adamhemsleyfutureworks

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB3001 - Professional Games Practice  Blog

Now that all 3 initial prototypes have been completed, myself and my group have reflected upon each and decided which one we wish to expand upon as our major project. We have tried to fit the project going forward to all the wants of each member so they can have the most fully realised portfolio tailored to their specific interests and future aims while still creating a fully realised game.

Prototype 1:

The first project took the theme of Transcendence. Rather than view this in a purely descriptive way, looking at spiritual evolution, we chose to look at the idea from a biological perspective and somewhat invert the conventional perception. It would be a stealth game focused around body horror ideas like self-deformation and alteration. The main mechanic we built the prototype around was the letting the player character deform from a human figure into a blob that could squeeze though small areas. I was tasked with designing a small level that would allow us to show off the different way the player could use this.

All members of the group were happy with the outcome of this prototype. Of the three produced it was the most fully realised and complex, however when it came time to examine or options for going forward we saw some issues that would arise from carrying on this project.

To carry on with this project would have required a large amount of time and effort to be given over to tasks that none of the group members felt fitted with their intended outcomes for the year. A large focus would have to be placed upon modelling, animation, rigging, texturing. Since none of the group members wish to specialise in any of these areas, we felt that a project that would require less of a focus upon these areas would be better suited for us.

 Prototype 2:

For the second prototype, we chose the theme of Fate. To change things up from the last prototype, we decided this time to go for a more narrative focused experience taking place in a flooded world that had suffered from a severe environmental collapse. The player would travel around this flooded world in a boat and find places on their map that they could dive down to explore using a diving suit. While exploring the sea bed, the player would find interactable objects that would take them into memories of people who died during the catastrophe the world had suffered. These collected memories would act as the currency for the player to buy more maps and upgrades for their boat and diving suit.

Of the three prototypes, this was the least well realised and the one the only one the group was unhappy with. One reason for this was that we had only a week to concept and work on it, as opposed to two weeks for the others. While I think it was the right choice to aim for something different I don’t think this resulted in

 Prototype 3:

The game is a bullet hell game though in a break from tradition, is played from a third person perspective. The idea was to take elements from 3rd person action games, such as dodging enemy attacks and melee attacks from the player, and introduce them to a bullet hell boss rush type game.

Initially the chosen theme for this prototype was supposed to be Trade, but when we decided to go forward with an idea from me and Sean, myself and Sam discussed changing the theme to Transcendence. This way we could incorporate some ideas from the first prototype that we liked and incorporate some new concepts we had had since then.

This prototype faced some issues, as the group member tasked with coming up with the concept and design for it never produced the needed work. As a result, myself and Sean took it upon ourselves to produce something based around our own design and Sam later produced a narrative background and some art work. Despite the process of creating this prototype having some stumbling blocks and resulting in a lot of last minute changes, when it came time to choose which project to take forward it was the favoured option for all the group. We all felt that we could get what everyone wanted out of their work taking things forward, with minimal need to work upon areas that didn’t help in achieving those goals.

 Going Forward:

The next major milestone for project is the end of semester presentation where we shall show the next stage of development on the project. For myself this means working on concept art, modelling and narrative work, along with designing the first boss battle for the game. This will involve working closely with all other members of the group, but the only one to face potential road blocks from my work would be Sean. This isn’t a worry for either myself or Sean, we have worked together on multiple projects and work well together. Unlike the other prototypes very little narrative or character work had been done by the time we presented the project. Since then myself and Sam have begun to fill in the blanks but there is still a lot of work to be done in this area over the first stage of development. So far on the project I’ve taken a leadership position when it comes to the group. It is likely that this will continue and as a result I’ll be taking responsibility for making sure everyone is fulfilling their parts of the project and avoid any problems that could impact upon others work.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2001 - Evaluation

For our final assignment in XB2001 games Origination we have been tasked with completing a single player level in Unreal engine 4 based on a given theme. I ended up picking the topic of Utopia, as I felt it was an interesting subject not often covered in videogames, which tend to be more interested in the dystopian idea. Utopias say a lot about us as a society, how we imagine a better world for ourselves.

