jones--bones

[jones--bones]

MY GDD

https://sotonac-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/g/personal/jj6g22_soton_ac_uk/EUn8ehVBBaBHgO-cZQJhdkIBn88vTdbb3W91z8X0fLmTBg?e=a7TEmv

[jones--bones]

Week 10 Supplemental Development

Wizard of Oz prototypes:

When doing the Wizard of Oz protoype for other testers I used the same test I had come up with previously, this time using finalised art that I had made to make a more complete version of the test rather than the handdrawn temporary art I used previously. In the test players would be using the wrist attatched menu to select and build a stone mine on a stone resource which would require commanding the gobling to build it by pressing on them and commanding their new path.

The tests were positive, with alot of positive feedback on the art and looks of the game, and also a positive response on the flow of the controls and gameplay.

Presentation and recording:

This week I recorded a voice over of me doing the presentation that I would have otherwise given to the whole class, but as I was away ill this week I had to record it. The presentation is an edit down version of my GDD, with game relavent art used to make the presentation fun and colourful. The video is posted to my blog already.

GDD developing and finalising:

This week I wrote the last few sections of the GDD as well as went back over the whole document tweaking bits, specifically parts of the gameplay and mechanics as the playtesting that took place this week did change my mind about a few details that I thought would be improved by various small quality of life tweaks.

results of prototyping (Q&A):

All responses about the style or art style came back very positive during testing so I am very confident and happy that very few/no changes are needed that area and that it can move forward with its development if this game were to be produced in full.

In terms of gameplay it was largley positive with only small problems with the flow of the controls, as it would sometimes feel clumsy or awkward to select the NPCs, then select command and drag them to the area they were being sent to. The work around was quite simple as it only meant removing the un-needed step of selecting command. Now a player only needs to tap on the NPC before dragging them, and this change is present in the GDD.

[jones--bones]

Week 9 Supplemental Development

GDD Development:

This week I worked on the art and sound sections of the GDD, I used images from various previous 3D models and I did alot of 2D vector art for the UI and resources which I added to the GDD. I wrote about the clean but colourful art style that the game would be going for.

Vector art and UI art:

Here is a representation of the wrist tracked UI that would be used to look at your resources and to select buildings to build. It was created in Inkscape as I do with all of my vector art.

Here are the closer individual assets for the four resources: treasure, rock, wood, and metal in the game:

All art was made in Inkscape and is in a consistent clean colourful art style with uneven lines to feel more whimsical.

Competition research:

The largest competition for the game is the animal crossing franchise and the game rimworld, as they are both very large in the colony sim franchise despite being on the two opposite ends of the complexity and difficulty scale. Prison Architect is also a large player in this area, on the rimworld side of the complexity scale. This is alot of large competition in a relativley saturated genre, however I think this is much less of a problem due to the unique selling point (USP) of my game which completley sets it apart from the others, making them much less directly comparable, that being the augmented reality and motion tracked controls. I have still taken alot of time to play and get a feel for these games, as they are masters at the genre, but I do not beleive that they offer much competition for my project, financialy or creatively.

Sound Effects:

This week we had a guest lecturer named micheal, who is a Games Composer and Lecturer. It was a very interesting lecture and allowed me to put together a short list of audio that I would need for the project, as I knew that it would not be especially long. The catergories of sound that I would need is: music, UI, NPC audio, Invader audio, Machine/Building audio.

The rest of the lecture was spent working with audacity and freesound.org to layer free use sound effects and samples to get a feel for how to use the program and how to possibly make some basic sound effects to use in our projects.

I used various twinkling sounds, with bells and chimes to create a UI select noise.

[jones--bones]

Grublins Presentation

This is my presentation for my game Grublins, that I recorded at home rather than in person as I was quite ill at the time.

[jones--bones]

Week 8 Supplemental Development

Further GDD Development:

I spent this week writing a large chunk of the GDD, this included mechanics like the happiness system which I also spent alot of time thinking about this week, deciding on how it would work, but also importantly why it would work in that way, does it aid the feel and purpose of the game, does it naturally flow into the rest of the gameplay and not feel tacked on. These were all very important steps to make sure that it didn't feel incongruant with the rest of gameplay.

