Blender Game Engine 5 - In-Game Animation, Health Bars, Pausing

What are three more things (other than health) that would make sense to track with a similar animated bar?
- Stamina
- Mana
- Charge for a special move (Able to use special move when bar is full)

Download One
- Only animation (still has pause code) due to the screen bugging out if the pause overlay was active at the same time as the animation.

Download Two

- Animation + Pause overlay, bugged screen while animation is running. But still able to pause it by pressing P.

Blender Game Engine 4 - Collectables/Counter/HUD/Timer

If you wanted to have a different end display for win (collected all the coins) vs lose (ran out of time), how could you do that?

I could create another scene, and make it so that instead of the timer changing the scene to the win scene upon reaching the specified time, it would instead swap to the lose scene.

Download Here

Blender Game Engine 3 - Dying/Respawning

Floor I used.





















Based on your experience with other game design environments, what do you think we might try to do in order to limit the number of re-spawns to a certain value (for example, you may want your character to only have 5 lives)?

You could create a value and if that value was above a certain number than it would allow re-spawns, but once that number was under the required value you could disable to ability to re-spawn and end the game.

Download Here

Blender Game Engine 2 - Losing/Restarting and Default Movement

Download

Blender Game Engine 1 - Movement and Perspective

The download is a folder containing the blender file, along with the floor texture and mushroom textures I used for this assignment.

Download Here

"Ideas for Story, Info Tracking, and Community"

- Co-op Horror - Investigating scary place with others, get separated. - 3D
- PC

Expand the story

• What is the setting? Do you know the time and/or location that this game takes place? How important is this to the story?
  
  The setting would be an old mansion, or some sort of mental asylum/hospital. The setting is important to the story because it would provide the atmospheric horror. The game could be set in either modern times, or even earlier times like the 1900s.
  
  
• What is the background/history of this game? What events have led up to the point at which we enter the game? How much of this does the player need to know?
  
  There have been mysterious things going on at the place of interest which has lead to a team of investigators (The player and friends) being hired to investigate and solve what's going on the place of the happenings. All the player knows at first is that odd things are happening, like disappearances, odd noises, etc. The players would learn more as the game goes on.
  
  
• What is the current situation as we play the game? What are the player's goals? What challenges or obstacles are there to overcome? This is some of the most relevant information to develop game play.
  
  The current situation as we play the game is that the players all start of together, they must investigate the place of interest as there is something going on there, but nobody knows what yet. That would be the players goal, figure out what's going on. There will be challenges and obstacles to overcome such as puzzles, roaming "monsters" that the players will have to avoid and hide from, but to go along with these obstacles there will be lots of exploration with the location (Old Mansion, Mental Hospital, etc) adding atmospheric horror, which will be the main fear source of the game. Atmospheric horror allows the players the be scared, but not be in danger of dying and having to reload a save, or perhaps die moments away from a check-point. The "monsters" would not be able to kill the player, but possibly injure them in some way, forcing them to find some kind of aid for the injury. With everyone starting the game together, some event may happen to separate the party, splitting the group into two groups and then maybe even later splitting those two groups of two into four people alone in different parts of the location
  
  
• What characters are involved? Who are they? Would the player interact with them? Would multiple players take those roles?
  
  The characters involved are the players, who are investigating the place of interest. Each player would be an investigator. Other characters could be people or "monsters" that are withing the place of interest. Before arriving at the place of interest, the players could meet a mysterious man that hires them to investigate this place. For the monsters, the player could possibly interact with them, but even just seeing these people/"monsters" could provide fear.
  
  
• Do we know anything about the future of this story? Does it depend on what happens in the game?
  
  As the players investigate the place of interest, the story will unfold and what is going on at this place will begin to become more clear. If a system were made for this, depending on the players actions, there could be multiple endings. One ending could consist of finding out what is actually going on at this place, while another ending could consist of whatever is happening to happen to the players, they would know what's going on, but not be able to tell the man who hired them since they have now disappeared/died or whatever.

         Identify and track information

• High Importance Information
  - Battery level for Flashlight
  - How many batteries the player has left over
  - Mini-map?
  
• Medium Importance Information
  - Menu to access any documents/papers found by the player if they ever want to re-read them. Or by chance one of the papers had a code on it that they need to open or access something.
  - Map menu so the player can see what rooms they've explored. (Explored rooms can be shown differently from rooms not yet explored). If a room has an object/item that the player needs to advance or do something it could also be marked differently on the map in order to assist the player in advancing the plot and getting further in the game without the player having to spend time frustratingly searching for a small item that they need to advance.

