Game design workshop with Mayamada 24/11/23
INTRODUCTION
Who are they?
Mayamada are a British-born company which started off with selling Japanese inspired t-shirts. Later after their days of selling clothes, Mayamada had a small downfall in which they were motivated to return stronger. Mayamada ended up becoming an anime and and manga studio specialising in anthropomorphic (animal-human hybrids) character designs. In the current day they also run games events called gamepad!
The aim
The aim for the session was to create a game and see how well we can work in groups. We were tasked to create a game with a few preset rules in a group. The rules consisted of making a family board game suitable for 2-4 players in the theme of buying/selling.
JOB ROLES
In the task of producing the game I noticed that it is important to have people take on different roles to do different activities. The activities in game design should consist of:
Producer/artist
The one responsible to bring life to the concepts and requests of the game by articulating them.
Developer
The one who comes up with the game and the idea behind it, this role essentially is the creator of the game's foundation
Level designer
This role is in charge of creating the base game mechanical flow and design and also creates a narrative for the game.
in terms of the industry there are a multitude of more roles
Programmer
This is the person(s) that code the game to work and flow smoothly
Narrative designer
Animator
Concept designer
Environment designer
IMPORTANCE OF GAME DESIGN
Game design is important in a game as having a well designed game allows you to hook and keep players into your game and community. Game design is split into five sections:
Spacing
The are and environment you can move around, observe and explore freely.
Components
What is included in the game that makes it special and unique to play?
Mechanics
What 'features' are there in the game? How can you learn how to adapt and play around these features to win the game.
Goals
Why is the game played? What is the end goal? What is your purpose and significance in the game?
Rules
What foundation of restrictions and allowances do you have in your game? How can it be played fairly and correctly to ensure maximum entertainment?
DESIGN CHALLENGE
Ideas
for the group ideas there were mainly two, mine and my group partners. My idea was some sort of turn based card game and the other idea was a guessing game with a zoo theme, the card game was too lengthy to create with out time so we settled with the guessing game.
Game
The game we chose was a timed guessing game, the way the game would work is that someone would roll a dice and depending on what number they got they had to choose a card from that section which has a number marked on it, depending on the number marked they have to attempt to guess what animal is being acted out as a 1-minute timer ticks down, if you can get the correct number of guesses in the minute you get that card as yours and whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins.
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| Board game production |
A Place Called Home 1/12/23
Introduction to Construct 3 4/12/23
In today's lesson I have been handed a license to construct 3 and was tasked to make a game.
When entering into construct 3, the first thing I did was make a sprite of the character you play, I kept the sprite simple so I didn't spend too much time on it.
FIRST SPRITE / CHARACTER MODEL
After creating my sprite I added another sprite to act as a solid floor. The way I did this was to fill the canvas with a solid colour and on the left menu, I added a behaviour which gives characteristics to sprites. With the behaviours menu, I made the floor solid which prevented the character from falling through it.
SECOND SPRITE / SOLID FLOOR
After creating my floor and character. I added some platforms and artwork to give life to my background and floor. On top of adding those 3 sprites I also added my first enemy sprite into the game which would kill the player instantly as I didn't know how to add a health bar yet
THIRD, FOURTH, FIFTH AND SIXTH SPRITES / ART, PLATFORMS AND ENEMY NPC
In construct I had to code certain sprites to do certain actions to actually give life to my game. This was achieved with the 'event sheet' which is a simplified coder, you give sprites actions and the engine follows it through 1:1 of what you requested.
