chrispydesign

[chrispydesign]

Moped Mayhem - Gold in Review

We’ve finally finished Moped Mayhem, and it’s been one hell of a ride.

We’ve managed to make a complete game within the 2 months we were given. I’ve learned a lot throughout this process as a Producer and Designer, and while I’m happy with the final result, there are definitely areas where I can see for improvement. 

From Alpha to Gold, the game has undergone a LOT of massive changes. We’ve completely overhauled our UI, added a properly designed menu system, touched up the buildings and textures amongst other things. 

The game now only runs for 2 minutes, and the overall speed of the game has been increased. We realised that 5 mintues was far too long for a game like this, and people were getting bored of it too quickly. By ramping up the Mafia spawns and reducing the team, we created a much more frantic and chaotic gameplay experience, more in line with what we originally intended. 

The audio and UI were the two biggest hold-ups for the game. Audio just didn’t have time given to it that it needed, and in future I would definitely begin work on audio much earlier in the project. I knew it would be important, but it was difficult to schedule time to work on it when the levels and buildings were still not finalised. 

In a similar vein, the entire games menu UIs were done within a day. It should have been planned and implemented much earlier; a nice menu UI can make a world of difference. 

Particles were another thing we implemented. We added a ton of particles to help give more feedback to the player, as well as add some fun juice to the game to make it more enjoyable. More particles came with accompanying sound effects. 

Overall, I was very happy with how the team performed. We ran into some bumps along the way, but we got there in the end and ended up with a product we were all happy about. I’m looking forward to the second year of classes, and what we can achieve knowing what we know now!

If you’d like to play the game, check us out on itch.io! 

https://mopedmayhem.itch.io/moped-mayhem

[chrispydesign]

Coming Home - An Analysis of Gwent’s Design and What Homecoming Seeks to Change

Gwent has had a very interesting life cycle for a game. It began simply as a minigame in CD Projekt Red’s hugely successful, award-winning RPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Players took to the game with gusto, often jokingly calling Gwent the main reason to play the game, leading to various memes and internet jokes like this:

Source: https://twitter.com/dylansprouse/status/603644571436904450

Praised for its unique design which was quite the departure from the other popular card games of the time (eg. Hearthstone), Gwent had a truly interesting and unique design hidden inside of this AAA RPG.

And then, much to everyone’s surprise, CDPR announced Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, which began it’s open beta in May, 2017. Initially, the game very closely resembled the familiar Gwent from The Witcher 3, but over the course of the open beta the game evolved and changed, getting further and further away from its roots, and becoming something entirely different. Over the year and a half of open beta, Gwent received changes that overhauled the entire game multiple times. The constant changes (which oftentimes dramatically changed how the game played) seemed to indicate to the players that developers were still trying to figure out exactly what Gwent should be, and what the core design philosophies behind Gwent, and how they wanted it to fit with all the other CCGs on the market right now. CDPR seemed to be tending towards a particular outcome, but to the players, what that outcome was wasn’t particularly clear.

And then everything changed when Homecoming attacked.

Homecoming had been announced for Gwent as early as April, 2018. CDPR promised massive, fundamental changes to Gwent, something that would bring it back to its roots as a strategic card game that simulated armies going to war with each other: a homecoming, if you will. For a long time, details about Homecoming were kept under wraps, leading to speculation from the players as to the extent of the changes.

Eventually, all details for Homecoming were officially announced, and Gwent was officially released to public October 23, 2018 with all the changes brought on by Homecoming.

Response to Homecoming was very mixed from the players. Some saw it as far too big a departure from the core of Gwent, while others embraced the change and found a whole new game to love. Homecoming fundamentally changed how Gwent worked, but no studio would’ve undergone such a massive overhaul of their game’s systems without good reason. Today I want to talk about why Homecoming was made: what were the original problems with Gwent, how did CDPR try to fix them over the course of the open beta, and how Homecoming has now sought to address those problems.

Card Design Limitations: Not Enough Knobs

Most CCGs on the market have a large part of their design inspired by Magic the Gathering. In these card games, at their most basic level a card will have a Mana Cost, Health and Attack values, usually alongside other abilities as well. This gives the design team three different things that they can tweak in order to fine-tune the balance of the card.

In Gwent, there is no concept of Mana, and Health and Attack are combined into a single stat called Strength. Right off the bat, this makes balancing cards a lot harder; when there are fewer knobs to tweak, it’s harder to do small-scale changes. You can tweak the Health of a card to reduce its defensive potential without affecting its offense, and vice versa, but in Gwent, because those stats are tied together, you can’t diminish one without affecting the other.

In open beta, CDPR implemented a new mechanic that helped alleviate some of this issue: Armour. Armour acts as additional Strength on top of a unit’s Strength, that doesn’t affect the number of points that unit is worth for winning a round. However, they also tied this mechanic to the class identity of one of the factions, which limited how freely they can use this mechanic.

Additionally, cards in Gwent couldn’t attack other cards directly: once you placed down a card, that was essentially it. This meant that most cards have to have effects that immediately trigger, or trigger on their own with little control from the player. There wasn’t as much agency in play and counterplay. It is difficult to make cards that felt fair to play against and gave you an opportunity to counterplay them, but also make them feel powerful to the player using that card.

Assembling Your Army: Deck-Building Variety

As mentioned earlier, there is no concept of Mana in Gwent: any card can be played at any time during the game, but you can only ever play one card a turn. While this has implications for balancing cards, it also has a major effect on meaningful choices in deck-building, and therefore deck variety.

Mana does a lot of things in games like Hearthstone: it limits the strength of certain cards, forces you to run certain suboptimal cards in order to fill out your Mana curve, and also groups cards into categories, giving you more ways to look at evaluating cards. A 2 Mana card might be weaker than a 4 Mana card, but you can play the 2 Mana card earlier which might make it worth more than a 4 Mana card. Similarly, it means that when you are looking to add a card to your deck, you mainly have to compare it with cards of the same or similar Mana cost, as those cards would fulfill similar roles in a deck.

In Gwent, because any card can be played any turn when deck-building a card must be compared to EVERY OTHER card in the game. At the current state of Gwent, it wasn’t necessarily a problem, but when adding future cards to the game, every card added will have to be measured up against every card, making it extremely difficult to release new cards that can compete with the current pool of cards, without being overpowered or underpowered.

The initial design of Leaders was also quite limiting for deck variety. Decks in Gwent are separated by Factions, and within each Faction, there are a few Leaders that you can choose. Leaders essentially function as cards that you always have in your hand, and each had a different ability. 

Balancing Leaders has proven difficult: because they are the only card in your deck you are guaranteed to have, the effect that they provide generally needs to be something that is critical to your gameplan or an effect that you’d want to ALWAYS have access to. Initially, some leaders were just flat-out more powerful than other Leaders: for example, every Monsters Faction Deck ran the same Leader regardless of deck type because of how powerful that Leader’s ability was. 

CDPR have tried various ways to balance Leaders over the course of open beta: one of the major things they’ve done is given Leaders a body that can be placed on the field. This means that not all Leader abilities necessarily have to be the same power level: they can supplement the power level by giving the Leader more Strength, and vice versa. While this has helped with Leader variety, one of the other big problems with Leaders is how specialised some of the Leader’s abilities are: some Leaders are clearly designed to support a particular archetype, and thus this limits your effective choice of Leaders depending on what deck you are building.

Another type of card featured prominently in Gwent are tutors. Tutors are cards that are generally weak on their own, but allow you to draw and/or play certain cards from your deck. When a certain card in your deck is super critical to your gameplan, a tutor gives you extra chances to draw that card, making it more likely you draw it. 

