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The different combat systems for the games super mario and double dragon

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Combat systems: Mario vs Double Dragon

In the super Mario games, the combat system is very basic a lot of the time, the player simply has to jump on the enemies heads to defeat them. Sometimes there's a slight difference like having a certain body part that's vulnerable or having a window of opportunity to hit them but it's always just jumping on top of them. A game like double dragon however, uses a combat system more true to life, it has multiple different punch and kicks that can be used but generally is just common melee attacks that can be used in combos to defeat the enemies I wanted to use the double dragon style combat but with a sword originally, but with the allotted time and the difficulty of the task I decided it would be a better idea just do a simple mario style system. Of course the melee system would be more immersive for my target audience and the jumping on heads option is usually in games for younger audiences but I don't want to spend half of my time doing one thing when I could be using that time creating the animation or graphic novel, but if I had a much longer time frame and if it wasn't something I'd be learning to do as I did it I would have definitely attempted to make it.

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My GDD

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Foley Research

Foley is a particularly effective part of audio in games and movies because it allows the management of levels without the need to record the same thing multiple times.

a scene will be recorded without sound, the Foley artist will then recreate all of the sound in the video in a studio while controlling the levels making sure everything sounds okay.

this is effective in gaming because you cant record a scene for a game with sound, as the sound needs to be created first so Foley is necessary anyway. it allows for natural as possible sounds that have been refined in a studio to near perfection.

i will need to use alot of foley in my game to create all of the noises in my game that i dont make with piece of software, so that would be the monster noises, any footsteps, the wind blowing through the trees and any speech if i put it in.

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Rotoscoping

in class we learnt about rotoscoping - the process of drawing over every frame of a video to create a cool animation of the original that can have as much detail as the artist wishes to put in.

Rotoscoping, while it is an arduous process, can produce a really good looking animation, it is also very simple if you don’t make it too detailed. The problem occurs when you have a long video and want to do each frame as detailed as possible, while it will look really good at the end it will take a really long time to complete. another advantage is because you don’t have to add in the background details, you can put i whatever you want to add to the scene and you can use props to get items into positions and then not draw them in, so it creates a wider variety of recording techniques.

i could use it in my animation because im not particularly adept at drawing, so i could video myself running and use that to draw my main character into the animation. this would make for a higher quality end product but would also require alot more time to make.

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Sin City

Originally, sin city was created as a graphic novel and when it was adapted to film there was much scrutiny as to whether it would live up to the original.

one of the defining differences was the use of colour, in the graphic novel there wasn’t a single instance where colour was involved but in the movie they made use of semiotics, for instance the antagonist in the story is a rapist and a serial killer, they make him yellow to connote that he is hazardous and sick.

this therefore makes the audience feel repulsed by just the sight of him and it clearly shows the audience what kind of person he is simply with association.

Using this information on semiotics, i can use colours to make objectives, enemies and friendly units clear to the player so they can interact with different parts of the game accordingly. This makes the players experience more immersive as they don’t need prompts all the time telling them what to do.  

i can making my enemies clearly sinister by making them primarily dark colours, greys, blacks. blues and i wanted to make my main character using reds, golds and whites, so that they look clearly like the protagonist, but also use colours of Asian or Chinese heritage.

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Audio: monster sounds

After deciding that I wanted my monster sound to be eerie footsteps I recorded the sound of my footsteps in a corridor, giving it that echo effect naturally, and then when I put it into audition I added further echo and lowered the pitch of the sound to make it really deep, giving it that eerie vibe.

it took a lot of editing to make the transfer between footsteps natural, i had to overlap the copies of each step to remove any dead space that lingered between the steps, although in the final product, i have noticed that it almost seems as if the monster has 3 different footsteps and my design for my enemies only have 2 legs, so that is definitely something i need to watch out for next time i’m making any kind of footstep sounds.

