Closing up

Here it is, one of the (if not) final updates for my MA.

So what did I do this semester?

At the start of it I revisited my Semester 2 work with the intent of working on that throughout, however I felt that I couldn't add much more to it, so I decided to create a new project entirely.

What I did manage to add, though, was a shortcut menu, inspired by a playthrough of Kingdom Hearts. It helped me realise that some spells were a little complex, and in a tight situation wouldn't execute as fast as I'd hoped. So I added in a shadow that would be assigned to one of three slots. Depending on how complex the spell would determine how long it took for the shadow to cast, and I feel it was a nice addition that sped up more intense combat.

I recorded a new video below to show it in action.

After I amended that, I thought that the project was lacking with how it handled movement. The level design offered no compliments to the gameplay outside of battle, and to add more movement mechanics would have tipped the balance from being so heavy focused on the combat.

My compromise was to call this project as a game combat focused, and move onto a new project which would merge the movement and combat into one seamless experience.

Because I didn't have much time to execute, I decided to make it a 2D platformer.

The final video is below.

Transitioning from the movement to the combat is as seamless as possible. I feel as though I've created a blend of two different game modes. The controls never change to accommodate either mode, and so gives a consistent feel.

I'll write up a more in depth postmortem, but this is all of my work for 3rd semester, and my final submission for my Masters degree in Games Design.

I'm gonna miss it.

Here's to

Panic Induced Progress

So it's going well.

I have a level sorted for the 2D side scroller, and I'm slowly getting more art in it.

The downside to this is that I'm not seeing how the combat performs outside of the testing area.

It's bad.

But I've little time to fuss about that now, I'm racing to get as much polish on the art as possible, after that I'll make sure that the combat is 100% what it needs to be, or I'm purposing it to be a pure platforming experience, which is absolutely NOT what I want to do.

I'm also in talks to try and get a little bit of audio for my previous project about the bard character.

It completely compromises my artistic integrity, but then I can't guarantee I had any in the first place, so in for a penny.

I hope you're happy, Jim and Josh.

Here's a very early shot of the level with minimal lighting, but it's getting there.

Hopefully it'll get more colour soon, and I can begin to completely remake the combat mechanics from scratch. Sounds fun, I know.

Life takes a while

So what have I been up to with so much time between updates? Here's an abridged series of my summer;

- Trying to find work
- Trying to have a roof over my head
- Getting part time work
- Having no money for the electricity bill
- University sites closed, or I'm at work
- Get job in Industry , now full time Mon-Fri
- Work as much as I can while trying to pay electricity bill
- Pay electricity bill
- Set up an internet contract
- Now it's September

So it's been a real uphill struggle, but I've been doing as much as I can to make a\ fast paced side scroller. Why this, and not building on top of my previous project?

Because my Masters is all about creating a solid flow with controls. It's about tapping into an innate sense of fun. I've had play testers tell me my previous project worked, what more can I gain from that? I couldn't think of adding anything new to it, other than more of the same. So, I wanted to make something new.

My first project focused on navigation, how the player moves from place to place. My next was entirely about combating obstacles head on. So I decided that my new project would become a mix of the 2 different styles.

I chose a 2D sidescroller because, design wise, I only had 2 dimensions to worry about. With my schedule being full enough as it is, I needed to save time for making the mechanics shine. I spent a lot of time last year playing Bloodborne and Kingdom Hearts on the PS4, so I took a hack and slash approach inspired by them. The characters abilities are based on fishing hooks, taken from where I come from, Fleetwood in Blackpool.

All together, the core mechanics are there. The player can run, jump, attack, grapple ledges, enemies and execute special attacks. So far, it's fun.

But then I've done absolutely 0 playtesting, an error I need to fix, and SOON. Otherwise I'll be out of pocket 20 nuggets.

So what's my focus for now? Polish.

The character feels fun to play, and all of their functions work without error. It's time for environments, particles and a proper level.

I really hope it's not too late to pull this back.

Bard

A doozy of an update!

So I’ve decided to start my side-scroller project! Although I really enjoy working on my Bard game, I wanted to try something new and this seemed like the perfect opportunity!