There are three influential themes for the game. The first was brutalist architecture. This was in response to my chosen theme of Utopias. Brutalism is connected in my mind, and the minds of many others, with the social democratic wave of post-war Europe. It represents a time when governments made a real attempt to tackle issues like poverty and rethink ways in which people lived. However it also represents how quickly those times passed and how those same ideals where abandoned by subsequent governments.  This also helped when it came to modelling the meshes for the game, as brutalism lends itself very much to modular design.

Ecological collapse is something I’ve spent the past year quite focused around as part of my activism. I drew heavily upon it for the games plot that of a dead world destroyed by rising sea levels that the player is exploring. I was interested in a story about a society that had discovered it was too late to avert their own destruction brought on by climate change, and the existential crisis of this. I’ve had issues relating to death anxiety for a long time and recently in particular, so I felt that this was a good way to channel these thoughts and feelings into a more creative and productive area of my life. It also worked as an inversion of the Utopian/Dystopian dynamic. The player could view the game as taking place in a dystopian world but over time comes to discover its utopian elements.

Another theme I drew from was Hermetic Qabalahic tradition. It’s something I’ve been researching a lot over the recent period and I was interested in exploring a more spiritual idea about escaping an apocalypse than the more science orientated stories around them that videogames tend to feature. It fitted into the Utopias theme with the concept behind divine unification, that the separate elements of god, of which humanity is one, could be reunited representing a return to Eden, the original Utopia.

I wanted an environment that reflected a sense of familiarity to the player while also being abstract and impossible within the logic they knew. I felt that the brutalist influences on the design helped with this as it used shapes that are architecturally familiar but could be used and placed in ways that was not.

I spent a large amount of time considering how level designers guide players through levels through use of colours, sounds, lights etc. An example that I liked was Naughty Dogs use of the colour yellow. In both the Uncharted games and The Last of Us, the games use yellow to give the players an idea of which direction to head. Ledges, pipes, boxes, paint on walls, all feature the colour which is purposefully kept out of the rest of the environments so as not to confuse the players. It’s a subtler version of how Mirrors Edge uses red to show the player the paths through its levels.

I was not able to use colour in this was, as I wanted colour to play a different role in representing which stage the player was in. Something like this should be a constant throughout the game, not changing from level to level. Instead I decided to take the same idea but use shapes and light. Due to the brutalist architectural influences on the games environments, the game heavily features squares and cubes, so I decided to guide the player using triangles. I created a gate like mesh, triangular in shape, that stood out amongst the squares and cubes of the level. I placed them along the games main path. I found this helped people find their way through the environments as the brutalists inspired blocks and looping nature of the levels path could be confusing without them.

Speaking of the looping path, I decided that rather than have the level be a straight and flat path, I would attempt to introduce verticality by having the stage loop around under then over itself. This was inspired by some brutalist conceptual pieces by the Montreal based architect and sculptor David Umemoto. This worked in to design of some of the puzzles as it allowed me to have the player need to return to previously completed puzzles and change them in order to solve new ones they encountered.

The one major aspect of the game that I was not able to implement was the voice acting that would play when players came into contact with the Tombs. This was simply down to time constraints as I had voice acting to record for another assignment and felt that was a priority. I felt that this game still worked without the voice acting while the other would be hurt by not having and therefor prioritised one other the other. In conclusion, though there are aspects of the game that I was not able to implement due to time, I’m happy with the finished result and see what I have as something I can expand and build upon in my own time.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2178- Evaluation

Evaluation:

Over the course of the first semester I struggled with this project, not in terms of producing work but in finding some way to connect the project to my overall ideals as a games designer. Over the course of the year the project has changed dramatically and I feel this is a result of me finding my own voice as a developer and having the confidence to pursue my own ideas rather than cling to traditionally held norms of design and practice.