Happiness Managment:

Ultimatley I decided that to have the happiness system flow with the rest of the gameplay it needed to directly tie in to the main crux of progression and gameplay, which is the development and expansion of your town. If happiness means the difference between a player quickly expanding their town, and being flush with resources, versus fighting to keep their town fuctional, before becoming overrun with invaders and eventually failing, then it adds much more gravity to helping and keeping your NPCs happy, on top of the cosmetic elements showing NPCs happiness which should help with the emotional connection between players and their NPCs. Put together I think this will be a very efficent and powerful tool to build connection and empathy in players for their NPCs.

Getting back on track:

This is the first week back after having a week off away from working on this project, I think this has both allowed to have a fresh perspective by stepping back from the project somewhat to have a better sense of what is important and whats supplementary. It has in a way taken me too far away from the project however, so I have spent a period of time rereading my previous work and posts in order to regroup with my own work and progress.

Peer opinions and light feedback:

I spent a chunk of time this week presenting an abriged form of my work to my two housemates who are also on the games course, to gain some light feedback and see if there were any areas they would point out as redundant, or overly complicated. The main feedback was in the progression of the game. They both agreed that it seemed backwards and counter intuitive that as the game progressed players were encouraged to move away from using the NPCs, and start automating to eliminate the need to use the NPCs, when the heart of the game seemed to be in interacting with them and forming relationships with them through play. I did agree with this after some reflection, however I still strongly beleived that automation was the direction to go with the progression in the game.

Heart of the Game:

After alot of thinking I realised the progression of the game was in need of a slight pivot, rather than the game being a movement of using your NPCs to phasing them out, the game needed to change to a movement of using your NPCs exclusivley for resources and construction, to using them for defence and combat. This would do a couple of things, it would get rid of the issue of not being able to interact with your NPCs as the game progresses as you will now be able to see and interact with them more while they are passive and showing more of their personailty while idling. Additionally it adds a new tension and challenge to the game as you are now working almost against time to become efficient so you can build your defence against the impending attacks rather than have all of your workforce in construction when they attack.

[jones--bones]

Week 6 Supplemental Development

Paper wizard of oz prototype:

I decided this week on how I would be doing the paper prototype. Despite still needing to create the art, I planned out the peices, as I will be needing a folding menu with a pop out menu to emulate pressing on your wrist to open the menu in the game. I would also be needing representations for the NPCs, their pop up menus, as well as resources and upgraded resources as the prototype will be replicating the process of choosing and selecting a building, and then building it by commanding and directing NPCs.

UI choices and Sketching:

I also spent some time drafting and thinking about how the UI will work in the game and eventually I decided that all UI would only appear upon being prompted by the player. This would happen when a player would raise their hand to use the menu, or they would interact with an NPC, either by picking them up or dragging them around. I want this as it will help the suspension of disbelief in playing, it is important to the core of the game that player feels like they are in the real world at all time, this is why the game is in augmented reality, not just virtual reality.

Filling out GDD:

I have began to fill out the few pages of details in the GDD, in the begining sections of the games core concept at inital pitch, its innovative approach and why I have made the choices that I have.

Civ V:

I came back to play an old favourite game this week to specifically get a feel for how it handels the expansion of complexity and depth as the game progresses, and you have more and more units and buildings you have to micro manage and keep running efficiently. Initially I was thinking of this as an issue that required a fix but as I got deeper into the gameplay of Civilisation V I began to realise that this didn't have to be a problem to work around but instead could be a soloution to another problem that I had started to encounter, that being the lack of emergant gameplay, and natural ramping of difficulty other than simply making combat more difficulting. By making the game progression a fight against loosing control of a sprawling complicated machine of a town with interlocking parts, it added a much needed layer of depth to the late and end game.

[jones--bones]

Week 5 Supplemental Development

Character Design Session:

This week we had a character design session with Lucy, as written about in a previous post, as I have already put alot of time into designing the character designs for my project, this wasn't particularly useful in my case currently, but it did make me think of how to use common motifs in my designs across other characters like the enemy invaders in the game.

Heroes of Hammerwatch: I put 6-8 hours into the game Heroes of Hammerwatch this week. My main takeaways from the game where in its upgrading and leveling mechanics, which I beleive I can learn alot from in the creation of my game, specifically in ways to spend the earned resources on permenant upgrades to stats to improve the speed and flow of the game consistantly. This mostly be seen in my game in improving movement speed and efficiency of actions in the NPCs actions.