After some head bashing and research, I decided that this project would be themed around a Ye Olde setting, which starts in a fishing village. I knew from the start I wanted a lighthouse to be the aim of the level, so I based everything around that. With this in mind I did some research into games that follow a similar theme and created some moodboards to help broaden my idea.

From this research I started to mock-up the game in UE4, I started by adding in a double jump and a wall jump. Character movement is also very crucial to this games design, so I changed how quickly the player can move and how high she can jump. 

Wall Jump

Then came the tougher stuff, I put in some attacks that affect the player, making them hop and jump back when attacked. As I couldn't visualise how she would navigate the level until the character was designed, I had to wait until I'd modelled, rigged and animated her.

From here I needed a character, I asked Becky to help concept the protagonist. The character design had to look rogue-ish as I thought it'd be fun to make a dual wielding character. I gave her loose instructions and she came back with this:

With these quick sketches, I 3D modelled a character that was very much out of my comfort zone, I'm used to making float-y armed characters that have a large head. I made two copies of this model and squished her to make the style more charming. 

After UVing the smaller one, I set this to Becky to texture whilst I rigged the character. Below are some WIP shots of the texture work: 

Two days passed and I was still trying to get the skeleton to work, I had to decide to make some changes to this design. I ran into trouble with making the hips animate right and with a deadline looming I'd rather have this done. So I went back to what I know, and tweaked the design to fit with what I'm comfortable with. 

Then came some problems with the style. It was really difficult to translate the poofy pants into the new style and sadly they had top get scrapped. After some humming and ha-ing Becky managed to find a design that looked cool and worked! So off I went to model it!

Here's a screenshot of an older model:

So this money thing

So I've got the very basics down for the platformer, should have a character going for it soon. I've been really busy with looking for a job and a house to live in, seeing as though I have another 3 weeks before I'm out of this place.

I have a job lined up, but it's not in industry. As for a place to live, I've been looking, and I'm still looking.

This is putting a real brake on my Master's work at the minute, and man, I hate it.

I've done about 2 days worth of work since the last Unreal meetup, and that's not with me not doing anything, I've had no time with a constant search for a sustainable income and a roof over my head. With the timing of everything, I'll be having a very tight budget for the next month or two, with very little progress on my work.

I'll talk to my tutors about maybe some extra time, because as it is now, my work is definitely nowhere near where it should be. I might ask for some work too, anything to pull in more hours for more money.

Crawling on through, wish me luck.

Unreal Meetup

So last night I went to Futureworks in Manchester along with some classmates to attend the 3rd Unreal Devs meetup. This was an incredible opportunity to showcase my work and get some feedback.

For the past 3 days I've been working frantically to implement a quick select menu which I intended to test out at the meetup. A critical piece of advice I took away from the meetup was to let people know there was a quick select menu in game, because absolutely no one knew it was there.

The response was mostly positive with a lot of feedback on things bug fixes and in general cool ideas. One of my favorites was a guy who suggested that when an enemy fell off of a platform a small helicopter would appear above them and they'd fly back onto the platform.

I'm going to be taking some time off of this project for a while, though. I want to create a 2D platformer. I honestly believe that it's a strong direction, I have concepts for the character and how it'll play. I feel that within a month I could have a very solid playable that is not only a lot simpler than my current project, but also shows off just as much.

I won't stop on the little bard guy, but I'm taking a break from work... With more work,,,

Rock n roll

A huge amount of work has gone into the tutorial rocks from the beginning of the game. They teach the players the different spells in the game, so they need to be near perfect for the 30th.

They're activated now with pressure pads, and a particle will play to let the player know something has changed. The stone then acts as usual, and the player continues.

I've also drawn up a list of secondary effects I want spells to have, if they don't have one already. Implemented so far is the Fire spell. It creates a small blast wave, knocking back enemies that come into contact with it.

One of the last things I want to compliment is a huge step in customisation. I want players to change how each spell can be cast, ranging from how fast the spell travels, to strength, to potency of the secondary effect.

