#gds220

[kahne-goldsmith]

Spoils of War - Game Textures

[kahne-goldsmith]

Light Horse Studios: Spoils of War – Exegesis

The Light Horse Studios team created Spoils of War with the aim to highlight the intense raw emotional and physical nightmares that the men of the 1st Australian Tunnelers company had to endure during the Great War and to help players appreciate the scale and horror of the conflict taking place at the time.

The goals that the Light Horse Studios team intended to portray were those of deep emotion, expressing the experience that these brave miners were faced with. The Team aim to achieve these goals through various in game connotations such as the art style, in game audio, game world, and personal game characters.

The thought of creating game art that aided in forming a sentimental emotional response towards the player by highlighting the ‘coldness’ and ‘sadness’ war time evokes was very important to the Light Horse Studios team as it emphasize the dark undertones often forgotten about the Great War. The eeriness of these tunnels dug by the bare hands of the 1st Australian Tunnelers aimed to show just how dark, bitter, and silent a shift was for these men. Through the use of grey/dark pastel colour tones we felt the player would greater appreciate the seriousness of the context and idea behind the emphasis on drawing attention to the intensity and raw emotional states left behind from the Great War. The game art created by the Light Horse Studios team did allow for the highlighting of such ‘coldness’ and ‘sadness’ through dark colour undertones present in the look of elements in the game word and the look of the character units. Although, the Light Horse Studios team would have appreciated if a higher level of detail was meet within the juicing phase of development. Animation of the player character would also have benefited from the juicing phase of development, but time constraints caused an undue rush for the implementation of said animations in the exhibition build of Spoils of War.

Game audio was a major aspect in the development of Spoils of War, aiming to represent the same sounds as those who were in the tunnels heard. The gameplay sound effects play a large part in affecting the player’s thinking and enhancing the feedback and experience of the game to the player. It was important to the Light Horse Studios team that audio was something that would allow the player to feel emotions, such as fear, anticipation, and terror, that greatly influence how one would feel not only straight after the experience, but further into their life. It was this importance that ultimately caused us to peruse audio designers to create these audio assets to a high quality that we were looking for. The inclusion of an audio dialog introduction upon starting the game gives greater context and feedback to the player to help them understand the situations these Tunnelers experienced during their time serving. Aside from providing an emotional tie this dialog also aids in teaching players what their objective is for the playthrough. This piece of audio dialogue is very vital because without it, players may only understand what Tunnelers do and not understand the context behind their situation. The game audio within Spoils of War work fantastically well in favor of the overall contextual meaning of the game, the main theme present on the user interface screens, as well as the game play screen provide a good background for the player supplying interest into the gameplay. The audio provides player feedback and player emotions to a standard that is well received, especially the audio dialog introduction sequence. Implementing various background sounds, such as shell/gun fire, explosions, etc. that were muffled below ground would have had a greater impact on portraying the sheer loneliness below the surface.

The importance of the construction of the Spoils of War game world became a principle objective to the Light Horse Studios team, as it was important to the overall context and idea behind creating such a game. The aim was to focus and represent the darkness, quietness, and loneliness of the underground ‘word’ compared to the ravaged landscape painted by the constant warfare above. A major aspect for the team was to correctly identify the different levels of soil that the 1st Australian Tunnelers faced, and just how long it would take them to advance through. This would allow the player to develop a sense of the hard work put forth by these men and the strategy associated with where tunnels were dug, further strengthening the connection between the player and the games emotional themes. The fog of war mechanic was implemented to create an aura associated with how the miners were digging into the unknown, knowing nothing of what laid among the next few meters, creating a sense of distress and fear for what may be waiting. Environmental factors were also strongly pursued in development as the factors such as air quality, boulders, and the fear of cave ins were a very real threat to how the Tunnelers operated the mines at the time. Greater care should have been taken when implementing world assets, such as the soil tiles and background images. Some trouble was foreseen during this stage as all the soil tiles were too large a resolution to identify between, as well as the background image being too short of a width to fit the scale of the game world. The game world itself serves a very good purpose within the overall context, allowing for an experience that portrays a deep emotion towards the player.

