quick gif of the game I have been working on with @mariobaronedev and @nicholasbarnett.

More info soon!

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teaser for what’s to come

People have inboxed me asking about what the next project will be, and as I’ve told many, I had news for June/July! My partner in crime @danielstuddert and I have just finished throwing together a pre-production-pitch-trailer for the next big thing!

*full video further down (best with sound) The trailers will be voted upon and if we get enough votes, we get to make the game!

And now, I present our pitch trailer!

The trailer shows some base features of the action VR archery game! More Soon

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Its been a while, but here is a sneak peek of what my team and I are starting work on, a VR archery game tentatively called Whisper.

More updates to come!

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Silva: From Concept to Completion

So the due date for Silva has come and gone. The game has come a long way over the last three months from the original concept art:

Then to the grey box with the very bare bones of the mechanics:

Then the art started to come in!

First came the basic silhouettes of everything starting to show the setting from the original concept work and the mechanics beginning to fall into place as the 1st milestone, alpha came and went:

Then beta came around with more art and better swinging:

And finally, finally came the project end with everything in and working!

We got there in the end through all of the roadblocks and the final result is something I am proud of. Only thing left to do is collate my thoughts and waffle on about them a little.

More Soon!

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Game Analysis: PixelJunk Eden

Originally released back in 2008 on the PlayStation 3, PixelJunk Eden was developed by Japan-based studio Q-Games and has the player jumping, climbing and swinging through the game’s levels, or gardens, collecting items to grow the plants in the gardens and to unlock even more gardens to grow.

PixelJunk Eden’s zen experience of collection and growth is accentuated its techno soundtrack but it is the ‘synchronization meter’ that throws this experience out a little and I would like to talk a little more on this feeling of mechanical dissonance. 

First things first though, a little bit more on the game and its mechanics because I find Eden a little hard to throw into a generic game category. The mechanics themselves are quite simple but polished to a point where they feel responsive and are easy to quickly come to grasp with.

The player traverses the world by jumping from plant to plant or by swinging on a thread of silk. There is a little bit more to the movement, like the slam and teleport but the player can move just fine with these two options. The jump, shown in the gif above when held will have the player attempt to move towards the mouse cursor and will fall through any of the world's geometry, releasing the key will have the player stick to most surfaces in the game.

Then there is the thread which when deployed will not only let the player swing around a central point but will blink and leave a residual image when the strand reaches the direction of the next ‘spectra’, the games main collectable similar to Mario’s stars. Combining these two mechanics allows the player to quickly orient themselves without the need of a minimap or an increased number of inputs, which allows them to focus on the games main goal of collecting.

But ‘spectra’ are not your only collectable in Eden there is also what the game refers to as pollen. Collecting the pollen will activate coloured blobs in the world, seeds, which will grow when the player runs into them.

So glide through the world, collect objects that allow you to glide to different parts of the world to collect more objects, a nice little game loop. But what about this dissonance you speak of?

This is where the synchronization meter comes in and adds an element of time pressure to an otherwise calming game. If the player does not collect ‘crystals’ before the meter in the bottom left of the screen before it runs out they are ejected from the level with all of their progress being lost. This pulls the player right out of their swing, jump, glide, bounce routine and into oh no, where is this every specific object in the specific part of the level that I am currently in?

This change in tone feels out of place and because the player has their focus on moving to ever greater heights it feels like it just comes out of the blue or could even remove the zen aspect of the game making the player laser focused on a specific rarer collectable, where the other collectable, the pollen, is freely scattered over the gardens.

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Controller Conundrums

So one thing we have noticed while developing Silva is that people have been divided on how they prefer to swing through the game. Is one controller stick enough to aim and move or should we go for two?

So this week the group did some testing to see how people felt about the controls schemes and the results? A slight preference towards the two stick scheme and that people when they have their preference have quite a large dislike of the other controller setup.

So the team's final verdict? Why not both?

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Silva Movement Improvements

Been spending some time improving the grappling hook in Silva and adding some new functionality in the hopes that it will make the environment more easy to traverse.

Starting off simply with a reel in and reel out:

Improving the clarity with the targeting by adding an arrow displaying the direction that the player is aiming:

And bringing in some more life to the rope by having it stick to surfaces:

That deadline of November 29th is getting closer and closer and there are still so many things that still need to be done!