 I wanted to remove and dead space from the playback and I also wanted to start the second step before the first step finished to simulate how an echo would sound in real life, so I overlapped the different tracks to give it this effect instead of cutting off the ends of them and putting them together, giving the audience a more immersive experience. 

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interactive production diary

While trying to design a health, score and lives system for my game I found that after trying to put a controller, the object that controls the health, lives and score, into the game it caused my entire room to delete itself which caused a major inconvenience because i had to redesign a simpler room with the little time i had left, meaning I have to use a much less detailed level, this also means it’s difficult for me to attempt to make the health, lives and score again because it will likely do the same thing again. Therefore, if I get spare time I will play around with the functions to try and find a solution, if I can’t then I will have to settle with none of these systems in my game unfortunately. 

In the next project i will have to try multiple ways of attempting this so that i have one of the fundamental parts of a game, it is also something that gives the player a visual cue for the danger they are in and it makes the game more immersive if they understand the danger the situations they are in.

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Production diary: Inserting sounds into the game

While putting my sounds into the game, I realised that including the sound for the players death may not be as simple as I first thought, as the simplest method was to make it so whenever the player gets touched by the enemies the sound would play, however, this would mean it would play when the player kills the enemies too which is not what i wanted. Therefore, I looked into the code for my player, and I looked specifically at the part where the game restarts if the player is touched by an enemy, here I added a line of code for the sound file to play whenever happens.

 I made the jumping sound effect play whenever the player hits the space key and the enemy death noise plays whenever the enemy object is destroyed.

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End Evaluation

Game evaluation:

the sound in my game went mostly to plan, i managed to get all of the sounds i wanted, although the sound for the monsters isn’t exactly what i planned i am happy with how it turned out because it gave off that eerie vibe i was going for. the jumping and menu sounds i made were how i originally thought they would sound and i found BGM from a non copyright artist because i definitely didn’t have enough time to design my own BGM alongside everything else

the interactivity part of my project was particularly difficult to achieve everything I planned to make and in the end, ended up having to have interactivity solely in the game because I spent too long making the game and couldn't get any interactive parts into my animation or graphic novel, however the interactivity in my game is of a decent quality as it has all the controls the player needs to manoeuvre the player to defeat the enemies and get to the end of the level but if I was to do this again I would definitely make sure to add more interactivity into the graphic novel and animation, by taking more time to create them and create a less ambitious plan for my game

I'm relatively happy with the visuals of my project, the art style of the graphic novel I was particularly happy with because the brush effect gave it a look similar to the brushes used in Asian scrolls and that fits my idea almost perfectly, and the simplicity of it also helped me a lot because I didn't have to be a wiz at graphics to make a good looking graphic novel.

the visuals for my game, while they didn't turn out how I originally planned, turned out pretty well considering the pressure I was under die to the time constraints, I'm pretty happy with all of the assets for my game except I would have loved to make them fully animated but as I had a graphic novel and animation to make, I had to stick with the basics but if I was only making a game with the same time period I would definitely venture to be more intricate in my designs

the animation visuals were my least favourite part of the project because of how different it was from the plan, but because I seriously underestimated the difficulty of making an animation however, I am still pleased with it because does portray the tranquility of the world that I was going for because it directly juxtaposes the game which is full of action from start to finish. I would have liked to added my protagonist walking up the path but I ran out of time and settled for what I had already made.

as a whole i think that my strength in this project was my willingness to turn to using skeleton code when the pre-made code couldn't achieve what i was looking for, this also made editing easier.

my biggest weakness was time management because it caused me to have a thinner boundary of time to work with to get my work done because i spent too much time trying to perfect my game, without considering how much time i would need for the graphic novel and animation alongside the amount of time i would need to create production diaries and evaluate everything i’m doing as i do it.