EVENT SHEET / CHARACTER MOVEMENTS + OTHER ACTIONS
After a few more minutes of messing around with construct I found out a few more things about it and added more sprites to my level
Reflecting upon today's work
The activity in today's lesson was to understand the basics of construct 3 and how the engine works. We started by making character sprites and solid blocks to turn our level into some sort of platformer challenge. This happened through adding behaviours into the sprites to make them solid, to make the characters move and to make my enemies damage the player character. When initially playing, the camera didn't snap onto the player and I resolved this by adding the snap-on behaviour to my player which made the camera follow it
Introduction to Construct 3 (continued)5/12/23
REFLECTIVE JOURNAL
In my construct 3 project I added multiple different mechanics to shape my game project into what the final outcome is. The first mechanic I've added was the collectable items, I wanted there to be stuff to move towards in my game rather something to just endlessly walk around. The next mechanic I made was a secret entrance, once the cat is collided with all enemies are gone which opens up a secret entrance, upon entering the cave a shadow surrounds my character which is my next feature/mechanic I've added. In the cave there is an enemy and to make it easier to see I added a torch at the end which when collected changes all animations for my character and removes the shadow.
The tools I used to make the collectible item was the destroy behaviour, I coded it so that on collision with the character, the shirt would destroy and add 1 point towards the score.
With the secret entrance I made it so once the cat is collided with, it squishes the cat and destroys all enemies and a chunk of the floor to allow it to be dropped down upon.
The shadow feature is introduced once you drop down the hole and how it works is that it becomes visible onto the player once the player passes an invisible sprite in which, the shadow is pinned onto the sprite so eveything appears dark around the character.
With the torch, I made it so that once the player walks onto the torch, the sprite would destroy both the torch item on the wall and the shadow around the player, I made it so that once you go across the torch, all animations with the player character also now have the torch to make it appear as if you have a light source as to your newfound ability to see in the cave.
The preproduction of a small game 7/12/23
Planning for a game project
Construct 3 experimental game 8/12/23
Group team project/Reflective Journal Week 1 15/12/23
Monday
At the start of this week, me and three other were assigned to be a part of a team. After newly learning construct 3 we were put in groups to make a small game over one month.
GDD
CONCEPT
INTRODUCTION
Me and my team decided on making a first-person-shooter (FPS) in a Player-vs-environment (PvE) manner. The fps is meant to be sort of fast paced both in mechanics and in terms of the player's actions, at the same time with being fast paced there is a stopwatch mechanic in which slows movement of player and enemies down for a short time. Our game takes inspiration from the titles: ULTRAKILL, post void and SUPER HOT
CRITERIA
In the project we are only allowed to make the game on construct 3, and it has to include: Audio, interactions and has to revolve around the word elements. The word element was free of interpretation in any way. These ideas limited very little to nothing for the idea we had as the restrictions still fit into the field of the game me and my group wanted to make.
CONCEPT SHEET
REFLECTION
For this week in pre-production im going to lead in all elements of art and the ideas for the game. I handle all concept art and art suggestions and give the greenlight to any ideas that are suitable and time possible for the game. In my pre-production role of concept art I feel that the finalisation of a character can be difficult at times potentially. The planning will be fully created by us, starting from the ground up.
Introduction to PyxelEdit 14/12/23
In todays session I looked at learning the basics of pyxeledit. We learnt about pyxeledit for our game project to potentially incorporate it in for our game.
Personally I wanted to incorporate pixel art from the start as I think it would fit our game well and can make art look better in comparison to regular art, this is because the game my group is producing is going to be in 3d but we would like to incorporate 2d art to cut the designing of 3d models as construct is more complimentary towards 2d game production.
PyxelEdit is used for making pixel art assets or just general pixel art. In the lesson we were given four characters and tasked to draw one out in a pixel redesign.
INITIAL CHARACTER
Yulie - White Knight Chronicles 2
END REDESIGN IN PYXELEDIT
After redesigning Yulie I am pretty happy as its my first time using a pixel art. However I could argue that I couldve obviously made it better in terms of the colouring and I could've made the arms longer.
Once I made the character model I imported into Construct 3 to test that the character model works well in the engine. Once I imported it into Construct 3 I saw that it was very tiny so I resized it. When in the sprite editor I noticed that the hitbox of my design was automatically assigned which cuts out time of creating them.
MY IMPLEMENTATION OF YULIE INTO MY TEST PROJECT
Reflective Journal Week 2 18/12/23
Monday
On this day I wanted to begin working on my character concepts, I wanted to make a few character concepts in the theme of hell. I thought up of different devils and tried to look for a source of inspiration. After searching around I concluded to three different characters from existing fiction.