At first I was planning what was essentially a top down 2D stealth game. What I ended up with was a 3D explorative game. How I got from one to the other was through a lot of consideration and experimentation about who I am as a games designer and what kind of game I want to make.

I felt that my original idea laid out in the early project plans was an attempt by me to cater to what a game is traditionally considers to be and this was a result of a mixture of lack of confidence in my own ideas and some personal issues that were affecting me. Over time as my confidence grew in the idea I had about the project that didn’t fit the more “gamey” feel of the plan I began to question if I should continue down the path I had set.

Over the Christmas holiday I questioned what I was doing with the project. I asked myself, “If someone else made this game would I be interested in it? Would I like it?” I had felt similar about a project earlier this year that while I did well in, I felt was quite hollow and not reflective of what I want to do with games. So, while thinking about what I wanted this project to be I thought about the games I like to play. I don’t play puzzle or stealth games. When I look back on the games I’ve played so far this year, except for two RPGs, they have all been what get classified as ‘Walking Simulators’. In general, they tend to be short games that explore a single narrative or mechanical point to the exclusion of all others. I felt that something along these lines was a better fit for me and for the project.

I had also felt somewhat uncertain about the projects theme.

Ultimate I felt that I had no right to be telling a story like this, and that it was so disconnected from myself emotionally that I wouldn’t do a good job of it anyway.

After some consideration, I decided to change the project quite radically. If this this was meant as a mini-honours project it made no sense to me to be doing something that would not be reflective of the things I want to do going forward from here, both in terms of the course and as a games developer.

Gantt Charts:

I’ll be honesty, I’m not a fan of gantt charts. That doesn’t mean I don’t see the usefulness of them but I think that usefulness only works in certain situations with certain types of work. When working as a team, as a machine that requires each part be moving in unison to achieve its aims, then the kind of time structure gantt charts offer is needed.

I prefer to work alone on my games. In fact, when working on these projects I often end up isolating myself from other people entirely for the duration. This helps me get to the kind of mind state that achieves my best work, works that is tapping into something deep about myself and expressing it though the game. When I work alone my work is messy, in that I tend not to designate time to specific tasks, I jump in a just try things and eventually my interest will catch on something and I’ll expand it from there. I feel a lot of the confusion and frustration I was feeling during the first semester

A repulsive love story:

Obviously, I couldn’t completely break with the Crusades theme. I needed to find a story that I could resonate with more that fit it though.

My family has been deeply involved with hermetic culture and spirituality for many generations. It’s something that I’d never felt played a large part in my own life until quite recently. I’ve been dealing with an increasing amount of death anxiety over the past year and though I don’t feel I’ve become a spiritual person, learning about my family’s past and way religion played into it has helped me deal with my existential dread. The Crusades represent the thoroughly awful and destructive form religion can take when it is mixed with political and social power. Returning crusaders were notorious witch burners, I imagine due to a mix of PTSD and the religious doctrinarian they went through. Subverting this I ended up working out an idea of a crusader returning home to discover his partner had been burnt as a witch. He had gift from his travels intended for her that was connected to her magic, and through burying her with it brought her back in some horrid form.

Body horror is a genre I’ve always had a liking for, the concept of uncomfort with our own biology and fear of it was something I felt connected with my death anxiety very well and allowed me to chanel into the work. I wanted this tale of a horrifying transformation but also have it be a kind of love story. A kind of reverse Beauty & The Beast was the way I thought about it.

Unreal:

While I’ve worked in Unreal Engine 4 on previous assignments this was one of the first real tests of my skill with it. This is the first beginning to end game I’ve created with it and though at times I did hit against some problems I think over all I learnt very fast what I needed and was able to implement the new skills quickly.

