contingencygamestudio

[contingencygamestudio]

Assignment 3 Postmortem

Throughout the development of our game, it has been really helpful to reference the reading to ensure we’re on track to submitting a polished and playable product. In chapter 13, there’s a diagram on page 434 which shows the stages of production. Using this funnel shaped diagram, with the help of my team members, we have organised to have certain tasks finished at checkpoints. In the first week of group work for assignment 3 (week 10) we not only smashed out the concept phase by having an in-depth discussion about our concept and focusing on the final idea for the game, but we also got to work on the preproduction phase by organising of MVPs and generally what roles we would play during this assignment. Over weeks 11, 12, and this week, we interwove the production and QA phase, since we had playtesting each week, and finally this week we have polished our game to the best it can be, and with maintenance all complete we are ready to submit, or as the chapter calls it, ‘launch’.

The content of chapter 14, including things like visualisation and concept art, was never really touched on by our team because I was lucky enough to have Earth and Zac put their complete trust in me when it came to the vision I had for the game. I did, however, consistently send assets as I completed them and let them know when new dialogue was ready to be tested out, which did create a sort of product backlog and clear documentation for each team member to file when they’d completed tasks and for the others to see and comment on whether it was up to their standards or not.

I genuinely believe through this process I have gained more confidence in myself to be able to pitch my ideas and skills, since during week 10 we had to form our own groups. I made clear that I was comfortable with coding, making assets, and writing, and while I normally tend to sell myself short I made sure my future teammates knew I was extremely capable. It felt great to put myself out there and have multiple people reach out to me to join their team. This experience, as well as the content in chapter 16, has motivated me to start working on a resume specific for game design jobs, and now that I have more experience and another game project I can put in my portfolio, I feel really excited to try and get a job in this field of work. 

If there was one thing I’d change about the process, it would be to more clearly communicate the boundaries for my work and time. While I appreciated that the other guys wanted to clean up my code, this would lead to me becoming confused about where parts of my code had gone, and I would waste a lot of time trying to get back to work on things I couldn’t find. Along with this, I probably would have made the scope of the game a lot smaller, since this is just a prototype and doesn’t need to be a fully fleshed out project. I believe that I may have excited my team members too much with all my ideas, and indulged their ideas a bit too much, which led to me putting in a lot more work than I felt I needed to do. Along with this, by making a lot of the assets I sent the message that I would be making all the assets for the game, thus I would be asked to make new assets for objects the others were working on, and this became very tedious and time consuming.

Overall I believe this was a really fun assignment, and making this game as well as playtesting it every week gave me a lot of joy and reminded me why I want to become a game designer. 

[contingencygamestudio]

Assignment 3 Iteration & Changes

Based on playtesting for the past 2 weeks, our team has made some changes to the game, including:

changing interaction button from ‘x’ to ‘e’ since this is more intuitive

adding more visual and audio feedback for player options

making the diary pages scrollable with right and left keys

an option to skip dialogue

added more information to ensure player knows what the goal of the game is 

Before submission, we plan on getting a few more crucial mechanics in, including:

upgrades shop

wrath of god ability

more npcs to recruit

a place to purchase new churches

win condition (destroying other religions)

make the UI prettier

[contingencygamestudio]

Chapter Discussion

Based on the reading for this week from the textbook, I have developed a new perspective on my team’s structure for the final assignment. I have always considered myself a game designer, since in all of my group assignments throughout my time at QUT I have fallen into this role, whether I wanted it or not. Chapter 12 served to show that in this specific assignment, the roles are not rigid. 

For example, I would be the game designer, as I created the game concept, communicated my vision to the team, and created levels. However, I also fit into the role of programmer, as I coded in most of the game’s working mechanisms so far. On top of this, I have made the sprites, so I am technically also the visual artist. Taking on many roles is expected in such a small team and with such little time to create a working prototype.

At first I thought I might be making a mistake, having put a finger in every pie, however, this chapter of the textbook emphasises that “your objective is to create an environment where all individuals are able to contribute to the very best of their abilities”. This reading helped me to understand that not only was everyone filling in weak gaps to create an overall strong team, but it helped me realise what the “best of my abilities” was. 

I couldn’t have asked for a better team, and even before reading the chapter, Zac and Earth were engaging in inclusive brainstorming sessions with me. My team members are open to all ideas and I feel like our time and task management is great; we all know what everyone is doing at any given time. 

[contingencygamestudio]

Assignment 3 Playtesting

During class this week we got to playtest our game with the other students in the class. I had managed to get a working dialogue system, as well as a single npc to talk to. If we had had time I would have liked to have a bit more of the influence system finished so that we could have more feedback on it, but we can save that for the next playtesting session. 

When splitting up the work for this assignment, Zac agreed to be in charge of making playtesting questions, surveys, and generally having everything prepared for the session. He created 2 surveys (linked below) which helped the ease of getting feedback. 

