Weekly Summary: 04-05

Early on in week 4 i created a piece of art work to help myself visualise the game in my head. It helped me have somewhere to work from while working as a great intro art piece for my pitch document!

It was difficult deciding on how to make the text look, as I'm going with the working project name of 'Light' I thought I'd make the logo represent a sort of light bloom or blur. Here are a few different logo's I created.

I decided to go with the second one, it looks a bit withered and the effect just looked great to me, the rest are either too subtle or too in your face.

Unreal Prototype:

So this week I decided to start making my game in a different version of Unreal, so that it's compatible with the computers at University, this was a great idea because it's good to re-create everything at a better standard. I'm planning to have my prototype finished and tested by the end of the week so that I can spend the last two weeks tweaking it.

I created a few mechanics, the light collecting mechanic is currently working great, basically the main collectibles in the game are lights, the more lights you get the brighter the level becomes, but I still need to make it so the level gets brighter, but I do have the collectibles hooked up to a HUD item that tells the player how light the level is becoming.

I don't know whether to apply the lighting change to the areas of the level where lights are found or the overall light intensity that surrounds the player, or maybe even both.

I've decided to go towards the idea of turning my game into a sort of therapy tool that people could possibly use to help themselves. I came to this idea after having an individual tutorial this week and going through my ideas. Having had personal experience in the area of mental illness it helped to bounce my thoughts and ideas off somebody who had similar experience. Now I need to start researching into how I will turn my ideas into reality. I definitely think I need to consider the meaning behind each mechanics and explain them so I've decided to create a research post dedicated to explaining my mechanics.

The design of the level is starting to make sense in my mind, this was the first iteration of my level design. The level uses to much backtracking to keep a consistent story, therefore I'm going to re-design the level to keep moving forward instead of getting the player to replay a lot of the level. I will still keep this idea for some areas.

I noticed that I constantly used blue, green and yellow in my designs, which makes a lot of sense, blue represents cold, shyness and anxiety, while green represents life and yellow represents warmth. To test this theory I created a questionnaire and asked around a pool of about 35 people what the colours meant to them. I was happy to hear that over 80% came back with similar or exact meanings. Using this data I created a colour gradient map for my game and illustrated the core game loop.

With these colours in mind I will recreate my level design to cater to gameplay based around these colours.

Maya Practise:

This week I did a bit of practise in Maya, I decided to start working on an endless runner game just for a little project so started churning out a few models to improve my skills.

I'm going for a more realistic style so it gave me a chance to test out PBR techniques. The final poly count is 300 polys. I used Ddo to texture and baked the normal map using a high poly model in Maya. Overall the pipeline worked well and didn't take me long at all, although there are a few issues with the model such as the white edges but that's just an issue with the Specular that I can easily sort out.

As a bit of fun I also made a dirty sink, in effort to start recreating a scene I made not long ago for my portfolio, I didn't document the creation of it but this is a render of how the sink looks.

I think I need to cut back on the scratch damage as it's making the material look less reflective.

Portfolio:

I recently started to learn HTML and CSS in order to make my own portfolio. This week I worked on the home interface for my website. My goal is to make the pages incredibly simple but very interactive. Here's what I have so far.

Soon I will upload a proxy website so that you can see how the website is interactive, but currently the web hosting I use is having issues.

Coherent Worlds Lecture:

Today I had my introduction lecture for my next project, which is a 3000 word Essay about How games create coherent worlds that we believe when we play and how they draw their influences from the history of entertainment through games (fun fairs, carnivals, war games).

this topic interests me deeply, I find it very interesting how the earliest of games such as Circus Charlie were so heavily influenced by the likes of Carnivals. Back when it was tech teams creating games it would be quite difficult them to come up with new artistic concepts, so it makes sense that they drew influence from existing entertainment platforms and just changed up the medium. This was the start of interconnection between analogue and digital entertainment. This was of creating games has become very standard, generally people do always tend to match the narrative with the design and mechanics, otherwise the appeal of the game just isn’t there. 

The idea of drawing reference from entertainment platforms to create coherent worlds bought me back to the concept of Flow in video games, during the lecture I thought deeply about a certain thing that was said about amusement parks, it was about how they were initially designed all around where and how the public manoeuvred around the park to drive them to certain points of interest ,and how to have them reach different areas of the park at certain times. This reminded me of how I used to do the exact same thing as a child while playing theme park world on the PS2. The entire game was based on the flow of success in the theme park that you design from scratch. That game is  good example of direct influence from past (also present) entertainment. The game worked because I believed that I was the manager, that I was actually making my own theme park, there’s no better feeling than having a smoothly running park… well until it get’s too repetitive, that’s why the game progresses in difficulty as the player progressed, to maintain flow.

It is well known that human beings as a whole feel the need and desire to create where and when possible for many different reasons, for entertainment, training, competition, the list goes on, it’s part of our instinct. As a child I would grab anything in my grasp and delve into a portal of my own imagination with it, all things from simple cardboard boxes to board games specifically designed for people to play, we know to do this from a young age, I feel as we grow older we learn how to turn our imagination into coherent worlds that we can share and experience with other people, and gaming as a medium is an incredibly effective way to do so.

I was interested to learn that the medium of gaming actually appeared from Military technology, obviously they were not initially as grasping as today’s games but it did spark interest, and that interest grew over a short amount of time. 

A recent rise in game design is the introduction of LEAN development, which is a managing strategy where people can easily create games and release them to the public in it’s alpha stages, and repeat the cycle while applying public feedback at the end of every cycle, this allows developers to cater the the desires of their audience (the reason behind the constant pummelling of pre-alpha releases on steam). This is taking off now, but it not a new concept. I was interested to learn that Charles Dickens adopted this platform with his weekly release of something called “The Penny Dreadful” The weekly Illustrated stories were very accessible to the public, something Dickens used to his advantage. He would change the direction of the narrative based on the views of the readers, this is something you’d see in the likes of Soaps and comic books today, so his influence is still heavy in today’s medium of story immersion and design.

Overall I learned a lot from this lecture and will immediately start to research into further things for my Essay.