Week 7! Beta! Trailer! Stuff!

INCREDIBLY busy week this was. First off we had a crunch to finish off the game for the Wednesdays beta testing.  I made a tutorial so new players could get into the game more easier. The beta event went well, we had a lot of good feedback. Our game is really turning out like a niche game, some like it, some find it very frustrating. One things i learnt about the tutorial was not to overwhelm the player. I will therefore split the tutorial into smaller submissions, with clearer goals and shorter missions.

Friday was a stressful day to make the trailer. I took it upon myself, I’ve found that i can do the work nobody wants to do to get it out of our teams way. Many scenes were made inside unity using animations and a simple script. To capture the film , i used a script of my own design which takes a screenshot every update. Lowering the time frame (the time between each frame) let unity render the logic in it’s own time. The trailer is a mix of ingame footage and some “pre-rendered” sets. These are basically models with movement scripts and some dynamic lights. Finding a nice drum track and then some fading and we’re done!

Was a lot of work. Stayed up until 4 to finish it, but it was worth it.

Week 6

This week i added in the new player models with animations working! This is a big step forward and makes the game look greatly better. I also added support for stationary Guards, and giving these Guards an intial look direction when they spawn. Other then that, not so much has happened. Just another week.

Fifth Week!

Not long until GGC now! It dosen’t feel that only five weeks have passed since we started, but i guess in such a short course there bound to be some of these changes.

The game is taking shape more and more by the minute. The two last items are in: Camouflage, which hides the player if he stays still for a long period and distraction bomb, which draws guards attention away from whatever they are guarding. The model for the guard and the player are coming along nicely, and we are hoping for something we can call beta by the end of next week!

My main focus has been in the producer role this week. I’ve reconsidered the need for me to step up and lead the team more directly, and I’ve been trying to accomplish this. A teacher suggested we should do daily stand up meetings. I’m not usually a fan of these, i feel that they are awkward and a waste of time. But it seems every group is different, because it’s been a great help in bridging everyone’s knowledge. It occurs to me now that even though I knew what everyone was doing, not everyone knew what everybody was doing.

I’ve been mostly working on my presentation for the GGC jury. Smaller programming tasks I’ve done include making some small changes so the  grappling hook animates (currently a little bit bugged, but mostly working), fixing a few bugs and building a small test level trying out a linear mode.
I have been debating with myself and others if the game should take a linear path or a more open ended one, but after some consideration, i think a open ended one is the best idea. The linear path quickly turned up boring after thinking about it for a while. In a way, since the game has no time limit to stress the player and the route is obvious, each encounter becomes a very obvious puzzle to solve. A open ended map will hide these puzzles more and make the map more interesting in the end i think.

 

Anyway that’s all for this week!

Fourth week of development!

Last week was an exciting week for me and the group in general! We have a game now, kind of. Our alpha is feature complete and we are ready this week for a feature freeze.

A lot of work went in to squash out the bugs in the movement system this week, and making sure it works for all cases. I devoted the first 2-3 days of last week to this. Also, we added items! Three items are in the game. A grappling hook which lets you scale any wall you want, a shuriken which knocks out the guard and a smokebomb which hides you from vision.One of our artists threw together a  fast level and putting everything together yielded a pretty good alpha build. As we sent it off for testing we got a good amount of feedback, some positive, some negative, all useful. 🙂

My work consisted of the general producing stuff: setting up scrum, bridging communications, helping when people have questions etc etc… But i also did some bug fixing and added in the shuriken item. We had several weird bugs with guard behavior such as their tendency to move to the  top left square before starting and patrol path,  skipping over tiles to get to a position they REALLY wanted to go and other problems.

 

The shuriken was pretty easy to create. If you click on the shuriken and then click on the enemy, the enemy sends itself off to the player which checks if he is in range and then throws the shuriken at him. The whole game is essentially on pause until all this is done. I used something called animation events for the correct timing: This allows you to call a certain function at a certain time in a animation. The biggest obstacle was trying to make the distance checking work. Since we are using a grid based system, we made a commitment to use grid based rules rather using raycasts which could result in weird results on diagonals and since our objects don’t actually contain colliders. Instead i check each neighbor of a tile in a straight line until we find a target we clicked on. Off course, any tile marked “impassible” will not be checked. If we don’t find the enemy the player clicked on, it is an invalid target!

 

I am so glad we have something that looks very much like a game! Hopefully by next post we will have the last few items, and maybe few new models to show off.