Building the GDD:

This is week I started the production of the GDD, I planned out each section that would l write about in the GDD, using various peers' as refrence as well as existing proffesional GDDs like the Race'n'Chase GDD, which later became the first Grand Theft Auto game. I split each of the sections into smaller portions relavent to my project, this meant a focus on writing about the specific control scheme and innovative approach for the game, due to the special use of AR and motion tracked controls.

Different Avenues of Prototyping:

My original planning for the prototyping was to create a video demo, with tracked elements to recreate the AR visuals with blender, recreating the NPCs, houses and the menu. However I came to the conclusion that this wouldn't be feasible for two reasons, firstly it would require too long to learn how to use the tracking in blender after spending hours attempting to get a basic grasp on it, and secondly, it would not properly convey the interesting part of the game, compared to a potentially much more efficient way.

Instead, I will be creating a simple paper "wizard of oz" style of prototype, in which I will be moving elements around to replicate the gameplay and movement, while the player tester uses a paper wrist mounted menu that folds out to replicate the menu system and get an idea of players build and naviagate naturally when provided with a fully physical system of play.

More Sketching to Develop the NPCs:

I spent more time sketching possible looks for the enemy invaders, which will look very similar to the regular NPCs, but with a different colour scheme, and I am thinking of a different kind of eyes to instantly make it clear and readable to players that they are hostile.

Name, Logo, and General style:

I have come to decide on the name Grublins for the project, it obviously creates images and connections to goblins, which the NPCs are visually tied to, but is still distinct enough, and in my opinion has enough personality to be distinct and their own thing. I also wanted to quickly create a logo using Inkscape to have something to use on documents and such to appear more proffesional.

[jones--bones]

Lucy Character Development Session

Lucy Character Design Workshop

Art director for Disney Illusion Island

Tips Section:

-Go in with a plan, deliberate choices and a purpose behind your choices, its okay to change your plan down the line

-Establish key words and phrases to guide the direction, e.g Solid, Chunky, flowy, playful

-The character needs to stand out against the world, in shape, detail, and colour. If you lose the character in the game that is a no go

-Think about the camera!! where will you be seeing the character from? how far away? what angle?

-Develop a visual vocabulary, recognisable elements, meaningful use of shapes and shape language

Design Session: Fantasy & Pirates Isometric RPG

Keywords: Stout, Steampunk, Opulant

thumbnail stage- (rough and fun) lots of research to try and break out of uncouncious biases, and stereotypes, push the shapes

Honing in- (Starting to commit, but still fast and rough) needs of the characters to think about in the design, FUNCTION

Finalising- adding details and elements of storytelling to the character, think about the immediate assumptions you make when seeing them

Poses & Expressions: make it personal, very important for the team and animators to see the personality and how they move and act

[jones--bones]

Week 4 Supplemental Development:

Rimworld:

From the start of this project Rimworld has been an inspiration for the gameplay of my project, although it is a much much deeper level of complexity than I plan for my game, I have often described both the complexity and depth of my game to 1 part rimworld, and 3 parts animal crossing.

This week I spent more time playing Rimworld as well as watching it to get better understanding of how they handle mehcanics like resource gathering and storage, building allocation and construction, and NPC job allocation.

Animal Crossing:

On the otherside of the coin I spent time watching and playing Animal Crossing New Horizon this week to see how it balances its role as a light hearted town manager with the different kind of player motivations in the game, like bug and fish collection, fashion, and town decorating to name a few. I also wanted to see and compare the shared mechanics between the two games, like building, and how differently they handle them.

Both games feature a grid based building system, which I plan to use too, however I plan to combine Animal Crossings placing of prefab buildings (opposed to custom built buildings) with the more specific and leanient placement of Rimworld, facilitated by the hand tracked controls letting you place building specifically where you want on the grid.

[jones--bones]

Week 3 Suplemental Development

Board Game Club:

The only new game that I played in Board Game Club this week was an expansion of Dominion, the deck building game played previously. As this introduced various new mechanics into the game it was very intereting to see the development of their use of affordances and iconography with more complex elements, though this was largley it.