It's a lot, and only 2 weeks before the showcase, so I'll probably shift focus now to the boss of the level, a duels shield wielding knight that can reflect magic, but not much more. The intent is to teach players to find sweet spots in enemies, given that the boss will always be deflecting things from the front. Canon fodder might adopt a similar approach, so it's up to the player to work around them.

Down to Earth

It's decided; I'm continuing with my Semester 2 practice, giving it a huge coat of polish and possibly developing it into a much bigger project.

So, what's first?

I have a little issue with the spell casting. Sometimes, it can take a while to pull off an intricate combo (I suck at my own work, hands held high), so what to do?

A couple weeks back I bought myself Kingdom Hearts on the PS4, and realised that they got around the issue of huge menus by having a quick select menu, so I'm thinking of something similar.

As well as this, there's an Unreal meetup going on in Manchester on the 30th, so I'll be sure to attend to that. It's a really big reason to make sure that my spells and tutorial are all working immaculately. This will mean a LOT more polish on the tutorials, something I have plenty of plans for. With just over 3 weeks to go, hopefully I can get the project to a standard where I can get really good feedback.

The Final Frontier

So I've been having thoughts about what to do for next semester, and I'm a little unsure.

I wanted to create a new project in a first person perspective that revolved around piloting a spaceship to meet an end goal, be it dog fighting or racing other ships.

The twist on it was that the player wouldn't use the controller to control the ship, rather control the pilots hands and, through extension, the ship. This would make the player reach for different controls such as a thrust, a steering stick, as well as redirecting power to different parts of the ship to ensure the pilot achieves their goal.

I also thought about the opportunity for cooperative play, with other pilots taking on other roles, such as an engineer to repair the ship, or a gunner to fight off incoming threats.

On the other hand, I just read your feedback Josh, and a summer of polish would be a great opportunity to expand the project even further, create more levels, more spells, more enemies, and try to incorporate an entirely new element to the project which, right now, I have no idea what it could be but with 5 months I'm sure I could make something great.

What to do...

A Challenger Approaches

On Friday I submitted a video for my second semester Practice module. The main body of work came in the form of a video (Link below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-oYN5As7Bg&t=3s

For semester 3, I'm a little stuck on how to proceed. On one hand, I really enjoyed this project, and I loved coming up with ideas on how this world works, but on the other hand I wanted to look into controls in Virtual Reality.

Unreal Engine is very VR friendly, so I'm confident in creating a prototype, but my main issue is access to the equipment. Working on a VR project means I need unlimited access to a VR headset, and I can't afford anything close to that. My solution is to use the VR in the studio office, but then there's another issue- From August to September the studio is closed, meaning an entire month without work.

I'll mull it over with the tutors, and see if there's absolutely anything that can be done about the VR situation.

For now, I'm continuing production on my last project, starting today with making some potential enemies.

I'll create some ideas for new levels outside of the forest area, thinking up some cliff/mountain/volcano area, featuring the spiky on the far right.

I've been making shapes and seeing what comes out of it, and it's been giving me some cool ideas for new spells to include, but I'll have to make the actual enemies first.

Updates soon!

Almost Time

Tomorrow I submit for my Practice 2 module. I have 2 levels working, both made as an introduction, but one of them is probably gonna have to be scrapped due to being pretty poor.

I've got a character casting 10 spells with different combinations of inputs on the right stick, and 2 enemies in place that can attack the player and be defeated. One of them has a complex brain, making them able to execute different attacks depending on a number of variables.

So what's left to do? I want a proper save mechanic where the player respawns in an appropriate checkpoint space, rather than at the beginning of the game. I also want an actual save game, where it saves more than just the player location, although I'm not sure what I could use for it.

Lastly, I want collectables, and this will tie into the save game. Collectables are nothing new to me, I've done my share of them. Just a brief matter of putting them into the game.

It's gonna be a rush.

Let's do this.

Easter Holiday

Since the last update, I managed to make an AI that I'm happy with, for something so small!