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Making Menus

The team and I have been starting work on the menus for Silva, the grappling hook platformer and here is what we have put together so far for the game’s main menu:

Each of the buttons are animated when the player has them selected and the camera in the background slowly pans across the opening section of the game’s level.

Still a lot of work to be done and that final deadline is coming quicker than any of us could have imagined! But with a lot of work coming out from all of the disciplines that means more to show off so expect more soon!

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Improvement Through Accessibility

Had a quick crash course in accessibility in games today with a focus on how colour blindness affects readability in games.

Taking a look at Silva the game my team and I are currently working on and we have not done too badly.

For a little more contrast starting at the top left with the common, protanope in the top right, deuteranope and finally Tritanope.

And even the vision cones did not turn out too badly!

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Placing Parallax

So far a lot of the gameplay shown of the Silva, the 2D grappling hook platformer has been shown with a lot of emptiness in the background, where it is meant to be set in the middle of a forest.

So some of my work this week has been implementing the art that the group’s artists have been making to fill out the world.

Read on if you would like to know a little more about how it works.

The parallax system works in a similar way to Michal Berlinger’s post on Gamasutra Combining Perspective and Orthographic Camera for Parallax Effect in 2D Game where the main camera in the game only sees the pieces of the level that the player character can interact with and the paralax layers themselves are handled by two seperate cameras one for the foreground and another for the background, which only see the paralax objects themselves. 

From here it allows artists and designers to place the parallax objects in 3D space to give the effect seen above

Here is how a section of the level looks like in the Unity editor in 2D vs how everything is in 3D

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The game you're developing looks beautiful and cute.

Thank you for the kind words! I can’t take all of the credit though, it is very much a team effort I am super lucky to be working with such talented individuals.

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Animating Silva

More progress on Silva, the grappling hook platformer our group of 6 are creating for our end of year game design project are building. This time one of the game's artists has been working hard getting the animations done for our protagonist.

Starting with a run cycle:

And then easing into something a little bit more idle:

Now to dust off mechanim and get them working correctly in the game!

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Back in the Swing of Things

Back from the games week madness to getting back up to speed with how the project has been going in my absence.

So how has it been going?

New character controller is working well and some of the detailed art assets are starting to come together, though the grapple still needs some work...

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Conegraphs: Telegraphing Cones

Just a quick little Silva development update. One of the main mechanics of the game is avoiding the vision cones of the game's enemies.

One bit of feedback we were getting from initial testers was that they felt like they were just dying out of nowhere when it came to the vision cones.

To improve this problem we added a little bit of transparency on the cones inner workings.

As the player remains inside the vision cone it will quickly fill with another colour and when the first yellow cone is filled in its entirety the player will then die and be sent back to the last checkpoint they have passed.

A lot of work still to be done, so expect another update soon!

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Revelations on the GCAP Floor

I'm experiencing Melbourne International Games Week for the first time this year and over Tuesday and Wednesday, I headed out to the GCAP conference held at the Melbourne convention centre.

GCAP is a series of hour-long talks where people working across many sectors of the games industry come to share their knowledge with other developers, whether that be about finance, marketing, company culture, tech, art, design or one of the other plethora of topics and ideas that go into making a game.

Getting a little more open and emotional with this one just as a fair warning.

I’ve been attempting to write this post for the last 3 days, I even deleted it a couple of times and started again. I want to get it right and I hope this, its third incarnation will be enough.

Out of all of the talks in the conference, there was a certain one that stood out to me, the one given by Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne) and Teddy Dief (Hyper Light Drifter). In the talk, both of the speakers had prepared the slides for the other and it was the first time they had seen what they had in store for them. There was a lot of useful information in the talk as well as some selfie rating and even some off the cuff karaoke.

But there was a single slide that made things click, a slide that made Rami stop in his tracks and stare. A picture of his fiance and the sentence ‘Why she makes me a better Rami’.

And I realised something, I have that someone, the someone who makes me a better Dan.

She is the reason I am in Melbourne, we met via World of Warcraft. Eventually, we decided to meet in person because I had just finished up working at a job and was taking some time off. It was meant to be a couple of weeks at the most, turned into two months with the only reason for me heading back home being my mum’s 60th birthday, which she came back for with me. We left a couple of days later with a car full of my things and that was now 4 years ago.