But one of the other important things that Tutors do is thin your deck by removing cards from it, making it more likely you also draw your other cards. When Tutors were introduced to Gwent, they became an integral part of most decks: thinning your deck makes you more likely to draw your more powerful cards and gives you direct access to certain cards on demand as well. Adding a Tutor to your deck necessitates that you also add the card you are tutoring, which can quickly fill up your deck slots.

This is compounded by a variety of other factors: you can have up to 3 of a card in your deck, which leads to players simply running 3 of each of the strongest cards available to them. Additionally, a lot of synergies in the game are hard-coded and based on keywords: if you’re running a highly synergistic deck this also limits your effective amount of choices.

A lot of these issues with deck variety tie into one of the core design philosophies of Gwent: consistency.

Consistency Versus Randomness

One of the main things that drew players to Gwent was the focus on consistency and strategy compared to other card games. You had a 25 card deck and drew 10 cards in the first round, 2 more in the second, and 1 more in the third. At the beginning of the game and in between rounds you also have a total of 4 mulligans, allowing you to filter out cards back into your deck. 

As a baseline, you are guaranteed to see over half your deck, not accounting for mulligans and card effects that draw cards and tutor cards from your deck. Additionally, there was a huge focus on a lack of randomness in card design: barely any cards at all used randomness in their abilities.

Consistency was a selling point for Gwent, but it also acted to its detriment. With how consistent the game was, most games played out exactly the same way, which can lead to the player base's long-term enjoyment of the game stagnating. As much as players can hate randomness, randomness is part of what keeps people engaged with the game; having outcomes be random and unpredictable leads to a rollercoaster of emotions, creating a variety of experiences which leads to long-term engagement. 

Ridiculous random outcomes also create entertaining content for Twitch and Youtube; loads of games rely heavily on their content creators to drive awareness, interest, and engagement with their games, and having a game that lends itself well to streamed content is crucial for increasing and maintaining a game’s player base.

In some ways, CDPR identified this and attempted to add randomness to the game with new cards. However, these cards were almost universally hated by the player base for various reasons. They went against the fundamental design of Gwent that drew players in to begin with, their general power levels were much higher than cards without randomness, and their results were far too swingy, particularly in a game where you can only play one card a turn, responding to these cards was difficult and it was nigh-impossible to play around them.

Homecoming: What’s Changed?

With Homecoming, CDPR introduced massive changes to Gwent, most with the goal of addressing a lot of these changes. In particular, the biggest change made is the introduction of the Provision mechanic, which influences how deckbuilding plays out.

Provisions are similar to Mana, but also quite different. Each card in the game now has a Provisions cost, and your deck now has both a minimum limit on the number of cards but also a maximum limit on the number of Provisions you can have in your deck. Now when deck building you don’t simply compare a card to every other card in the game, you compare it to other cards of the same Provisions cost, but also compare it to how many Provisions you have left to build your deck with, and how many cards you already have in your deck. 

You make sacrifices by having a lot of powerful cards in your deck because now you must also fill it with lower strength cards. Or, you can go for an alternative route and only put mid-strength cards into your deck, ensuring you have a generally even power curve throughout the game. 

Provisions are another way that cards can be balanced: if a particular card has a powerful effect, the effect itself doesn’t have to be nerfed: the Provisions cost can be tweaked, making that card have a higher opportunity cost for adding it to your deck.

Aside from Provisions, various other changes have been implemented. Leaders have been completely reworked, and now most of their abilities are no longer highly synergistic with certain archetypes and can be used in a multitude of decks. They removed the bodies of Leaders, and instead balanced them by restricting the amount of Mulligans they receive over the course of a game. 

However, limiting the power of the Leaders in such an invisible way may not be as effective as the straightforward Strength value of previous Leaders. In particular, some Leaders are still quite powerful and would still be so even with restricting the Mulligans. I feel that adding a Provision cost to Leaders AS WELL AS cards would be an effective way of balancing Leaders rather than limiting Mulligans. It already ties into how deck building has been changed to work and is a much clearer trade-off for both players.

Another change has been to how card abilities work. In other CCGs like Hearthstone, a minion is first played, then the next turn they can attack, either other minions or the opponent directly. With Homecoming, they’ve added a bunch of new abilities to cards that function similarly to attacking in Hearthstone. When first played, your unit cannot use its ability, but on the next turn, you can use their ability. 

These abilities have extremely varied effects, from dealing damage, boosting, tutoring and more. Additionally, some of these abilities can be used immediately, some have limited charges, and some have infinite uses but have a cooldown on them. By introducing these abilities with a variety of implementations and applications, CDPR have given themselves much more flexibility when it comes to designing cards.

Conclusion

Homecoming was an incredibly risky move from CDPR. Not many games get this far into their development and open beta before flipping everything over on its head and rebuilding the game from the ground up. A lot of the decisions made as a part of Homecoming have been positive and are moving the game towards being more fun to play, more varied in gameplay, and also bolstering the longevity of the game. These changes are a great starting point for this new version of Gwent, and I’m looking forward to seeing how far CDPR can take this game.

[chrispydesign]

Reducing RNG in Turn Based Strategy Games

While XCOM may not have been the first turn-based strategy game, it is undeniable that it is one of the most well known and prolific entries in the genre, and most people’s first point of contact with the genre. One of the most iconic aspects of the game is the RNG: almost every attack you make in XCOM has a percentage chance to hit, and this percentage chance is the source of a lot of frustration, ridicule and also discussion.

While it’s not a pure roll of the dice: there are a lot of ways for the player to influence the numbers, but at the end of the day, it is still random. So is there a better way to handle this? Here are 3 games in the genre that have tried different ways of approaching attacks.

Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

At a cursory glance, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (MRKB) seems VERY similar to XCOM: a party of characters, movement, attacks with an RNG chance to hit. But, diving deeper into the mechanics we can find how MRKB differentiates itself from XCOM, and how those mechanical differences lead to different gameplay outcomes.

Humans are REALLY bad at interpreting probability. 60% isn’t a huge change from 50%, but a lot of people will think of it as a guaranteed hit, despite it being essentially still 50/50. While MRKB still uses a random chance to determine whether shots will hit, they simplify it greatly: shots can only ever bee 0%, 50% or 100%. This really helps the player make accurate predictions as to the outcomes of their actions, leading to more satisfying strategic gameplay and rewarding decision making. 

When an action has an outcome that is determined by random chance, you generally want to have the freedom after making that action to adapt to the result and make the best of a good (or bad) situation. In XCOM, your unit’s turn is over the moment they choose to attack. This prevents the player from easily adjusting their game plan based on the results of their shot because attacking is always the final action. 

In MRKB, you are free to use all your actions in any way you want. This hugely opens up the possibility space, giving the player much more freedom to approach scenarios and adapt their moves based on all their actions. Actions have also been hugely simplified: every character has 1 attack, 1 move, and 1 bonus action. Some abilities have also been split up: in XCOM, every unit can Hunker Down for defense and Overwatch to fire on enemy movement, making most units feel like they play largely similarly. In MRKB, these actions are only granted to some units, with slight tweaks between each unit to add more flavour and variety. 

Steamworld Heist

Steamworld Heist is unique from most other turn-based strategy games in that it’s 2D rather than 3D. While this leads to some design limitations, it also opens up a lot of interesting opportunities, particularly AIMING SHOTS. 