There are elements I would change if I had more time. I built a lot of the game around matinees and midway through the project they got passed into a legacy feature. I may revisit the game later and consider what the new alternatives for this are, but as I was already quite deep into things I chose not to change the way I was doing things.

 Visuals:

The area of the project I am most happy with is the games visuals. I put a lot of focus upon aesthetic values in media and I spent a lot of development time tweaking the games visual style to end up with a good match to what I had in my mind. I had two major influences I was from when it came to this, the first was early 3D games from the PSOne era. I’ve always had a fondness for the flaws of digital media, the scan lines of VHS tapes, the muffled sound of worn cassette tapes, and the z-fighting textures of games built on early 3D hardware. The post-processing effects I worked together have got that result of gagged edges and jumpy textures that I was looking for. The other inspiration was The Blair Witch Project and other found footage movies. Something about the lo-fi visuals of VHS recording has always appealed to me and I wanted a look that reflected these flaws in digital media.

Ultimately I’m very happy with the results of the project. This is the first time I’ve produced a game for the course that I feel is the type of game I want to make, not just something done for an assignment. I’ve learnt a great deal over the course of its development, not just about Unreal and Blueprint, but about how I work and what kind of process produces results I’m happy with.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

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Maybe this world is another planets hell.

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DD2000: A2 Blog 1

Since beginning this degree I have questioned what kind of role I would want within the games industry. At times I’ve questioned if I want to work within the industry at all. Working on what would be considered more mainstream games, whether that be within AAA or indie development, is not something that appeals to me. While there are certainly AAA and mid tear budget games that I enjoy and some that have had a huge impact upon me, in general these are not the games that I like to experience for myself. So ideally I would like to work on smaller games that I can use to express something more personal and emotionally impactful. The “alt-games” movement is something that I find much more appealing that AAA or the vast majority of the indie games industry which is simply recreating smaller versions of AAA games with the same fundamental deign ideologies behind them.

Creative control and freedom of artistic expression comes at the cost of smaller games with significantly smaller budgets, but I believe it is possible to create media for a more niched audience within the games industry at this time and have it be to some degree sustainable. Personally I’ve come to appreciate small, vignette games that look to focus upon a single emotional state or experience. This small focus often leads to much more success in achieving what these games set out to do in comparison to the bloated nature of large AAA games.

Since we have been asked to research a games developer that fits the for this assignment I thought about the types of games I’ve played over the recent period and the ones that stuck with me and that I felt achieved the kinds of things I myself want to use the medium to express. The developer I have therefore chosen is Tale of Tales. Their most high profile release, The Path, is a game that opened up to me the possibilities that games offer in regards to art and emotional expression. Tale of Tales may seem an odd choice considering that this past year they have made the choice to move away from the games industry to at least some degree. However, their approach to the medium, as outlined in their Realtime Art Manifesto, contains within it the what I see as the best approach to bridging the “conceived” gap between high art and video games.

While the main focus of my research will look to Tale of Tales and their games specifically there are also other developers whose work exists in the sphere of games that I myself would like to create within. From games nearer to the level of AAA, such as The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and Campo Santo’s Firewatch, to small alt-games from individual developers and artists such as Jack King Spooner and Kitty Horrorshow.

Coming out of this I will hopefully be able to being piecing together my portfolio and filling in gaps within it. I feel that a portfolio and a large body of work being available online for people to see and experience is much more important for someone planning to work in this area of the industry as you must take responsibility for selling yourself and your work.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2001 A2 - Blog 4

Final Thoughts

Well tomorrow is the hand in for the group game development project and I wanted to take some time to review how it went and determine how I feel about the result.

Looking back on the attempt to communicate an idea though traditional gameplay, ultimately I think the game fails to achieve this. I was unsure of how effective this idea could be going into the assignment and was using this as a testing ground to try the idea out. Not that I haven’t learnt anything from it, I believe that experimenting in different ways to communicate with players though games makes me a better designer. Perhaps if the other elements I planned out in the GDD that didn’t make it into the proof of concept were present then the game might succeed better in putting across its central point? Maybe that’s something for me to look into more in my spare time.