Great Goat (BERSERK)
The great goat to me resembled darkness and evil backgrounds, in berserk the great goat has a lot of resemblances and symbolisms towards the theme of hell which made me want to implement this character, the character is seen to be human-like but also has inhuman features like an obvious goat head and hooves.
Deadly Alliance Nitara (Mortal Kombat 1)
For my second character I already knew what I wanted it to be but I couldn't get my finger on the right outfit, in search of my succubus' outfit I recalled to fighting games and chose an outfit from a demon character from mortal kombat, Nitara. The reason I chose this as my outfit inspiration is because I wanted to see what a demon character would wear and I implemented parts of that into my succubus character design.
Test Subject (Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice)
Character concepts
After gathering all my inspirations together I begun making character designs for each one of my characters. on procreate, considering that I wanted to use pixel art from the start I tried to not spend too much time on the concepts so I can get on the main drawings as fast as possible.
PyxelEdit animation 21/12/23
In todays lesson we were given the task to understand the basics of animating in PyxelEdit and to be able to create a short animation using PyxelEdit. In this task I decided to make an idle animation with one of my characters ive designed to test my ability in implementing them into pixel art.
TEST IDLE ANIMATION
I decided to recreate my succubus concept and create a test idle animation for it, meanwhile I liked the design of the succubus I decided to work on my concept to keep it simple and improved do a test idle animation to understand how the flow of animation works in PyxelEdit.
In my opinion I find the animation partly successful as there arent many movements making it seem less lifelike and in terms of design I did seem to place the pants at a lower waist position, this could maybe be fixed by curving the pants by the top to wrap around the lower body.
Discussing with my partners, using PyxelEdit was an idea we have had since the beginning of our game but learning the animation had just reinforced the idea as we have now got the hang of how it works. We intend to apply PyxelEdit into all elements of the game besides the form of the map. All enemies, ui and tilesets will be pixel art following through our game.
Overall I am pleased with what I have produced for my first test run animation in PyxelEdit.
Tuesday
Today I wanted to get some sort of audio into my game, I started this by making a list of all sounds needed for the game and I gathered all necessary equipment needed to record the sound. To record sound I used a shotgun mic to pick up all sound near me.
Gathering all raw audio from the sound recording session, I used adobe audition to edit the sound to shape it btter into something that sounds more familiar to the sound im trying to achieve or to make it more fitting into the game.
Gunshot audio created
The Development Of The Indie Game LIMBO 11/1/24
Group Project Week 3 Entry 19/1/24
Monday
Today I wanted to work on my first enemy AI to get a model into the game, the AI I decided to work on was my smallest enemy, this was because the design was the simplest and I wanted the values of the enemy to be established so my group members have an idea of how the values should be set as the 'oni' enemy is the weakest one out of them all.
For the design I wanted to do it in pyxeledit as I feel that pixel art can look very good for a game like ours, so I wanted to experiment. I knew that all I needed for the animations was a walk cycle, this is because the enemies never stand still and they cant be seen once they make contact with you so an attack animation wont be needed.
After the day I managed to make the entire walk animation for the first enemy.
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| finished walk animation |
Tuesday
On this day I wanted to create a bunch of small items to fill in the game more and more, to start of what I wanted to get in was a crosshair so people know where they're shooting, I wanted to keep it simple so I went with the cult classic-design of what most what crosshairs actually look like.
After creating the crosshair I created some sort of a cracked background with the colour purple and orange to set the games signature style. After creating the background I felt it was missing a sense of personality so I ended up animating it to give it a fresher look, the animation consists of making the cracks glow on loop.
I also created a blood splat effect universally for all enemy AIs, this was to give them more of a sense that they're dead because before they would just disappear, seeing this I knew that it was bland, boring and confusing, so in response I made a blood splat to even give the deaths of my enemy AIs some sense of life and it also gives the notion to the player that they've actually killed the enemy rather than make it disappear.