In Steamworld Heist, every attack you make must be aimed. Your unit will hold their gun out, their aim wavering and wobbling every so slightly as you try to line up your shot. On top of this, shots can be ricocheted off of walls, leading to crazy trick shot moments which feel hugely satisfying to pull off. 

This small change has a huge effect on gameplay and player perception of outcomes: it makes the game much more skill-based, but also means that the player can no longer blame the game or RNG for missing a shot: it was purely up to the skill of the player to make the shot. 

Into the Breach

Into the Breach is much more similar to XCOM, utilising a 3D grid-based environment. But, unlike XCOM, every attack is guaranteed to hit, and enemies will telegraph their attacks. Into the Breach is much more about movement manipulation than it is about direct damage, and because every action is going to have a guaranteed and predictable outcome, the game becomes much more of a puzzle game than a strategy game if anything. 

Gameplay is also broken up into much smaller, compact mini-levels than sprawling environments that the player must traverse through, which XCOM style movement isn’t very well-suited to. Every turn, players have to consider multiple things: how to mitigate the damage done to buildings, how to deal with the existing enemies, and how to position yourself to be best equipped to deal with future turns. While all of this is also a factor in XCOM, because of how predictable actions are, the player feels much more like they are strategising and planning for the future; they feel rewarded for strategising correctly, and also appropriately disappointed and frustrated when their plans fall apart. 

Conclusion

The XCOM style of gameplay isn’t terrible by any means. The focus on RNG leads to the intended gameplay experience: trying to force players to make the most of terrible luck, and feeling like they made it out by the skin of their teeth when they succeed, rather than every mission being a guaranteed success. However, it is also important to consider how other games approach similar problems, and what lessons XCOM can learn from these games. 

[chrispydesign]

Moped Mayhem - Alpha in Review

As my first year at AIE draws to a close, it’s time for our capstone projects to begin. You can learn the theory of how to make games all you want, but nothing can beat the practical experience. Throughout this process, I’ve learned a lot about teamwork, project scoping, and how truly iterative the design process is. 

Moped Mayhem is a chaotic, casual, single-player, top-down action racing game. Play as a delivery driver trying to earn money by delivering food around the city. However, you also owe a LOT of money to the Mafia and they’re tired of waiting: they’re sending their top hitmen after you to take you down. Try to earn as much money as you can before time runs out! 

That elevator pitch/game overview sounds simple enough, but even such a simple concept went through so many iterations before we settled on this idea. 

Our initial idea didn’t even have an enemy in it: it was just the player delivering orders around the city. We were quickly told that this idea was far too boring; without any opposition, the game becomes routine and boring and would stagnate quickly. After heading back to the drawing board and bouncing around ideas, we came up with the Mafia, enemy units with various abilities that would attempt to stop the player from delivering food. 

While the core ideas about the game remained relatively the same, the actual execution of those ideas changed a lot. At first, we weren’t sure if we wanted to do it as a “survive as long as you can” type game, or an “earn as much money as you can within a time limit” style. We settled on the first idea because we wanted to evoke an Arcade-y style of gameplay, and proceeded into our Alpha from there. 

As part of this idea, the player had lives which would be depleted by being hit by the Mafia. We had our 3 Mafia variations planned, each with different ways of being dealt with and situations that they engineered. Whenever the player was hit by any of the Mafia attacks, they would lose their food and lose a life. 

Once we started attempting to implement this enemy, we didn’t have the Health or Death scripts attached yet, so they simple rammed straight into the player and sent them flying. Funnily enough, through internal and external testing we found that people actually enjoyed this a LOT. With this feedback in mind, we shifted our design and removed the lives and dying entirely, and instead made all the Mafia attacks knock the player around. 

Without lives, the player would never die, which meant that we had to come up with a different way for an end-game state to be reached. We had two ideas: a timer, or a goal amount of money. 

We elected to go with a timer, with the goal of the game being for players to earn as much money as they could before time ran out. While the narrative wrapper surrounding this idea isn’t as tight, we did find that player’s enjoyed this gameplay more than reaching a goal amount of money. It also meant that we had much more control over the length of a gameplay session, and could tweak the spawn rates of our Mafia to create an effective rising tension over the course of the game. 

So where’s the project at now? We’ve got our order delivery systems in place, and are close to having all of our Mafia implemented too. From here, we’ll be working on tweaking the player movement to get it feeling as good as possible, and getting all of our art assets in. Our game has two core aspects that will make or break it: the LEVEL LAYOUT and the MAFIA. We will be focusing on lots of testing and iterations on level layouts, made much easier thanks to the modular kit we designed, as well as testing out Mafia spawns. 

Follow us on Twitter here for more updates!

[chrispydesign]

Dead Cells - Reducing Monotony in Roguelikes

Roguelikes are generally built around three design ideas: procedural generation, permadeath and meta progression. However, one of the potential problems with the  repetitive nature of the game loop is that it’s very possible for your players to become bored of having to repeat the same area of the game over and over again, having to kill the same enemies repeatedly in order to progress. Dead Cells reduces the potential monotony with two of their game mechanics: the Timed Doors and the Hunter’s Grenade.

Dead Cells is a 2D sidescrolling action hack-and-slash roguelike-Metroidvania developed and published by Motion Twin. It was in early access for a year before being released officially on August 7, 2018. In the game, you take control of a mass of cells that possesses and reanimates a corpse and uses that corpse to fight through a dungeon, gathering a resource called Cells which can be used to permanently upgrade yourself after clearing a level. However, if you die, you lose all Cells you are holding onto and respawn back at the start of the dungeon.

As with most roguelikes, dying is an expected part of gameplay. The player is expected to not really know what they are doing when they begin, die, learn, then restart. So how does Dead Cells keep the beginning of each run fresh and exciting?

Timed Doors

The main way to earn Cells is by defeating enemies. However, if this were the only way to earn Cells, this could lead to players feeling like they HAVE to grind and kill every enemy that they come across. While fighting the zombies and archers is interesting the first time you play the game and are still learning the mechanics, it loses its novelty quickly.

The other way to generate Cells is by reaching the Timed Doors located in some of the levels. These doors lead to areas with gold, Cells and other valuable resources; the catch is that they lock themselves after a certain amount of in-game time has passed. This means that in order to reach the Timed Door, the player will have to speed through the level, ignoring most enemies to get their reward.

However, it is not always in the player’s best interest to make a beeline for the end of the level: throughout each level, there are valuable, limited upgrades and resources that will be vital to a successful run. In order to maximise rewards, the player must learn to seek out these rewards as fast as possible, on top of identifying the quickest route to the next level. It’s a delicate balancing act, supported by the procedural generation of levels: each second you are asking yourself, “will this path lead somewhere or am I just wasting my time?” as you keep an eye on the in-game clock, making sure you have enough time to reach the Timed Door in the next stage.

This system allows players to essentially skip over the easier sections of the game, once they have demonstrated their mastery over the mechanics. Further, because the Cells are gained at the start of the next level, not at the end of the current level, there is a non-trivial risk involved: if you die after reaching the Timed Door, those Cells will be lost.

Hunter’s Grenade

One of the meta-progression systems in Dead Cells is the blueprint system. Some blueprints are hidden in the world, and some have a random chance of dropping from enemies. Once a blueprint is acquired, accumulated Cells can be invested to unlock the blueprint, gaining a permanent weapon or upgrade to the player.

