Weekly Summary: 10 - GAME JAM

Game Jam Week!

This week has been dedicated to a game jam. We chose teams of 5 and were sent away with the theme of Arcade and facade.

I have taken the role of 'Team leader' to help incubate ideas and help everyone understand the limitations set on us with our very little programming experience. It's very easy to think too big, so my job is to help narrow the scope for the project, and to prototype the game in Unreal.

The project brief is 'Facade' so we decided to include it into a narrative, basically you are a fish, you and the fish love of your life are frolicking in the tank 24/7, until your owner places you in a different fish bowl out of spite, this place was not the heaven that it seemed, instead it's nightmarish hell in which you're torn away from your one and only fish love, your only goal is to get back to her... or him, I can't tell it's gender to be honest.

This artwork in this post are not only mine but that of my entire team.

Monday - Idea generation:

I decided to jump straight into Unreal and flesh out some basic mechanics for the game, this was before having any assets ready to put in, except for an awesome fish animation made by a team member.

Here's what the game looked like at this phase

It doesn't look like much but most of the core mechanics are already done, all I have to do is edit them and change them around, I can also start adding assets when they are ready to go in.

Tuesday - Pre-prototype and asset making:

Unreal progress - I have now blocked out where most of the assets are going to be placed, this way I can start fleshing out a final level design so that we have something to work towards.

Using assets and photo bashing, I was able to come up with a quick level design that shows the mechanics of the level. From this I know exactly where I need to go with blueprints.

Wednesday - Prototype and asset making: 

The game is starting to come together nicely, now that all the mechanics are in place and assets are starting to flood in the game is really becoming quite coherent.

I completed the timer around this phase, now you can collect the timer add-ons and there will be  cap on how much time you can have.

Menus - To help the game keep coherent with it's arcade theme I created some basic menus that prompt the player to pay to play, and one that gives them their score, keeping it simple really speeds up the process of navigating menus.

Thursday - Polishing:

Below is an image from our pitch presentation for the game.

Below is a still from the final game, personally I think it looks great, pixel art was definitely the way to go with this task. The only thing I'd change is the change up in styles, everyone was pretty new to pixel art so we couldn't set a style in stone.

Friday - Outcome!:

Overall this week has been a great test, working in a group has been great practise and I've learned a lot of skills to do with blueprints and pixel art, it also shows how much you can get done in a week with a willing team! The problem solving aspect of the task has been the best part for me, it really does teach you a lot of skills, and handling a team has been great practise.

If I could go back and re-do things I would spend more time on the HUD aesthetics and maybe add a few more mechanics, possibly even clean up the blueprints.

I'm happy to say that we came away with the best 2D art award and won us some sweet kinder eggs. This is something I'd definitely do in my spare time again.

Weekly Summary: 09

Learning Adobe Illustrator - 

i decided to start learning some illustrator in preparation for my specialism, I want to be able to create custom logos and graphics for my project. I am using a tutorial series from a youtube channel called 'Tasty Tuts' check them out here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKWnkIPur2Q

I tasked myself with polishing off my portfolio logo in illustrator. 
Below is a screenshot of the logo

I also tasked myself with creating a simple and recognisable character that could feature in an app game.

Light Prototype Play-through - 

Here is a video showcasing the entire prototype level of my game 'Light'. Now that I have some gameplay I need to annotate it and get it ready to hand in.

Personal Projects - 

This week I started working on a hobby-project with a friend, he will program and I will create artwork, whilst teaching each other aspects of what we specialise in. After sitting down and brainstorming random ideas we decided to work on a game similar to Minecraft and Terraria. 

Our goal is to start simple and let the game grow with time, seeing it as more of an experiment than an actual product we would release. 

Anyway, the working title for the game is called 'Land'.

We started work on the start menu, which is working great, below is a screenshot of how it looks. 

For the art I decided to churn out some simple concepts as fast as possible to create a foundation for the game to go from, I've done much pixel art so it's good to learn something new. 