While conducting external testing, it was emphasized to the team that having a tutorial mode was extremely important for the player to learn the mechanics set out. During the weeks leading up to the final build of Spoils of War, it was decided that developing a tutorial with accompanying audio voice assets would be ideal. The Light Horse Studios team were unsuccessful in creating an inclusive tutorial mode for spoils of War, due to issues involving how the tutorial interacted with the gameplay world.

Overall, creating personal characters for Spoils of War was of utmost importance for the Light Horse Studios team as these men would be how the player interacts with the game would to be delivered the inclusive emotional response. Having included three playable characters in Spoils of War, each with varying stats that would aid or diminish them in different situations/environments, creates a chance for the player to become emotionally inclined to units as they are not respawned at any time during a play through. By allowing the player to choose the makeup of their team up to six units, in any format they see fit, gives the player some control over their experience, without the thought of becoming emotional connected to the units they have chosen. Originally, the Light Horse Studios team wanted to develop six individual personal characters each with a personal background/story to further strengthen the emotional ties towards the player. This goal however was out of scope, causing the team to stick with three individual classes of characters. By committing to this three class system the team ultimately achieved the goal to express teamwork within Spoils of War, allowing a strong connection with how the 1st Australian Tunnelers proceeded to achieve successful actions. The personal character’s aspect was one thing the Light Horse Studios team want to achieve the most, but were unable to achieve such an empathic link due to the inability to convey the emotion on the characters. These characters showed very little personalities, with nothing to distinguish their roles or story elements, other than their face.

All things considered, the Light Horse Studios team achieved the overall aim to highlight the intense raw emotional and physical nightmares that the men of the 1st Australian Tunnelers company had to endure during the Great War. These thoughts and ideas were present to help players appreciate the scale and horror of the conflict taking place at the time, but better execution in many of the already existing areas could have been achieved to a higher standard to further express and portray the deep emotion felt by the men of the 1st Australian Tunnelers company. Nonetheless, with extra time and care within the polish phase Spoils of War would have presented to be a fantastic final execution. Although, the goal of portraying such emotion is what the Light Horse Studios team wanted to show within Spoils of War and is present throughout varying aspects.

[kahne-goldsmith]

Light Horse Studios: Spoils of War – Postmortem

This Trimester Studio Unit 2 called on the class to create group game that would hold a message or an emotional response that differs based on the experiences of the player. The group, also known as Light Horse Studios, ultimately decided on working to develop the game I pitched called Spoils of War.  The vision I anticipated for Spoils of War was that of a 2D side-scrolling/real time strategy game that plunges players into commanding an Allied tunnelling company during the Great War (1917). The Player would be tasked with destroying Axis trench lines by digging tunnels beneath the enemy to set explosives, all while avoiding complications that can cause death to the company men. Spoils of Wars aim was to highlight the intense raw emotional and physical nightmares that these men had to endure during these daring attempts and to help players appreciate the scale and horror of the conflict seen. Personally, I believe that the team has accomplished the units target goal, but greater care and consideration could have been taken to achieve a higher level of development in various roles and positions throughout the entirety of the project. Due to the overall scope of the game, and varying skill levels within the team, Spoils of War fell short during its development process.

As Spoils of War was my vision I was tasked with being the Creative Lead for project. My role consisted of aiming to maintain the overall consistency of creative assets being produced, gameplay objectives/mechanics, and aid in the creation of art assets and documentation. I believe that my role was performed steadily and reliably from the outset and throughout the entire development process. A task that I found challenging and quiet daunting from the beginning of the project was being in somewhat of an authoritative role. This is something I hadn’t previously been exposed to, but over the course of the project quickly started to learn and pick up various leader role techniques alongside the Project Manager. I do believe however that both myself and the Project Manager should have been somewhat firmer with the team from early on as a backlog of development task seemed to pile up towards the pointy end of the project development process. That being said I did really enjoy the experience of being in a lead role, I didn’t think before this the commencement of this trimester, but I would happily put my hand up for another role like this.

