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Seattle Trip #3

The last weekend of January was Global Game Jam 2016, and since GGJ last year was my first ever game jam, I decided to do it again as a one-year anniversary thing. Last year, I was at Facebook HQ in Palo Alto. This time, I went back to Seattle! 

Game jams are always a good time. There’s nothing else like throwing together a team of random people and making a game in a weekend. My team this time made a little horror game in Unreal Engine 4 called “Vittra”. This was my first time making a complete game in UE4, so it was cool getting to experience the whole process! The Blueprint system is incredibly robust. My work was mostly on creating 3D assets (like the candlestick and some of the furniture), and design contributions.

Download the game here!

(And make sure you have Visual C++ for VS installed!)

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This past week I was in Seattle for Ludum Dare! Seattle is a beautiful city with tons of really friendly people. Something everyone NEEDS to add to their bucket list is to visit the Seattle Central Library, which is an incredible marvel of architecture.

I had some fun adventures, and made a cool little game with some peeps in the process! It's called Racing Entropy and you can play it over here. We won second prize in the Wimmer Solutions award!

We plan to continue supporting the game post-jam, and we're already implementing tons of new features not in the jam build.

I actually ended up staying in Seattle a day longer than planned due to my flight being cancelled. I stayed at the house of our technical artist and UI programmer (huge thanks, Jake and Jade), and we burned the midnight oil hammering out Android builds of the game for testing.

I had a blast, and I'm so glad I got to participate in a Ludum Dare. Definitely won’t be my last!

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Worked on a script today for player accessing/ examining stuff, like a terminal!

On key press when player is in a trigger that meets certain conditions, it disables the First Person Controller while the player is “accessing”, and enables a specific canvas. Then, on another key press (Quit), it disables the canvas and re-enables FPC.

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Made a cool dust cloud in Maya for an animation I’m working on!

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Some screenshots I took in Channelwood while giving realMyst a whirl (doing a study on puzzles in games and Myst was like #1 go-to).

Didn’t realize this game has day/ night cycles and I think weather, too!

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The Two Types of Puzzles

Puzzles can seem daunting to implement in a game. You feel so clever when you solve one in a game, but actually putting one in your game? A totally insurmountable task. It’ll never happen. Puzzles are HARD. I’ll just stuff more shooty guns in my game, there, people will like that.

Well, I’m here to tell you that puzzles are actually not hard, and you can put your extra shooty guns away. Puzzles are just… misunderstood. They’re actually very simple at their core, and only as complex as you need them to be. You build their complexity at your pace… as long as you start with the basics.

From a design standpoint, there are really only two types of puzzles: “key” and “code”. That’s it. You either find a key to progress a puzzle, or a code. These keys and codes can take on many forms, however, and that is where things get interesting. How creative the puzzle designer gets with the key, the code, and the events surrounding them determines the complexity and ingenuity of the puzzle.

Keys

There are almost limitless possibilities as to what items and/ or events can represent a “key” or a “code”. Keys can be any kind of item: crank, ancient artifact, a literal key to a door, etc. These items can do anything from opening doors to moving objects to blowing up rubble, but the idea is that they progress or solve the puzzle in some way by the player finding a thing and bringing it to the puzzle site, and then using it properly. There can even be multiple keys in a single puzzle, such as finding items to combine together or bring to one place.

Simple key: There’s a locked door. Player explores, finds the key, returns to locked door and uses key to open it.

Creative key: Player needs to sneak aboard a boat, but there is a guard blocking the way. There is a seagull nearby. Player finds “Scrap of Bread” (key) in another area, and feeds it to the seagull. The seagull poops on the guard, making him leave.

Codes

Codes work similarly, but they require more input from the player. The most basic example is finding say a 4-digit code to a door. The player finds the door the code goes to, inputs the code number by number, and boom, puzzle solved. But the code has to be exact. Another example is having to rearrange books on a shelf in a specific order to unlock a secret passage, or regulate a power system to only be generating a certain amount of volts by flipping switches in the right order.

Simple code: Locked door with keypad. Player finds a code and punches it into the pad, unlocking the door.

Creative code: Player needs to access a platform that is too high to reach. They need to use a crane in order to stack boxes of varying shapes and sizes in the correct order to climb up.