The random nature of the blueprint drop can lead to boring gameplay where players are grinding the same enemy type over and over again, begging for a blueprint drop. However, you wouldn’t want to make EVERY enemy drop a blueprint; that would diminish the significance of a blueprint drop, and also potentially overwhelm players with too many blueprints, and not enough Cells to acquire them all immediately.

One way Dead Cells tries to help speed up this progression is the Hunter’s Grenade. When used against an enemy, the affected enemy is guaranteed to drop its blueprint. However, use of the Hunter’s Grenade is incredibly risky and comes at great cost.

For starters, the Hunter’s Grenade transforms the enemy affected into an Elite version of itself, making it have more health, deal more damage and also spawn smaller enemies to distract and potentially overwhelm the player. However, you can’t kill this Elite enemy: you have to get it to low health, then use the Extractor on it, which forces you to stand still and channel: very risky considering the Elite enemy will still be pursuing and attacking you.

To make matters worse, the Hunter’s Grenade takes up one of two item slots the player has access to, neutering their combat capabilities. This is further exacerbated by the fact that the Hunter’s Grenade can only be purchased in the first area, meaning that if you want to use it on an enemy that only shows up in the later stages you have to carry it with you the entire way through, essentially leaving yourself down an item slot.

On top of how difficult it is to get the Hunter’s Grenade, carry it to your enemy of choice, use the Hunter’s Grenade, defeat the Elite enemy, capture it, grab it’s blueprint and carry it to the end of the level without dying, the Hunter’s Grenade also costs 7,500 gold: a hefty sum, particularly early on.

To use the Hunter’s Grenade is an acknowledgement of one’s own skill by the player. The Hunter’s Grenade can only be used if the player is confident in their abilities, as it is a hefty investment, and lost 7,500 gold feels very bad and can negatively affect future runs. What the Hunter’s Grenade represents is a way for skilled players to accelerate the blueprint progression system in a difficult, yet satisfying and rewarding way.

Conclusion

All roguelikes have to find ways to answer the specific problems associated with the genre. Dead Cells does so in creative ways that reward the player’s skill and allows them to dictate the pace at which they progress through the game in a natural way without pushing the player into any particular play styles. Dead Cells is very accommodating for multiple play styles, and the Timed Doors and the Hunter’s Grenade are an indication of how flexible the design of Dead Cells can be.

[chrispydesign]

This Blog Post is Quality, I Assure You

As a stark contrast to my previous units, this unit has seen me… NOT make a project. Rather, our most recent had us covering Quality Assurance and Testing.

We can’t go any further talking about QA without mentioning this classic though: https://youtu.be/BRWvfMLl4ho

Tightening up the graphics indeed.

In order to learn how to properly test games, we had to get some games to test. We were assigned two games: one from Alpha Beta Gamer, and another from a studio. 

In both scenarios, our role was vastly different: working on the ABG Game, we were acting as if we were the developers: in essence, we created all the testing forms and wrangled up our own playtesters. For the studio game, we were testing for them, and so we had to use the forms they gave us. 

The ABG Games were randomly picked from the site, then randomly allocated amongst students. The one I got assigned was Ever End, an interesting visual novel action game hybrid. You can look it up on their Itch.io page: https://teamamaranthine.itch.io/everend.

I’m the kind of person who really likes paperwork, so making up all the necessary forms was something I enjoyed doing. It was a puzzle in a sense: you had to figure out exactly what kind of questions you needed to ask in order to get important information from your testers. This was made that much harder considering I had zero say in the design of the game: I was merely an outsider. But by finding examples of testing forms, and collaborating with classmates I was able to create a comprehensive feedback form and got some valuable data out of it.

Doing testing for another studio was a whole other can of worms. Rather than being responsible for anything remotely creative, it was largely busywork: being assigned to do the boring, repetitive tasks that the developers themselves couldn’t afford to spend their time doing. That’s not to say that what we were doing wasn’t important; it just would’ve have been efficient for the developers to do such extensive testing and also work on the game. The tests themselves were VERY dull indeed: most of them boiled down to a checklist: “do this thing to see if it works if it doesn’t let us know”. And while playing their game was fun the first time, having to go through it, again and again, made it - not surprisingly - significantly less fun. Because we were working for another studio, we also had to make sure that we hit deadlines with test submissions, on top of our normal school workload.

All in all, it was a very eye-opening experience. The world of QA and Testing is super important, but also super dull. But without it, games would be shipped as buggy messes (and some of them still are!). Learning how to properly test your game is critical for a game developer to learn, and I am glad that we were able to do so in such a hands-on way.

[chrispydesign]

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Learning how to make an effective story without any dialogue or text proved to be more difficult than anticipated. Trying to convey a narrative with such restrictive limitations was a challenge, but it was something that I enjoyed trying to tackle. My past 5 weeks have been dedicated to working on this narrative project, Zombie Story.

The story I wanted to convey was a depressing one. You’ve woken up in a cabin, with zombies surrounding you on all sides. As you walk around the cabin, you find that all of your friends have died. In the last room, you decide to end your life by setting the cabin on fire.

Rather than start working on the layout of the cabin, when I started this project I first designed some environmental setpieces. I wanted them to tell a story about how your friends had died, and what had gone wrong.

For example, here I wanted to convey that he had been shot, leaned against the wall and died, his body propping the door shut from the zombies trying to get in.

I had a very clear idea early on that I wanted a scene like this: a door slightly ajar and a trail of blood leading to it from a toppled chair, which leads the player to this:

Once I had those, I went to work on the level layout. My initial sketches were just based off of real-life cabin layouts that I looked up. I tried to find layouts that I thought would be very easily adaptable into a game: I tried imagining myself walking through the layouts, and how I would place my setpieces and guide the player through the cabin.

The final sketch I settled on was this:

I liked the idea of having a kitchen island counter where the player would start. It would allow me to directly guide the player where I wanted them to be, and conceal a lot of the level before they get to the end of the counter and see the rest of the cabin.

One thing I learned from this process was that your levels will always be designed way bigger than they need to be. Throughout the whole process my level layout changed from this:

To this:

Entire sections of my layout had been removed, and the entire level was just compressed.

One of the most tumultuous aspects of the project was modeling my low poly character. I decided early on that I wanted to model everything, but it turned out that that was far too ambitious and it meant I had to cut down on a lot of content and polish.

While I was happy with how it ended up turning, it took up far too much of my time making the model, and in the future, I would rather focus my efforts on the rest of the level.

In the end, I learned a lot from this process. I needed to budget my time better, identify what aspects of my game were the most important and zero in on that. I’ll definitely be taking these lessons to heart moving forward.

If you want to try out my game, you can download the build here: https://goo.gl/6QxUJT

[chrispydesign]

Slot Based Skill Systems - How Restrictions Can Lead to Interesting Gameplay

Skill-based progression systems are quite common in video games, particularly in RPGs. Though there are multiple ways for games to handle experience, levelling up and skill systems, today I want to look at two games in particular that utilise a slot-based system, how it curbs the potential problem of “god” characters, how it allows the player to express themselves through game mechanics and creates extra meaningful complexity to games.

Witcher 3

In the Witcher 3, as you go around completing quests and fighting monsters as Geralt you earn experience and can level up. When you do so, you can put points into skills, but there’s a catch: it’s not enough to just have points into a skill, but you also need to assign that skill to one of your available skill slots.

The number of slots you have access to increases as you level up, but caps at 12. No matter how high you level up, you can only ever have 12 skills active. Because of how it limits the player, it prevents the player from ever becoming too powerful for the game and becoming a “god” character, while at the same time forcing the player to make meaningful decisions as to what skills they want to use to complement their play style and which skills synergise with other skills.

