georgiapickupfutureworks-blog

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Tabletop RPG

For our assignment, we was informed that we would be creating a tabletop game in the RPG genre. I had to do research into the genre, and see what was already out there, after all; I feel like most games on the market probably all are similar to Dungeons and Dragons in some way. I for one have never played it, and I also had no idea how it played out, but I found a nice handy rulebook online and an overview, and it give me an idea how the game plays out. I wanted to take the idea of having a Dungeon Master role, (a storyteller?) and having one in my game too. I didn’t really understand how else a tabletop rpg would play out.

I don’t know why, but I am that 1% of the population that comes up with the name first (even if I do change it a bit,) just to come up with an idea. My end name was Planet Hoppers. Others I thought of was Planet Invaders, Space Magic, Attack on the Planets, Galaxy Wizards. I knew I wanted something along the lines of Space, and Magic, the character breeds I was willing for anything. I wanted to make the game as wacky as possible, so when I thought of the name, it went up from there! I feel like name first is important to me, then I can make a pun-derful idea that I will enjoy making.

As I wanted to make this crazy idea into a playable one. I needed to figure out why on earth Frogs would be in space. Here are the basic themes I wanted to expand on in creating the game;

Frogs and maybe other strange similar animals.

A wizard on Earth (main storyteller?)

Necromancers wanting to learn animal training

Each player owns their own planet and companion

You defend/attack each others bases?

As of coming back to this blog, my ideas have changed completely, I decided not to re-write anything, as it gave me something to look back on. I feel like I was over complicating the idea, and I could of made it more simple whilst still keeping to the aesthetic I wanted. I scrapped basically most of the initial mechanics, and come up with something that anyone can easily pick up and play.

As the art style of pixel evolved within my game, I wanted to make sure the gameplay really represented that. I decided it would be some wacky game that makes no sense and requires no real storyline. It’s simple, you start on the moon, travel through planets, kill things, collect things, finish on Earth to be taught a spell of a Wizard. Simple right? No, the Game Master throws all these bosses in your face that you must defeat, before you can collect Spirit Animals of him. That 10 health you had at the start of the game? Bam, you are now on five.

At the moment I have done no play testing, the Game Master will have some limitations as to how many of what he can spawn and how many overall he can spawn. The gameplay is designed to be fast paced and not take long. I can’t wait to do some playtesting and see the evil boss spawns game masters out their decide. As for me, I know I would spawn 20 buzzy bees if the game allowed it, to see the mages cry themselves to sleep.

Currently, my blog is all over the place, when I am writing my ideas are just on some sort of broken plane, and I can’t write in a logical A-Z space. My work is a mixed up alphabet, that could be a game idea in the future, I’ll note that down. I’m not the best artist, but I really enjoyed creating all the little bits of art in my game (also why I chosen pixel art.) Pixel art is hard to be bad but I made it bad, not purposely, of course.

So, the basics of my idea, I researched about looking at rules of other games, I didn’t want to look at anything other than rules or mechanics because otherwise I get too much into other people's ideas and i’m like, I want to do that! Before I know it I have made almost a carbon copy, so mechanics research is where it's at. Look at the rules, and look no further. When playing Escape the Castle, I learned better about how role playing tabletops play out. As I have never played one before. I have played a lot of rpgs in the past, but never a tabletop, it was a fun experience! From games I have played in the past (Mostly Everquest 2,) I like to think I have a large knowledge of fantasy characters and abilities, and I feel as though I can balance a game well.

As for inspiration, I was inspired by the idea of quirky art style, and a bunch of fun normal bugs and made up animals. I was gutted that I couldn’t make the museum trip as wondering a museum and looking at all the weird and cool things of life is always a fun experience. To make up for it, I looked deep into the world of pinterest, my second home. Inspiration is the life of me there. Inspiration, mostly my nights awake, insomnia comes in to use a lot for having ideas, the notebook at the side of my bed is full of crazy ideas. This is one of them. I used to be the type of person so shy to write down ideas I had, because I was ashamed they was too weird, but now I aspire to be that designer who makes the strangest things possible. I added a screenshot of the art I was working on.