While I have my doubts about the success of the reverse gamification idea, I’m very happy with how the game came out looking. The game definitely gives the feel of an old sprite based Gameboy game while working in 3D.

Overall I’m happy with the outcome I have. The game feels good to play, looks good and works so none of that was in anyway impacted by the attempted narrative experiment I tried to work into it. I’m significantly more satisfied with it than my work on this unit’s previous assignment. I found a way to make the works something technical that fit the needs of the assignment but also something that I found fulfilling to work on a personal level.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2001 A2 - Blog 3

Visual Style

Since I was placed in the role of determining and implementing the games visual style I thought about how I could work towards something that was unique visually but also helped with the whole reverse gamification idea. For this reason, I didn’t want a realistic look to things, I wanted to the game to at a glance look very much like a fun party game.

I personally believe the video games industry has a problem when it comes to the over use of nostalgia. I believe that when people have their selective memories of the past catered to that it can become a barrier to any sort of advancement toward new ideas and experiences. The first wave of modern indie games relied heavily on this exploitation of childhood memories in 30 somethings, regurgitating a rose tinted version of something from the 8 or 16 bit era. In many ways I felt that this stagnation focused around recapturing a moment that has already long past connected with the idea of societies stagnating and refusing to evolve that I was trying to work into the background noise of the game.

The first step in this was restricting range of colours the engine could render down to a few different shades of green. A found a good template online that I was able to take into Photoshop and adjust to represent the colour range I wanted and then place within a post processing volume to affect the games colour grading settings. It took a bit of going back and forth between Photoshop and Unreal to get the colours just right but eventually I ended up with something I was happy with.

The next stage was to create a pixilation effect. This was something I already had a working knowledge of how to do due to it coming up in side project I had been working on. Again I began with a post processing volume, this time making a material to be applied that would break the screen up creating a pixel look. Rather than apply the material directly I used an instance of it which meant that the amount of pixilation could be easily altered by using the scaler parameter in the instance. While I personally would have liked to have the game more heavily pixelated than it currently is, I didn’t want it to be so heavy as to make the work of the 3D modellers irrelevant.

Finally, in order to make certain aspects of the game, such as the players and the payload, to stand out despite the lack of colours available show I put in place a thick black outline that would render around any objects that hand custom depth rendering switched on. While this worked it was at first very jumpy and made focusing on objects with it quite hard. The problem was the game inbuilt antialiasing settings trying to smooth out the jagged edges of objects that was being created by the pixilation effect. The solution to this came from turning the games antialiasing setting down a low as possible.

 The end result can be seen here.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2001 A2 - Blog 2

Reverse Gamification

The mechanical prototype I made for the previous assignment in this unit was something that I didn’t feel any form of connection to, it meant nothing to me and was just a thing I made for an assignment, and as a result I still feel very unsatisfied with the result and generally disappointed in myself over it. I didn’t want to repeat this but I also didn’t want to drag the other members of the team down with an idea that conceptually wasn’t fun to work on and that they themselves wouldn’t feel a creative attachment to.

During a discussion after a lecture in DD2000 the concept of reverse gamification came up. I had been tasked with debating that “games should be fun”, a concept I fundamentally disagree with (Which is no doubt why I was picked to represent that argument.) and had ended up arguing that a form of reverse gamification may be a better way to present complex ideas within games. Could a game be fun and use traditionally “gamey” mechanics to express something that was actually quite the opposite? The example I had given was Alexander Ocias's Loved, a platformer that works to give the player the feeling of being within an abusive relationship. I felt that this assignment offered me the chance to try something similar and see if it worked.