Considering the kind of technology that you included in this Mechanics/Story/Aesthetics/Technology combination, how would you provide access to the high, medium, and low importance data?

• Battery level could be included in the players GUI, but amount of batteries or other items they may have could be displayed in an inventory that would be the player's bag/pouch they carry around. 
• Documents the player has found could be kept in another area of the players inventory (A different tab). The same inventory would be used for items and documents, but separate tabs would be provided so that the inventory would not be cluttered by books/papers when simply looking to see how many batteries you have, or if you have a key for this door.

Create community. Many games are successful because of their social aspect, but this can look very different from game to game. Consider the following questions:

• How many players are appropriate for your game? Is it single-player? Multiple players working individually? Multiple players working as a team?
  
  The game would be appropriate for up to 4 players. The game would consist of all these players working together to solve the mystery and the place of interest, but players would end up separated, but still working together in order to escape / find out what's going on.
  
• If there are multiple players, are they playing in the same room, on the same device? Are they remote, playing online? If they are remote, should they be able to communicate with each other? Would their characters be communicating in the game, or would the players be talking to each other outside of the game world?
  
  The players of the game would play together through online means. For communication, the players would be able to talk to each other, but after being separated the players could find walkie-talkies or even some kind of communications where the game takes place. The players could of course talk to each other outside of the game world using programs like Skype or Discord. But if the players would like more immersion then they can choose to only use the communications that the game provides them.
  
• Is there an AI (artificial intelligence) engine to compete against?
  
  The main thing that players would compete against would be place itself. There could be characters or "monsters" that the player would have to not necessarily compete against, but hide from and be scared of, providing more horror to the situation.
  
• Should there be a community *outside* of the actual gameplay? Would interactions between community members involve conversations / forum discussions? What do you think they would need or want to talk about? Could/should any trading or buying/selling take place-- things like objects, tools, ideas, etc? In what other ways would you ideally see players interacting with each other outside of the game?
  
  The bulk of the community for a game like this would be suggestions for the game, or possible bugs that have been found in the game that need fixing. It would be a story-based game, so there would not be any trading or buying/selling of in-game items. Some people could go to the community for help in a certain part of the game if they're stuck. For players interacting with each other outside of the game, that could include players looking for a group of people to play the game with, since the game would be a multiplayer cooperative game.

"Brainstorming the Four Elements"

• Who you brainstormed with.
  - Me, myself, and I.
  
• Your top 5 favourite ideas from each category.
  
  Mechanics
  1. Horror
  2. Rogue-like
  3. Puzzles
  4. Bullet Hell
  5. Cooperation
  
  Story
  1. Horror Theme
  2. Exploring a dungeon
  3. Building a Kingdom
  4. Investigating scary place with others, get separated.
  5. Surviving post-big.bad.event
  
  Aesthetics
  1. 3D
  2. Pixel Graphics
  3. Isometric
  4. Cel Shading
  5. 2D
  
  Technology
  1. PC
  2. Smartphone
  3. Console
  4. Handheld Gaming Device
  5. VR
  
• Your top 3 mix-and-match combinations.
  
  1. Rogue-like - Exploring a Dungeon - Pixel Graphics - Smartphone
  2. Horror - Investigating scary place with others, get separated. - 3D - PC
  3. Bullet Hell - Stop (Thing/Person) from destroying the universe - 2D - PC
  
• The two target audiences for each combination, and how you would customize the game to make it more appealing to each audience.
  
  When I was thinking of these games I didn't have a specific gender, or role in life in mind. The only real target of these games would be people of certain age, or people already interested in these kinds of games (Horror, Rogue-like, Bullet hell). The games would be made and customized for those people so they already had a general idea of what they were getting into when starting the game.
  
  1. This game would target people who already enjoy the idea of Rogue-like games and people who want a challenge in their game.
  
  2. This game would target older people and groups of friends. It would be a co-op horror experience so since it would be scary that's why older people who be targeted, and it would require a decent amount of cooperation.
  
  3. Also for people who enjoy a challenge with a lot of things going on at once, would target people that are able to focus on a game that requires precise movement and multi-tasking.
  