I had some very basic rough handbooks in powerpoint as my game was developing, now I know what I want to go for, I have created a house style in photoshop. Graphic Design is my jam so I was super excited to get into creating a player handbook. I went for a very cute and quirky style that really represented the game, lots of bright colours involved!

I thought heavily about the mechanics in my game, I enjoy number crunching, mages are my favourite out of all four archetypes. My idea evolved very quickly, and I decided that I wanted to make it cooperative mages that must defeat the game. (After suggestion later on, they must defeat the Game Master instead.) (And I love that idea.) I gave each mage their own ability. Each boss have their own abilities too. I loved being able to balance the game, I always love a good logic puzzle to make a game balanced. I wanted to make each Mage special in their own way, and make each boss special in their own way. Testing the game was a way I could find a balance in everyone's abilities. There is only so far you can test as a Game Master will never be certain. Below is a screenshot of the Mage Page in the handbook.

I never intended to have a Game Master, I considered it, scraped it, and now after it being suggested I can really see one fitting in the game well. Game Masters can make a game way more creative, bringing mechanics into players hands! I made a guideline page for the Game Master so they can’t go over the top, will work out the specifics during testing.

As of coming back to this, I have created a house style in Photoshop and worked on how I want my player handbook to look. I am so happy with the visuals, I spent a lot of time working on the art for the game and then doing the graphics for the handbook, but I love it! I wanted it to be super colourful and fun, and I feel like the handbook represents the game perfectly. At this point I am happy where I am with the game, and I am ready to test!

Having people read over the rules made a massive difference to how they are written, I am awful at communicating across my point so having multiple people read was very important for me. A couple of typos were picked up for me which was helpful. As my game is meant to be great for children new to RPG Tabletops, I needed it to be easy to understand, after all, the game is a simple concept in itself. Another suggestion I got is that the Game Master should be encouraged to create more of a storyline, to make it more fun for children. So I added that into my Game Master Guide.

I also did all the math of playtesting to make sure the Game Master can’t fully control the game and make it unbeatable. The math made me realise some things needed to be adjusted. E.g I adjusted the mages health from 10, to 15, the mages was too easy to kill if the Game Master was feeling up to it. I also decided to add a revive to one of the less skillful mages. Meaning if someone does die, you can try again. You can only use it once. I will add a screenshot of the math I did, it is in a weird format where I understand what is going on. If you understand my brain, enjoy the spreadsheet!

Overall I feel like my game come together really well. This was an enjoyable assignment that introduced me to a new genre in games. As an aspiring game designer I feel it is very important to have some knowledge in all genres, to be able to reach maximum creativity. I hope for anyone who plays my game enjoys it as much as I had fun making it!

[georgiapickupfutureworks-blog]

Whitebox Prototype Blog

For our assignment, we was informed that we would be making a whitebox prototype game, that has three different blueprints, and a basic HUD. As well as this we had to create a visually appealing concept documents for our game idea. This assignment meant we was learning a new piece of software, Unreal. 

For the concept documents we did, I went for a battle royale and cooperative game idea that was designed for the Nintendo Switch, Kombat Kittys. I loved the idea, and that's staying for my concept documents. As for creating a whitebox prototype in Unreal, I felt like it wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted, and that I wouldn’t be able to execute it right. So I decided that my whitebox prototype game would be a difficult platformer, and that I would design one of the levels for it. I knew I wanted to make a Dark Souls meets Mario and send everyone insane with stupid mechanics. Not necessarily hard, but annoying.

I started working on the whitebox prototype, if the game wasn’t whitebox, I wanted the place to look like a laboratory factory. I put in some placeholders, described what I wanted to achieve in the game, and got some feedback. The feedback I got was absolutely fantastic, and it has given be a lot of ideas in where to head for my prototype!

I am having a lot of fun experimenting and trying new things within this whitebox prototype, my initial idea for a platformer was cool but as I gained feedback and learned new things, I can see how my game has developed itself more and more everyday. Below is a photo on my initial idea, I will be adding more photos of the progress as I go along the blog.

Firstly, I worked on the teleportation mechanic first. I wanted to make it so when you fall of the platforms the game will take you back to the spawn point at the start. I added a trigger box around the bottom floor, and created a blueprint for it. For making the teleport I added the trigger volume, then linked that to a teleport. Within my teleport I linked the character to the target. I then made a link to the spawn (just a basic cube,) added a get location, and linked it to where the teleport location will be. There will be an image below of the result of the blueprint! It was very simple to create a teleportation mechanic.