However, there are some flaws in this system. Because each skill has the same cost associated with their use (one skill slot), each skill must be designed for the same power level, or else there is little point taking the weaker skills when you can use the stronger ones at no additional cost.

Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight handles its skill system quite differently. As a Metroidvania, one of the core aspects of gameplay is exploration, and the skill system is integrated into exploring the environment, not levelling up and gaining experience.

Skills come in the form of charms that augment the player’s abilities. They can either be bought from vendors or found in the environment or through beating bosses. It encourages players to engage with the core mechanic of exploration by tying “progression” to exploration. To complement this, the player is also shown the full list of charms that they will eventually get access to, with their abilities and design hidden from the player, enticing them to go out into the world, explore and find the charms. While this is quite different from traditional RPG, much like the Witcher it also handles its skill allocation on a slot based system.

To begin with, the player only has access to three slots (called notches in the game), and only gets access to a handful of charms early on. Each charm takes up a varying number of slots, based on the strength of the charm.

Right off the bat, the player is presented with a meaningful decision: do they use three weaker charms that together might create a powerful effect, take one mid-strength charm and one weak charm or one strong charm? Not only that, but the charms also affect multiple different aspects of Hollow Knight’s gameplay: some affect your nail attacks, some help you explore more easily, some are focused on manipulating the Soul resource to cast spells or heal, and many more. What charms the player equips will influence and be influenced by the playstyle of the player and what they prioritise in their Hollow Knight experience.

Then every time you find an extra charm notch, your entire build changes again. With the extra notch, new options open up to the player: do they simply add a 1-notch charm to their build, or remove a different charm to add another charm that they previously couldn’t use? This is all before we even consider the fact that some charms have specific interactions and synergies with other charms, opening up more options for the player.

Conclusion

While on the surface slot based skill systems seem quite restrictive, depending on how they are implemented they can lead to meaningful and interesting player decisions. Under the limitations provided by the system, players are challenged to optimise their build at whatever stage of the game they are at, while also using the system to express themselves and their unique playstyles. While allowing players to access and benefit from every skill available can be fun, I find that it’s restrictions that lead to more interesting decisions and gameplay.

[chrispydesign]

No Robots Were Harmed in the Making of This Prototype

Another 6 weeks another post-mortem. It’s been a crazy 6 weeks, and it’s all been spent working on this one project: Room-Bot Rumble.

This has been the first time I’ve touched coding seriously, and I have to say that I have mad respect for programmers now. When your code works as intended you feel like a god, but when it doesn’t...

Never has this felt truer.

For this unit, we had to learn to program from scratch and create a prototype. After watching a few too many cat on Roomba vids...

and a little bit of ARMS...

I had an idea. ARMS meets Roombas in a king-of-the-hill style party game.

R O O M - B O T     R U M B L E

I knew from the beginning that what I wanted was a weird and janky movement system. But a delicate balance was going to be necessary; making something weird was one thing, but I didn’t want it to be unfun.

My first idea went as such: 4-player party game - 2 v 2. Each robot moves forward at all times, while one player controls the Roomba’s movement, and the other controls the punches.

That idea didn’t last very long. The fact that you needed 4 players at minimum to play seemed like a huge limiting factor, but I kept the control scheme intact but adjusted it to just be two players.

Before I even touched Unity or coding, I started off with paper prototyping. I knew the robots would punch each other to knock each other back, and that there would be a control zone of some sorts that players would have to go for. I also tried physical prototyping: I got my friends to sit in office chairs, push each other around and swing at each other. It looked hilarious as it sounds.

But it wasn’t all fun and games; through this testing and discussion I figured out a new interesting control scheme that I would roll with: tying throwing punches to rotating your body. It would be weird, wacky and everything I wanted in my control scheme.

Now, to translate this into code and Unity. Oh boy.

This is how my early iteration of the game looked.

Feedback from my teacher and colleagues revealed so many things wrong with this. The floor colour looked ugly, the camera was way too far away from the players and there wasn’t a control zone yet. BUT the gameplay was fairly fun. Punching people felt very satisfying.

3 weeks later, the game looks like this now:

Tightened the map, added some obstacles, got the control zone working, changed the colour scheme, added lights to player punches, and got a score UI working. You can’t see it in the gif, but I also have a main menu, pause menu and the player can restart and quit the game. It doesn’t sound like much, but working on this all from scratch and seeing it finally come together was like magic.

So what have I learned from this? A lot of things actually.

For starters, I definitely needed to plan my scripts a lot more. I ended up with far more scripts than necessary; I definitely could’ve rolled a lot of my UI scripts into the one script, but I never planned that far ahead, and just made them as I identified that I needed them.

I also learnt how important getting feedback was. Without my classmates and teacher always there to tell me how I could improve the game, and how they felt about the mechanics I don’t think it would’ve ended up as good as it is now. It was especially important because of the nature of my design of the game: wanting to have weird, janky controls but not make them too weird and too janky to the point of being unfun.

I was really happy with the end product and glad that I could bring smiles to so many of my friend’s faces. I’m looking forward to putting the skills I learnt here to more use in future projects. Stay tuned for more updates!

[chrispydesign]

Healing in Dark Souls - More than Just a Health System

Dark Souls is an action role-playing game that has reached legendary status within the gaming community. It is renowned for its environmental storytelling, intricate level design and skill based combat. Developed by From Software and published by Namco Bandai in 2011, it received critical acclaim upon release, with the difficulty of the game being one of the most contentious and talked about aspects of the game: some praised how challenging the difficulty was, while others saw it as being unnecessarily harsh on players.

Regardless, something I wanted to discuss was how health and healing was implemented in Dark Souls. Because of how the health system interacts with combat and exploration in Dark Souls, it is able to serve a variety of purposes in-game and ties together nicely with the intended experience of the game. And it’s all thanks to this little guy: the Estus Flask.

If there is one thing that Dark Souls is about, it’s skill. The game does its best to never feel unfair to the player. All damage in-game is avoidable, and combat heavily rewards skilled players who are able to dispatch enemies efficiently. This focus on player skill also extends to healing. The only way to heal in Dark Souls outside of resting at a bonfire is to consume an Estus flask. However, this takes time, and while your character is drinking they also cannot move. This means that players can’t just pause the game and heal whenever they get in trouble; in fact, there is no pausing in this game at all. If a player gets low on health and wants to recover health, they must find a safe moment in combat - for example, running away from enemies or stunning an enemy - in order to have enough time to drink from your flask without being hit. Because of this, healing is reliant on player skill; the fact that healing is a large commitment and leaves you vulnerable is something players must always take into consideration, and it will dictate how cautiously the player approaches a combat scenario.

But your Estus flask cannot sustain you forever. Healing in Dark Souls is simultaneously finite and infinite; at any given moment, your Estus has a cap on how many charges it has before it must be replenished. But, you can also refill your Estus flask by visiting a bonfire, one of many checkpoints scattered throughout the world. The charge based system also emphasises player skill: players cannot brute force their way through combat encounters by grinding for healing items so you have an essentially unlimited source of healing. At the same time, it also does not actively discourage players from using health items; if Estus flask charges acted as a consumable and were permanently lost when used, players might have second thoughts on using healing when they might otherwise need to, because they fear that will never get that charge back and might need it later.