  Click here for all of my brainstorming ideas

Build Your Own Game - Finished Game

With all the things I had to figure out or code in order for this game to work, I'm proud of making my own textures and figuring out code by myself. But I'm mostly proud of my game actually working, which is frikkin awesome. I'm also happy I was able to get the enemy a.i. working, it took me quite a while to figure out why they wouldn't move. But apparently it's cause I was using physics, but didn't use physics code for their movement. (Thanks for the Reddit page)

I did it
Download my cool game

The Plan - Making "My Own Game"

I'm "going" to make a game that is a top-down shooter in which the player must survive waves of zombies with increasing difficulty with each wave. If the player collides with zombies they will be punished by losing one of their three lives. I "plan" on using physics for this game to help with the top-down aspect and in order for me to "make" player and zombie movement smoother.

There is an order I "plan" on doing everything. Starting with more basic things at the top and working my way down to harder things or last minute things I think of to improve the game

- Make sprites
- Make the game environment
- Player Movement
- Score System
- Lives
- Enemies
- Enemy A.I.
- Enemy Movement
- Wave System

Unity 2D UFO Mods

1. Which step in the list above was the most challenging for you?

- The most challenging step for me was getting the player to collide with the new pickups and then making those disappear and then add score. At first they both had separate codes, so I had two lines for "void OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider2D other)", one for each pickup. I was able to fix this problem after a lot of trial and error by removing the second one and adding it to my first with an "else if" line of code to go after the "if" code. I learned that you don't always need to give something it's own set of code, and can use "else if" on similar things.

2. Link to Download

Unity Check-In

• What stage you're at in your Unity adventure (which tutorial video are you on, or if you're on the second assignment, which step are you working on?).

- I've recently completed the second assignment.

• What challenges have you encountered so far?

- I encountered an issue where I couldn't get the new pickups to disappear and the player would just move over them, I fixed it by replacing a separate piece of code with a "else if" line.

- I also had some difficulties setting up the pop-up for a tie, or making sure the game would only check the score after all pickups were collected.

• What's the most interesting thing you've learned so far?

- I've learned that if there's a problem, with enough googling and trying things you can eventually fix it.

EDIT: I can't seem to make the text in this post any larger for some reason, sorry about that.

Unity 2D UFO Tutorial

1. Have you done any scripting or coding before? When / why / for what?
   
   I've done a little bit of coding before while working on re-creating the game "Asteroids" in game maker as an assignment for Game Design last year.
   
2. What did you think of all of the detailed explanation as the narrator looked at the code documentation, explained how he was choosing each piece of code, etc? 
   
   I found the explanations pretty useful in understanding what code did what and why he chose the code.
   
3. On a scale of 1 (super clear) to 10 (super confusing), rate how well you understand what the code in the scripts does. Were some sections easier to understand than others (controlling player movement, controlling camera movement, rotating pickup objects, collecting pickup objects, counting pickup objects, displaying score, displaying win message)? Explain.
   
   I would give it a 3, I have better understanding of the code, but there is still code that doesn't entirely make sense. Understanding the rotating pickup objects, counting pickup objects, and displaying the score/win message was quite easy, while the movement was a little more tricky.
   
4. What part of this 2D UFO game-building process did you find most rewarding or enjoyable? Explain.
   
   Learning code was fun, but the most rewarding part of the process was to see the final product at the end and have it work with no bugs or glitches that mess it up.
   
5. Between about 10:00-12:00 in the collectibles pickup video (7 of 9), you set the tag of the pickup items so that the script knows when it runs into a treasure. What could you do if you wanted to have two different kinds of treasure that were worth different points?
   
   I could give the treasures different IDs, so that in the code there will be separate code for each type of treasure. With the other treasure having a separate name I include an "else if" line of code for when the treasure isn't the first one. For example:
   if apple do +5 points
   else if orange do +10 points
   Something like that.
   
6. Describe one way that you could add complexity to this game.
   
   I could add obstacles that would make it more difficult for the player to obtain all the pickups, or make the pickups move around randomly so they're not just sitting still.
   
7. Include a link to your build folder so I can try your game. This involves a few steps:
   
   Link to game download

Game Designer Skills

After going through the list I feel as if these three skills are ones that I feel confident in.


Brainstorming
- I feel confident in brainstorming ideas for games, worlds, settings, plots, architecture, and more. Although I can't think of a lot of things on the fly, I eventually come up with ideas for things. I have some experience brainstorming through coming up with ideas for characters, buildings, or figuring out possible solutions for puzzles or challenges.