Based on the feedback, players wanted to interact with the rooms more, objects that intrigued them. They found some controls a bit confusing, since they were different to what they were used to (using ‘e’ to interact rather than ‘x’). The game goal needed to be clearer from the start in order for the players to feel confident while playing. There were minimal bugs, mostly to do with unfinished areas of the prototype. 

Some things I want to fix based on the feedback is:

add back and forth scroll to the diary

change interaction from ‘x’ to ‘e’ 

add popup boxes when interacting with objects

add intro information/controls screen before entering the game

Zac’s Playtest Questionnaire

Zac’s Playtest Survey

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Assignment 3 Character Assets

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Assignment 3 Development Progress

For assignment 3, I grouped together with Earth and Zac, and together we brainstormed the idea for a top-down RPG style game in which the player plays as an acolyte who must gather more followers to grow the influence of their god. 

We have decided to set up a time on Friday afternoons to have discord calls, in which we will discuss what we have done so far, and what we aim to have done by the next class. Zac has been kind enough to set up an entirely new discord server, where we have different text channels to organise our thoughts and tasks:

Based on our game idea, this week I got to work on creating a dialogue system, and found this to be quite easy since GDevelop has an integrated system with Yarn, where I could upload .json files of the branching dialogue straight into the game. 

From there I programmed when the text would pop up, as well as choices and prompts for the player:

I also made some pixel assets for the churches, player, followers, and a blank world space, which I will dump into the next post!

[contingencygamestudio]

Assignment 2 Final Design

In my last post about assignment 2, I showed the one sheet/sell sheet for my game Flesh Pit. That design is what I decided to go with for the final version of my assignment, and as well as that, I created my one page to give further information about the game:

I honestly have little idea whether I need to add anything more, and hope the information contained is enough. Basically, I highlighted all important game objects and UI, with brief explanations about the roles they play in the game. 

[contingencygamestudio]

Racer Post-Mortem

Based on the playtesting for my racer, there were mixed reactions to the gameplay. 2/3 playtesters enjoyed the movement of the car in the world, while 1 didn’t like it and suggested changing it. All playtesters appreciated the aesthetic and assets of the game, finding the concept to be intriguing, which was the main goal of the visual design. 

Playtesters wanted to see things added, such as:

Collect different types of police (colour coded) with different abilities

Obstacles to the road

Power ups

Overall, the general reaction was positive, but found the game to be lacking. This prototype was probably the one with the least content provided out of all my prototypes, due to having been busy with a lot of other assignments.

If I had time to fix the game, these are the issues I would address:

Adding a win condition

Make the course longer

Balance health (enemy needed more health because they were too easy to kill)

Make car movement less janky 

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Assignment 2 Progress

I have finished designing my one sheet/sell sheet for assignment 2. I was inspired by tourist posters, as well as the movie poster for Jaws, where the person above is unaware of the giant beast that lurks below. 

The information on the sheet provides everything that the rubric asks: a title (Flesh Pit), an X statement, three unique selling points, as well as defining details. I used a mix of collaging techniques and played around with textures quite a bit to end up with a crinkled poster effect. At the bottom of the sheet I integrated a screenshot from the actual game, to give an accurate reference to the gameplay. I also overlaid the entire sheet with a grungy, maroon filter to emphasise the dark nature of the game as well as the fleshy aspect. 

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Racing Development

Development on my racing game is coming along nicely, with all the assets for enemies, police motorbikes, and the basic world imported. I’ve decided to give the player no way to directly attack enemies, thus they must rely on the police motorcycles they collect to protect them and destroy the enemy cars for them. 

Enemies, police motorcycles, and the player car all have health variables now, and I’m thinking of adding an explosion effect to play when they have no health left, before they’re deleted. 

I’ve created sprites with simple animation, such as the presidential car having waving flags to give the illusion of movement:

I think the ‘racing’ element of the game is still a little weak, so I might add a timer to put emphasis on the player needing to race towards a certain goal.

[contingencygamestudio]

Racing Elevator Pitch

TITLE: DALLAS

PITCH: You play as William Greer, President Kennedy’s driver and fatefully behind the wheel on the 22nd of November, 1963. After receiving a strange premonition, and against the orders of the FBI, you decide to take a different route, avoiding the parade during which JFK was meant to be assassinated. By doing so you created an alternate timeline, alerting the Time Order Tyrants, and now you must race to escape them as they pursue and try to kill JFK.

IMAGE:

CONTROL DIAGRAM:

UNIQUE SELLING POINTS:

Play out an alternate version of a famous historical event many people are intrigued by

See what would hypothetically happen if JFK lived

A racing game with an emphasis on evading capture rather than reaching a finish line

[contingencygamestudio]

Asteroids Postmortem & Download

I have finished my asteroids game, and I’m pretty happy with the final product. It is a totally functional and fun game to play, according to the playtesters, and I managed to iron out all the issues brought up during playtesting. 