One aspect of the whole project that was hit and miss was the use of adequate and strong communication channels. I believe that over the entirety of the Spoils of War project communication between team members was our major downfall. From early stages the group struggled to grasp a steady stream of communication as we were trying to contact each other through various applications such as Slack, Discord, and Facebook Messenger. There was very little discussion on the game development process which prompted myself and the Project Manager to create a sole communication stream in the form of a Light Horse Studios group on slack. It became very apparent to the group that communication was a major issue when our programmer posted that ever since the project had begun communication between team members had been close to zero. Team meetings were really the only form of communication between team members, and even then were only being scheduled once a week. In response to what our programmer expressed about the groups communication, the decision to hold a meeting twice a week was put forth. This caused a very big spike in communications between the group as all team members often had questions or updates on development work, although often what was discussed at these meetings wasn’t elaborated to those who may have been absent. Which in turn caused bumps in implementation down the track. In the future, seeing how important strong communication channels are, I will definitely be pushing for stronger communication and feedback between all disciplines and members of the project at hand.

Something that was very adamant at the end stages of the project development was how the lack of a well-used Gantt chart caused some implementation hiccups. Early on it was discussed that having such a chart would help organize and prioritize tasks that needed to be completed in order to proceed to the next task at hand. During the first half of the development of Spoils of War a Gantt chart was used, but very minimally. Not making good use of the Gantt chart in the second half of the project hurt us and our ability to implement work that had been finished, and find out what hadn’t been finished at all. For future project I believe that there definitely need to be a well-used Gantt chart to adequately differentiate what has been done and what needs to be done to further development.

Documentation, with the exclusion of the Gantt chart, was something that I am very proud of during the development of Spoils of War. All team members were very adamant right from the get go about having well rounded documentation to convey the ideas set by the original pitch documents. The use of strong Asset lists and a detailed Game Design Document/Art Bible without a doubt helped set the vision of the project right from the start to the end of development.

During the last few weeks on the development of Spoils of War the issue of rushing last minute work was becoming a problem. The major aspect during this time that was holding the team back was the creation and implementation of the player animations. The issue with this process was that prioritizing the entirety of the animation components of the project should have been something that was worked on early on. Clearly something a well-used Gantt chart would have solved. This being said though, having those who were working on animation pick up on the fact that the area that they are solely working on is moving slowly and bringing it to the attention of myself and the Project Manager should have happened. Some resentment at the very last stages of development caused undue stress to those who were working on other tasks, such as myself and our Documentation Lead, as we were tasked with picking up the slack of the Animators. This was definitely a learning experience for me. In future projects, to prevent this issue from happening again, as a Project Lead having discussions with each team member regularly on the progress of said tasks would be adamant. As previously stated, having a Gantt Chart or similar documentation would have aided in helping the team prioritize and know the milestone dates of certain tasks.  

Overall, the highlight of the whole development process of Spoils of War was having the ability to work with a large group of passionate class mates to not only develop a game, but one that I had envisioned. Each team member seemed very thrilled and excited to work on my game, which made me feel very excited in turn. A lot of effort was put into Spoils of War and I’m ecstatic that the team got to the end and met our target to an extent.

[kahne-goldsmith]

Yuanfen – Postmortem

This Trimester Studio Unit 2 called on the class to create a 2D side-scroller/platformer in Unreal Engine 4 as an individual project. This project, much like the group task, to create group game that would hold a message or an emotional response that differs based on the experiences of the player. I was pleased to see that we were tasked with creating such an individual game, as it gave me the opportunity to dive into Unreal Engine 4 head first, with no prior knowledge of the engine. One thing that I enjoyed most was the self-guided learn that I was tasked with, especially in relation to leaning Blueprints rather than having to hard code. Over the course of the Trimester I believe that this individual process went very well, compared to any previous individual projects I had worked on in the past. Although, I did run into some issues due to my lack of knowledge of such processes in Unreal Engine 4.