During the first few weeks of the assignment two things filled a lot of time for me that ended up forming the basis for the idea I wanted to communicate through the game. The first was a series of video lectures by Mark Blyth, a political scientist and the current professor of Political Economy at Brown University. These focuses around recent events such as Brexit, the US presidential election and the continued electoral failure of social democratic parties in western Europe. He classifies all these events as part of a global phenomenon of revolt against technocracy and political elitism in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crash. He argues that the pressure being put upon the vast majority of society to pay for the mistakes of a tiny group who themselves have not suffered is reaching a boiling point where open revolt is beginning to take place, and while that revolt was currently electoral in nature that ultimately, “The 20% need to listen because if they don’t they’re going to find something out. The Hamptons is not a defensible position. Eventually people will come for you.”

The other issue that was on my mind as I began planning work on the games concept was the events taking place at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Both of these things put into my mind the concept of how quickly civil societies can begin to fall apart under pressure and how in those times the relationship between a state’s authority and the mass of people can quickly develop into an antagonistic one.

My thoughts went to if I could work the games mechanics to represent how the careless use of violence by state forces escalates the use of force by other groups in response and if that could give the player an overall feeling of a repeated cycle of events were this kind of antagonism from people towards the systems that control their lives leads to the downfall of those systems.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

XB2001 A2 - Blog 1

When initially brainstorming ideas for the group game development assignment, the group I was allotted decided on a multiplayer game but ultimately left the design and of the game up to me as lead designer. Myself and Sean, our technical designer, put together the idea of a competitive multi-player FPS game based around payload escorting like Team Fortress or Overwatch but making the team dynamic asymmetrical by having one team fill a purely defensive role while the other could only attack. We took inspiration from the Roman solider shield wall technique Testudo. One team would have impenetrable shields and would surround the payload while the other team attacked and tried to get through gaps in the guard’s defence.

An initial prototype was built upon the idea of this FPS game, but after some discussion myself and Sean decided to move away from it. One of the major factors in this was that the first person view did not lend itself to the role of the guards as they could never keep the payload in view while also pointing their shields away from it, making their task almost impossible. A quick test was made putting the guards into a third person view and while it did improve things the problem still persisted.

After a brainstorming session myself and Sean decided to switch the game from being a competitive multi-player game to a team based one were 4 players protected the payload from AI enemies. We envisioned this having an isometric perspective and were quickly able to get a basic prototype working.

With the prototype working we decided to split work between ourselves, Sean working on aspects like player attacks and enemy AI and that I would take responsibility for implementing the games visual style.

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

DD2000: Research Blog

As part of the research for my essay on a contemporary design issue I’ve looked at the changes that have taken place in web design over recent years. Mainly I have looked to examine how these changes have come about and why.

Changes in Interfacing

Based on my research, the main reason I believe web design has seen a dramatic change in design principles is due to the shift from PC and laptop based browsing to smartphone and tablet based browsing. The way people interface with these two types of platforms are fundamentally different and required a re-evaluation of how web sites were set up and presented to the user.

Display resolution, or more precisely the lack of uniformity with display resolution, on smartphones can be identified as a major factor in this. Websites used to be designed knowing that while some variation in resolution for the devices accessing them was there, it wasn’t so much as to present a problem when it comes to the websites format. This isn’t true of smartphones, which can have drastically different resolutions from one to another.

The noted web designer Ethan Marcotte was someone I looked at in detail over this. He is considered by many to be the driving forces behind responsive design which looks to fit the design of something to the situation in which it is presented and used. In web design form mobile platforms this comes in the form of flat design, the use of simple geometric shapes and grid like patterns.

Role of Social Media

The rise of social media combined with the way smartphones are interfaced with has led to a change in the way information is presented on websites. Specifically, the above the fold idea that has been prevalent since the days of print media, has seen a decline in use as scrolling, which was clumsy and looked down on when browsing from a laptop, has become more and more common a design choice. Scrolling down through an endless stream of content feels more natural on a touch screen device, using just a flick of your finger or thumb. This is a change from the front loaded nature of above the fold, which tries to have all relevant information immediately presented to the user on one screen, following the way that was used on the top half of a newspaper. It also fits well with the nature of social media like twitter in which content is constantly being added and none is, theoretically, considered more important than any other.