Look at any game from Myst to Resident Evil, and these two puzzle types are present. Even physics-based games like Portal exemplify this: Portals are used in code format to create a solution to a puzzle, while Companion Cubes are keys used to open doors, etc.

Puzzle supplements and subtypes

Keep in mind there are other things used to supplement puzzles, such as mini-games, as well as subtypes of puzzles, such as platforming. These can be used in conjunction with keys and codes. For example, maybe there’s a locked door across a vast pit of lava, and you have to play a watered-down version of Asteroids to unlock the door, and then jump across three precarious pillars to get to it.

I’d like to explore this idea of the two types of traditional puzzles further and spread it around the game dev community so puzzles don’t seem so daunting to implement. I challenge you to think of other types. Have you played a game that had a unique puzzle that wouldn’t fit into these types?

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So, what’s next?

First of all, thanks for all your praise, feedback, and constructive criticism. It means a lot, and I’m taking everything into account heading into the future.

But, what is that future?

Well, I said I MIGHT continue working on Memory Lapse, as it is just a demo right now. However, I’m a little torn, because I want to do something original, something that isn’t based off a licensed property. I want something that is my own. 

So, here is the tentative plan for now:

I will start working on my next game, and I will also continue working on DR0. Work on DR0 will be slow, but the reason I will be able to keep it up is that my next game will be an expansion of the game design of DR0. The next game will have maze-like maps and enemies that chase you, but there will be more puzzles to solve, keys to find, and a story to uncover. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but that’s the basic idea, to just expand on what I’ve created with DR0. And DR0 will also continue to grow with it, as I create new code and learn new things for the new game.

No matter what happens, I’ve learned a lot through this journey so far, and it’s not going to stop here. Hope you stick around!

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Your game is amazing but I keep getting killed. It's still super fun tho. The track pad on my laptop keeps glitching the head movement at times which can be frustrating but that's my only complaint & honestly it's not that bad. So glad you made this~

Thanks so much! Yeah, if you’re playing with track pad, I’d recommend just not touching it haha. Just look straight ahead the whole time. Although, I haven’t tested it, maybe it works better in some cases. :D

Also, if you need some help navigating, check out the map!

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I don’t know why that map came out so small, but here’s the full size!

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I think I'm a noob, but I`ve already died over 30 times... Can you do a map, please? ;_;

Nah, you’re not a noob, the game is pretty tough.

The main strategy is to grab the first key, then get as far away from the first Monohead/ Despair Kid as possible before opening the door. Then, you need to head straight for the next key so you can get it before the second Kid comes after you and the first one catches up. Also, don’t worry about the pages for now. They don’t do much in this demo except that you can collect them.

To make things easier, here’s a handy map! Make a beeline for those keys! But be careful, because your route may not be safe…

EDIT: Refer to the next post for a larger map… don’t know why Tumblr crushed this one…

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Considering Apple has released different OS versions left and right in the past couple of years, that could be the case. If it is, sorry about the confusion!

It’s okay! I hope you can get it going on Bootcamp, and enjoy the game! :D I’m glad you have that option. And by all means if anyone else reading this has the same issue, let me know. 

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Yeah, I was hoping to do some testing when I read that statement on the game page, but she definitely can't outrun the despair kids at the speed she goes so it's pretty much impossible to play, unfortunately. Thank you for trying to make it mac compatible, though! I'll just have to play it using windows/bootcamp!

It’s interesting, though, because I have several other Mac players who said they were able to run. I wonder if it has to do with the OS version…

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How fast is Ryouko supposed to run? I'm on a mac and when I hold shift I do hear her footsteps "quicken" but I don't notice much actual change in speed.

She should run at least twice as fast as she walks, but she’s still kind of slow. If she can’t outrun the Despair Kids when running, then there’s something wrong. Like I said on the game page, the Mac version is totally untested, so I appreciate your feedback. I wasn’t going to make a Mac version at all, but I figured I might as well, in hopes that more people could play. Something like not being able to run is pretty game breaking, though, so I may need to take it down.

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It’s here! 

My Danganronpa Zero fan game is ready for download! 

Please read the description and Install Instructions! Thanks for checking it out!

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FINISH!

The demo for my first game, Danganronpa Zero: Memory Lapse, is complete!