Going into this project was quite daunting to me as I was particularly worried about implications concerning code as this is definitely something that I am not strong at. But I was quickly reassured after discovering just how easy visual blueprinting is to an extent, especially for someone who is very visual, such as myself. Being able to rapidly prototype my game within the first few weeks of the project gave me a lot of faith in my ability to overcome problems and create art assets/animations that I’d be happy with. My self-motivation during this project was the highest it’s ever been during an individual project. The only real implications I came across with blueprints was trying to initiate different ‘states’ to my player and game world objects, this did cause me to become quite frustrated as I found it hard to visualise how these components would fit into the blueprints, and how they would react to one another. It was also quite difficult to find online resources and tutorials for creating a 2D side-scroller/platformer, which in turn made development time longer than I expected. One thing that helped me immensely with blueprints was the ability to group and comment different components to see how they worked internally. For future projects, personal and Studio related, I will definitely be choosing Unreal Engine 4 over other engines such as Unity 5 as it is very user friendly and effective to use. The highlight of the project for myself was having the ability to teach myself and learn a wide range of new things in an Engine that I may have not touched otherwise.

Producing the art for this project was the thing that I enjoyed the most, creating 2D art is something that I am very passionate about. I often find myself working more on art related processes, rather than dividing my time evenly across other aspects of the development process. This is something that I will have to work on if I want future projects to run smoother. This project gave me the opportunity to develop 2D pixel art, something that I had previously been told to avoid making as it often has stigma attached to it of being a pain to accomplish. Creating the level assets was something that I enjoyed greatly, and having the ability to easily be able to implement them into Unreal Engine 4, add collision, and then literally paint my level was amazing. Although I did find individual aspects of creating the 2D pixel art a little challenging, such as smoothing my animations, I appreciated the challenge. Being able to quickly import animation frames, then use the flipbook option in Unreal Engine 4, made implementing these complete animations that little bit easier. In the future, combating animations is something that I will have to spend more time researching and developing to create something that I am truly happy with.

As the Trimesters end fast approached, my individual time management suffered a little. Looking back on the project as a whole I should have individually planned sections and tasks to be completed at certain points along the development timeline, especially after my prototyping phase. I often found myself switching back and forth between different sections and tasks, which in hindsight stressed. This stress ultimately caused me to start rushing things and pushing it right to the last week of the Trimester to get a build ready for the exhibition. Future projects will definitely have time management become one of the most important things is address. Setting milestones along the development timeline will be a very high priority for me, to help with the overall project consistency, efficiency, and stress. By doing this I will create a greater chunk of time to further develop and polish my project and have a reserve amount of time if anything major happens to derail progress.

To me, having the opportunity to create a project in Unreal 4 Engine has given me a greater appreciation for visual coding, I found it to be very enjoyable as I was able to adequately understand how and why various things happened the way they were happening. Upon completing my individual project I was able to learn how to develop Blueprints to make game mechanics I otherwise wouldn’t have found out to do. Furthermore, having learnt how to develop simple enemy AI with different control states, and environmental hazards has been of interest to me. Finally, how Unreal Engine 4 makes the importing of art assets easy to use and place in the game world, through the use of Tile-maps and Flipbooks, makes me excited to use the engine again. This project was very enjoyable to not only myself, but my peers as well. The project has opened my eyes about the prospect of having indie game developers produce games in their own time with such an easy of use. Having the ability to teach yourself new engines amazing.

[kahne-goldsmith]

GDS220 – Postmortem

This Trimesters unit has without a doubt been my favorite unit I have completed thus far in my studies at SAE. The focus on creating games that hold a message or an emotional response that differs based on the experiences of the player is something I am very passionate about in game development. Over the course of the 13 weeks on Studio Unit Two I have learnt many new things in relation to being a leader, how Unreal 4 Engine is a great tool for budding designers in terms of its ease of use, and how working in a large design group can be beneficial as well as a challenge.