The number of charges in your Estus flask essentially acts like a tally for the number of mistakes you are allowed to make in combat: as you can only refresh them when you visit a bonfire, the stretches in between bonfires are a test of player’s skill, and how efficiently and safely they can make their way through the world while making the least amount of mistakes. This is also exacerbated by the boss fights: unlike other games, Dark Souls does not typically provide you with a checkpoint right before a boss fight: if you fall in combat against a boss, you must trek your way through the level again before you get another chance at fighting them. So in a similar way, the existence of the boss fight at the end of the road makes it even more pertinent that players conserve their Estus charges while they are fighting their way through the level; players are incentivised to play in such a way as to maximise the amount of healing they have by the time they make it to the boss fight.

The charge based system also creates an interesting choice that players must make when they fight. In combat, you will often take glancing hits, hits that aren’t powerful enough to deal significant damage, but small hits that will add up over time. Because healing is such a time commitment, when players find themselves losing health from small hits, they have a choice they must make: do they use a charge of Estus as soon as they find an opening, but end up wasting some of the healing it provides because you overheal, or do you play it risky and wait until you can maximise the value of your Estus flask charge? There are times when your health may not be low enough to gain the full healing from an Estus flask, but also low enough to be one-shot or chain attacked by an enemy and die. This dynamic creates another layer of depth to the decision-making in combat.

Another interesting way that the Estus flask interacts with more than health is how it creates dynamic difficulty. At each bonfire, you can expend souls to tend to the bonfire, which will increase the amount of Estus flask charges you replenish when you rest at that specific bonfire. As I mentioned before, Estus flask charges essentially act as a tally for the number of mistakes you are allowed to make, and thus by increasing that number it makes the game a little easier while still retaining that strong focus on skill. Because this choice exists, it allows the player to modulate their own difficulty without feeling patronised or feeling like they are cheating the game or giving up; many games do offer different ways to deal with difficulty, from having it be a setting that can be changed in the options, or allowing the game to play for the player if they die in one level enough. However, Dark Souls takes a different approach to this; by making the difficulty modification a part of the game that exists both in-universe and as a game mechanic, players do not feel like they are gaming the system by reducing the difficulty for themselves; it feels like a strategic choice from the player. If they are finding a specific area particularly difficult, they can tend to that area’s bonfire (using an in-game mechanic) to alleviate the difficulty but without trivialising the challenge; they can simply make more mistakes before they must return to the bonfire.

Overall, Dark Souls stands as a shining example of how to incorporate a healing system into your game. Not only does it stand alone as a great and well designed mechanic, it also contributes greatly to the core gameplay of Dark Souls and the intended player experience and facilitates and enhances the focus on skill, challenge and overcoming adversity that the Souls series is known for.

[chrispydesign]

OXENFREE - Strangest Things

I’m a big fan of games with a strong narrative and games that try something new and unique. Oxenfree is both of those things, and I love it for that.

Oxenfree is a story-driven supernatural thriller about a group of teenagers who unwittingly open a ghostly rift on a deserted island. The game was developed by Night School Studios to rave reviews. The quality of its voice acting and dialogue help create a believable and enjoyable dynamic between the characters, combined with an intriguing story and unique dialogue system is what sets this game above other story-driven titles. While it still had moments of tedium (generally everything that wasn’t related to character development or story), overall Oxenfree is a well-crafted experience that immerses you in its story and makes the player make choices that truly do have an impact on how the story plays out (but not in an annoying way). Goes without saying, but SPOILERS AHEAD.

First, I HAVE to talk about the dialogue system. The first time I played the game, the game absolutely floored me with its dialogue system; it was novel, simple and effective and the crowning achievement of the game in my opinion.

(DISCLAIMER: I played the game on the Nintendo Switch, but I assume the button mapping will be similar between consoles)

I’ll explain how it works first. Throughout the game, characters will be talking to Alex, the player character, and each other. At various points in the game, some speech bubbles will appear above your head, in the general directions of up, left and right. Each bubble corresponds to a button on the controller; the upper bubble is for the upper button, left bubble for the left button and so on. When a dialogue option presents itself, players can choose one of the options by pressing the appropriate button, and Alex will speak.

That in and of itself is already great: the button mapping feels natural and intuitive and the response is fluid and doesn’t break the flow of dialogue. But there is so much more to the dialogue than this that really elevates it.

Many of the elements of the dialogue system serve to make the conversations flow smoothly and seem as natural as possible. To start with, something Oxenfree allows the player to do that many games do not is to not say anything. Many games will essentially pause the world when they ask a player a question, giving them infinite time to answer. This is not the case in Oxenfree.

In real life, a lot of times saying nothing is the correct way to go. Oxenfree recognises this, and incorporates that option into its dialogue. Many times throughout the game you are prompted to respond to what has been said, and every time, you can choose to simply not answer them. This is communicated to the player by having the speech bubbles slowly fade away as time passes, telling the player how much time they have to make an input. If the bubbles fade away, Alex will elect not to say anything.

A dialogue system is all well and good, but without good voice acting and written dialogue, it won’t matter how clean and well executed the dialogue system is. Thankfully, Oxenfree has quality voice acting and dialogue in spades.

The voice actors are great. They each have a distinctive voice that encapsulates the characters they are portraying, and the way they talk for the most part sounds completely believable as American teens.

A great way the system ties together with the voice acting and written dialogue is how the game deals with interjecting dialogue. This is also a problem that affects movies from time to time; in real life, people don’t just wait their turn to say their lines. In a group environment, there will be a lot of interjecting while others are talking, speaking over each other, etc. Oxenfree’s dialogue is written in such a way to facilitate this; when you select a speech option, sometimes Alex will interject in the middle of what the current character is saying. When she’s finished, the character will say some lines like “Now, where was I?” and continue with what they were saying. Because of the way the dialogue is written, the conversations in Oxenfree feel like actual conversations, not actors reading off lines.

As much as I love the dialogue system it is not without some flaws. The main problem I encountered was that I was never sure if a dialogue option would make Alex cut into the current character’s dialogue or if she would wait for them to finish before speaking. But, that problem has a simple fix: having the interjecting dialogue speech bubble be jagged to indicate they are going to cut off another character would be an effective and simple way of communicating what kind of dialogue you are choosing.

Another problem I encountered was how the dialogue interacted with interactable objects. As you move around the island, there are various points of interest that Alex can interact with and start talking about. However, you will often encounter these points of interest in the middle of plot-relevant dialogue, and sometimes, interacting with these points of interest would actually cut off the plot-relevant dialogue and it wouldn’t returned. This happened to me early on in my playthrough, which made me fairly paranoid about doing so again while a character was talking, leading to lots of moments where I was simply standing around, waiting for a character to finish talking before interacting with anything.

These days, a game granting player’s choices that influence the world is almost a given. It’s expected from a lot of players that their decisions will have some impact on the game world, and a lot of games play this feature up a LOT, particularly story-driven games.

To me, the most important part about choices in games is that they feel like an organic part of gameplay (i.e. not immersion breaking), that they lead to a meaningful consequence, and that such a consequence is largely predictable by a player. It’s difficult for a game or choice to fit all three of these criteria (unless you’re Fallout 2), but even knocking a few of these criteria goes a long way to make choices in games more appealing and well-executed.

One of the things I dislike in games is the obvious signposting of choices. For example, in Dragon Age every choice and dialogue option you make that will influence your character and the world is blatantly shown to the player, and the consequences of the choice spelled out too. I also believe that often when a game makes its choice have a clear “better” choice, it undermines the point of having a choice in a game (eg. Rescuing the Little Sisters in Bioshock). Oxenfree thankfully does neither of these things.