If I had had more time I would have loved to add some of the suggestions made by the playtesters, difficulty settings being the main thing. Chapter 10 of the textbook emphasises how important balance is to creating different difficulties, and as well as this I was very interested in changing my game from a symmetrical system to an asymmetrical system by possibly adding things like power ups. The chapter also mentioned combination, where a timer could be added to create more tension on top of objectives: this could have worked really well in my game if I had time to implement it.

Overall, I’m satisfied with the end result, and have learnt a lot from the experience and the readings. I’ll keep some of the things mentioned in Chapter 10 in mind for my next game, and hopefully can find the time to implement these things to my racing game.

GAME DOWNLOAD LINK

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Asteroids Playtesting & Book Discussion

This week I was lucky enough to have three people playtest my asteroids game, and from their feedback I created this graph to visualise overall game quality:

After reading chapter 10 of the textbook, I found a lot of good tips for ensuring my game is complete. I used the exercise ‘testing for completeness’ and applied this with the feedback I got from playtesting, leading to me finding solutions to each complaint:

ship hitbox needed to be more precise

I edited the collider to hug more closely to the ship’s body

when shooting asteroids the player will sometimes be thrown back and it looks janky and confuses the player

I changed the move away action so the asteroid moves away from the player when it is hit, basically inverting the subjects of the action

some people can skip over the controls and become confused when playing, can’t go back to view controls

I added a pause menu where the player can double-check the controls if they skipped over them

Based on the positive feedback, my game feels balanced. I did a lot of tinkering with timers for asteroid and ship spawning when I first started working on the game, so I think this paid off. One of the playtesters mentioned possibly implementing difficulty, which could impact spawn times and damage, but I don’t think I will have time to create a new system like that. Chapter 10 of the textbook does go into detail about how changing variables can effect the balance of the game, providing for different difficulties, and if I had time I would have liked to explore that further. For now, the variables I have at the moment (e.g. ship speed, damage, spawn times) have been balanced accordingly considering I only have 1 difficulty setting for the game. 

[contingencygamestudio]

Asteroids Development

After completing the setup for my asteroids game in class, I went on the add more elements to the game to create something that resembled my elevator pitch. The first thing I did was import new assets for the ships, asteroids, etc. 

My first task that I assigned myself was to give the player W,A,S,D movement as an option, since I wasn’t able to figure it out for my platformer. I found it much easier in a top-down game environment, and by using logical conditions and behaviours I managed to implement this easily. 

I also wanted to implement some more environmental feedback to let the player know when they’re taking damage and destroying asteroids. To do the former, I again used the flash behaviour, and carried over a lot of the health code that I used for my platformer. For the asteroids, I programmed them to play an explosion animation before being deleted: 

Before playtesting on Thursday I plan on adding ships, an assimilation mechanic, and the station to take over.

[contingencygamestudio]

Asteroids Elevator Pitch

TITLE: SWARM

GENRE: Space Action, Shooter

PITCH: You play as a member of a hive-mind virus, compelled to infect and take over the entire galaxy. Hunt down fleeing spaceships, and ensure that they do not escape by shooting mind control waves at them. Once you have enough ships assimilated, you’ll have enough force to take the space station. You will aim to enter these hubs of high populace to infect more people, ultimately winning the game once you reach this point.  

SETTING: Deep space, asteroid field 

IMAGES:

Ref: James Clyne, ‘Star Trek Concept’

Ref: Skylines Official Trailer (2020)

CONTROL DIAGRAM:

AUDIENCE: Beginner gamers, ages 6+

3 SELLING POINTS:

The game has unique mechanics (assimilation)

The game provides a narrative experience not often explored (play from the POV of the “bad guy”)

The game provides a fun challenge (needing a certain number of assimilated ships to unlock the objective area of the game)

[contingencygamestudio]

Platformer Postmortem & Download

I have come to the end of my time working on the platformer, and while there is a lot I wished I could have added, I don’t have enough time to add anything else. I’m pretty happy with all the mechanics I was able to squeeze in: main menu, health bar, collectables, etc. 

If I had had more time I would have implemented a melee attack for the player, but since I could not do this I added more health kits to the map, so that the challenge isn’t too hard and the game doesn’t become frustrating.

Nevertheless, this experience has been truly rewarding. I have learnt so much about behaviours, conditions, and actions, as well as using scenes and UI elements. In making this game I also discovered a quick way to make assets: all the assets in the game are copyright free images taken from the internet and run through a pixel filter to give them all a homogenous aesthetic. Something else I’m really pleased with is the overall world atmosphere, and from the playtesting I was happy to learn that the horror/gory vibe I was aiming for was achieved. 

GAME DOWNLOAD LINK

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I have managed to add a flashing effect to the healthbar when the player takes damage to make it more clear when they are losing health.

Also, as can be seen in this video, I’ve added acid puddles as a damaging element of the environment, based on the feedback from playtesting that suggested I add more enemies in the form of bodily elements.