As a part of the assessment criteria within the Unit a set of Key Performance Indicators needed to be met with either a successful or masterful application at the end of the trimester. Personally, I needed to focus on trying to increase five KPI’s from successful to masterful.

Over the course of the trimester further developing my communication skills was one thing I wanted to impact most on. Early on in the trimester I believed that when it came to communicating with my peers in a 'non-formal' setting I was able to adequately get my views across while taking on theirs. The Spoils of War group project has given me opportunity to grow in this area. My ability to communicate in a ‘formal’ setting has definitely improved, especially when it comes to gathering the ideas and questions of my peers. Although, greater communication over the course of the Unit would have benefited me to a larger point.

Time management has never been a major problem for me, but it also has never been something I’ve been on top of. This trimester I feel I’m still focusing on aspect of projects that I find more intriguing, while pushing back other aspects that are just important. I still find that I may be distracted with other things, but do always find the time to accomplish what needs to be done. Providing an adequate amount of time to all processes still stands as something I need to look into.

Given the opportunity to develop an individual project, with the elements of self-teaching and research has seen a massive increase in my ability to problem solve. I will still continue to try and analyse any problem I face with any previous problems I have encountered, to determine if it is solvable from the knowledge I have gained from overcoming said problems. Seeking outside help has had a massive benefit in my problem solving ability. It was very rare for me to become so frustrated with a problem and leave it for an extended period of time, something I would have previously done.  

Again, with the inclusion of the individual project this trimester has seen a considerable leap in my ability to integrate new processes into my work to improve the overall quality of it. Finding out new ways to develop even the smallest aspect of a design further has given me a lot more faith in my ability.

 The pressure of this trimester definitely motivated me to work to a better standard than I previously had. By taking and maintaining a sense of priorities from this I was able to apply them at a more level headed work ethic than previously. Which in turn actually increased the quality of work I produced.

Overall, this trimester has helped me develop my skills to a level that I am confident will take me to the next level of my studies at SAE. Not only has the support been fantastic during the unit, but the confidence that has been granted to myself and peers has been very reassuring in my ability to continue conducting my studies further.

[jakerobertsongames-blog]

Group Project - Post-mortem

It comes to that time of the trimester were we must reflect on our time during this tri and talk about how we think we did as well as what we learned though out it. I’ll be splitting up my group and solo project into two different posts as not to confuse myself and others who read this (mostly myself).

The group project – Spoils of War: Once Kahne had done his project pitch, I was looking forward to working on his idea, a 2D side-scrolling real time strategy game set in World War I, and then once we all got together talking about what needed to be done and setting roles, I was super pumped to set out and work on this project. I was given lead level designer with one other member to help me out, and we both set out to nail down the level design since it was really the first thing that needed to be done. As for my work on this project, the level design was really the only major thing I had to do and once I was done, I sort of sat back but not completely, as if other people needed help I was there to do so, which I did with assets design and mostly research for other members of the group.  

I’ll start with cons since I like to finish on positive notes. For me, after the level and research were out of the way, I was sort of behind on how the project was coming along, I all ways asked if there was anything I could help with but the team was on top of it or it was something I couldn’t do and ever since I saw the first prototype I never downloaded it but just asked the others how they think the game was going, which every response I got was “good” or “It’s ok” and after playing it on the final day I wish I had play tested before the final day because by the time I did and spotted all the bugs, we had no time to fix them in them. The team sort of also fell apart in the last few hours as everyone started to focus on their solo projects as well as their post-mortems, I sort of half expected to see this happen on the last day since everyone is stressing out over getting everthing ready for handing in, me included.

