#erasmus team

[mdj2017]

Last post before MOJO

‘Last week I was working mostly on game state logic - which trigger event should occur when etc...  And implemented that events. In order to be able to do that I also needed to import other models like mole and fox and made animators for them. We are almost done now, still need to add logging for the playtesting purpose, and there are lot of small things to improve - but we are quite close to presentable demo. MOJO is approaching very fast and it kinda stress me out, don’t feel the best in “marketing” role :D

[mdj2017]

New “Ethan” tuning

This week we delivered our playtesting plan and concept documents. In the end we splitted some parts to finish. My main responsibility was the part about game progression in the concept document. In regards of implementation, I joined Danny, to help him with replacing of default Ethan with our male character - who we call new Ethan.

We discovered that, we are not able to map the model made by Magda to humanoid shape of unity. So I changed a character controller a bit. Also, we were using the root motion for the main character, so we needed different export (not walking in place) from tool she is using. This caused us lot of troubles and we were working on it for couple of days.

We finished it yesterday, so now my next step is to make the mechanism to save states of the game to trigger correct game events. This should also influence which type of answer in dialogue are enabled. We described our choices tree in document, so the next step is to translate it into the game. Additionaly, I was working on introductory video to the game. I discussed that with my artist friend Zuzana and she will draw for us 4 pictures which will be use for that purpose. We will describe the story and situation by them. First one is below:

[mdj2017]

MOJO preparation

This week we were preparing a concept of demo scene for MOJO and also playtest plan. In this demo we want to examine interaction with pet. That implies usage of all pet actions in reasonable context, interaction with other pets, other npc interacting with our pet etc....  To excercise all this, we were not able to reuse our concept of first island - because it was too huge to implement and only few interaction are involved there, so we rather created new one - so we can focus mainly on the pets and not on the other aspects of the game. We spent a lot of time together discussing and drawing things. My individual work was not related to documents for MOJO, but to fixing some issues found during controls testing session mainly related to wolf - but even if I spent lot of time with that I am still not completely happy with the result, so it will need even more work...

[mdj2017]

2ne delivery

Last week we finished our controls prototype. I was working mainly on controls of the pet. I also conducted 3 testing sessions with our focus group. Results were promising, although we found a problem with pet staying in the way in some occasion which can cause a lot of troubles.

[mdj2017]

Concept presentation

This week, we were delivering a presentation (version updated according to feedback) about our game concept. Each of us were mainly focusing about presenting different parts.

Danny: I was mainly talking about the key idea about the game story and about the main character. It showed up that the idea was good and the audience liked it, but it was necessary to expand the idea more and update the presentation to be more detailed untill the end of the day. Birgit: I was talking about the level conception and the future player including his actions and motivations. Our level concept is based on islands and the riddles that have to be solved to go from island to another island to proceed with the story and finally reach an island where you can get the cure for you pet. The player motivation should include sympathizing with the character and his pet, feeling satisfaction when a riddle was solved and the ambition to reveal the story behind the game

Petra: My part was to present some visual reference of a game and to summarize what we can offer to our players and why the idea is worth developing. There was positive feedback about chosing a low poly art style. Audience also liked idea of pets reflecting personality of the owner, but there was a serious remark that the pets should be involved more in the puzzle solving. We were improving our concept after the presentation to take into account good remarks from the feedback. We developed more detailed game mechanisms, we dropped the idea of completely different puzzles on every island and rather made a pet’s abilities essential part of puzzle solving (2 example puzzles included in the presentation). We also advanced with our story to make it more clear - why there are islands and why you need to travel to them.

[mdj2017]

Game concept ideas

Right after the first class we were dicussing what could be our game about. We came up with some ideas what the game theme should include:

Running and collecting items, jumping, killing some enemies

Besides action, it should iclude a story and use intelectual skills of the player - puzzle solving and doing some clever decisions to overcome enemies and obstacles

May include fantasy

An unicorn (or other pet), and the story may be related to it, e.g. saving a unicorn captured by evil person, or recovering it from illness

We also mentioned that the game should be aimed for causual players and include comic graphics.

Then each of us had time to think on his own and come up with another ideas. I sticked to more to the fantasy theme and had this ideas about what the game should include:

The levels could take place at some magical forest, garden and a hidden undeground system with puzzles

Includes small dialogs with other characters, where a character can give some task to the player, so the player could proceed into some other location or level, or to gain some item needed,...

The game characters are wizards, each wizard has a pet which helps him to do magic, strengthens him in a battle against evil. Without the pet, the wizards is weak and unprotected.

A pet has a kind and appearance according to the personality of the wizard (e.g. a lion for a fighter and leader, an unicorn for a sensitive one,...) 

Concerning the graphical apearance, my opinion is it should be 3D, but maybe the camera should not move with the player, it should move only left or right, so the movement of the player in the third direction would be also restricted,...

I also though about the story of the game, which takes place in some land of wizards:

One night when everyone’s sleeping, a person in a dark robe, cover by a shadow, sneaks into the room of our main hero and poisons the friend animal with a dark spell. Then quickly disappears… The animal, after a while screams in pain (which obviously wakes up our hero on the bed) and slowly starts to dissolve into the air… When our hero sees that he gets mad by grief and rushes out of the room to catch the evil-doer. But the criminal is already gone.

Our hero wants revenge, but at the same time he needs a new friend animal. And without it, he may die.

He has to be on his way to the highest magician, who is the only one who can give him a new animal, with help of the samples of his body (DNA, hair, or fingerprints,... - the animal needs to reflect him after all :-)

So he sets up for a journey - it will include several levels.

He does not only need the recovery of his friend, but also the high magician is able to tell from some evidences that were found in the room who is the traitor and performing dark magic. It is a very advanced spell that has to be produced and no other man has enough knowledge for that. So it’s vital that the mission of our hero succeeds :-)

[mdj2017]

Let’s try to be a game developer

Welcome classes already passed and there are 3 months of hard work and sleepless nights waiting for us! Maybe I’m exaggerating, but it seems so, at least from the point of view of a software engineer whose biggest achievement in the field of game development was a simple clone of Angry Birds written in Java.

My task for the first week, except of thinking about concept of our game, is to try out Unity and Unreal engines and to find out which possibilities they offer because we are all quite new to them.