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Analysis of a graphic novel

A graphic novel is typically mistaken as a genre, when it is actually a format and can be all types of genres from fantasy to non-fiction. they are also often mistook for comic books because of the use of panels and onomatopoeia, however comic books generally have multiple editions whereas a graphic novel is typically a single story with a more detailed plot, that sometimes ranges over multiple novels. a few well known types of graphic novels are superhero based ones and manga.

the types of art in graphic novels consist of style, colour, design, symbolism and lettering and the vocabulary is displayed in gutters, panels, with sound representation, in speech and thought balloons. 

the panels are the parts of the page that display the information, but sometimes the images or text leaks through the panels across the gutters, the gutters are the spaces between the frames that can be manipulated to give the frames a 3D effect.

the sound effects are represented using onomatopoeia and the shape and size convey the situation to the reader. the speech and thought bubbles show the direct thoughts and speech of the characters in the novel and the shape can tell the reader how the speech is being said.

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Game Script

Game: The game will start with the character at the spawn point of the game, and they will proceed forward and kill the enemies that are in the spawn area and find the gate ahead is closed and wont open, so they backtrack and find an area above the spawn that has a miniboss in, killing that boss releases the lock on the door and they can then continue to the boss, upon killing the boss the story continues onto the graphic novel.

this seems light but the game itself was to be a demo of a full game so I didn't drown myself with too much work making the game, in such a small amount of time, so I was going to focus on other aspects of the work. 

the audio in this game will involve the sword slashes and the hit sound effects whenever the player or an enemy gets hit, the BGM will play constantly throughout and the enemies will have their unique enemy music playing whenever the player gets near the enemy until they kill it.

Graphic novel: the graphic novel will be a recreation of the final boss battle, meaning there will be no speech, just the epic fight between the protagonist and Lucifer himself, starting with a the protagonist approaching Lucifer, then he looks at her with an expression as if he recognises who she is, then he charges her like a wild animal and attacks ruthlessly, she takes advantage of this and waits for the opportunity to strike, upon doing so the beast like demon recoils and turns to ash, it ends with a close up on the protagonists face and the demon blood on her face slowly fades to ash aswell. the audio in this will be the sound of the page turning.

I ended up deciding to do the graphic novel the same story as the animation but it would be from a different perspective, for example, an underworld general looking through a portal to see how the assault on the monastery went.

animation: the animation has a still image of the monastery in the mountains with cherry blossom petals blowing everywhere, the protagonist meets the companion for the first time, and upon meeting her they return to the monastery only to discover the grandmaster and everyone else in it has been killed by the underworld forces.

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Dead Island Trailer

In class we were discussing how trailers connect with their audience, particularly with the use of sound, and i decided to look at the Dead Island trailer because i had never seen it before and heard that it was really effective.

most of the trailer is played backwards, starting with a little girl laying face down on the ground, rising up and towards a window, and as she gets higher up, it becomes more clear that she is a zombie, up until the point she is grappling on to her father biting him. whenever the video is played backwards, it is in slow motion and you cant hear anything but the music, but when parts that are playing forward, you can also hear the screams and zombies. As you can tell, it is very graphic and not a very happy story, in fact it is set in a way so that when you get to the end of it and realised what happened it can leave you teary eyed.

The sound is unusual too, the main sound is the background music, which is slow piano music, adding to the sad vibes the video produces. you can also hear the zombies popping in and out every once in a while.

While i don’t think i am going to make something as intricate in my own animation, this trailer is a good reference for the the effectiveness of advertisement, because there was no game play shown in this trailer, and the game itself was pretty bad, in my opinion anyway. Because this was the first impressions of the game, the expectancy was really high because the trailer caused a huge amount of anticipation, so i would like to try and implement this idea in my animation because it will be the first impression that attracts all of the players.

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AUDIO: GETTING ORGANISED

What have you recorded so far?

i have recorded a jumping sound, monster sound, hitting and slashing sound, and background music. (the monster sound was recorded, the rest were created using a software.)

What sound effects do you still need?

none, if possible the boss's roar could be recorded but isn't a primary concern as im not sure i will be able to implement a boss into the game in time.

How do you plan to obtain them:

I’m going to record my sound during our lesson that we have specifically for recording sounds, and after that I will record the sounds in my own time, using a piece of software that is on Moodle.

