Discover Top Posts Tagged with #art 108

Final Blog #9

The class overall was a refreshing experience; getting to know the development process of video games was really enlightening. I really enjoyed the process, which is what I would say if I had a team member for the video game portion of this project. One thing I learned throughout the latter half of this project was the benefit of working as a team. I noticed that a majority of the solo devs, such as I, worked with limited resources; some forgoed the art style to tighten up the code, while others focused on only one level of a game and polished only that one. I'll be honest, my work could have benefited from having someone else working on it with me. For one, I am not a coder, that much I can tell. There are a lot of times I struggled to get a function to work right or to ensure I had the correctly named CS file. Seeing all these final projects, I can tell working with someone could be supremely beneficial to the game development process. However, I can not deny the fact that I had freedom of control as a solo dev, so if I were to continue this path, I now know how I would like to tackle the next project. With all that said I am still really proud of what I've made, and I defiantly see myself working on this game further in the summer

#art 108

Blog 7

Jack Box is a game built for parties, and with the gameplay, it shows the games we played were TEE K.O, Trivia Murder Party 2, and DoDoReMi. In the first game, I was able to play as a main participant and could be active in the rounds of TEE K.O with my drawings. In this gamemode, we were given time to make three sketches, following that, we were tasked to write them out. Players then got to combine a drawing and a phrase to make a shirt. Participants then voted which one they liked best, and here the audience can augment the vote as well. However, out of the games we played, this one in particular feels like the audience was able to participate as much as the other three. In TEE K.O., the audience can only cast their vote without participating in the actual gameplay of the game, apart from tapping a button that would trigger a small animation. In the last game, DoDoReMi, I played in the audience, yet despite not appearing as one of the main participants, I felt I was no different from them. Their gameplay was my gameplay, unlike TEE K.O or Trivia Murder Party, where the audience had a different role. In this game, we played a rhythm game not too different from Guitar Hero, while the main players fought against a rhythm-eating plant monster, the audience still played the same way as them.

#Art 108

Blog Post 5

The name of my game is called Xeno Dash. This game is about survival though the direction of the game is still in development, for I got several pieces of advice from other students. I am assigned to the art, programer, director, and taking care of everything essentially. Since I took a bit to get the programing done as I am not well versed in the game so there is no end game yet. Another thing is I haven't added any way to contain the alien creature from leaving off screen. Lastly from the feedback people were unsure how to get play the game. These are issues I need to fix and fast, from my initial scope of the original idea, I need to downsize. From fixing the escaping alien to actually applying the blaster mode, I need some major rework from the game. I think I’ll still keep the overall asthetic in place, but I need to reel back on my intial idea. I think i’ll add a timer to survive and instead of creating an escape theme. The Whole idea that the creature cannot be killed is intergral to my inital insperation Alien Isolation. Rather than running away I think having to hurt it to slow down rather than die was actually an idea given to me during the inperson play test.

#Art 108

Blog Post #5 - First Playable

I was the programmer and designer for Bake It Till You Make It, a top down shooter where you play as a pastry shop employee who must fend off Karens by throwing croissants at them before they transform into demons and put a premature end to your shift.

Based on our playtest sessions, players found the concept and visuals charming. The mechanics were simple to understand, but the pacing felt too fast since the game starts right away without any tutorial. There were elements that weren't clear, like the stars on the top left being your 'lives', and the customers transforming into demons being an indication that you'd lose one of the stars if not shot down in time.

In terms of completeness, they thought it felt like a game, but it could be more fun. Keeping this in mind, I plan to add a short tutorial to introduce the mechanics, and add a score counter for each demon defeated. Quick changes for clarity would be to slow down the demon transforming animation so players have more of a warning, and adding sound and/or animation for losing stars. If I have time I'd like to change the enemy moving pattern to be more random, by making them either zigzag or attempt to dodge when the player throws pastries at them.

#art 108

Final Blog Post 8: Course Reflection

This spring semester in my junior year of university, I had the chance to take an introductory game studies class that delved into the history of making games, its theory, as well as hands-on experience with game development. I was in the Monday/Wednesday section of the class, which was split up by a lecture on the former day, followed by an activity relating to the previous lecture on the latter day. The overall structure of the class was well organized, and its lecture slides accessible since the first week so there weren’t any huge surprises if you looked ahead of the material. I had heard about the class from friends who had taken the class that the class would require you to create a game, and also looking at the class scheduler noting it as an activity class requiring 8 hours of work per week I was somewhat worried. Now at the final stretch of this class, either I really improved my work ethic and time management or the class was actually not as tough as I expected. Then again, I chose to code a visual novel game with Ren’Py which is definitely a lot easier to code than in Unity with C#. Still, I really enjoyed the class and it was really intriguing and refreshing to be in an environment that facilitated game analysis in both terms of narrative and mechanics.

The textbook that we were assigned and given for free through our school accounts was pretty informative and also fairly casual with the way the author would be talking in first person towards the reader. The overall tone, though unconventional, made the topic of games and the theory behind making them a lot more approachable.