While not every dialogue option will have influence the characters, it is also not made obvious by the game which ones will; these dialogue options are not presented in a different way to the rest of the dialogue options, but the player can intuit that these options will have some effect if they are following the story and reading the dialogue options. A lot of these options come up in normal conversation, and some of them arise from the narrative and tensions between characters. The most important part is that the choices all feel natural and do not break your immersion with the game or story.

One particular section I want to talk about here illustrates the good parts of how the game deals with choices, but it also does clash with the narrative a little in my opinion, which I will discuss later.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

At some point during the game, you will be sent back to the past and relive the moments where your brother Michael died, and the moments leading up to that. In these moments, Alex is given a chance to talk to Michael and Clarissa in the past, and her dialogue will actually influence them. This happens various times, and they do not happen linearly (i.e. the first time you go back to the past is actually further in the timeline than the second and third time you go back).

Here is where the predictability of consequences shines. In the first flashback, you learn that Michael died because he went swimming with you and Clarissa, and he did so because he decided to leave the town and go study interstate, so he wanted to have one last celebration before he left.

Later, Alex goes back in time again, this time before that fateful day. Michael will ask Alex for her advice about whether he should go interstate to study. Now, knowing that Michael died because of a chain of events that started because he wanted to go interstate to study, the player can use this information to make Alex tell Michael to stay in town to study, preventing him from dying. This is never signposted to the player, but it is information that an attentive player can learn and utilise to inform their dialogue choices. It demonstrates aptly that choices in Oxenfree matter, do influence characters and are relatively predictable.

But this segment is also problematic, in a narrative sense. One of the themes of the game is moving on from the past: the ghosts that plague Alex and her friends torment her because they are trapped in the past, obsessed with getting revenge and returning to life and have become warped and inhuman because of this. One of the possible endings is reminding the ghosts of their humanity, and convincing them to let you go and move on to the other side.

For some reason, this character arc can be exempt from Alex, if she decides to bring Michael back to life by influencing the past. Is Alex a hypocrite, exempt from the lesson she is trying to impart on the ghosts? This would’ve been a great moment where Alex also learns that she too must move on from the past and look to the future, but there is the possibility for Alex to not come to that realisation and grow as a person. To me, Oxenfree should not have allowed Alex to change the past, rather, Alex could have gone back to the past, but realised that she can’t change anything; no matter what she tries to do, Michael still goes interstate to study, he still goes to the beach with her and Clarissa, and he still drowns. 

It also raises weird Butterfly-esque questions; if at the end Michael is alive, despite all odds Jonas still meets Ren and Alex and comes to the island with them despite none of the events that were put in motion by Michael’s death that eventually led to them meeting having taken place. 

Despite some of these problems, this section is only a small part of the narrative. The core of the story still remains very solid throughout Oxenfree and will keep you engaged throughout. 

But by far the worst quality of the game is the tedium present in some sections. There is a LOT of walking in this game, which would be fine if there was enough dialogue and character interactions to fill that empty space, but you’ll often find the characters exhausted of words and just silently walking around the island.

The puzzles are also relatively uninspired; not very challenging or engaging, and just give the player a break from the more interesting parts of the game, the characters.

Rewinding the tapes was also a chore. Doing just one of them for each time loop you get stuck in would be more than enough to serve as an indicator that you have broken the loop. But for some reason the number of tapes you have to rewind INCREASES as you play the game, making it a chore to do, especially considering that it does take a considerable amount of time.

There are a lot of places where Oxenfree could serve to cut the fat, remove some of the more tedious aspects of the game and focus even more on its biggest selling point; its interactive story.

In closing, Oxenfree is a fantastic game and definitely worth checking out. The story is short and sweet, the characters are likable and believable, and aside from a few tired moments in the game, it’s a deeply satisfying experience. The dialogue system is an incredibly inventive, unique and greatly satisfying way of handling character dialogue, and I very much look forward to future applications of the system and the storytelling that will emerge from it.

[chrispydesign]

A Game Design Student’s Post Mortem - 2 Many Ducks

This gif may not make much sense right now, but trust me it will. These past 6 weeks have been insanely hectic. I’ve probably learned more in 6 weeks than I’ve learned more in these 6 weeks than all of high school, but this has also been the most fun I’ve ever had studying. 

Before I talk about ducks, I have to talk about some of the other cool stuff we’ve done. We’ve been focusing on level design, and specifically modularity in design. We’ve learned from game development giants like Bethesda how they designed their modular kits, which allowed them to save on development costs by making level generation an easier and more optimised process. In the spirit of this, we tried to design our own modular kits; I decided to do mine based on a mine. 

I never got to texture it or build anything with it, but it was a good exercise. I also learned about scoping: I initially had much more to the mine that would allow it to have modular height, but even with the fixed height it was still difficult and time-consuming to design and model. I would like to one day revisit this and make a level with it. 

Expanding on that idea of modularity, we examined another game that has a heavy focus on it, but for a different purpose: Borderlands is well known for its “87 bazillion guns”, and clearly they didn’t model each individual gun; rather, they divided a gun into different components (stock, barrel, scope, grip, magazine), designed some parts for each, and mixed and matched them in game. We also designed our own guns, and I went for a more... outlandish feel to mine. 

Yes, that is a trebuchet as a scope. I ran out of time before making the main of the body, so I learned a lesson there about time management. 

Last but not least, we have to talk about the meat of this unit: the 6 week long assignment, Mother Duck. For this assessment, we were given a competitive party game abotu chasing ducks, but we had to design a level based on a real environment in Melbourne, and my group chose the Arts Centre.

This was also the first time I’d every done on-site referencing for a project. As a group, we headed over to the Arts Centre and took a bunch of photos and sketches: I personally took 500 photos, which were a pain to sort through but provided ample references for our models and textures in the level. 

We didn’t know it at the time, but these references would be critical to the development of the level: having an image to make your model from is a million times easier than trying to model an object from memory. Very glad I spent a lot of time taking a ton of images.

As a team, we allocated tasks to each other and got to work. My particular beast to slay was the centrepiece of our level: when you think of the Arts Centre, the first thing that pops into most people’s minds is the Eiffel-Tower-esque spire perched atop it. 

Yep, I had to figure out how to model that. Good luck to me I guess. 

My process of modelling the Spire went through many iterations. I started by trying to create it using polygon primitives: 

Yea, it didn’t turn out looking so good. I soon scrapped that approach, and tried to figure out another way to do it. Thankfully, my teacher introduced me to a nifty tool called “Lattice” in 3DS Max. The tool would draw a cylinder around every line in your object, very useful for replicating the Spire’s mesh design. With that knoweldge in mind, I reworked my approach, and tried to make the spire out of planes and draw lines inside the planes which would later become cylinders.

STEP 2: 

After completing that, I exported it from Maya to 3DS to lattice it. 

STEP 3: ???

STEP 4: PROFIT

I think it turned out looking pretty good. 

Through trying to make this beast of a model, I learned a lot of tools that Maya had available to me, and was able to really broaden my knowledge of 3D Modelling. Though it took me longer to model the Spire than I would’ve liked, it ended up beign very worth it. 

But the Spire wasn’t the only thing in the level: when it comes to level design, there’s a lot more that goes into it than a hero model. Unfortunately, my team was one of many that suffered from production issues: namely, we started off as a 4-man team but ended up as a 3-man project within the first day, then a 2-man team halfway through the project. 

Things were not looking good. 

With only two of us remaining, we had to shift our game development into overdrive. We had to cut so much content from our level, reallocate all of our tasks, and ensure that we were both on top of our game in order to make our deadline. 