I figured out I would like to re-use a similar blueprint later on. I decided instead of the player having health points, that I would just make it so anything bad you touch, you just died and respawn instantly. (I was considering adding a respawn delay, but I figured I was being cruel enough by having a lot of things that can kill you.) I will be adding a bunch of spikes around the place to represent damage and danger. Screenshot below of my blueprints.

As I began to work on the overall design of the whitebox and placing geometry, I soon was getting even more of a theme of it being like a dangerous laboratory. I wanted all these crazy shapes everywhere, for it to look like some sort of simulated experiment. One room has a floor full of spikes, if you fall, you fall down into the pit of death.

In the room where you first walk in, I added a bunch of spheres around the area. I thought it would be a cool aesthetic, the idea is that they represent like acid bubbles that are lingering in the area where you spawn in. They don’t do damage though, it is just something visual and fun for the first room. Along with that there is a signpost up the top, that directs the player for their way.

When you reach the end of the corridor you have a small room with a few platforms. They are both different difficulties but the player has no idea which is which. You can go down either path and both would take you to the next level in the game. I have added a screenshot below of a birds eye view of the game.

One of the room is filled with tons of spikes, throughout that lane has many moving platforms at a high speed, making it difficult to time reactions along with the players movement being sluggish. I wanted the player movement to be like that as he is a small character in a big world. The idea I had is that the player is some sort of lab rat, and that the player needs to escape the laboratory and go through different levels to achieve that. Also that he is dosed up on medications because he has been experimented on, so the characters movement is difficult. I played around with a bunch of settings to see what worked best, where it isn’t impossible, but it also isn’t easy, enough to make a player go insane. Because I have been playing around with the character so much, I know it is doable, but if I didn’t try to control the character movement, I would easily just keep dying.

The massive open area it is a little easier but still a lot going on. There is no right or wrong way to get to the end goal! There is just a bunch of random pieces of geometry with things moving all over the place, to show that there is many machinery and lots of work going on. Coming back to this I adjusted the other lane slightly to make it a little easier. Then the massive open area just takes longer.I added many scripts for moving platforms. I also added some text to the level. As well as this I went along and added a HUD for my game. Below I added a screenshot of my HUD.

Overall I feel like this was a fun assignment for properly using Unreal for the first time. Blueprinting was difficult, but with the tutorials out there it was very easy to get things working. Playing around with the design of the level was fun, although I wish I could of added the in-app textures to make it more playful! I feel like I have learned why whiteboxing a game is important for prototypes. It allows for testing scripts, etc, to see if there are any problems early on in the game. It also allows for experimenting with new things and it is easy to change at that point.

[georgiapickupfutureworks-blog]

The Murder of Eleanor Winters - Blog; Part 1 (Assignment)

Intro

Our assignment was to create a 1500 short story then expand the story and make it an interactive narrative in Twine. In the 1500 short story narrative I decided to turn it into a little prologue of what will happen in the interactive story, this way I could expand it and really focus on the story-line.

I did debate many different ideas for my story, like creating a fantasy world, but I decided to go for something more simple and build a story out of the world we live in today. I decided to do this as it makes it more relatable and easier to write a story as I have never written one before. Also because my chosen genre is crime, it is something I feel more comfortable with as I love law and investigation. It felt like something I could expand upon nicely, and do a lot of research into, and I also have a lot of past research from my interests. A simple plot twist can really make a story so intriguing to its reader.

Most people say thing of the name to the story last, but for me, that was the first thing that come to my mind, so I just went from there...

Basic Research

I wanted to make sure to get in as much research as possible, and really try and create a realistic story-line. As a base research I used the following websites for inspiration/help on building my world/characters. It really helped me create realistic characters and it made me think of small traits I wouldn’t even think to give them myself. As I am not the greatest writer, I wanted to make sure I made up for it as best I could in creating the story itself. Here is a website that listed a bunch of traits to create my character. And here is a character profile sheet that helped me build my characters from scratch. Here is just some writing tips that helped me think about my characters more in depth.