For my final, as mentioned in the first paragraph, I coded and wrote for a visual novel game and had the art implemented in it supplied by two artists in my group. I am quite interested in storytelling, though I hadn’t really put many of my ideas onto paper for public viewing so that was a daunting experience. Still, the reception that the game received during peer reviews were quite encouraging to me and I’d like to share more of my stories in my future works. As a digital art major who is rather fond of 3D modeling and comics, coding was a bit out of my comfort zone, though I was able to make it work and my efforts sufficed for the assignments’ requirements. While I wouldn’t delve into game mechanics that involve complicated physics, I wouldn’t be opposed to coding for more visual novels through Ren’Py.

(Below is a screenshot of one of my first attempts to code a player character through C#)

#art 108

Blog Post 8: Final Project

For the past month, I continued to be the programmer in my group for the final project. This time, instead of being in Unity, I switched over to Ren’Py, the software that is often geared towards Visual Novels. Albeit starting from scratch in terms of my knowledge in the coding language it ran on (Unity used C#), Python wasn’t all that difficult for me to understand, or at least I saw the example code from the template given on the Ren’py Engine, and was able to work with the structure. As the programmer, I was in charge of inputting all the assets I receive from the artists in my team into the game, as well as the entire script that the game is hinged upon. So far I’ve uploaded everything I’ve inputted in Ren’Py to be seen through my itch.io page. I also took the liberty of downloading some free use Gui images, sound effects, and fonts so that the format isn’t totally the same as the default one.

My team consisted of me, the programmer and producer, and two other artists. One artist was in charge of background art while the other took care of character sprites. I had a certain vision already for the general plot and its aesthetics, so to save my artists the trouble of coming up with concept art I compiled a whole Google slides to refer to for possible references and inspiration. I assigned the background artist to do 3 images while the character artists would do 2 different characters albeit each would have 3 different facial expressions each.

#art 108

Blog Post 7: JackBox Games

This evening, I played a few Jackbox games hosted by my professor with my classmates. Jackbox games are essentially a collection of party games that often involve the voting and simultaneous action selection mechanisms. These games require players to go head to head with each other in order to be the player with the most votes or the last person standing. Out of the entire collection, we played a game each of Tee K.O 2, Trivia Murder Party 2, and Dodo Re Mi. The class played Tee K.O first, and in the first lobby room, the group code to join the room was “RIZZ” which was pretty hilarious so some of us took a picture of it. 2 We opened up Chomp’D Up, where players’ drawings are faced against each other and were rated based on randomized categories that either drawing applies better to, though in the first voting session the window crashed so we chose a different game. The different game was Trivia Murder Party 2, whose gameplay I was already familiar with as I’ve played TMP2 with my family before.

Having an audience in the game past the actual players participating was rather nice in that there didn't seem to be much of a limit to those who could be involved with the game. It’s also cool to see everyone’s reactions to certain prompts, especially to the T-shirts made on Tee K.O and everyone’s performance in Dodo Re Mi. In between turns however, it seemed rather slow for the audience when we had to wait for players when they were drawing or coming up with catchphrases in Tee K.O and when players were in a sudden death minigame in Trivia Murder Party 2. On the other hand, it seemed that Dodo Re Mi got to involve everyone in the main game where everyone gets to participate in the rhythm game.

Overall, I had a fun time playing a variety of Jackbox games with my classmate, and having the opportunity to experience this in a larger group also let me understand where most of the classroom's humor lies.

#art 108

Blog Post 6: Video Game Prototype

For the last month in the game dev class, my group tried our hands at producing a game prototype through Unity. I acted as the main programmer and designer for the game whereas my partner, H.X., was responsible for the art. My group partner made all the assets through Aseprite, a pixel editor application aside from the health bar, through which I pixelated a medically-accurate heart I found free to use on the internet through Piskel.com. That particular image can be found here: Human Heart.

Dead On Arrival utilizes common movement keys and shooting toggles that are seen in other games like the WASD or directional keys for moving and the space bar/left mouse click to shoot projectiles. I had a strenuous time making it so the projectiles’ angle would correspond to which direction it’d be shot in, though I had help with my significant other to figure out the math bits required for the mechanics. Now, there is still a nominal issue of the player experiencing recoil when shooting the projectile due to both the player and the syringe having collider components. Despite that, I find the map a lot easier to navigate around in contrast to the alpha build which had the player shooting projectiles in the direction of their movement.

As of right now, Dead On Arrival is a 2D top down shooter that involves a doctor trying to survive in a hospital lobby from violent creatures. I am amenable to working more on the game in terms of a clearer narrative for the game as well as adding sound effects and more animations to make the game feel more dynamic. I also really hated coding at times, however, so perhaps I might like to do more art and even experiment with some music and writing if I can find someone else to be a programmer later on in this semester.

The game can be found below if interested:

Q.L.

Dead on Arrival by SpryMint

#art 108