 

 

 

Third Week of development! Alpha here we come

So the third week of development has come and passed. While we haven’t been quite successful reaching a full alpha stage, but we have all the basic features basically done, if not in a really playable state. My work has mostly be producer material. I started the week by setting up a meeting with myself and the lead designer to figure out some kinks in our design. My concern was that

1. We did not have a universal picture of how the game would look anymore

2. The way i had envisioned items and the changes we had made we’re not cutting it anymore.

So we remade the design. Items will no longer be consumables, in the sense that each time you use a grappling hook you will delete it from a supply of 99. Instead, items will be like perks, unlocked on the way.

New Item System! 🙂

 

Get an item once, use it forever.This is benefical in many ways. The main one being that if the player runs out of items, he will not be able to finish the level. This forces you either to punish a player when you do not want to or make all the puzzles possible to win with the deafult moveset, totally destroying the item based gameplay. This felt like bad design. Switching it to a perk like system also meant we have active control of what abilities a player has at what point, which eases level design.
We then spent some time making a standardized list of all the items that fit in. We narrowed it down to a list of 5 totally doable items, and some which will require extra features implementation. Not BIG features, but little ones. Collecting this data felt very vital to the understanding of the process.

 

 

Physical Asset list and rule board! Me likey.

 

Then i had the art team go into a general art design meeting. I gave them a set of tasks, some things to be mindful of (setting, perspective and console most importantly) and a suggested order of business. The full meeting took almost an entire day and involved all the artists, but i gave them the time and it really paid off. The artist constructed a physical asset list ( which i didn’t even ask for, but i really enjoyed to see!) and a rule board. All artists seems to have good understanding a common ground to work on.

I have also been doing some programming work this week. I finished the new terrain system using a single mesh. I also added support for a little blocker object. Basically level designers can put it over a tile and it will tell the tile it’s over that it’s impassible! Using these we can construct the levels before, and without coding knowledge, so hopefully our artists can double as level designers if need be. Using a temporary mesh constructed by our lead artist and the animation work done by a coder i constructed a little demo and prettied up the game to see how it looked. Almost looks like a game now. Almost ;).

 

Next week i hope to get to full alpha stage. We are gonna start putting our backs into it. I am also moving this week, which is unfortunate, but hopefully i will have time for it all.

 

-J

Second Week of Development!

This week was incredibly short in general. Firstly, the whole group went home for Easter on Thursday, some leaving a bit earlier. This left total development time for this week just three days, with no time to call extra meetings on Saturday on Sunday. I am myself busy with touring my girlfriends brother who is visiting, and in the process of moving. This kinda complicates things.

I’ve focused mostly on programming this week as we are lagging behind in that aspect.  The alpha is delayed one more week, but i want it done the next, so i am hoping to make the changes we need to start building the game finally.

I’m reworking the terrain system to instead of using separate tiles with colldiers use one terrain mesh (or any mesh we choose) for our terrain. This will save in memory and also let us use the terrain meshs special properties, such as painting textures onto the mesh and also raising and lowering it with built in tools.

I am also trying to delegate more of the tasks. I have gotten into the uncomftarble posistion of producer, game designer and programmer. These roles kinda pull away from each-other and with neither being a good job done. I’ve delegated the role of game designer to Viktor. I hope this will lessen the burden  and let me get some programming work done!

First week of development!

Hi blog! Long time no see!

So last week it was time to pitch for all people who did not already have green lit groups. I pitched a little game called Sneaky Ninja, a mobile based stealth-puzzle game. You can watch the pitch here: http://prezi.com/lmexnf88g1u1/sneeky-ninja/ As luck has it, it was  quite successful pitch and i got some team members!

This is all quite exciting for me. I have worked as a producer before, several times actually, but every time it has been as a… “supportive role“. My view of a good producer is the one that makes sure things done. Makes sure people communicates, sets and checks goals, sees how production going, makes sure everybody knows what they should be doing if they are lost etc etc. Before I’ve felt more like a glorified secretary and being a producer was more a distraction to my programming then anything else. Filling in a excel based scrum that is’nt to often read and which is no use to the team, and writing game design documents that are also summarily forgotten about.

This time it will be different! For one, our scrum is a physical based board, a concept I’ve had in mind for a while now (but the implementation i stole from Emelie. Yoink!). 

Looks good… 

The basic idea is that there the brown sheet serves as storage for tasks. Then tasks are assigned to a person, who each has their own board. However, the person is not the sole person to do that task. It just becomes the “home” of the task. This just means that they are responsible for getting it done. A task may require several people, or cooperation of other people. This makes sure that these tasks are also accounted for.

After the task is done, it is put on a second sheet. As time goes on, more and more tasks goes from the left to the right, from unassigned, assigned to done. A very good improvement against most scrums I’ve used, given a better overview what problem the group is facing at the moment. Is someone overworked? Does this person have something to do? Is someone stuck on a task? The wall will tell you. 🙂

This week i have spent a lot of time running around and fixing this. I setup the asset server so we can sync the project easily and people can work from home. I also spent some time getting screens, a router, and getting all such necessities. A basic scrum and a project plan were also started on, as well as general assisting with coding.

