loudenemyphilosopher

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 12 - Assignment 3 Post-mortem

Introduction

Swordsage: Oakwood Adventure was my first collaborative game development experience. I worked in a team to code and create a platformer game. This game used a pixel art style and involved the player working their way through a level, taking out monsters, and saving their progress, as they went.

Team

The team consisted of myself, Antonio Naoher, and Luke Boulter. The contributions include

Alex - Playtesting, Programming, Asset design, sprite cutting, hitbox rigging, prototyping

Antonio - Game Testing, Level Design

Luke - Playtesting, Part B doc setup

Objectives and Goals:

The initial objective of this assignment was to create a game that would challenge my programming skills as well as my creative design skills, while also documenting my progress and reflecting on and improving the game based on extensive feedback.

What Went Well:

The game programming and designing went well, as I had lots of fun turning my ideas into a real game and it felt very satisfying being able to program what I wanted to put into my game. As a team, we also worked well together, by effectively communicating through discord to lay out the work for who would do what. Playtesting also went well as we got lots of valuable feedback which helped us to reflect on feedback on the game. Luke was very proactive with the documentation of part B of assignment 3 as he created the template for us to work on. Antonio also exceeded expectations numerously as he turned my sprites and coding into a beautiful level, which surprised me.

What Didn't Go Well:

Prototyping didn't go very well as we had lots of features that we initially wanted to have in the game but couldn't due to time restrictions. Additionally, there were also issues with some of the game design where we had features coded that couldn't be used due to performance issues, which ended up being a setback.

Root Causes and Analysis:

I think many of our shortcomings were caused by time restraints and a lack of game design/programming skills. However, many of the reasons for our successes are due to our team's dedication and specifically our teamwork and communication.

Lessons Learned:

The first lesson I learned from this assignment was, that the sooner I get started on an assignment the better I can do on it because I have heaps of time and wouldn't need to be as stressed. I also learned that programming can be lots of fun when I know what I'm doing. This assignment also reinforced the importance of teamwork and communication. These lessons are valuable to me as they will aid me in future assignments throughout my bachelor of games and interactive design and ideally will also aid me when I join the workforce of the games industry. This will also aid me in any personal projects that I choose to do as it will help me manage my workflow.

Closing Remarks:

In closing, I think I have learned valuable information and lessons in game design and teamwork as I am really proud of how the game turned out. I am especially happy with the findings and feedback as it helped us greatly in improving the game.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 11 - Assignment 3 Playtesting

With Week 11 being Playtesting, I decided that I was going to have some of my family try my game. I decided to do this because I would have play testers of varying skill levels and experience playing my game which would get me a wide range of feedback.

From my family, I had 3 playtesters, one who had never played any games before, one who only played the occasional mobile game, and one who had lots of gaming experience on consoles.

From the first playtester (no prior gaming experience) I found that it would be good to have varying difficulty that players could choose from, which would make the game less overwhelming for less experienced players. The participant also liked the fact that the game started with a tutorial that clearly and simply explained the controls and the basics of the game.

The second participant (with little experience with video games) found the game very fun and also enjoyed the tutorial, but thorught that it would be nice if they could change the controls that they played on.

The third playtester (experienced console gamer) thought the game was easy to play and needed more mechanics, such as abilities and knockback when hit, etc but other than that enjoyed the game.

Other feedback I found was:

When enemies don't have any hurt animations, the only way to tell when damaged is from a quick flash

The game was easy and required more enemies for the player to fight

The game needed more sounds/effects to feel immersive

The game needed more decorations/objects as the current game feels bare bones to play

The camera movement was a very nice addition

The player should have the choice to have more health

From here our team will continue to work on our game and will try to make changes according to feedback to better improve the game

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 10 - Assignment 3 Development Progress / Group Formation and Team Discussion

For Assignment 3, I have teamed up with Luke Boulter and Antonio Naoher to create our prototype. After a short meeting discussing the assignment, our team agreed to work on my first platformer called Swordsage: Oakwood Adventure. The reason why we chose this game was because we saw that a platformer had lots of opportunities for creative freedom and we believe that we could be constantly expanding the game.

So far for assignment three, we have already made good progress with development. We have done the following.

Added pathfinding to enemies and fixed bugs that came with it such as enemies still following the payer after death

Added particle effects

Created a tutorial-level

Implemented a soundtrack

Created the sprites needed to create the world

This is currently where the game is at, as a team we have planned out what we will all be doing and are still coming up with ideas that we could use in the game.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 9 - Racing Game Post-Mortem

Creating a racing game on Gdevelop has taught me the basics of racing games, top-down gameplay, and randomly generating sprites. Overall, this game creation was fun and intuitive and was significantly quicker than the past games I have worked on, as with every game ia have created, I have become more competent.