Now the pros. We worked really well up to the point I talked about above but in the time we did it really well, everyone was in consent contact with each other and knew what the others were up too. This helped get the big parts of the project out of the way fast, like the level design, assets and the prototype when we got the programmer on the job. The audio was fully covered to thanks to the audio students that jumped on board, if anything we had too many audio guys working at once, which isn’t bad since all the audio was done in like two weeks.

My final thoughts, I loved working on such a big project but wish I helped out more as well as having more time for the others to fix up the bugs we found.

Thanks for reading and until next time

See ya

Jake Robertson

[jakerobertsongames-blog]

Solo Project - Post-mortem

It comes to that time of the trimester were we must reflect on our time during this tri and talk about how we think we did as well as what we learned though out it. I’ll be splitting up my group and solo project into two different posts as not to confuse myself and others who read this (mostly myself).

The solo project – Underground: I really loved working on this, I had a lot of fun trying to figure stuff out on my own. I’m not going to lie, I did have a lot of help from the guys at uni including both students and teachers and I couldn’t have gotten my game to the point it is now without them. I still have a long way to go with Unreal Engine 4 before I call myself a pro but I now have the necessary skills to start up a prototype to get my idea across to someone.

I’ll start here with the cons of this project that I see in myself now that we’re at the end of this trimester. First is the feedback from my teacher, back in week 7 or 8 when I showed of my sprite sheet for my character, he pointed out some stuff that I should of fixed right away instead of holding off till the every end, he also told me to change my level environment sprites, which I also held off till the last week to change. In my head, I had it set out to at least get a working game out then work on the stuff that that he wanted me to change, in hindsight I should of changed it that week he told me, since now I have to re-import it all into my game then set it all back up.

The pros on the other hand, since I had the time to focus on this solo project primarily, I had a lot of time to research into Blueprinting for UE4 which was good because I have never used Blueprints before this tri, at first I was overwhelmed by the amount of information that was out there on the subject but as I kept looking into them, I started to figure out the right terms to search and places I should be going to first.

Trimester Post-mortem: Now for how I did over the whole trimester, at the start I was sort of shy when it came to showing my work to others as I seemed to have it that my work must be perfect before I do, and since I didn’t have much confidence in myself this made me think that my work wasn’t good enough to how to the rest of the class when it came time to present it. Over the last 13 weeks, I’ve been building this confidence up in my skills to present my work to other people, which for me was sort of a wall I’ve been needing to knock down, I still get a bit nervous why I stand up in front to present but I believe I’m getting better with it. I’m also more confident in my own skills when it comes to doing something new, at the start of the tri when I came across something new and I wasn’t comfortable with it, I would sort of not try very hard to overcome it but now I try a lot harder to understand what I’m trying to do.

Thanks for reading and until next time

See ya

Jake Robertson

[jakerobertsongames-blog]

Game Exegesis

Spoils of War or SoW for short, is a 2D side-scrolling, real time strategy game that puts the player in command of a group of Allied tunnellers from World War I created by Light Horse Studios. The player’s objective in SoW is to mine under No-man’s land and into the enemy’s side to plant bombs and blow it up, while doing this the player must make their tunnellers survive the events that can take place in the mines.

We at Light Horse Studios aimed to create a game that shows players the intense raw emotional and physical nightmares that the men of WWI had to endure and help the player appreciate the scale and horror of the conflict that took place in that time period. From a mechanical point of view, this was done by giving players the option of choosing who was on their team to complete the game, these characters can be killed though out the game but cannot be replaced once they are dead, making the player think about what they should do next with their team. Environment hazards and enemies can all kill the player’s team, so the player must manage all six members on their team to insure no one dies.

SoW went through several different ideas before the team set on the idea that you see today and from day one of setting down on the current idea, the team focused on producing a game that fits the description above and over the past eight weeks have tried their best to do so, something’s were dropped due to time constraints, like the personal character bio’s and different coloured enemy team. If the team had more time, these things would have made it into SoW, besides these the game has lived up to the goals the team had in the first place.