Other research I did, was looking into the crime/murder genre I watched TV series, films, listening to podcasts, looking at book blurbs, games, and look at the more real life pieces of media like news and documentaries. It was important to me to look at as many murders as possible to create something realistic. I wanted to get an idea that many scenarios are possible in a murder, anything can happen, I wanted to know as much as possible to help me write the genre. To create an interactive narrative I also had to learn how to use TWINE. I found a very good tutorial creator ‘James Ryan’ and you can find his videos here. His videos were extremely helpful and informative, but also quick and straight to the point, I was able to get started in Twine in no time.

In depth Research

Some of the series I have watched recently include, The Blacklist, How to Get Away with Murder (FYI highly recommend both,) Dexter, Dark, The Sinner. I have watched a lot of other crime genre in the past like NCIS, etc. Less film, more just TV programs, I would like to see more murder mystery out there in the world of film. Overall I am just a huge fan of the crime genre and that is why I felt like writing something that fits into it. I also listened to a podcast, Knife Point Horror. When I listed to this I was so engaged into what the reader had to say. It felt like I was there in the moment, by the way he explained things. The one I listened to was called Staircase, you can find his podcasts here.

I was looking at some real life murder cases you can find here, as well as the inspiration it struck, it really sunk in for a moment that it is so real and it kinda scared me.I am not great at reading, so I just read a few blurbs/synopsis of a few books, otherwise it could take me months to read them. I had a look at Murder on the Orient Express and In Cold Blood, it helped me get a brief overview of murder writing style on paper, rather than visually watching. You can’t visually see a writing description, so looking up books and articles is important to so that I can see how things are explained in that world.

My experiences from Research

Overall from my experiences in watching and reading upon a murder, I feel like I can recreate a dark story-line to make it feel not only engaging but also real. Within writing techniques I wanted to heavily portray foreshadowing. I feel like it is an important technique within horrors or murders to easily its genre and that something bad is going to happen. I also wanted to use heavy descriptive sentences that actually didn’t make much sense, (but in a good way.)

I feel like my story-line was less research driven and more personal experience. Because I was so interested in the whole crime/murder genre, I had watched a lot in the past. Trust me, there is nothing better than a good documentary based on a murder. Also, because I have had a lot of tragic life events, I feel like crime really suits for something for me to write about, as I suppose most writers incorporate their life into a story in some way.

Creating a Story-line

Of course, my genre was crime, but what type of crime? A murder, a robbery? Of course, I already knew murder. But I needed to work out the specifics. What type of murder? A gun, a knife to the throat? Or even a torture murder and ... never mind, lets keep it basic. The good old three stab wounds that lead to slowly bleeding out to death in around 20 mins. Great, I had the important information laid out.

(Intense rambling ahead) Then, I needed to know, why he did it. There needs to be reason, after-all, I made the characters and the world first, then I had to create a story for them to act out. Kind of like going back to being 6 and playing with my Polly pockets, what would I of made my characters do? Kill someone......I was 6! Of course I didn’t, but you get the idea. But what I can add is, I do love Sims, so, I feel like that almost says it all. I tried to find a gif of killing off a sim but apparently Tumblr gifs game is lacking.)

So I decided, a rich family pay an average family to stay quite about the tragic accidents that happened, as their son killed one of the twins. The rich parents of a killer keep him a hidden secret and say he died. One twin grows up, secret stays safe, but then rich boy things she is going to tell her daughter everything so he gets his son to kill her. Clues lead daughter back to that side of family and bla bla bla, before I knew it everything just fit into place so easily. Whilst watching Pretty Little Liars I didn’t think coming up with a plot twist was that easy to do.

Although when it come to writing, things changed, but overall the structure stayed the same as what I planned.

Creating a World

Honestly, creating the world was the easiest part, I wanted a crime, I didn’t want it to be in the future or back in 1600′s. I just wanted your everyday plot twist murder based in our time now in England. All I really needed to do, was choose a location for context, and there you have it, world complete. I did take notes of things like, its Winter time, 999 not 911 as it is UK. UK references only in the writing style. The story is based on false events but it easily fits in to our real world, making it feel like it happened. Below is just a little billboard I created, just to remind myself of the location whilst writing the story.