Lastly I wanted some 0sort of indicator to show that the gun was on cooldown for shooting as we didn't have a reload mechanic, to show this I made a bullet indicator inspired off of a bullet kin from Enter The Gungeon. The animations consisted of flashing grey to white to show the bullet cooldown and a kill indicator to give the bullet more personality.
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| Blood splat |
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| Kill Indicator |
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| Bullet indicator |
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| Crosshair |
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| Crack (no glow) |
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| Crack (glow) |
Thursday
Today I focused my work on making an opening cutscene. The reason I wanted to make an opening cutscene is because alot of people say that there is no story or incentive behind the game, so to change this I had an idea of making a cutscene to give a little story to it.
To create a cutscene I had to work on Adobe After Effects, using this software I can edit my cutscene to my liking freely. In terms of making the actual cutscene I ran with the idea of some sort of retro computer text cutscene, I got the inspiration to create something like this through SUPERHOT, the cutscenes in that game are a text based dialogue written out in some sort of computer screen format.
Final cutscene
After making the cutscene I knew I needed voice acting in it to give it more of a story-like narrative, following the next week on Monday I had decided to get my friend to voice act for me, surprisingly it went well and it took a few amount f tries to get the right voices in for the voice-acting.
In this audio clip I had my friend voice act both characters. I merged all the tracks I wanted to use into one big one to add the same effect on them at once. After I got the audio I split it apart and matched them up respectively
Friday
INTRODUCTION
Today me an my group presented a prototype for our game and gathered feedback based on responses that people critiqued us on. Using the feedback we got from others we aimed to use that as a guide to get us set in the right direction to get our game's production.
Once my group had gathered all the information from others I made a spreadsheet to sort the feedback into what is most important, what priority it should take and what part of the game does this affect.
I found that it was difficult sorting the problems past what was the most common, to tackle this I attempted to get them in their own subsections to make it easier to sort them as there will be less competition to all the feedback.
ANALYSIS
I would personally that I met my target for today of knowing what specific problems are found within my game so I can target those points specifically instead of adding/changing unnecessary things that are fine as they are.
A problem I found myself upon is that some of the feedback was not useful or was too vague. This led me to find some difficulty in what some of the others specifically want to see improved/changed.
LEARNING EXPERIENCE(S)
I have received a wide range of feedback that I deem to be helpful and essential to the future of my group and our game.
Production Of Half-Life18/1/24
Group Project Week 4 Entry 26/1/24
MONDAY
On Monday, I decided to work upon the UI, doing so I animated a shooting animation for the gun. This was achieved by using one of my group members hands and a Nerf gun so I can get image references. Once I got the images for the frames I drawn into pyxeledit and I drew over them to bring them into art
How its done
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| INSPIRATION |
In my game I wanted to get a semi-realistic drawing the for the gun and hands off an inspiritaion by the old DOOM games. Wanting to achieve a similar look I knew that I couldn't do it alone from scratch on PyxelEdit so after some thinking, I decided it would be best to have someone hold the gun from a blank canvas so I can get a clear image to use for the drawing.
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| INITIAL PICTURE |
Acting upon my idea of using an image to trace over, I brought in a toy gun and borrowed one of my group members to do the pictures with, I set up the scene with an A3 piece of paper in good lighting and requested my group partner to do slow shooting motions frame by frame and after each frame I would take a photo. after taking the photos i uploaded them to my computer and got rid of the background using an internet software to give me a clear PNG of the hand and gun alone.
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| END RESULT |
I insterted the cutout picture into PyxeldEdit and started drawing over the hand to make a trace, I decided to keep the hands the same as there was no need to change it up any bit but I made the gun look more like a realistic model than a toy. After establishing the colour pallette on one of the frames (current displayed is the idle) I wanted to begin working on a shooting animation which would consist of four frames to make sure the shooting looks quick.
Tuesday
Following up from yesterday I wanted to complete the rest of the animations for the character, Today I was going to work on the shooting animation which would've finalised every animation the character needed.