Below is another piece of concept art for a cowboy game that I am currently in the process of developing.

Weekly Summary: 08

Game Trailer

This week I created a 30 second trailer for my game to show in the pitch presentation, the aim was to create a very short and to the point trailer, showcasing what the game is about and to generate questions for the audience. Below is the outcome.

Changes to Prototype

Gravity Pad - I decided to make the game look a little more aesthetically in sync, to start of I created a basic gravity pad. below is how it looks in-game, with an emissive and alpha map. I'm considering making the see-through green area animated.

Voice Fragments - I decided to add a new collectible to the game, they're called voice fragments, there are very hidden and scattered across the level, when the player collects one a screech noise is played, indicating that they have found a fragment of lights voice.

Hidden Areas -  There will be hidden areas in the level, due to the foreground being black it's quite easy to apply this mechanic to the game. Whenever the player enters one of these areas a trigger will go off making the texture fade to a lower opacity, when the player leaves the area the texture reverts back to normal.

And here is the level blueprint set up to create this effect. the opacity of the foreground texture has a scalar parameter that is changed when the player overlaps the trigger, when this happens a timeline is triggered transitioning the scalar number, this creates the fade effect.

Waterfall particle effect - Using a rain map exported from the example files, I changed the parameters to suit a waterfall for the game.

Presentation Outcome

Critique - Sadly I could not attend the pitch presentation due to injury, although I managed to get critique.

Changes to Pitch Document -

Change double jump icon - A suggestion was to make the double jump mechanic a bit more understandable, I went and changed the icon to a more user friendly concept.

Sizing of Document - There was quite a lot of empty space between the content and the border of the pages, a suggestion was to scale the pages up to fill the area, this makes much better use of the space.

Justifying text - To make the takes more inline with the layout I was suggested to use photoshops justify tool to ensure the text blocks all lined up, this look much neater than before.

Use more screenshots from the prototype - I was recommended to change the concept illustrations to actual screenshots from the game.

Changing pages completely - I decided to go through a few of the pages structure and restart them, they now look a lot better and convey information a lot more clearly.

 Page 2 - Before changing the page it was very cluttered with information, now it looks a lot better, clearly showing the core game loop. Having the information laid out this way makes the document simple to read as interactive PDF's do come with a lot of issues.

Page 03 - I changed the illustrations to screenshots and removed most of the text, everything that I was saying was self explanatory.

Page 04 - I changed the structure of the content so focus is on the large visual on the left, while also removing the hidden area illustration and replacing it with another screenshot.

I feel the pitch document looks a lot stronger now, below is a Gif of the document, although the interactive trailer can't be seen.

Research Post: Before and After video

Here's a video showing the first area of the game before and after changing a lot of elements.

Research Post: Prototype Testing Analytics

Prototype Testing Survey

The purpose of the prototype survey was to gather information about the play testers experience in certain areas of the game. The google form analytics allow me to analyse the information gathered to see what issues are major and which are minor.

The first question was 'Did the game flow?'. 70% replied with a mostly, indicating that it didn't completely flow, which was expected. It is important to get this area positive, as the theme of the project is flow.

The immersion level of the game didn't hit lower than a 7 out of 10, which is great news, although it would be preferable to get a majority of 8, the second phase of testing will hopefully come back a bit more positive.

This was an area that I required a lot of feedback in, as I wanted to see how people emotionally responded to the content. Although there were a lot of mixed feelings it was good to see that each person felt a mixed range of emotions during gameplay, interestingly every person checked curiosity, showing that the game offered a lot of questions.

The game is about mental illness, so sound and colour are both important to get right, the analysis shows that the sound effects do in fact fit in with the game on most occasions, a revision of the sounds are necessary to ensure a better response for the next testing phase.

Everyone replied to this question pretty thoroughly. This question was more for idea generation for where to take the game next.

This one was admittedly quite silly to ask seeing as the game is based around darkness, still it's interesting to see that someone actually said it was a little bit too dark.