Games
- I've played many different games along with many different genres of games; including board games. Through all these years of playing games, I can use the knowledge I've gained from playing them and apply them to creating games. Through 13 years of playing video games, I believe I've developed a familiarity with them and their various genres which will help me in creating games of those genres and developing worlds for those games to exist in.

Architecture
- I've always been interested in architecture and building/creating worlds, cities and even just buildings. I've played a lot of games that all have different architecture styles along with different settings and styles of worlds. In games where I can build and create, I enjoy building and designing building in-game, spending hours building and creating whatever I feel like, which gives me some experience in architecture; whether it be through actual building or just seeing different environments around me while playing games.


One skill that could prove to be particularly challenging for me would be Business, I don't have that much experience in business, so it could prove to be challenging until I were to take time to learn about it. Although this skill might be challenging now, I'm sure if I put time into any skill I could improve on it.

Another year of school.

Neato

GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 3

- What difficulties did you have? 

      During the process of making my game, the only real difficulty was creating the power-up and all the aspects of it. I had some difficulties creating the charge for the power-up and creating the effect of multiple bullets at a time.

- How did you solve them?

      I solved the charge problem with multiple sprites for a battery of some sort, making it change depending on a global value (global.charge) which would increase for each red asteroid destroyed, up to a total value of 9. As for the multiple bullets, I searched online on how to do it and found code that enabled the player to shoot 3 bullets at once during the power-up.

- What did you change in your game to make it unique? How do these changes affect gameplay?

      I made a custom model for the player along with making the asteroids more unique by adding a random rotation to them as they're created so that even if there is two of the same asteroid, the rotation will be different making them seem unique.

      A big part of the game that I made unique was making a power-up that requires you to destroy 9 small red asteroids which spawn upon destroying the large asteroids. As you destroy them, the "battery" in the top right will slowly charge up and once fully charged it grants you the ability to shoot 3 bullets for a total of ten seconds. During the power-up the player is also invincible so they won't die during the power-up.

Download

GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 2

- What difficulties did you have? 

At one point I somehow made the game unable to launch due to an error in the code.

- How did you solve them?

I looked through my code quickly to discover a few extra brackets, removed them and then the game launched fine.

Extra Stuff

-Made my own custom player sprite, and made the asteroids rotate randomly upon creation so they would look more unique.

Download

GameMaker - Asteroids - Part 1

What difficulties did you have? How did you solve them?

I didn't have difficulties with anything while I made this.

Download

GameMaker - Catch The Clown

Download

Blender - Character Modeling - Part 1

Blender File Link

PS. Started on Part 2 before uploading this.

Indie Game: The Movie

1. What are some of the differences between "big games" and "independent games"?

- Big games could have hundreds of people working on a single game, while independent games very often have less than 50 people working together on a single project.

- Many big games are made by big companies, already giving them some fame and people find out about them easily. Meanwhile it's harder for an independent developer and their game to gain recognition fast since not too many people have heard of them before.


2. What are some of the difficulties the developers in the film have to overcome?

- Some difficulties the developers had to overcome were due dates. For the developer of "Fez" he had to delay the game multiple times because he couldn't finish it in time, or he wanted to redo / add things. Similar to the "Fez" developer the "Super Meat Boy" devs had to work extra hard in order to make a playable version of their game for a gaming event.

- The "Fez" developer had to deal with his one co-worker leaving him, and then having to go into legal stuff that if went wrong could mean that "Fez" couldn't ever be released.


3. What do you think is attractive about developing an indie game? What do you think you would like about working on an indie game? What do you think you might not like?

- The thing that's attractive about developing an indie game is that it's your game. You put your ideas and imagination in to it, so it's a game not only for the people but just as much for the developer too. By creating your own game, it becomes a part of you.


4. What is some advice you might have for someone trying to create their own game based on what you learned in the film?

- Some advice I have would be to try not and set a due date for your game, it seems that if you set a due date you become stressed over that day. What if your not finished? What if you find more things you need to fix up and polish? If you delay the game multiple times people will begin to lose interest or lose hope in the game. But if you just relax and work as hard as you can until the game is finished you won't have to stress over that upcoming due date for your game that you've been working on.



5. What is the best part of completing the creation of a game for the developers?

- The best part is just a feeling of accomplishment, a developer could have spent 3-5 years making this one game with maybe two others, and for that project to be finally finished and be able to release it as a full game to the public would be amazing.