Creating Characters

Characters, quite possibly the area I spent the most time on. I wanted to develop characters that felt so real that if I walked up to them in the street they could tell me their life story. I had a lot of character planning, so instead of adding a picture, I will insert a link to my character slides here. The research of what helped me make them is listed above. There really isn’t much I can say in a blog about creating my characters, to understand them more, I would check out the link of where I designed them. Creating the characters was super important for me, to help me understand their personalities better, I made them in The Sims 4, if you wish to see, email me on gpickup1@futureworks.ac.uk (they are a masterpiece.)

I really can’t tell you what I was thinking at the time of making the characters, just random ideas come to me, and I was like okay, I will use that. I knew I wanted a daughter, mother and grandmother living together in the countryside. It just felt right, I don’t know why, it just did. And I wanted the Mother to have tragic past and means she gets killed. At this point of making the characters, I didn’t know why she was killed, I just knew she was the one I wanted to be murdered, and I knew I wanted it to be the long lost hidden Father. I created a rich family, who had hidden his son, (for whatever reason I hadn’t come up with yet.) It was only when coming up with the story-line, I introduced a new character, Alison Winters. Karen’s (the main character’s) twin. She fitted in easily into the story with no real information needed to create her. But that one simple added character completely made the story go in the right direction. It also gives reasoning for Karen’s strange behavior and emotional outbreaks, she has a twin who was murdered just after birth, she felt like she had a part of her missing.

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The Murder of Eleanor Winters - Blog; Part 2 (Assignment)

Writing the Narrative

I decided I would write the narrative before I started on Twine. For my narrative I decided do to a prologue story of the actual narrative of Twine. This way I could begin a story, and not feel like I had to cut it short due to world limit, as I could expand it further on Twine. I decided on the narrative I would specifically focus on details of the murder, like a detailed flashback/dream of when it happened. I wanted to write in past tense, first person (Karen,) I tried to stick to that as best I could throughout. With my narrative I kept the writing style pretty informal, like it is actually a teenage girl writing down her thoughts, so I wanted to make it seem real in that sense.

You can read the narrative through here!

Working in TWINE

So before I jumped into the world of Twine, I decided I would rather do a branching plan in power-point. I wanted to have a skeleton to work with. I wanted to make sure I knew where I was heading with the story, and as I created it in Twine, I could expand heavily, and change bits round if needed. But I had the skeleton ready to go, so I jumped into Twine and started creating the story.

Below you can see the skeleton design of how I planned to have the story-layout.

(Screenshots are very blur, but the information on the skeleton is just note form that I could understand when it come to working in Twine. Just wanted to show how my layout evolved from planning to creating)

So that was the planning done.

I hopped into Twine after looking at tutorials (linked above in research,) and it just really flowed along. There are quite a few things I changed, for example, some of the pathways you see above lead to different areas. As I was expanding the notes I made, I had to change pathways to make sense to what I was writing.

Overall though I found Twine really fun to use, and even though I have never wrote a story before, I would probably go back again in my own time and play around with it some more. When this assignment was first handed out I was terrified, I knew I couldn’t write to safe my life, my English is awful, and my idea’s are usually all over the place, but I really enjoyed learning some new techniques and seeing a different prospective to story writing.

Below is the screenshot of the finished layout/pathways in twine. I had to put half the story to the right to make it fit onto one picture.

As you can see, there are 3 finishing endings. All of them are fairy unique to each-other. I wanted to give a lot of small choices in the story, have the story make you are making small choices throughout, and then at the end, the small choices have a very big impact on what ending you receive. I enjoyed creating the Twine story, especially as it was an investigation style of writing. You can play through here! (Hopefully that works.) 

Feedback Received

I had a few people play through my Twine story game, and received some very valuable feedback that helped me adjust anything that I didn’t notice. E.g, typo’s (as my spelling is beyond awful and Twine doesn’t auto correct like word, god damn it.) I also had some feedback on writing in past and present tense, I was trying to keep it all present tense, and I slipped up in past tense a lot, so players noted where past tense was happening. Also just some context mistakes, as they was playing through, they realized it felt like there was some information hidden. So I made it make more sense overall and that players find out the most important stuff the whole way through.  