It was a stressful 6 weeks, not going to lie, but you know what? It was totally worth it in the end. We managed to put together a pretty killer level that I’m proud of, and also learned a lot about people: some you can rely on, and some you can’t. Our troubled production experience and how we made the most of a crappy situation is something I will keep with me for future projects. Experience is the best teacher after all. 

Here’s a GIF from our final level. Let me know what you think.

https://gph.is/2rqKvFc

Overall, this unit has been a stressful and tiring experience but super rewarding. I’ve had a lot of fun learning, and I’m definitely looking forward to more of it, but maybe a bit less hair-tearing and hopefully production goes smoothly next time (yea right). 

[chrispydesign]

To infinity... and BEYOND

While working on a school assignment, I found a weird interaction between the player controller and inclines. I’ll let you see what happens for yourselves...

[chrispydesign]

A Game Design Student’s Post Mortem

As the first six weeks in my game design course comes to an end, I want to take some time to reflect on what I have learned since I made the life-changing decision to become a game developer.

The year so far has been incredibly intense, and jam-packed with content and activities. I’ve learnt so much about the game design process, and I’ve also learnt how much I still need to learn.

Before I started this course, I barely knew anything about how to develop a game. And now, I’ve been able to dip my feet into a variety of programs, start messing around with them and become more familiar with them.

We started with a program since before the days of Unity: Doom Builder. After learning about the design of the original Doom, we were tasked with designing our own levels. I  found level design to be quite challenging; the level I made ended up being quite rudimentary. I spent most of my time in that class helping other people implement their levels rather than work on my own. In the future, I really want to improve my level design skills.

After this, we were introduced to Unity. Our first task seemed relatively easy: recreate a piece of concept art in a scene in Unity. You can see my first two attempts at this here and here. Working with just the primitives and ProBuilder felt restrictive at times, so I will be looking forward to sinking my teeth into Maya and using that for my modelling.

We also learnt about using Photoshop. We started with a photo of Google Maps.

From there, we used photoshop and accompanying reference images to outline the important details.

Finally, we brought this into Unity to recreate this scene, much like we had done from the concept art.

http://gph.is/2Itr4D7

I learned a lot about using Photoshop through this process, and how useful it can be as a tool for a designer. I’ll have to shell out some cash to get Photoshop at home so I can continue to mess around with it.

I loved learning about the MDA Framework for analysing games. While I’ve dabbled in game review and analysis in my spare time, it always felt like I didn’t quite know how to word my thoughts and ideas, and convert them into something that was easily read and digestible. The MDA Framework has been super helpful in creating a consistent and universal lexicon that I can apply to my game analysis, and helped me become better at it.

And of course, one of the most critical things that a game designer needs to know: how to construct a Game Design Document. The task seemed daunting when I first heard about it; creating a 45 page document was well beyond the scope of anything I’d ever attempted in my wildest dreams. But I found that, once I had an idea I was happy with the words flowed onto the paper, a stream of thoughts from my brain onto page. Thanks to some feedback from classmates and my teacher, I’ve been able to improve my writing skills and create a GDD that I’m proud of. Though I may never make this game, it was great to be able to practice the process of assembling a GDD.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time so far learning about game design. Going forward, I want to focus a lot on my personal development, and doing work outside of class and outside of the prescribed work. I’ll be posting updates onto this blog, so follow if you want to see more.

[chrispydesign]

Darkest Dungeon - A Short Analysis

Darkest Dungeon is an RPG developed by Red Hook Studios and was released in 2016. It received rave reviews and for good reason; the game takes the tried and tested turn-based party RPG format, and puts its own unique take on the mechanics, while also crafting a deep and interesting world based on Lovecraftian horror, a mythos that has not been utilised in many successful mainstream games. The positional combat adds more complexity and depth to the turn-based combat, and the stress management system creates a new resource to manage while also creating organic moral decisions for the player. 

You have inherited a mansion from a relative who has awakened ancient evils inside the dungeons below the mansion. As the new owner of the mansion, you are now tasked with clearing out the dungeons below it by recruiting adventurers to delve into the dungeons and confront the horrors that lurk beneath.

Darkest Dungeon’s core loop can be summarised as such: You send your party into a dungeon, aiming to complete an objective and loot the dungeon. After clearing a dungeon (or failing), you return to your Hamlet, the base of operations. You spend the currency (heirlooms and gold) to upgrade your Hamlet. You can also upgrade your Adventurers who survived, assign them to stress relief activities to relieve the accumulated stress built up over dungeoneering or recruit new Adventurers to replace the ones you lost. Then, it’s back into the dungeon you go, going through harder and harder enemies and dungeons until you confront the bosses and eventually, the titular Darkest Dungeon.

The game utilises the randomness in combat very well; it creates great cycles of tension and relief as you wait for that next attack that might decimate your entire party, and sigh in relief when the enemy misses. Likewise, it can cause deep frustration when your Adventurers are unable to get their act together and keep failing to kill enemies, taking more damage and getting more stressed in the process. It’s an unforgiving and brutal game that really aptly captures the tone of despair and horror that is commonly associated with Lovecraftian Horror.

The Stress management system is one of the major aspects of the game that sets it apart. As your Adventurer crawls through the dungeon, they will accumulate Stress. If an Adventurer accumulates enough Stress, it can apply a debuff called Afflicted onto them, which applies stat penalties and can also have a variety of effects, from making them ignore your commands, to refusing healing from allies or shouting abuse at the rest of your party, causing them to become more stressed. Eventually, if an Adventurer accumulates enough Stress they can have a heart attack, bringing them down to 0 health. 

However, Stress doesn’t end when the dungeon does; an Adventurer’s Stress will persist when you head back to your Hamlet, as well as their Afflictions. Managing the Stress of your Adventurers is a core part of the game; in the dungeons, you want Adventurers to maintain low Stress so as to not debuff themselves and the party. Post-dungeons, players have a few ways to deal with Stress: you can spend money to assign Adventurers to the stress relief activities, which will occupy them for one dungeon run but reduce their stress, or you can send them away from your Hamlet, and recruit a new Adventurer to take their place. 

One thing that’s very interesting about the mechanics of Darkest Dungeon is the moral dilemma that the dynamics present to the player. Adventurers accumulate Stress, and Stress costs time and money to cure. However, recruiting new adventurers is free; there’s always a few fresh-faced adventurers eager to take a crack at the dungeons. In some cases, it will be cheaper to recruit a bunch of new Adventurers, send them into a dungeon to gather as much loot as possible not caring about their Stress, then go back to the Hamlet and send them on their merry way, their minds tortured and torn apart by the Eldritch horrors they have witnessed. It’s an interesting moral dilemma that is presented to the player that isn’t signposted by an obvious “YOU ARE MAKING A MORAL CHOICE” flag from the game, which is exceptional and something a lot of games ought to do more of. 

Overall, Darkest Dungeon is a fantastically brutal game that delivers on its promise to instill dread, despair, and horror in the player. Its unique mechanics create a fresh new turn-based RPG with a captivating setting and rich world. 

[chrispydesign]

Messing Around with Probuilder

Another attempt at recreating concept art in Unity. This time, utilising the new tool Probuilder that was introduced in class. How do you reckon I did?

[chrispydesign]

Creating a Unity Scene from Concept Art

One of our first assignments in class is to choose some concept art and try to recreate the blocking in Unity. But, we only could use primitive objects and had 2 hours to do so. This is the concept art I chose, and what I ended up with. What do you think?