More updates to come soon.!If you want to check out what the others are doing, Check out the team blog at: http://ultrasneakyblog.wordpress.com/

 

Math is not about memorization.

I’ve always had a bit paradoxical relationship with math. On one hand, i often find math both interesting and fascinating in the way it can do seemingly impossible things. To find numbers using a small subset of what you know, and solving problems that puzzle the brain has always been interesting to me. However, in most math classes, i, like most, have been bored out of my mind.

There seems to be the running paradigm of most math classes to keep what you teach secret. Basically, tell the student to do their problems in this order, using this formula, but don’t tell what they are actually doing. Take for example negative numbers. I remember with clarity i was confused when these introduced these in high school, especially combinations of different positive and negative numbers.

We were given a set of rules to remember: Like numbers become positive(. ++ = +, — = +), different ones become negative (+- = -, -+ = -). The double minus especially threw me a curve ball? Why is does it become negative? Why does this happen? My teachers were very reluctant to answer, telling me to memorize the rules if i was having trouble. I had to beg them to teach me why this actually is. It’s this over focus on memorization and practicing that really kills math for me.

It was with sadness then i started math class about trigonometry yesterday and found that a lot of material the teacher went through, although centers around proofs, did not properly explain what we are doing. What is Sine? How does it relate to a triangle? What are we actually doing when we are doing this problem??? Sometimes i think that the teachers forget that students has never done these problems before. When i tried to search for help later on, i found only more rules and formulas to my dismay. Sin V = A/B,SOHCAHTOA, the circle diagram.

WHAT IS SINE? WHAT DOES IT MEAN.

Finally, by sitting down and trying to solve it, i found the answer i was looking for. I will post it here for others convenience.

———————————————————–

Sides and angles in a right triangle have a connection and a certain symmetry, since only certain angles can allow for a triangle of a certain size, and a certain size triangle is always has certain angles. (a 2, by 4, by 3 triangle always has certain set of angles, regardless of configuration). Due to this connection, a triangles angles can be calculated using its sides, and with the angles and one side, you can form the missing sides.
Sine works as a conversion factor between these triangles.

The sine is equal to the opposing side of a triangle divided by the hypotenuse ( e.g: Sin V = O/H). Doing this results in a sort of conversion factor, which can be used to get the side or an angle of a triangle. If you need the angle, you can use the function know as sine Prim, which returns an angle of the triangle. If you need the sides and know of one of the sides and the angle, you can use a bit of algebraic magic to get to it (F.E side O is 5, side H is x, angle V = 35. Note that sin V = O/H. Since we need the hyponenuse, lets just rearange the equation using basic algebra: SIN V * H = O, H = O/SIN V. The simply input the values: H = 5 / sin 35)

Note the underlined part. Most teachers would skip this part, especially the one that explains what sine actually is.

I truly belie we now have a faulty thinking in our math education, reducing it down to rote memorization and boring exercises, while never pondering on the why’s and why nots of math. Never is math treated as a bit of fun, and never is a lecture ever just explaining concepts and doing example numbers.

For anyone who sees some reason in what i am saying, give “Lockharts Lament” a read, it summaries my positions on math education neatly.

Peace out

-J

Spank the monkey as a RPG

So some people took offense to my comparison with spank the monkey to a permadeath rpg, so i wanted to write this post to clarify what i meant.

 

The reason i thought that i was interesting is that it’s not immediately obvious that this is what is going on. While building your defense cards and such and such, you might consider this a fun family game with no strategy to it. However, nestled beneath the seemingly simple exterior is a complex system. And the best way to describe this system is like an RPG battle system. With attacks, defenses and “Health”, and different stats interacting (armor and attack types, special cards that only couple with other cards.) the game can manifest in many different ways. In some cases the strategies involved resemble that of card or paper based rpgs.  This was my point, and it was kind of interesting to see it in this family friendly game, from which i had no idea could spring such wonderfully complex gameplay.

 

Now about the mentioned permadeath, the point was that the game, if you look at it LIKE an rpg, had a “death” state where you lose progression, the cardinal sin of any RPG. When testing the game, i found that a lot of times, all of which we had been building towards was reset back to virtually zero. The earthquake and missile cards basically guarantees that this happens at least once per game, and any number of strong attack cards and the collapse function makes anything but the most robust towers fall down. This could, in a way, be characterized as permadeath. Your progress is reset, you keep your cards (items).
ANYWAY. This example was just a little fun thing we found that i thought was intresting and is in no way shape or form any serious analysis, so take it face value. Just wanted to clariy what i was trying to say.

Peace out.

-J