One bit of feedback I really liked to hear was that the player wanted to know why and how he killed the baby twin sister. I laughed, as every-time I watch a good old mystery murder, there is always something left unsolved/unclear. So this was my unsolved mystery that let players think for their self. As a writer, I can confirm, sometimes we don’t even solve things for ourselfs, we just want readers to imagine.

I didn’t really get much feedback overall, I asked some people to play it and read the story, but I received very minimal feedback, so I didn’t have too much to tweak, so I assume that is only a good thing!

Overview of Finished Story

I feel like I learned a lot from story-writing. It was a super fun assignment to work on, and I always love learning something new. I feel like my story-line fits in well to the world of mystery murder. I am happy with the decisions I made throughout the creation of the story-line. I hope others can find some form of immersion or enjoyment out of my story! 

Read it here!

Play through here!

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Photos - Story Game

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Rules - Story Game

Setup

Make sure each deck is fully shuffled, place down the loot deck and the spell deck in the middle of the players.

Shuffle the character dungeon cards and randomly hand them out, do not let each other know who is what player, you must work that out within gameplay.

Rules

Four player game.

Game time is around 15-20 minutes, we recommend playing 20 rounds, but you can play as many as you like, but it will affect game time.

Place down a counter to keep track of rounds.

On your turn you must make sure you are following all your character's rules.

On your turn, make sure you are telling a story in a fantasy setting of what you are doing. e.g, I am a ranger, pronouncing stealthy in the forest, where I come across an unusual chest.

Roll the dice to determine if you can draw a card from the spell deck, if you roll an even number you can, use the spell and put it to the bottom of the deck.

If you have a spell you can only use it on the next turn, and before the dice roll.

Take one piece of loot from the deck. If you roll an odd number, you can take an extra piece.

On every second round you can bank in one item to cash in for gold, the piece of loot goes to the bottom of the loot deck again.

Follow the price list card, take notes of how much you have, you cannot loose gold currency unless you are blown up.

In the shop/bank you can trade in 3 different gemstones to obtain the collection of gems, making it worth more.

Certain items are loot are worth more to different characters, it will say on the card what bonus’ you get obtain.

1 attack = steal an extra item if you have a spell that means you can do so.

1 defense =  if someone attacks you, they take one less piece of loot

You can stack attacks and defense. You must have the card out in front of you to make it clear you have that bonus. Once that statistic has been used though, the piece of loot is now worthless and it goes to the bottom of the pile.

Categories

There are different card categories you will find in the game.

The main 2 decks are the spell deck and loot deck.

The other things in the game are to remind players of the rules and the story. There is the price list for the shop/bank. There is also the dice of fate. Finally there are the character cards that have their perks on them.

How to Win

Winning is simple, whoever has the most worthy loot by the time the rounds has ended wins.

Tips

Make sure you have a notepad and pen or calculator to add up your gold.

Keep an eye on your enemies moves to work out their character to exploit their weakness!

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Summary - Story Game

Summary - The Rich and Cunning

With Great Power comes Great Responsibility. You will stop at nothing to attain the most wealth, riches and glory in order to become the most powerful Ruler of all - but the path is not easily traversed. On your quest, you must collect the most values.eg loot, battle enemies and other hopeless competitors, and outsmart the weak. Use your traits to your advantage and keep your dungeon safe. Only the most cunning Tyrant may win. A ranger, a troubadour, a swashbuckler, and a beastlord, who will take the victory in becoming the most wealthy ruler? Character cards are shuffled randomly and randomly handed to players. You must keep that to yourself, it would be unwise to make it too obvious as to what powerful tyrant you are. Players take turns to roll the dice and collect spells to battle their opponents and collect loot to become wealthy.

Collect loot, play tactically, know your enemies weakness and use it against them! Some characters have certain perks so if you try to attack with a certain spell it will backfire, so if you have a spell, make sure you work out who to use it on.

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Material List - Story Game

Material List, The Rich and Cunning

Game Includes

 Dice

Counters to keep track of rounds

4 Character/Dungeon Cards

Spell Deck

Loot Deck

Price list

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Design Statement - Story Game

Design Statement - The Rich and Cunning

Iterations

Whilst coming up with idea’s for a story game, we tried to look at other types of role playing games of different genres. We went through many different idea’s before we settled on one. As a group we countered many problems with idea’s whether it was idea’s not working well together or it just being an idea that wasn't achievable.