Strengths

Setting up the scene was fairly easy as I just needed to put together a road and the user's car of choice.

It was also easy to find sprites that I wanted to use as there were plenty of top-down car / racing-themed sprites for me to choose from.

What could have been improved?

I think if I were to make another racing game I would put more time into the movement to make the driving feel nicer and easier for the player. I would also put more time into the world design to make the game immersive, as the scene was fairly simple for the player.

Takeaways

From this game creation, I have further progressed my understanding of Gdeveleop and I found that I have become more efficient with my game creation. I have noticed that I do not make the same mistakes I used to in the past games and my code is optimized.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed creating this racing game, as I feel like it has contributed to my understanding of Gdevelop and my overall game design career.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 8 - Assignment two progress

When I started working on assignment two, I decided I was going to base it on which game I had enjoyed making the most and what game idea I was most likely to use for the third assignment.

The game I settled on was a separate platformer I had worked on early on in the semester which I enjoyed working on and was planned to be used for assignment three.

So far doing this assignment has been a refreshing and interesting change which I am thoroughly enjoying. I have found the screenshots that I plan to use for the one sheet and one page as shown below

Luckily for me, when I originally started working on this game I already come up with a name and some features, so this has made the assignment easier to work on.

From here I need to finish writing up my ideas and the other information required for the one sheet and one page, then add my information to the Canva designs.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 8 - Racing development pitch

Since the elevator pitch for the Chase down, great progress has been made, the player can switch between lanes, going forward and back and cars now spawn in random lanes and at random times.

Currently, I am working on making a progress bar to show the player how close they are to completing the level / catching the robber. I am also working towards creating different cars that will spawn randomly which I will do by adding different animations to the cars, and then when the car spawns it will have a random location, random speed, and random style, which should make the game more interesting.

I have also had to solve some bugs/glitches such as an issue with the cars spawning too fast and overlapping, which was solved by adding timer resets after a car spawns.

I also have had some minor playtests done, and feedback I had gotten was that the cars were spawning too fast, going too fast, and creating unpassable barriers that the player would die to which I have also worked towards fixing by reducing the spawn speed range and reducing the speed of the cars.

I aim to continue working on this game, adding more features and having it playtested further, in order to make my game fun to play.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 7 - Game elevator pitch

Title of Game: The Chase down (Racing Game)

Have you ever wanted to experience the thrill of a high pursuit chase. Well now you can. In the Chase down you can experience a chase between cops and robbers, ambulance and a hospital or a firetruck and a fire.

Control Diagram

birds eye view

navigate through multiple lanes of traffic.

avoid obstacles.

reach the different types of "finish lines."

gain speed

Slowing down

crashing

How to play:

The player will control either the cop car, the ambulance or the fire truck and will use the arrow keys to navigate up/down and forwards/back on the roads to avoid obstacles that will be on the road. The car speeds up when the player doesn't hit anything and slows down when there are collisions. The player wins when they reach the destination.

What Makes this game special? ● The player can choose the event they would like the play through, and it will be customised to the players choice

There will be a high score system that the player can use to challenge top times.

There will be power-ups mixed in with obstacles that will provide an incentive for the player to be riskier.

Bonus speed for close calls encourages the player to move at the last second for bonus speed.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 7 - Deztroid post-mortem

Introduction

My goal for Deztroid was to experiment with an asteroid-style game and to try out different scenes as I didn't use any scenes in my previous games.

Development Overview

I started off making this game by following the baseline tutorial, with my own chosen sprites and making minor changes to the tutorial to have it perform the way I wanted it to. After completing the tutorial I started adding different features to my game and improving what I already had. I also did some simple playtesting to see what I could improve on.

What went well

Overall I really liked the sprites that I had chosen for my game, as it made my game feel more fun to play, and the randomly generated different-sized asteroids, as they did damage based on their sizes. I also think my menu screen went well as the little spaceship was put on the main menu and would follow the cursor around.

Challenges and Obstacles

One of the challenges I faced while creating my game was how the ship moved once it reached the mouse pointer because it would spin around on the spot until the mouse was moved away again. I also struggled with the variables as this was my first time using variables. My last issue was global objects as I hadn't worked with them before.

Takeaways

My main takeaway from this game design process was learning how variables, global scenes, global objects, and buttons worked. This was a fun and educational game style to learn how to create and these skills will definitely aid me in future game design.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 6 - Asteroids development post

After I completed the Elevator pitch, I worked towards making the basic game with the provided instructions on Canvas and some custom assets I found, after that was done i had my base game, which was designed around the instructions from the workshop. The player could fly around, shoot, die, and respawn, but this wasn't very much as my game lacked:

Start screen

collision effects

death animation

A parallax background

planned abilities

A win condition

and many other ideas

From my base game, I have been working towards adding these features, Below I will show what I have created since then.