Finally the big question, would anyone actually play my game, thankfully most enjoyed it enough to gain a bit of interest.

Overall the testing phase went well, a lot of information was gathered and now it's time to iterate the game to make the required changes.

Weekly Summary: 07

This weeks focus has been on completing the prototype, testing and then iterating on the prototype using the received feedback, while also preparing the pitch document for critique.

Prototype Work

Main Menu - 

I decided to include a simple main menu for my game, the menu consists of three buttons, Play, settings and Quit, I might leave out the setting as it's not necessary for the module.

The style of the game is relatively simple, so I thought I'd reflect that with the menu buttons. Above you see the first iteration of the menu.

After completing the UI pages of my pitch document I decided to go back and re-create the aesthetics of the menu. Below you can see the pitch page for UI and the final menu. I ensured to keep to a minimal amount of options to ensure simplicity, due to the fact the game is simple it makes sense that coherency would flow if the menu's also followed this rule.

End Level Menu - 

It was necessary for the game to include an end level menu too for scoring purposes. I also created an alternative of an if/else statement in visual programming as a little test to see if I could figure it out, the purpose of the piece of code is to change a piece of text on the end screen depending on how many lights the character has collected.

Testing 

After getting my game ready to play I created a before and after survey using google forms, inspired by a recent game play testing experience. This will help me gauge who is playing my game and help me understand their personal responses. 

Outcomes - Overall the testing phase has gone great. I got a lot of feedback from gamers and non-gamers that will help me clean up the game so that it's a lot more simple to understand. I was able to use google forms responses to visualise the responses, I will be creating a separate research post on the gathered information.

Seeing as flow is the theme of the project, I saw fit to include a question directly addressed to the flow of the game.

Interestingly, everyone that played the game had a unique emotional response, indicating the prowess in the game to actually evoke emotion in the player, except every single person said the felt a spike in curiosity after playing the game also interestingly everyone managed to address similar issues of the game when asked about what they think could be improved. Below are a list of the main issues that were talked about in the surveys.

Changes needed - 

Make the lights change colour - A big critique was that it was difficult to tell if the lights had been collected, to make this more obvious the lights now start off being yellow with no glow and then shine really bright when collected. Below is how the lights look now before and after the player has collected it.

Make double jump more obvious - Most people were unable to figure out the double jump, to tackle this a visual way of showing the ability to jump must be thought about.

Make player faster - The character was found to walk too slow, resulting in boring areas of gameplay, to tackle this I have just made the player walk faster which sorted out the issue.

Character HUD - Multiple comments asked for a few HUD elements to show amount of lights collected and and a stamina bar to further helping people understand the double jump mechanic.

Keeping player interested - 

Getting rid of word narrative and add more narrative imagery - I will do this by completely removing text and thinking of a way to represent concepts with imagery presented in the background.

Pitch Document

I prepared my pitch document for the mid-week group criticism. I ensured all 10 pages were ready to ensure I could get enough critique back as possible. 

Criticism and changes: Most of the criticism I received was to do with the presentation of the information. The biggest thing was to condense text and ensure that all text was consistent, don't refer to self and don't use any programming terminology. With this in mind I reviewed my information and changed things.

Below are a few page examples before and after changes -

Before: This page was getting to a useable standard, although I was unsure about the structure of information.

After:  Instead of adding more to the page I was suggested to use the information and just make it bigger, while also narrowing down the amount of text to allow prominence for the visual things. The page definitely looks a lot stronger now.

Before: This page was far too cluttered, too much information and too much overlapping visual information. 

After: I decided to clean up the page and make it simple, everyone already knows the meaning of the icons from previous pages so it was pointless to have al of that information there. Instead I opted for simple notations next to areas of interest on the level design map.

Now all I need to do is pick at little tweaks to the document and send it off to get criticised again before I present it next Friday. 

To top everything off here's an awesome pic of a box I made in Unreal