Tomorrow, I’ll get uploading figured out and make a post with the download and some facts/ stuff you need to know!!! So excited!!!!!

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I have some kinda sorta bad news. The Monokuma Theater I talked about in the last post is going to be a little different from what I was working on.

Turns out, the Visual Novel Toolkit I was using to create this intro sequence doesn’t play nice with Windows builds. Or any other kind of build, for that matter. At least in Unity 5. Or something. I don’t know. All I know is, the entire game runs beautifully and perfectly in the editor, but when I make a Windows or web build, it literally will not start. I get a white screen and the game crashes. Without the Monokuma intro, the game starts fine and runs great. When I make the build with the intro, it throws all kinds of script errors from the VN Toolkit saying certain commands are obsolete, and I should change these to something else. But when I change them, then it says there’s a problem with what I changed it to.

I’m not going to waste my time trying to rewrite all this buggy code that probably hasn’t been updated since Unity 4.2. But, I also don’t want to scrap the intro to this game. So, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do instead:

I am going to turn the intro into a video. I’ll record it directly from the editor, then edit it and export it as a video file that Unity can play. It’ll be like playing Danganronpa on AUTO mode, basically. I hate that it had to come to this, because I really wanted the player to experience the intro like a Danganronpa game and be able to interact with it, but it just isn’t possible at this time.

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TWO if statements!

I’ve been working on the intro that will play before the main menu this past week. I decided a month or so ago that I would have a special intro for this game for Danganronpa fans, and I’m excited to finally reveal that -- It’s a Monokuma Theater! The game will begin with a Monokuma Theater, similar to those in the games, with dialogue written by me. The excellent Visual Novel Toolkit for Unity has made the process of actually creating the scene in Unity really easy.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me clarify the title of this post. I had finished the bulk of the work on the intro, and the dialogue, sprites, background, animations, etc. were all there and playing nicely, but I needed a way to fade in and fade out, then load the main menu when it’s done. This proved to be easier said than done... then in the end pretty easy after all.

I discovered the best way to give the appearance of fading in and out to black was to use a Canvas Group on a Panel. You create an empty game object, add a Canvas Group component to it, then assign a Panel from the UI menu to the game object as a child. Canvas Group has an alpha value that can be any value from 0 to 1, 0 being totally transparent, 1 being opaque with a solid color or texture. In this case, we want black. I also have an audio source playing music, and I wanted that to fade out at the end, or whenever the player wanted to continue to the main menu, so I assigned that audio source to the parent game object, where I would also assign my fader script. 

I decided to use Backspace as the key to fade and proceed to the main menu, because due to the self-contained nature of the VN Toolkit, whatever key goes to the main menu has to always be assigned to that key during that entire scene. Backspace seemed like a key players would be less likely to hit accidentally.

In the script, I used an if statement to basically say, “if Backspace is pressed, fade the Canvas Group to 1, fade the audio to 0, and load the main menu.” Easy enough, right? Well...

The problem was that the script executes all at once, so there’s no time given to fade before it loads the next level. I tried using “yield WaitForSeconds (3);”, and that didn’t work (still not sure why). I was stumped for a while, and then this afternoon on my lunch break at work, it hit me: Two if statements. I’ve applied this logic before, I can do it again.

“If Backspace is pressed, fade the Canvas Group to 1, and fade the audio to 0″ Okay, now - “If Canvas Group alpha = 1 and audio source volume = 0, THEN load the main menu”

It works!!! This isn’t the first “eureka!” moment I’ve had during this project, but it still feels just as good as the first. :)

So! What’s next? Well, I said there would be a video, and sadly, I’ve come to the realization... there’s kind of too much to show! I’m pretty much done with everything, and so much has changed since the last video, the only thing I can really show at this point is maybe a playthrough when/ after I upload the final game. We’ll see!

As far as what else I have to do? I want to give Monokuma some voice clips during his speech in the intro, so there’s that, and I also want to look at maybe adding some post-processing effects to the game to make it look more interesting/ dark/ creepy/ etc. Maybe.

Getting really close! I know I’ve said that before, but it’s a difficult thing to gauge in this situation. Really, with this project, I’m making it a learning experience for me, and I keep finding things I want to learn by applying it to this game! But I think what I have now is good for a demo, just to get the basic idea across of what a full game like this would be like.

Stay tuned.