Start screen

As shown in the video I added a simple but interactive start screen before the player starts playing. In this start screen, the player can fly around the spaceship which I thought was a cool inclusion in the game.

collision effects

I added a flashing effect for when the player comes in contact with ant asteroids

I created custom collision masks for each asteroid so the player would only be taking damage if they actually collided with the asteroid.

Death animation

The animation where the ship blows up was also fairly straightforward forward as it just required the variable to check if the lives were greater than 1 and once it hit 0 the animation would change and the ship would stop moving and then the player would go to the game over scene.

Misc

I also decided to have the player do damage based on asteroid size rather than taking flat damage. The damage ranged from 1 - 5 based on the asteroid's size.

Currently working on

parallax background

abilities

win condition

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 6 - Interesting information

Interesting/helpful information from the Game Design Book.

I will include only a few points from each chapter to stop this post from being too long.

I will continue to update this each week with new readings

Chapters 1 & 2

Chapter 1:

The game designer must look at the world of games through the player’s eyes.

I think this is very important for game designers to remember that they are not making a game for themselves but for game players. The game designer's responsibility is to create captivating gameplay and have a priority focus on player experience.

Playtesters are people who play your game and provide feedback on the experience so that you can move forward with a fresh perspective. By watching other people play the game, you can learn a great deal.

From working on this assignment I have learned how important playtesting is. From simple forms such as passing my laptop to a friend to quickly play my game and give verbal feedback, to setting up specific playtesting with questions set out for feedback, playtesting has helped me improve my games immensely.

Many game designers don’t involve playtesters in their process, or, if they do, it’s at the end of production when it’s really too late to change the essential elements of the design.

I also found this fairly important as I hadn't realized that taking on feedback too late would be pointless as essential gameplay wouldn't be able to be changed.

The most important skill that you, as a game designer, can develop is the ability to communicate clearly and effectively with all the other people who will be working on your game.

I think this is very important as you will need to be able to communicate with your team, directors, and potential stakeholdeers, by simply communicating with your team it will make game design easier.

Chapter 2:

A game is:

A closed, formal system, that

Engages players in structured conflict, and

Resolves its uncertainty in an unequal outcome.

I found this quite useful for helping me make my games so far.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 5 - Asteroids elevator pitch

Game name: Dezteroid

Asteroid Elevator pitch:

It was just meant to be a normal space mission for supplies, but before long you got left behind by the rest of the fleet and the only way to catch up was to take a shortcut through an asteroid field, otherwise, your ship would not have enough fuel to get home. Now it's up to you to utilize your expert spaceship skills to navigate through the asteroid field to join up with the convey and make it back home with enough fuel.

Control Diagram:

Navigate a spaceship through space

Avoid asteroids of varying size

shoot and destroy asteroids of varying health

Don't let your health drop below 0

Get to the end to join up with your fleet and complete the game

Unique selling points:

Randomly spawning asteroids

Weapon choices (slow firing, heavy damage / quick-firing, less damage)

Abilities such as avoiding asteroids, doing extra damage, and more speed.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 5 - Platformer post-mortem

Introduction

My main goal for this platformer was to really learn the basics of using Gdevelop 5, as this was my first project using this engine.

Development Overview

This game didn't take me very long to complete as I was able to use the workshop to create the foundations, such as player movement, platform behavior, and enemies and their movement, and from there all I had to do was put in more platforms and enemies. I later added a couple features unique to my game such as UFO beams that would pull the player upwards.

What went well

For this game, I was very happy with how the player moved around and jumped and how the slimes moved. I was also happy with my respawn animation as it felt special and unique to my game.

Challenges and Obstacles

I originally had issues with the respawn animation of my player, as sometimes it would happen too many times and sometimes it would play twice and cause the player to become much larger than intended, but I was able to fix this issues eventually with the trigger once command which ended up making me very happy with the respawn feature. I also had issues with a high jump ability on top of UFOs that were supposed to let the player jump high when on top of it and it took me a long time to understand what I had done wrong. Most of my other issues were able to be fixed by watching YouTube videos or by communicating with other students to understand what I had done wrong.

