Unity, and the passion to actually do something.

This will be kind of a dev-blog post. It was not intended intended to be a series of posts, just this one, and maybe another to show of the final product. But this post turned out to be a wall of text, and I haven't really talked about what I intended to in the first place. So there will be two more posts!


I first heard about unity in... 2008, maybe 2009, back at the university. According to Wikipedia, it was first announced in 2005 as mac-exclusive, but somewhere on the line that clearly changed. And I guess it was sometime around then, when people started playing around with it, the popularity was rising, and eventually you would hear about it.
I've said to myself a number of times that I would try it out, learn to use it. And the number of times I've said that has been quite a lot, mainly because the increasing support. In short terms, and based on things unsaid, there is absolutely NOTHING to lose.

I was going to say that it was last year, but it's actually more than one year ago. It was December 2013 when me and a friend decided to start coding unity. We began with a "simple" space shooter project, that really turned out to be water over our heads. I've made space shooters before, in completely new engines (first time Torque2D), but that was a long time ago, and we had a tutor.
The game we aimed to do was quite simple really, a ship circling around a "mass" of squares on the center of the screen. The mass consisted of squares and would grow, and the player would shoot pieces of it. It was the unoriginal idea of a tiny robot inside a human, removing a tumor.
We didn't really start on the project right away, we actually had one or two sessions where we were just playing around with the engine. But we should have had a few more of those sessions before we decided to go forth and do something more advanced.

As I said, It's been more than one year since we started on the project, and looking on the from our SVN, the last time my friend committed something was in January of last year, and the last time I committed something was September of last year. I had not committed anything between January and September.

Anyhow, there are a number of reasons why the project stalled. The continuous roadblocks i unity, the fact that my friend recently had become a full time dad. And personally I was focusing on getting a degree in game design. And just to be clear, I got my degree.

Following the Extra Credits channel on YouTube is one of the this I do on my spare time. And a few weeks back they came to their senses (according to them selves) and made a series of videos on how to make your first game. This was a really good reminder to me and actually the spark I needed to get the thumb out of my ass and start doing SOMETHING. Especially their video about making a "Minimum Viable Product".

The video they posted reminded me about the first game I made completely on my own, from scratch. Using SDL and C++, I started to make a game with zombies and a samurai that would have a weird kind of way of moving around. But in the end it turned out as a "herding" game instead.

The zombies and player animations turned out as a bunch of numbers just looping from 0-9.

Below you can see the zombie attack-animation on the left, and the player animation on the right.

And this is the "cages", fenced pastures, or goals, whatever you want to call them. The idea is that they have a standard color of yellow, and when reaching a quota of zombies, they will turn green, if they exceed the quota, they will turn red.

This is not just the instructions on how to play the game, this is also the splash screen the player will firs see when the game starts.

I think I'll actually just wrap it up here.
My genius plan is to convert the game from SDL to Unity, with a few minor changes perhaps.

This is my minimum viable product.

Cheers!

The Game Aesthetics

Strange to say, but the first time a really felt that I came in contact with the "aesthetics" of a game was when introduced to the MDA framework.

In short, MDA stands for Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics.
Mechanics could be the press of a button; Dynamics, what happens when the button is pressed. And the Aesthetics is the feedback of the dynamic (from using the mechanic).

(If you're into game design, you've probably heard this a million time before)

But the thing about aesthetics is that the explanation mentioned above is merely a scratch on the surface. It's more like the feedback of the dynamic, and the overall feel of the game. And everything in-between.

Some great examples for the aesthetics are the sound Mario makes when you jump. This is just plain feedback for the jump.
But an even greater example would be the sound the car exhaust makes when you throttle. Like the jump, it's feedback, but it probably gives you a feeling of how fast the car would be.

If the exhaust of a Ferrari has a monstrous roar you would most likely say "YES (!), this car is fast!". But if it hums like an electric car you would probably feel that you couldn't race a snail with it.

But then again the aesthetics is also the overall feel of the game.

A great example of this is the game "Sissyfight 2000" which is about bullying.
Now, lets start with a bad example, that I just made up.
Imagine a game where you play cards like "Bullying", "Wet willie" or "Wedgie", against one or more opponents. Each card breaks the opponents "psyche" until it reaches zero and he or her loses.
Playing the card "bullying" probably wont make you feel like you are bullying the opponent, and the opponent probably won't feel bullied. And the same would go for the other cards. Yet, this is rather common in some games.

The way you play Sissyfight 2000 is designed so that the opponent will feel bullied. This is achieved by forcing all the players openly "discuss" who will be the next person to lose. The players can then team up and "attack" that player to break it. Defending oneself is possible, but will only slow down the process.

And that's Aesthetics.

Game design loner

The game is in it's last phase.
Everyone in the group is leaving for GAMEX, except me, and i actually saw this as a bad thing. But today when I was working on the game, I kind of felt that it was the first day of work with pure design. Or maybe it is just the part I like the most.
During previous meetings we have been concepting about things that can happen.

Right now I'm mostly just analysing the game so that I can get a grip of what the effects will be when I make changes. And what the odds are of certain things happening, such as getting a phobia and what the odds are that a phobia will be triggered once you caught one. How much food will there be in the game, will it make the players feel safe, will it be insufficient for the players or will it be just enough for the players to survive.