If downloading the sound effects, which website/s will you gather them from?

 i am going to use a website called bxfr.net, because it is a generator and editor software to make sound effects however i want.

If recording, discuss recording arrangements:

We have booked kit for use in our Friday lesson to record and that will be 2 hours for recording, and an extra hour for editing the sounds in audition, alongside any extra time I get at home to get any extra sounds I missed or feel could have been added. I’m going to record with other classmates and I will record in hallways and corridors to get a natural echo effect.

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Audio in Games

After looking at the games Timesplitters 2, Godzilla and Mario Kart and analysing the audio, i noticed that audio is heavily influential on the attention of the player, for example, while sifting through menus and looking at options on Timesplitters there was a fast paced song playing to stop the player becoming disinterested in the game during the monotonous moments.

Comparatively, Mario and Timesplitters are very different games, and have very different audio which serve different purposes. For example Timesplitters using tense music during stealth missions to make you play more cautiously and Mario Kart used very upbeat and fast paced music to make you play more enthusiastically.

Godzilla used very daunting music to help the sense of scale of the game, because you are controlling monsters that are taller than skyscrapers you need some epic music to make you feel epic while you’re playing.

The dialogue in each of the games vary for effect as well, Timesplitters 2 uses accents to tell the player the location of the game, such as the Russian sounding accents when the game was currently in Serbia, which has similar sounding language to Russia, whereas Mario Kart only used dialogue for exclamations from the characters, when they got hit or when they win or lose and Godzilla uses it exclusively for the cutscenes.

This is crucial information for my game because it has shown me that to keep my players fixated on my game during monotonous scenes, good use of audio is key. Therefore i will make an audio loop for use when the player is in the pause menu and have different sound effects for when different buttons are selected, Furthermore, in game sound is also very important because it is what immerses the player, with everything from character voices to the sound of the wind cutting past the characters ears and i will take full advantage of that to immerse the player deeply into my game with intricate sounds, ranging from leafs blowing across the floor to a portal opening up dropping in several hellish creatures.

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Cover art for my Game / Graphic Novel

I wanted the design to fit in with the Asian style of my game but also wanted to keep an air of mystery. Upon first look the first thoughts of a viewer would be wondering who the girl is, why she has a blindfold, what the sword is for, these are all questions that would be answered in the lore of the game making this the perfect kind of pre release advertisement.

the font of the name was an interesting choice because the sharpness of it dictates the reader to read it quickly causing an uncertain feel of danger.

the see no evil, written in mandarin, shows the origins of the game and where it could be set.

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An Idea for a Companion

After some research into Chinese Gods and Goddess’s, one in particular caught my attention; The goddess of mercy and compassion: Kwan Yin. 

The story of this goddess is that she was murdered by her father and arrived in hell, while there she recited from holy books, stopping the devil from causing pain and suffering to the dead souls. This caused the god to become disgruntled and eventually returned Kwan Yin back to the world of the living where Buddha granted her immortality.

Where Kwan Yin was returned to the world of the living is where i want to alter the story slightly. Because of the events happening in my game, she was not able to be given immortality by buddha and instead returned to the human world as a vulnerable sprite, upon returning it isn't long before she meets Zhe (My Main Character) and warns her of the plans that the devil had made for wiping out the rest of humanity. Shortly after Zhe is chosen by god and receives the power she needs to banish the demons from earth.

Of course the story of Kwan Yin happened some time ago and my game is set some time during the early 1800′s but i think that the story is still valid if we push the historical events up to a more recent time, as it would just be me putting my own spin on the story. And i would name the sprite Yin, instead of her full name.

in terms of game mechanics, it will serve the same kind of role as Navi from the Legend of Zelda series. it will follow the companion and wont have any effect on the actual game play of the game, but i would like to give it speech that can help the player out during times that could confuse the player, like if they missed a pressure plate or if they cant figure out why a door wont open.