Other idea’s we come up with was inspired by the animation film, Monsters Inc. We liked the idea around playing with doors to access different places on the map (the board.) The idea is that a child was running away from their family members and trying not to be caught, we experience the child's dreams through the story. We decided to scrap this idea completely, we come to the decision that making the board was an unrealistic goal, and that the overall idea didn’t connect fully. We then tried to create a similar idea but in card form, but the game didn’t really fit together well.

After our first playtest through it was clear what issues we currently had and what needed to be changed. As we carried on play testing we adjusted more and more to a point where we think the game is at an enjoyable state and once the players learn the rules it has a lot of potential to be fun but also super competitive.

We made quite a few adjustments to the rules and also the character cards to fit the new rules. Overall the characters and spells were balanced even though people didn’t start out evenly. The mechanics worked well so we just had to tweak them slightly to fit the new ruleset. We removed a rule where players rolled a dice at the start that decides their character, this straight away made it a little too obvious who was who. We added in defense and attack mechanics with certain items as loot, as it made sense if some of the loot was boots, swords, etc, but they are very class specific. We also removed a bunch of cards that didn’t make sense. As well as this we added in a brand new mechanic we like to call the banking system, every other round you can bank in one item to keep it safe to cash in for gold so they don’t lose it.  

Rules

As complex as the rules are, once you get to understand them it is a fairly simple game with a straightforward structure. Each person is a different character, you collect loot as you go along, you can cast spells on enemies to gain bonus loot. On each player's turn, they create a little story of what they are doing, we have set the overall start and end, 4 tyrants are battling it out, 1 wins. But we wanted to make it player driven of how they have the storyline within that start and end, making it feel more creative for the players.

Design

The design of the game is overall pretty simple, you can play with just a deck of cards, a 6 sided dice, and some counters. We did in fact ponder the idea of boards a lot, but it felt very out of our reach created one. The cards are just standard cards that come in a deck along with the dice and counters.

Overview

Throughout creating this game we learned a lot as a whole and that play-testing alone is the most important part of creating a game. When you are coming up with idea’s it sounds great on paper, but when you start making it you have to think of little things that make a difference in gameplay; for example the simple issue with the dice at the start we had mentioned earlier. Small things like that change the game completely. Overall the game come along successfully and the whole idea of it being a player driven storyline made it feel creative and more re-playable.

[georgiapickupfutureworks-blog]

Limbo Trailer Assignment Blog

For our assignment we have had to re-create the sound for the Limbo Trailer. I watched over the trailer many times before I could probably remember it off by heart and it sent me insane, but totally worth it for the research! You can find the original trailer with its original sound here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4HSyVXKYz8

I also played through the game, I wanted to get more of a feel for the games aesthetic and genre so I decided I would play through, plus it is an amazing game with a completely interesting but messed up story line. I would highly recommend playing through, worth an hour’s playtime (assuming you don’t die, but you will.) Download on Steam, it seems to be on sale often and can pick it up for a couple of pound. 

Anyway, about the assignment, I instantly knew I wanted my genre to be heavily inspired by a fantasy theme. I first looked on wiki, like everyone else does for answers in life. One line in the entire page hit me the most; ‘Fantasy is a genre of fiction set in a fictional universe, often, but not always, without any locations, events, or people referencing the real world.’ And there it was, one sentence that opens up so many opportunities for endless creativity in a project, Fantasy is by far the more creative genre, (with many sub-genres,) and it opens up so many doors for projects. You can read more about fantasy here, wiki may always seem boring and daunting, but honestly this is one of the most fun research projects I have yet to do - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy 

So once I had my main genre set, I wanted a sub genre, you can have many different types of fantasy themes whether it is magical, scary, in a fairy tale world, sci-fi, comical and many more. Even though my initial idea was to make it feel like a fairy tale, it drastically changed into more of a horror fantasy world. Over the course of the blog you will see how my idea changed from one to another. I feel like as a creator it is okay to change idea’s, I feel like being stuck in one mindset is what stops people being as creative as possible. Explore! It will always make the end product feel something to be proud of. A good website that shows and explains Fantasy and its sub genre’s well is here; http://www.findmeanauthor.com/fantasy_fiction_genre.htm