Board game meeting #4

A full day of board game design.

Starting at 9 am, I ran a bit late, but we where all set up at 9.15. So no greater harm done!

Today's main mission: Get the core system running.

Other topics:

Alignment,

Weakness vs Alignment

Playing against the game,

Ingame choices, clear vs diffuse;

Coordinate system?

Item system,

Terror,

"overkill penalty" (Terror),

Core system

We used 4 sheets of the tileset template as a board game.

The initial thought was to start test on one of these, but it was just to small.

Movement system

Iteration #0

Place start tile somewhere in the middle.

Start with a small deck.

Use some kind of piece and start moving around in turns.

Remove tiles, out of character "visual range".

Find exit.

Make up necessary rules as we go.

Iteration #1:

Calculate the minimum amount of cards required to play the game, based on amount of players.

Expand the number of cards in the deck.

Iteration #2:

Reshuffle trigger changed from "every game round" to "when draw pile depletes".

Iteration #3:

Exit tiles placed in discard at start of the game.

Iteration #4:

"Visual range" mechanic defined propperly.

Marking tiles with usage for number of players.

Iteration #5

Tiles around starting tile will be removed like other tiles.

Tiles around exit tiles will be removed like other tiles.

Food system

A food/energy system should be implemented. Daniel says this will give the game a time aspect. I agree.

Thus far the only thing you do is walk around in a cave, splitting up, exploring, finding the exit, and that's it. There is no collaboration between players yet.

Iteration #6:

A character card is implemented containing a meter ranging from 1-10, with an indicator.

Every character is given 1 food ration, when consumed replenish 2 food/energy on character card meter.

Every turn, players energy/food meter is drained by 1.

Iteration #7

Character card meter is expanded from 10 to 20.

Food tokens are pick-up'able from "food rooms" in the cave.

Character can carry unlimited amount of food.

Board game meeting #3

Meeting #3

This was a rather short meeting, due to some members having other classes. But the overall plan was to get a schedule for when things had to be ready.

We tried this the week before but failed due to the portal being down at that moment, and people just forgetting after that.

However, we found out that we had to have a playable prototype of the game ready before Friday.

Simon presented some tiles for the game, different types of rooms where different kind of events would happen. I made some additions to the tileset, on site, as well since there was a clear lack of different corridors.

I also made a template for further construction of tiles.

On the last meeting I mentioned a youtube vide where Michel Stevens at Vsauce where talking about what made things scarry. He particularly mention something called the "High Place Phenomena" which was caused by "cognitive dissonance", where people at high places would have the sensation of something pushing them of the ledge, or to push someone else of the edge... I spoke of this because I thought it would be cool to have that kind of a feeling in the game.

It was scraped however. But we kept one thing for further study. The "terror" as defined by Stephen King, where you can sense and something standing behind you, ready to grab you at any moment, and turning around to find out that there was never something there to begin with.

I said that we could have a "terror token" dropped at a random location on the board and each round moved closer to the player(s). Then you would flip a card to find out what it was.

On this topic Daniel noted that the game "space hulk" had a similar mechanic.

Vsauce - Why things are creepy

Board game meeting #1-2

So now that all groups have analyzed game systems, board games and table top RPGs, we are all supposed to make a board game.

During our first meeting the group with the group we came with a some what aesthetic goal of paranoia vs trust and fear in a fight for survival in a cave.

Game systems, group assignment

We received a group assignment to create a game system and write a report on it. This system was then to be handed on to another group for analysis.

In our group we went with the idea that each of us should come up with one or more ideas for systems each. I went for one.

So, I don't have the slightest idea what to have in mind when designing a system, where the idea is that you could apply any kind of rules. Anyway, I just started doing something, and tried to build on top of that.

So the first thing I did was drawing a few squares that would be available in different colors and added some geometrical shapes. 

Not a lot of thought put into these pieces other than that there is one color that would differentiate itself from the others, something like the black piece in the Looney Pyramids. The pyramids have five different colors though, and I can see why that is a smarter thing to do.

Anyhow...
I added a few smaller token objects that (my first thought) would have a direct relationship with the bigger pieces. The relationship was that they would have the same geometric figure as presented on the bigger pieces. The new tokens came in 3 different colors; gold, silver, bronze-ish (my second thought) and came in various amounts as well (my third thought), that could embrace some form of value and competition in overcoming the pieces.

There are only half the amount of circle-tokens as there are circles on the bigger pieces. And they had the most amount of gold pieces.

The square tokens are an equal amount of the number represented on the bigger pieces, but they are all silver.

And the triangles; at first they had only the double amount that was represented on the bigger pieces, but then for some reason I thought that it would be a better idea if the amount was more than double.

Stripes could also be used, examples on the right.

So this was my version of system.

The one that was handed in for analysis was similar. Well it contained all those pieces except the stripes, but instead of having different amount of tokens, there was an "unlimited" amount of all of them. And we also included a bunch of clay figures and a paper wheel (pictures below). All pieces had a lot more colors at the end.

Hello advanced game design (5SD024)!

Hello game!

Hello world.