Takeaways

From this game design process, I learned about the importance of feedback and taking proper breaks from game designing and also the importance of searching for help to solve issues.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this was a great first game to work on, I really enjoyed using Gdevelop 5, to create this game as it taught me a lot that I can apply to my future games. I also found great help from reading chapter 10 of the game design book as I read the: Is your game balanced section, specifically balancing the dynamics helped me to balance the gameplay. "it can be a combination of actions that provide an optimal strategy for players who know the trick." (Fullerton, 2019) this section here helped me because it reminded me to make sure there weren't any strategies that could be used to gain an unfair advantage

References

Fullerton, T. (2019). Game Design Workshop: Working with Formal Elements. ProQuest Ebook.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 3/4 - Platformer playtesting and pitching insights

Chapter 4 of the Game Design Workshop discusses the importance of goals and feedback. By getting feedback on my platformer I can better improve my game, so I decided to have my friend play my game and then answer these questions.

Questions:

Was this game interesting to play, did you want to continue playing it?

Was this game challenging? Why?

Did you notice any bugs/ glitches?

Answers:

I liked the concept of this game, however, there wasn't much to it and it was relatively easy to complete. But if there was more to the game i would be interested to play it again.

No, it wasn't very challenging. The slimes didn't move very fast and it was easy to avoid them.

I noticed that the UFOs didn't let me jump as high as I think I was supposed to, but other than that the game seemed to run good enough.

Based on this feedback I know that my playtester found the game maybe too easy and that there wasn't enough content for him.

based on the feedback I made changes to the way the slimes moved and worked towards making more content and fixing my code to remove potential bugs.

References

Fullerton, T. (2019). Game Design Workshop: Working with Formal Elements. ProQuest Ebook.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 3/4 - Platformer development post

This week learning shifted from planning to prototyping and basics

My goal with this first game was to understand the core concept of Gdevelop 5 and how to make the basics of a game such as movement, animations, jumping, platforms, and enemies. This was done by following the tutorial in the week 2 lecture.

After following this tutorial I had my basic game

From here I started to iterate my own ideas for the game such as a ufo beam that would suck up the player

While developing my basic game I had to experiment with different values for all of the mechanics, such as designing the ufo beam, I used a collision checker to change the gravity and from there I had to play test different values to find the right value so the player didn't fly off out of the map.

Continuing I had to set up my platforms and move them around while testing the game to make the jumps challenging while not making them too far so the player cant reach or too low so the player cannot walk under it.

Playtesting

From the game design workshop book, I found this quote interesting and important.

"Another key component of playcentric design is that ideas should be prototyped and playtested early."(Fullerton, 2019)

During the week three workshop, we conducted playtesting of our basic game I found someone to play the game and tried not to tell them too much about the game and just let them play.

After they were done playing I asked them the following questions

What was a frustrating part of the game? What did you like about the game?

From the playtesting, I got feedback on how I could improve my game, one of which was to make the jump longer and to make the player faster so the game didn't feel as slow-paced.

References

Fullerton, T. (2019). Game Design Workshop: Working with Formal Elements. ProQuest Ebook.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

Week 2 - Platform elevator pitch

The exert from "Game design workshop" by Fullerton "The role of the game designer is.. [to] ..look at the world of games through the player's eyes." I found this quote to be quite important to my initial brainstorming as when I would be playing videogames I would be judging critically based on my experience with the game, and in starting this task I realized the importance for me to be designing a game from a players view rather than one of my own.

Setting out on this task my end goal is to create a game that

challenges my game design skills

engaging gameplay that feels rewarding to the player

an interesting and stimulating world/environment

Game Pitch

Game name: The Aliens Wacky trip Through Earth

Embark on an epic adventure as you the little green alien navigate through earth and try to make it back to your new UFOand try to get home.

Dodge angry slimes

Navigate dangerous heights

Utilise UFO beams to jump up to new heights

Here is a bit about my game.

I hope to make my game compelling to potential players by having a fluid mechanics where the player can play without feeling slowed down or forced into a standstill animation.

My target audience would be roughly 5+ due to the pixelated nature of the game, and players would be able to pick this game up and play without spending too much time learning the mechanics and controls.

Student Contact Info

n11543680@qut.edu.au

Alexander Saffigna-Hayes

References

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop : A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, Forth Edition (4th ed.). CRC Press LLC.

[loudenemyphilosopher]

#Introduction / About me

Hello, my name is Alexander Saffigna-Hayes, although I prefer Alex. I am a first-year university student taking a bachelor's degree in games and interactive environments and majoring in game design.

I have been involved in video games my whole life, from watching my parents play when I was young, to split-screen Halo with my brother growing up, to staying up late gaming with my friends and even playing in some tournaments. Safe to say I have lots of experience playing games, but I don't have much experience with what goes into making a game or anything related to the game that isn't playing it.

So I hope for IGB220 I can learn the basics of game development and game design as well as how to build and playtest a video game prototype and I hope that these skills and knowledge I learn can be applied to the real world and be used to help me get a job in the game design industry.