She is the reason I am doing the game design course that I am currently doing. She pushed me to follow my dream when I wasn’t sure I could do it and now I have come a long way, met some amazing people and have crafted memories I will cherish for the rest of my life.

She is the one who even though she suffers from fibromyalgia and is developing arthritis in both of her hands, sacrifices her time to make sure that I have enough to get all of my work done. Though I do secretly do housework behind her back when she tells me to stop and go away, shhh don’t tell her!

This game dev journey? It's not about me, not really. 

It's about her.

And now, now it is time to give back. And I think I finally know a way.

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Silva: Bring Me a Shrubbery

The groups artists are going in a replacing the silhouettes of objects throughout the game with some final art pieces. Starting with some of the trees in the game.

And also because I haven’t gone this in a while here is an obligatory bug gif of an animated Silva that is not quite there:

Instead of saving the forest, why not just crush it?

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Game Analysis: Duet

Heading a little closer to home for this months game analysis and looking at the Melbourne developed game Duet and explore how it brings the player into a state of flow.

Duet itself is a game based on the simple premise of rotating two connected orbs and having to guide them past obstacles as you glide through the game's levels.

Simple does not mean easy though. And about this flow thing, what is that anyway?

Flow, flow is that feeling of total energised immersion in an activity. It is that point in which you are totally enthralled in something, in the zone so to speak.

Duet brings the player into this with its easy to use control scheme of touching one side of the screen to turn in that direction and by following the loop of play, fail, reset, repeat.

Play in Duet involves spinning your way through the level with your two connected orbs avoiding a set layout of obstacles, the individual types being presented early in the Chapter, the games name for stages. 

The speed of the game slows down for the introduction then slowly ramps up as the player gets more used to the mechanic.On top of this, the game’s designers throw in more nefarious ways of using the introduced mechanics and even the mechanics themselves get more and more complex. 

Here’s looking at you disappearing platforms!

Failure occurs when either of the player's orbs collides with the obstacles in the game. There is a brief pause on hitting a platform emphasized with a colourful splat that persists on the platform that you hit for the remainder of your time within the level.

The splat does a couple of things, firstly it acts as a progress marker showing the player that they have gotten past this point before and that they can do it again if they just have one more try.

Secondly, if the player has been caught out by something before it is a visual marker that displays a warning of a tough section and that the player should slow down and focus more on this part of the level, further bringing them into the flow state.

Upon failure, the player is taken back down to the start of the level where they have to start again from scratch.

On top of this, every single obstacle in the game is also reset to its original position. This enables the player to begin to recognise the patterns in the level and to learn exactly which way to spin to avoid the current set of platforms giving them trouble.

In this respect, the game becomes somewhat like a complex dance where the player is learning all of the steps.

So the player died the level reset and they have to start again, but this time with an increased knowledge of what is happening around them.

They know for a fact that everything is in the same position and rotation. They have a visual tool showing them where points that are giving them trouble occur. And finally, they have an increasing muscle memory of the dance steps, built through repetition.

Now they can complete that level.

These steps draw the player in and the levels, while tricky, are short enough not to be too frustrating to start from the beginning upon every death. And the feeling of completing the level that has been painted red and blue because that section right at the end is giving you a difficult time? Well, let’s just say I got a few strange looks on my train ride home after one such instance.

All the lessons in flow taken from this game are going to be majorly useful going forward in my game dev career, especially in the current end of year project which more and more seems like it is going to hold up on feel and flow alone. Not to mention all of the great artwork that the groups two artists are putting out!

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Silva: Alpha Wrap up

Yesterday was the deadline for the alpha build of Silva, the 2D grappling hook game which some fellow students and I are working on for our end of year game design project.

But the real question is did we hit all of our required goals?

We did, though there is still a large amount of work to be done before we call the project finished.

What that does mean though is that we succeeded in creating all of the games main mechanics and getting them working, if, in a somewhat unpolished manner. Our character controller with grappling hook is included, the Corvus with their vision cones are in and rotating on command and we have added some of the silhouette art pieces that our talented artists have set out.

So from here, the main focus of the next 4 weeks, the beta portion of development, will be focused on ensuring that everything is working as intended, that as many bugs as we can find are squashed and that the work the artists are currently doing behind the scenes is being placed into the game.

Time to get back to work!