Adventure Time:

As seen in my original moodboard created for my character design, Adventure time is a big inspiration for the art and asthetic of this game, and so I have been watching more of the show this week. Specifically taking note of their combination of simplistic and childlike design and style, combined with their cluttered and busy magical elements used through out the whole show specifically when designing enviroments.

It Takes Two:

In It Takes Two you play two characters that I have turned into small toys navigate the world as well as how its been warped and changes from the imaginative perspective of a child, all of which are elements that relate heavily to my game, being a mystical and magical world, seemingly invisible to the normal eye, happening around us at a much smaller scale.

Tears of the Kingdom Clothing:

I also found myself playing alot of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom this week, but I found I spent a large amount of time not focusing on the main missions and story but interacting with two specific side parts of the game: the clothing/armour sets, and the home construction. I had two realisations from playing in relation to my project, one being that I want a strong focus on customisation when playing my game. The simple block building in Zelda gave me the idea that something very similar could be done in my game, as it will be using a grid system to build up your city, why not allow buildings to connect and even build on top of eachother, creating sprawling messes of settelments for your minions.

Additionally, I need elements for the players to do inbetween the loops of collecting, building, fighting, and what better element with a game focusing on lovable little minions than dressing them up. Different clothing options could be both hidden behind objectives, and craftable, using special tailor buildings, and collected resources, to give your favourite minions something to distinguish themselves.

Paper Craft Session:

During a session on concept art, we were shown a method by Jake of creating a collage to illustrate your idea, as it allows you to move peices around very quickly, and see how these small changes alter the feeling of the creation. I used various peices to quickly put together my minion character. My main problem was trying to show the scale of the character, and I quickly realised the problem was there wasnt anything to compare them to, so I used a splash page of a Heinz advertisment to try and show the scale and was immediately happy with the results.

Blender Project Project:

The next day I got to work creating the character in blender, as well as playing with various effects like subsurface scattering. While these real time lighting effects would not be viable for the actual game, there is potential for cheating it by creating a texture for the skin and ears specifically that suggest subsurface scattering, since I think it lends alot to the charecters small size.

[jones--bones]

Week 2 Suplemental Development

Board Game Club Wednesday:

In this week we played Dominion, Cockroach Poker, Cosmic Encounter, and Blood on The Clocktower.

The first game was Dominion, a deckbuilding medival card game where up to four players take turns going through various action, buying, and clean up turns. While the deck building gameplay doesnt directly relate to my project, the art and style does. The various icons and symbols did give me a chance to think about the affordances behind resources and actions in rustic styles of games.

Cockroach Poker is a facinatingly simple bluffing card game, where players pass cards around to each other making claims on the kind of animal it is. What I took away from it was its hidden layers of complexity, things that arnt imeddiatly apparent, like the likleyhood of lies based on your own hand and prvious cards played, and the multi layered bluffs that develop as the game progresses. All of this from a rulebook so simple it fits on a post it note.

Cosmic Encounter is a very interesting case study for ballencing in games in that it takes the very unique stance of giving every player a hidden power for their chosen character, all of which are seemingly game breakingly overpowered at first view, but are all as overpowered as each other, creating a suprisingly balanced game, where each player's presence itself hugley shifts the flow of the game.

Terraria:

Recently I have been playing alot of terraria again, putting in around 40 hours in a shared world over the last 2 weeks. The NPCs in Terraria have a very simple system for their happiness being that it is effected by proximity to other NPCs that they like and dislike, the biome that they are housed in, and how many other NPCs are in close proximity to them. This is a very simple system, but has impacts both emotionally and mechanically. Emotionally the NPCs dialouge will adjust depending on their state, displaying more of their own personalities and encouraging players to work to keep their favourite NPCs happy. Mechanically the game rewards players by offering both various exclusive items that are only sold by NPCs who are happy, and offering discounts for purchasing items, on top increased payment for items sold to them.

The interplay of these mechanics works incredbibly eficiently to create well rounded personalities and an extra level of depth to a objectivley quite simple NPC system. I had already been planning to add wants to my NPCs in my project, by having them request certain things when being picked up, but playing terraria has built on this idea. Firstly I want NPC happyness to effect you in a tangible way, such as reduced speed and efficency of their actions and movement, as well as emtionally, maybe using a slower, sadder looking set of animations for walking etc.