Here's a list of how it behaved;

If there's no player, loiter or patrol, there's a choice of the two

If the player shows up, use whatever weapon you have available (There were five, ranging from a pistol, shotgun, revolver, tommygun and a hatchet, each with a unique behaviour)

If the character doesn't have a weapon, run and hide for cover before thinking about combat

After hiding from the player, begin searching for a nearby weapon (Even the one the player has equiped)

Run up, pick up the weapon and fight!

After this project, it wasn't back to my own studies yet. I wanted to learn a little more about AI

A music student wanted a project with an enemy roaming around so that he could add in his own sound effects. I was happy to take it on, and 2 days ago handed him the project with a fully functioning AI.

Now I'm back to my own work, and after looking over everything, it's an absolute mess.

I have too many functions doing similar things, and a very lazy approach to making the AI work. In all honesty, it's amazing that it does!

Now I'm taking it back to the drawing board so that I can make the AI not only more efficient, but universal between different enemies. Not sure how, but that's the goal. I plan to get the most of it done by the end of the day, as well as lay in foundation for a levelling system.

Should be fun!

Okay, 3, 2, 1, let's jam

I need to learn AI. 

I know a decent foundation, but what if I want an enemy to run away and look for cover? What if I want them to consider how to attack you?

So I'm taking a week out of my usual practice to make a crude hotline Miami game, having 0 art assets implemented, just purely focusing on the AI and behaviour trees. I want it done by Monday if I can, but I'll update my progress on it soon.

Research, 2

I've been mainly posting about my practice on this blog. In fact, in the first semester, I posted almost nothing on research, leaving my blog dead for a few months.

Well, here I am, blogging about my research, letting you know it's all underway.

For it, I need to interview peers within the industry already and get their take on what I believe is the foundation of my practice. I also now need to use my notes of lectures from the past few weeks and write 1000 words on how their practice helps to inform mine.

So this is a "I'll see you later", the deadline for this is April 7th, so until then

Testing, testing

Over the past week I was challenged by my tutor to get 20 people to playtest my project so far. The wager was a box of 20 nuggets.

I will not lose for a box of 20 nuggets on the line.

So what has changed in my project after getting 20 different people to play my game? Well, the level has been scrapped for now, and the tone has taken a very dramatic shift. I've implemented an abundance of tutorial prompts, also.

As the playtesting progressed, and more changes were added, a dramatic shift in feedback happened. It changed from the majority saying something along the lines of "I didn't quite understand how to use the spells" to "I want more spells!"

This, however, now presents a new issue. People want more things to do, and although none of the 10 spells are locked, I can't be dumping people who have never played the game with 10 different spells right in front of them to try out. For the sake of pacing, it's just not great. Maybe I should just lock all the spells from the start? But then would there be fun in playing about with different combinations to try and cast a new spell?

I think back to Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask. In those games, you had a magical Ocarina that can be played to access new areas, manipulate time and be a general fun thing to mess about with to get some nice tunes. When you played a song, though, if you hadn't learned the song already, nothing happened. I couldn't summon a horse, I couldn't make it daytime and I could open the Door of Time.

It never really phased, me, though. In subsequent playthroughs it gave me something to look forward to unlocking, something about the natural progression of the character. I also liked going out of my way to find songs that were completely optional, but helped make certain parts of the game easier, like the Sun's Song and the Redead's.

Let's see what happens.

Let there be less light please

So today I've been working on a new level; I want a serene night time setting, so a lot of thought will be going into the lighting.

One thing I thought would be nice is a particle spawning from certain points of the floor.

Oh boy.



So here's an untextured level with a particle effect. Notice how little lights float around just the character. Now notice how there's a million other lights dotted everywhere else.

Here's my issue.

The material is only visible when hanging around my character, but I've no idea how to tell the particle to put lights onto ONLY what's viable. I'm completely lost.

I'll carry on, but I'll probably have to pester a tutor for a solution.

Ready for the firing line

So I've managed to get a solid foundation of mechanics going, with a few still to add to, but I decided it was time to find out how crap my work is.

Short answer; Very.

When it comes to the mechanics, my playtesting has shown that they're solid in terms of the spells. They're horribly tutorialised, but aside from that, they work and are cool to execute. I've been asked to make more, and more spell combinations, and it's definitely something I want to do, although I'll probably strain myself coming up with them.