How does this apply to games?

In terms of how I intend to link this into games design specifically, my initial thought is focused on game menu systems. I feel that it is very often the case that the way menus are designed and laid out is something of an afterthought in the development process for a lot of games. I want to examine if any lessons of how the simplification of the way websites are presented thought he use of the ideas behind the likes of flat design can help with the way game menus communicate information to the player.

Online reference and research material I intend to use can be found below. I will also be drawing from academic work on design principles in general to see how these advancements in web design fit into the overall ideology of design.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/02/design-trends-flat-design-2-0/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/infinite-scrolling-lets-get-to-the-bottom-of-this/

http://www.cio.com/article/2475406/social-media/how-social-networks-are-changing-mobile-advertising.html

http://sms.sagepub.com/content/2/3/2056305116662173

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XB2001 - Assignment 1: Technical Games Design| Reflective Analysis

For the first assignment in XB2001 Games Development we have been tasked with solving a given problem through the creation of game mechanics. The listed problems were The Gap, The Locked Door, The Lever and The tower. I began with several different ideas that focused around different problems. Rather than pick just one at this stage I began to work on some prototypes for 3 of them and then see which worked out and was within my capabilities while still challenging myself and then bring that idea further towards completion.

For the gap I had the idea of a jetpack game where the player must fly around or a game in which the player must shift the worlds center of gravity to pull themselves across gaps. For the lever I envisioned a game where the player must run around a room full of them pulling the right one before a timer runs out.

Of these three ideas my personal favourite was the idea of changing the world’s gravity but I found that the idea I had in my head wasn’t really possible within Unreal’s Blueprint system, it would involve altering the engines base code and would have been far beyond what I could hope to achieve within the assignments time frame. I had the opposite problem with the switch idea that I felt was too simplistic and bland. Ultimately the idea that I felt worked the best in practice and was unlike other prototypes I’d created in the past was the jetpack flying idea for the gap problem.

I had an idea of what I wanted to do early on, changing the player character between walking and flying modes of movement. This involved adding a new access mapping option into the project settings then adding the ability to access that into the base player movement blueprint. 

Rather than add in sideways and downward movement I only gave the player the ability to increase their upward velocity in bursts through the press of a button. I felt that this was more inline with how a jetpack would work, having to burst upwards and allow yourself to drop down and make the judgment between these two to get you to where you needed to be.

This allowed the player to move themselves up within the game world, but didn't prove particularity challenging to either the player or myself in terms of the implementation of the mechanic. I decided then to add on a fuel system for the jetpack that would force the player to have to think more about it’s use. In order to achieve this I had to create a series of variables relating to the fuel (max fuel, current fuel, depletion rate of fuel, etc.) that could the be used to determine how much the player had, was using, collecting and so forth. At first I had this fuel regenerate itself after the player stopped using the jetpack, but this could be easily abused to stay in the air indefinitely so I removed the regenerating fuel and instead replaced it fuel pick ups the player could collect scattered through out the game. this also meant that in certain situations the player could end up trapped without fuel and so had to think about their placement within the game and when to collect the pickups and when not to.

As well as the actual mechanics of the jetpack I added a simple static mesh to the player character to act as a visual stand in for it along with some particle effects. While fairly simple they do add to the idea that you are using a mechanical device to aid yourself in flying, plus the sparks and smoke added to the slightly awkward feel of flying in the game, like its a prototype of a jetpack you’re trying out for the first time.

In order to add something more to the prototype then flying over gaps I added in a door and key system. this meant that the player was not just using the jetpack to solve the problem of gaps but also the finding of keys hidden away in far to reach places.