Additionally, looking at my old research on Kurt Vanagon, having each NPC assigned specific wants, likes and dislikes, like in terraria, is an imediate way to create a personality in the eyes of the player, which is already a huge priority for me, as it has informed the use of augmented reality from the start.

Blender project development:

This was some work I did in blender this week to try and actualize my frist sketches into 3D. I was very happy with these, and although they're still untextured, with some clean up of their topology and more variations, I plan to use these models in an animation in my future GDD.

[jones--bones]

Mini GDD

Logline:

Using AR help build and raise a colony of little minions in your own home, building your villages from desktop resources and defending from invaders using your hands for motion controls.

Gameplay:

On one hand the player will have a menu on their hand containing a scrollable list of buildings you can place, as well as counters for your resources and minions. You can use both hands to pick up each minion, move them to give them new commands, create pathways for resources and even lift them to your ear to hear their needs.

Setting:

The play area is your own surroundings as it will be using augmented reality, and the structures and buildings will be all constructed from desktop materials such as pencils, paper, paperclips etc.

Audiovisual Style:

When creating the visual style of the rest of the game, such as the UI, character design, and general artistic theme, I knew imediatly I had two avenues of design I could follow, a more mechanical and robotic style to fit the commands and controls of setting routines and tasks. Alternativly I could follow a magical and mystical direction.

My first idea was to sketch out various ideas for character designs, as I wanted that to inform the rest of my artistic choices. My requirments were that they be simple, allow for slight variation/customisation, be able to convey alot of varied emotions and have simple limbs for easy but charismatic animations.

My takeaways from this session was that I wanted to mainly go down the magical or mystical approach, potentially with a mix of toy like mechaincs, but only in addition. I also knew that I needed to create a moodboard going forward before I could settle on an idea.

I looked at various inspirations, with the main being adventure time, It Takes Two, and various studio ghibli films such as Arriety. This cemented I wanted to go with a goblin/pixie/woodland asthetic. I then began sketching out some of these ideas:

This is the character design I setteled on and that I am very happy with, it has large expressive eyes allowing for alot of emotion, long wacky limbs to allow for alot of characterful animation and second hand movement in motion. Additionally it allows for various on its clothing, even potentially a progression of outfits as you progress through the game to get more civilised. This art style will now also direct my UI and other artistic elements of the game.

Platform Specifications and Controls:

This project will be devloped for AR/XR headsets, specifically using the HTC XR headset and Unity, as it also allows for easy hand tracking implementation. I am putting in some thought of accesibility for players with either impaired hand use, or generally without use of both hands, but I will need to give more thought to potential work arounds.

30 second description of play from players point of view:

Open your hand menu. Select your beacon (which you will start with one prebuilt in your inventory). Place it in your play area physically, allowing you to command the 3 minions wandering in your play space. Look around your play space for the various resources. Pick up one of your minions, and place them by the resource, assigning them to it. Assign a second minion to travel from the collected resource and your beacon, transporting goods. Select a new building from your list, like a campsite, watch tower, or store room, and place its build site. Assign your third and final minion to build, using the resources to construct the new building.

[jones--bones]

Week Two, Monday Takeaways

Jeffery Lam Senior manager product design @ EA

Attitudinal vs Behavioural what your told vs what you see Henry Ford - We want faster horses -> we want to go faster listen to peoples input and research and try and break down what people actually want, not what they think they want

Dont be another Anthem, have a cut off for your ideas, a point where you cant keep pivoting.

NUI Natural User Interface: computer literacy isnt needed,

Onboarding: organically teaching elements for the first time, like climing in breath of the wild, or throwing a ball to teach grenades in plauge tales.

Jedi Survivor: gameplay loop, increasing your power by collecting more "stances" to feel more powerful and have more options in combat

Making site maps of what each button press will do and where it will take you with each press

The hardest part of the double diamond is the first step, finding and esstablishing what the problem is, not the fixing the problem.

[jones--bones]

Week one Extra Development

Blender Development:

This week on two occasions I joined a call with my partner who is trying to learn how to use blender for his uni project. His experience prior to this was 2 hours of the blender donut tutorial but he was largely trying to learn by doing. I spent about 4 hours on call with him helping troubleshooting, teaching short cuts and the details of blender, before he was happy to continue on his own.

