charliebennettdesign

[charliebennettdesign]

Beat Down That Sword

The end of Psychology and Economics has left me with a whole bunch of new knowledge, tying it all up creating a Farmville-esque game showed the many struggles available post-development with in-game economies. Now with the beginning of the make a game unit I’ve got the chance to prototype a game I’ve had sitting in the idea books for a while...

The BEATSMITH!

A mobile two button rhythm game based on a blacksmith fixing weapons, with enough game-feel for an army with broken swords.

[charliebennettdesign]

A New Assignment

With the beginning of the year comes the first task of the year... BULLET FARMER! With our major current focus being economies within games, I thought what better way than to create a game that Revolves around farming bullets in order to defend your cowboys from the nightly alien invasions. Today's work was mainly getting the foundations down, basic models with the UI layout.

More to come...

[charliebennettdesign]

Business as Usual

It begins the 2nd week of the 2nd year of Games Design and Development at Academy of Interactive Entertainment. This unit is round economies and so what better way to get started than looking at the business of a lemonade stand? The task revolved around managing and working towards balancing a lemonade stand, at first it seems like an easy task but one of the first lessons learned that changing one number can have drastic effects across the board.

Taking into account that this was on a small scale model with 6 different inputs it’s hard to believe it’s possible to balance systems and economies such as EVE Online.��

When the prices of one ship are this complex with a variety of player created prices across multiple systems how a team is able to balance the whole universe is amazing.

[charliebennettdesign]

FLUX - Flaming Toast

With the final documents being completed for FLUX. It marks the end of working on the final group project for the year, working in a team was a great experience and something you can’t be taught. The amount of soft skills and communication required throughout development is something that can’t be stressed enough but when it all comes together you can get some awesome work! Look forward to a trailer video coming up in the future...

[charliebennettdesign]

So light em, up, up, up!

The final milestone for FLUX has been hit, GOLD! It’s been an awesome time getting to work with a larger team each with their own skillsets and abilities within and outside of game development that everyone brought to the table to make a great game and a strong portfolio piece. Stay tuned for the Post Mortem... 

[charliebennettdesign]

Care for a seat at the Summoning table?

Today marks the “Release” of Tavern Summoners! https://charliebennettdesign.itch.io/tavern-summoners

Having added the finishing touches some particles here lines of code there. Overall I came into creating this game thinking of it as a quick project in order to better my understanding of programming slightly. But as it is with developing a game you never learn just one thing...

It all began with a tavern environment I developed earlier in the year as a greybox. I was keen to bring it back to life with some of the skills learnt throughout this year and potentially use it as the setting for my new game the question left was what would this game be?  A dice game? A board game?  No. It’d be a card game.

Once the card game decision was made the next decisions were focused mainly around the gameplay and how it would play out. One thing I missed at this stage was the value of how important initial layouts were and that card games do require quite a substantial amount of UI (well this one did in the end anyway).

I decided on a base layout and the basics of the game, it would revolve around a simple rock paper scissors mechanic of elemental monsters and the players health was tied to their remaining cards.

The next step was problem the biggest mistake, by attempting to keep the elemental abilities within the game in a fashion similar to top trump I found that the game had become too balanced. The game was perfectly balanced in the worst ways possible for a card game a player was guaranteed to be able to remove another players card and so it became a one for one until the end, a rather boring game in all.

With some research into elemental trios and how other games have successfully used them I came to the conclusion a simple bonus modifier would suffice, this combined with a predefined deck meant a new element of strategy was added to the game. Another layer added later in development was to allow players to attack the enemies deck at the expense of that monsters attack. This gave players an option to decrease health of their enemy while the underdog had the chance to potentially get some cards down without having them instantly wiped.

From there on the gameplay itself didn’t evolve overly but what became very evident is how necessary polish is to a game, a lot of key elements in regards to player feedback were revised and added towards the end of the month and a half or so of development. Important things such as  - Sound Effects - Music - Visual Feedback - Exploding Cards

With the final touches added I’m really happy with how the game turned out and the unexpected things I learnt along the way. The most evident thing I’ve learnt over this past year is I have a thing for games with excessive amounts of UI and so my next step is to spend some time learning better ways to organise and minimise cluster while still effectively communicating to the player.  Just gotta keep taking it one step at a time.

[charliebennettdesign]

Ready for the Portfolio?

One thing we’ve learnt over this year is that at some stage you have to release/submit what you’ve made whether it’s where you want it or not. 

This has come into play with my most recent project Tavern Summoners as now I can finally say that I’ve learnt 95% of what I can from this project and it’s worth moving onto something new. 

Tomorrow I’ll tie up all the final touches and write up a Post Mortem in order to share all the mistakes and successes that were made along the way! But for now here’s a GIF showing of all the new shiny particles and effects that have been added.

[charliebennettdesign]

It’s Time, To Magically Duel!

Over the past month, I’ve been developing a 2-Player Mobile Card Game, in which players fight in a magical fantasy tavern. The development began as a programming challenge but since has led into developing a wide number of skills within Unity as well as overall improved development practices.  To see how it’s come along in 3 weeks 

Originally the game featured 3 different elements in which players could attack with but inevitably it led to a “Perfectly Balanced Game” one in which players would go card for card. So the journey for Perfect Imbalance began..... there may have been some bugs along the way.

The first step was to remove 3 Elements and combine them into one Power Value. From there the next crucially missing piece was player feedback, the goal was to allow the player to know what they had clicked and what they could click at all times this was done a manner of different ways - Particles - Movement - Glows

Eventually, with numerous effects working together the player was starting to get a sense of what each click had done in the game world but the world itself felt dull. To counter this dull feeling I’ve applied a layer of postprocessing along with some animated environment pieces which are working well so far. But the tavern vibe is yet to come across, next step? Time to add some sounds to this merry tavern.