I've had a lot of whiplash about the level design. I designed a level I could complete easily, but not first timers. Thankfully a lot of time going into that level was just to make some art foundation, now I can focus on creating a new level that caters towards newer players.

I've also been given some ideas that I'll pick up and implement right away, mainly about tutorialising. As soon as most os the issues are addressed, I'll get it back to testing and find new ways to build!

To Catch a Bard

Over the past few weeks my design has been tumbling all over the place. One minute I fancy a control scheme that users button inputs to cast spells, then I experiment with using the right stick to input the spells via specific rotations and angles. But then something still wasn't right.

The sticks allowed for lightning fast reflexes to input spells instantly, but casting them was a mess. In the original scheme you had to press the right shoulder, then the right trigger to execute. My reason was to give the finger a strumming motion, although this, to be frank, sucked. Hands became very worn very fast. So I remove the right shoulder, and made the right trigger the only button to execute spells. STILL, it wasn't right.

After using a spell, an animation would play and then, after about a second, the spell would be cast. This wasn't good. 

Why bother having lightning fast reflexes if the game brings up a red light every time the player had the chance to prove their speed?

Unless something in the design reflected this, like the whip in Castlevania (NES) having a delay, then it would fit well. But again, everything until pressing the button was a mad dash to get the spell cast. It didn't work. So I made the spell cast as soon as the button was pressed, but then why have the button at all?

So here we are. The spells right now are, like I wanted at the start, input using a series of rotations and angles. However, there's now no toll gate between the stick and the game. The entire combat system, as it stands, takes place on the right stick.

I've recorded some videos, but they'll be up Monday to show how it's all progressed since the original scheme.

Catching Up

So I did manage a fair bit today, and enough to try out the new combat system. It was met with really good feedback twice! I'm not feeling it myself just now, but it works and people like it, so I'm gonna continue to pursue it as the staple in combat.

Recovery

For the last week I've been bed ridden with a flu. It sucked, I couldn't get out of bed without feeling dizzy, so that's my reason for not doing work for an entire week. This week will be FULL of crunches to get me where I want to be.

Unfortunately, not much actual progress to report, but by the end of today I aim to change that.

See you in a few hours!

Oh, progress

So to carry on from the last update (Like, an hour ago) I've come up with how I can implement the new controls. It's soundproof, but I'll need a while to organize the blueprints properly. I'll probably commandeer the Whiteboard in the MA area for and work it all out on that. The studio's closing in a minute now, though, so that's tomorrows work.

Ah yes, progress

So over the past few days I've been trying out a few ideas on how to go about making my new project control. One thing that's certain is that the main character will be a Bard. I've worked a lot on the model, and now she's all ready for the project!

After a really good brainstorm session with some classmates, the control scheme is almost finished, but this is where I'm stuck; How do I actually go about making the controls?!

I'm not gonna say too much just in case the scheme has to change, but I should have something conclusive down by the end of the week! If not, then I'm going to have to revert back to an older method of control.

Gonna remain optimistic, all the progress I've made so far with the idea had to be wiped today, it was getting too convoluted and I couldn't get it working how I wanted it to.

Here's to progress.

New Year Update

So I was deep in research over the past few months, not returning to practical until Christmas. Since then, I've completed my Literature and Contextual review, as well as including new features in my practical work!

Here's a link to the video for how it all plays now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM5Bf_H7F4M

So what have I added?

I've put in an attack ability for when the character's on the ground, with a little spinning animation to play. There's also a new animation for when the character's in the air, how much they'll lean forward while flying. The biggest update I've made is the collectables, and how they tir into the gameplay.

Before, the player could jump and dash into the air up to 3 times each. Now, I have upgrades that lock it away until purchased with the collectables, creating a sense of character growth. Jumps that you could just about make before are a trifle for you now, enemies that needed 3 hits to defeat now only take 1, more health and faster speeds.

I also wrote a bit of music to play in the background of the level, as well as make a few sound effects.

That's everything I've been up to in the practical! Hope everyone's having a happy new year!