I started to research into other games, one of my most played games of all time is Everquest 2, it has been out for 13 years now, and it is hands down one of the best games. Not to mention the sound when you are playing, you don’t have to play with sound, but if you do you feel like you are there and you feel so more engaged, it never gets boring. As Everquest 2 is of course very heavily fantasy themed, each year they bring out new expansions and they always have a trailer. I watched through each trailer and seeing how the sound was all placed in and it really got me inspired. I will link my favorite trailer of where the sound really stood out for me, (for controversial reasons I won’t mention my favorite expansion.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj-S4GB6y7M

Other game trailers I briefly looked at was the Skyrim, Final Fantasy and Destiny trailers, I wanted to get a feel for similar fantasy games and see how each game has their own personality with sound. Of course I also re-watched all the Harry Potter trailers, if you know me well you know I will do anything to sneak in some Harry Potter somewhere! So there you have it, I also watched them trailers to get an idea of sound also used in film. It is amazing how similar sound in games and film is used. You can easily find all the trailers I mentioned over on YouTube.

So after watching the trailer, playing the game, working out a genre and doing research into other games/films, I sat down and analysed the trailer bit by bit and noted down every possible sound. I also noted down how I could re-create most sounds to suit my chosen genre. Doing this gave me a frame to work that really helped me come out with a final product better.

I began collecting any sounds I wanted to use, because I have so much experience with editing packages like Audacity and Premier Pro, I felt comfortable taking a sound and really making it my own. I got most of my sounds all over the place on Epidemic Sounds, this website is amazing for all types of music and sound effects. There is such a huge verity on there it meant I only had to get very little things from external sources like YouTube. 

Overall I collected around 50 different sounds to work with. Including two separate sound tracks. I didn’t use them all but I did use about 85% of them and edited each one in some way.

All the links to the sounds that aren’t on Epidemic Sounds can be found on a separate document here. The document has links that take you directly to the YouTube page of each one.

For someone new to Audacity and Premier Pro, all the different options for editing audio can be overwhelming. Even to a semi-experienced creator like myself there are still many settings I don’t really understand fully when it comes to editing audio. The best thing to do is mess around with different effects until you find something you like! Once you start finding effects you like it gets much easier to edit other sounds. 

I really enjoyed editing the sounds I collected, you can take the most basic sound and turn it into something completely different in the matter of a few buttons. One example is the sound of a duck I taken, I edited it to sound like a stranger creature. Quick link here. 

I really wanted to have an intense build up in the trailer, to achieve this I used techniques of having sound get faster and louder. It makes it more intense as you are watching. I wanted the ambiance to feel realistic for a fantasy setting and I feel like I achieved this well. I wanted to have many little sounds that all added up as I felt that was more dramatic and interesting than one big sound. 

Before I had any feedback of my first completed trailer, I think I was semi happy with it but I did feel like there was something missing. When I received the feedback from my peers and tutor it become clear what I could improve, but I did get carried away and ended up changing my sub genre from fairy-tale to horror fantasy. 

After feedback when I added in more sounds, I decided to remove the original soundtrack I had as it was too overpowering with the other sounds. Instead I just added in a piano that slowly gets faster paced. I was much more happier with this change. Less is more! 

Watch my original trailer before I made any changes.

My finished trailer after I received all my feedback.

You can see how my finished timeline looks. It is very layered but some of them full-length tracks you see are ones put together in Audacity. I originally did all my sound layering in Audacity but it was causing problems with the timings, so I but the more specific timings in with Premier Pro so I could match it up better.

After writing about my process fully I know how my trailer went from fairy-tale fantasy to horror fantasy, I feel like that was all simply in the research, I could of looked at more fairy-tale fantasy games or looked at Disney trailers to get a better idea of what a magical setting should sound like. 

I am glad I did lean towards horror fantasy, it started to feel like Stranger Things and I really liked that. Stranger Things is one of my favorite shows and all the sounds are so intense and super interesting. I feel really happy with my finished trailer, although it went through a lot of changes I am glad it did. I feel like I re-created the sound well and I hope you can understand my thought process and enjoy the trailer! 

*inserts link to finished trailer again as I am proud*

Enjoy!