I created a blueprint for a door that involved an opening animation along with a variable that allowed me to set the number of keys needed to open each door placed in the game to be different. I hid the key pickups though out the level and added in a print that would show the player the number of keys they had at any given time.

I filed the many gaps the player has to cross in the game with spikes and overlayed trigger boxes on them. This meant that if the player fell into them I could cause them to die, effectively repawning back at the beginning of the game with the progress they had made collecting keys and opening doors begin undone.

the area of the prototype that saw the most change take place from the first version, apart from the jetpacks fuel system, was a corridor the player must go through to get the last needed key. The corridor originally feature it’s ceiling, floor and wall covered in spikes for the player to avoid. However after play testing it proved to be a bit too difficult to make it through. The first attempt I made to fix this was to expand the size of the corridor but when this was play tested it was far too easy for the player to make it through and proved no challenge. The finished game now features the corridor with ceiling and floor covered in spikes but not the walls, while remaining at its original size. This proved to be the best option as it is still difficult for the player to make it through, balancing how they use the jetpack, but doesn’t feel unfairly punishing.

While I’m happy with the outcome of the prototype there are things that I would change if I were to revisit it. This is mostly just cosmetic, making walls fit together a bit neater and brightening up the games lighting more. However there are aspects of the blueprints I would like to change, such as the hot boxes for the spike pits which I’m sure could be streamlined together more elegantly. As for how creative my solution is, I feel that I made the attempt to give a narrative basis to the solution, making the ability to fly reliant on the jet pack and the mechanics of flying seem related to a burst of upward momentum rather than just flying. As well as this I feel the blueprinting pushed my knowledge and understanding forward, being far more reliant on variables and blueprinting in general than my previous work. 

[adamhemsleyfutureworks]

DD2000: Essay Plan

Adam Hemsley

Games Design Year 2 - Hotel

DD2000: Contemporary Contextual Studies

Tutor: Niall Taylor

Assignment 1: Essay Plan

 Essay question:

'How has web design adapted to fit the needs of smartphone and tablet based web browsing?’

 Essay length: 2000 words

 Introduction (150 words)

o   Thesis statement: Through an examination of modern popular web sites, it is clear that web design has undergone a dramatic change in design philosophy and practice since the rise in popularity of touch screen devices.

o   Introduce main points or topics to be discussed: Why has web design had to changed? What are the key ways in which it has changed? Why did these changes work?

 Topic 1: Touch Screens and Smartphones (300 words)

o   Explain the change between PC based web browsing and touch screen led smartphone and tablet based web browsing.

o   Difference between screen shapes and how the user interacts with them.

o   Movement, mobility and travel.

o   How did this make the previous trends in web design fall short?

 Topic 2: Flat Design (300 words)

o   Visual pathways. Leading people though a site by shape and colour.

o   What Windows 8 got right. Grid design.

o   Minimalism, use of empty space.

o   Google logo change: smaller file size, less load time.

o   Rendering on devices with different shapes and capabilities.

 Topic 3: The infinite Scroll (300 words)

o   Role of social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in breaking the “Above the Fold” design focus in web design.

o   Why does scrolling fit smartphones and touch screens better than windows or tabs.

 Topic 4: Fixed Head Bars (300 words)

o   Following on from the infinite scroll – the use of fixed head bars.

o   Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.

 Topic 5: Sign In Prompts (300 words)

o   With designers having to think about load speeds more, how has this effected the placement of advertisements on sites?

o   Has this had to be re-thought?

o   What other avenues of monetisation has this led them down?

 Topic 6: Video Game Menus (200 words)

o   What can game design learn from these recent changes in web design?

o   UI design.

o   How can the way games implement menu systems take these simplified design choices and fix problems?

o   Game menus tend to be messy, no ease of flow through them, very excel spreadsheet feeling. Often no consistency in design between menus.

o   Can this be simplified?

 Conclusion (150 words)

o   Concluding statement:

o   Sum up main points or topics that have been discussed