In the end he was happy with his model and wanted to export it to procreate for texturing, but it was not working, so I received the files and being trying to troubleshoot. This meant learning myself how to export to unity, cleaning up the model, UV unwraping it, fixing its normals, and generally optomising the whole model to work in procreate, as well as working in 3D printing software.

Teaching blender to another person isnt something that I have had to do before but it immediatley helped test my own knowledge, and the problem solving of trying to detect and the fix errors made in the model originally, while visually leaving it unchanged was a greate exercise for myself.

Board game study:

On Wednesday I joined a board game club hosted in the studio by GDA Y3 Liz. With seven of us in total playing 3 different board games. starting with Deception: Murder in Hong Kong, a social deduction murder mystery game, where a story teller player reveals clues so that the detectives can figure out who at the table is the murderer. After that we played Coup, a quick card game, where players will use their ability to bluff and call out others bluff to be the last player standing. And finally we played cockroach poker, a deviously simple bluffing based card game, that has a rules page so short its no bigger than a playing card, and the whole game is one 64 card deck.

From playing each of these games what really impressed me was in the levels of depth you could acheive from the ingenius interplay of such simple mechanics, especially in cockroach poker.

[jones--bones]

Begining to develop my Idea

We have been challenged with deciding on a definite Technology, Media, User or Theme for our projects before we move forward. While I am still unsure of the Tech, Media, and Users, I have decided that for my theme I will be working with the subject matter of Proffesional Wrestling.

My reasoning for this is twofold. Firstly I beleive that the hight action, bright colors, and loud nostalgic astethic of Wrestling is alot of fun and underused in gaming, with the only big example outside of the more basic wrestling simulators to tap in to the theme being the game Guacamelee. Secondly the theme is very close to me as a fan of wrestling since I was 12, one of the rare constants in my game dev journey has been a want to make a truley great game about wrestling. While I don't think that this project will necissarily be my magnum opus like I have thought of endlessly, I do think it will keep me invested and excited about this project through its ups and downs of development.

[jones--bones]

If I Could Make Any Game

Tech: Augmented Reality Headset

Media: Hand Tracking

Topic: Settlement builder and colony survival

My pitch for a game I would create if I could make anything would be a colony builder game, like rimworld, but using an augmented reality headset. You would be able to select you town boundries and physically manage your burrower town folk to build them up. Enemy factions would come to attack your base, using the rooms geography as physical terrain to their advantage and as blockades. As you developed through the game you would expand your colony to other parts of the room, and establish connections between them.

Due to the difficulty in creating a consistantly balances game, as some peoples rooms will provide a better benifit to survival, the game would lean more casual and creative, similar to animal crossing like games. Ideas to support this would be maximising the relationship between the townfolk and the player. You would have the ability to pick up the NPCs physically with your tracked hands and see them, and build your towns with alot of creative control to develop your town as you like.

The general player interaction would be a more casual relaxing version of the gameplay of rimworld, commanding your townsfolk to do tasks to help build and grow your settlement, like collecting resources, farming, building, hunting, etc. as well as answering the requests from your townfolk directly. The point of the game is to take the relationship and connection that players feel with their townfolks in games like animal crossing and stardew, and cranking that up to 11 by having them appear in the physical world, as well as providing a charming and creative way to have each players expereince be different and feel their own, as these towns grow around their own home.

[jones--bones]

Week One, Monday Takeaways

During todays session we worked in teams to workshop creating a creative game concept quickly. In teams of four we wrote many example ideas of sticky notes according to: Tech, Media, User, Topic. After these were all put up onto the studio wall, teams took it in turn to select two sets of 4 notes for the team in front of them. Teams would then pick one of the two sets and create a quick pitch for a game idea meeting the requirements.

Our team (of Me, Aidan, Luca and Logan) had the chosen notes of:

Tech: Potato Battery

Media: Rumble Motors

Users: Cult Followers

Topic: Cthulu

With these notes we came up with the idea of a "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" type game, where one player would be the "cultist", using a potato battery equiped with different rumble motors to complete various tasks, that will be dictated to them by "cthulu", another player speaking to them from another room without visual of the first players actions.