[charliebennettdesign]

Loading Level Layouts

Progress for today consisted mainly of looking at crafting new designs for levels. With programmers tying things up ready for testing and the artists smashing out UVing we’ve found the design side has had some time to spare. This time was invested punching together some more levels more akin to what a ship would feel like over our current rather boxy level. 

Hope to flesh one of these out in the coming weeks!

[charliebennettdesign]

Making a Card Game is Easy Right?

With last night’s progress into the Game, from a side-project point of view, I believe the project has finally hit “Alpha”. A player can progress through the game and complete it albeit with numerous issues but that’s a problem for today.

After getting some feedback along with personal testing I’ve managed to narrow down a list of bugs and fail-safes that need to be added before exporting the game for mobile testing.

Today’s Main Focus: - Basic Player Feedback - Deck and Graveyard Incrementing/Decrementing - Stop players from destroying their own cards

Easy Right?

[charliebennettdesign]

Alpha Milestone Complete

With the final touches being added to our systems we have hit Alpha right on schedule thanks to some great work from the team all-around. So looking back what are the key things that it takes to get a game to alpha?

- Communication: The number one thing was constant communication between the team. The close workspace we had made it exceptionally easy to communicate an idea throughout the team in a matter of minutes and thanks to that we managed to iterate at a rapid speed.

- Unravel Your Ideas: As soon as an idea comes up within the team if you can see the slightest issue start a discussion about it, pull at that idea until it unravels and you either have a solution or abandon the idea early. - Share: Even though you’re working on the same project people often have completely different ideas of what sounds exactly the same. Get your teams to draw, describe or recreate with pencils, whatever works. Be sure everyone expresses their vision throughout the development so everyone is on the same page 

With these as key focuses we will hopefully smash out an awesome end product!

[charliebennettdesign]

Lights, Table, Cards

It was finally time to put the tavern scene to use with a good suitable card game. Tonight’s progress began with developing the cards, positions and an easy method of turn switching.

To see the plan for the rest of development...

A few designs were thought of for the backing of the cards as I’d inevitably be staring at them for a long time and so a little bit of art would help both clarity and making it easier on the eyes.

Having decided on the centre backing I then moved onto photoshopping together a rough draft for the Play Field. As not all of the card game has been fleshed out yet I wanted to keep the layout rather broad but as it stands now.

The game will be simple in its mechanics.

- Player’s are given 20 Cards - A Player can play 1 Card a turn with a max of 3 Cards on the Field - If both Players have Cards on the field, the player whose turn it is can attack - All Cards will have 3 Stats that work in a Rock-Paper-Scissors Triangle - An attacking player designates the fight type

The game ends when one player runs out of cards on their field, hand and deck.

By keeping the overall game quite simple I’m hoping to make a somewhat casual game and have a large sum of fun with particle effects surrounding the cards. Next step is stats!

[charliebennettdesign]

FLUX - The First Layer of Paint

Today we began to add the initial colours, emissions and all things visual in order to get a more accurate sense of how FLUX is going to feel and if we need to take a more in-depth look at our HUD elements.  

After some initial bugs we managed to get together a working visual demo but had issues throughout the day when it came to merging our programmers code and so we had some slight delays today.

With those delays came the number one lesson of production and that’s to get your scope and double it. Due to how we’ve managed our time even with today’s delays our expected outcome is still positive and the team’s doing great work at a fast pace which is helping to keep us on track.  Hopefully will have some finished models in the scene soon and we can start moving away from bulk colours and potentially start some lighting passes!

[charliebennettdesign]

FLUX Sell Sheet

Here’s our FLUX Revised sell sheet, the colours come across quite overly saturated on Screens but that’s to accommodate for the reduction that happens due to printing. Now just to give it to some industry professionals and see what they say!

[charliebennettdesign]

Building a Tavern

Work has begun revitalizing old Greybox. A tavern scene that was made towards the beginning of the year has become my new side project as I aim to create an environment which can be used for the setting to a bunch of future games.

I began by stripping back the old greybox built in Unity and Re-Exporting it into Maya to give myself a template to work with.

A list was then made from all the objects within the scene so I’d have something to work off rather than picking a model at a time. 

With tonight’s progress and some help from Textures.com I managed to get through the benches, dice, mugs and flooring in order to get a general feel for the level. The next goal is to get the remaining main furniture pieces complete before moving onto aesthetics like barrels and bulletin boards.

[charliebennettdesign]

Do You Wanna Build A Greybox?

The first steps in replacing the Design Greybox assets have begun today. The artists greybox assets have begun to replace the majority of the assets within our scene and with that, the game is starting to come together.

With the early stages of pre-production, FLUX has already seen numerous attempts at different layouts. Due to the nature of our modular assets we’ve been able to pump through multiple levels and see what seems visually appealing.

Through the many iterations, we found that our camera was initially way too far away and have cut down the size of the level several times in order to convey a feeling of being on a large spaceship. We had to allow clarity through the visuals due to the chaotic nature of the game and so our UI and colour palettes are under constant reiteration.

But as it goes for now, here is Level 001 - On its 7th attempt it’s finally  - Highly visible  - Interesting  - Spacious

[charliebennettdesign]

Modular Design

A key theme across the development of Flux has been modularity due to the scope and time constraints presented on the project.

It was only once we dived into the project did we realise as to what building with modularity entailed, as a designer it sounds well and good minimising assets, the time required and potential problems down the line but at the end of the day, there's still much work to be done.

Whether it be the seamless art or the sizing and dimensions at the end of the day we've come to the conclusion it's a reshuffling of the workload but one that we can afford and have successfully overcome so far.