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INITIAL PHOTOS
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Using the same respective colour palette in PyxelEdit for the previous asset made, I made an animation for shooting, this consisted of four frames of shooting. The shooting frames on their own looked good but I felt that it was too choppy, to fix this I added a smear on the frame which the gun jumps up, both on the gun itself and the muzzle flash to make it flow better.
END PRODUCT
Friday
INTRODUCTION
Just like last week, this day was spent doing a group crit to see what the rest of the groups think of our current build of the project, same as before we had people review our game and one person collects data.
Following through this weeks feedback, it seems to be very useful and will help us guide our game, the feedback consisted of many factors that would've saved us both time and a hassle by cutting out things we wanted to do or things we were doing. An example of this would be the tiles, they were all meant to be red and bloody-like but in the end people did not like the mass of red so we focused on different sorts of colours for our game instead cutting out the current creation of any other tiles needed.
ANALYSIS
The issues I've encountered in the crit was understanding what people were giving back to me in terms
of feedback as sometimes they would not be clear or give me feedback on something that was out of the control of our group (construct issues within the engine itself.) To overcome these issues what I would do normally is ask them to show me the problem that they are having so I can get a deeper understanding and reword it on my feedback.
of feedback as sometimes they would not be clear or give me feedback on something that was out of the control of our group (construct issues within the engine itself.) To overcome these issues what I would do normally is ask them to show me the problem that they are having so I can get a deeper understanding and reword it on my feedback.
Group Project Week 5 Entry 2/2/24
Monday/Tuesday
This week I wanted to get in the last enemy AI that needed to be created which was the succubus, to create this enemy I needed it to be significantly taller than the oni as it is the 'middle' sized enemy of the game. While designing her I made a change ont he hair to keep it more simple and easier to draw by removing parts of it.
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| Finalised enemy succubus |
Friday
INTRODUCTION
After finishing the artwrok for the game completely I wanted to help on bug fixing so in todays crit I aimed to get as many construct related issues as possible.
In the crit Ive decided to stay back and collate the evidence myself by reviewing the game and how they play it without having any communication with them to see what I can observe personally before they can tell me, the reason I do this is to make sure they dont forget to mention anything or try to sugarcoat something about the game.
After collecting all the feedback, I found out that all art was found satisfactory which meant I can jump onto coding for the next week to bug fix any issues found within the game. The evidence collected this week wasnt as useful as normal, however it helped me see any reoccuring issues found within the game.
ANALYSIS
The issues Ive faced this week for my crit was understanding some problems and how/why they were happening. To combat this I asked them to repeat their actions to see if I can understand why its actually happening.
Group Project Week 6 Entry 5/2/24
Throughout the entire week I made an attempt to bug fix on the issues of the game, mostly focused on the AI and physics. With the physics of the dash and solidity of the platforms, I managed to find the fix to by adding behaviours to the player and enemy AI which prevented them from entering into the platforms. For the enemy AI however I only managed to mend a small part of the issues created but that would always bring a new problem to hand which made me only able to fix a small issue which was the fact that the hitbox would barely match towards the AI movement, I managed to increase the hitbox size to made it easier to shoot but this made it so multiple can die to one bullet, in the end I had to settle for this as time was running out and I couldn't change it further.
GAME
Game Project Evaluation 5/2/24
The task for the project we were given was to make a game following through a brief. In the brief our chosen genre was a 3D shooter game with the theme of elements. The theme of elements can be taken in any way so me and my group decided to use an element of hell for our game.
Over the course of the project me and my team changed up a few things, we made the game simpler by reducing the amount of enemy types and weapons, we also strayed away from the colour red as it began to be an eye sore. Other than that me and my team stuck to our plan pretty well.
During the project many issues came up over the course of the entire game, most problems were technical as construct 3 doesn't support 3D as much considering its a 2D based software. This caused issues like not being able to use most blocks besides the square as the solid hit boxes didn't match up, performance issues and a lot of issues with coding the AI.
I personally didn't face any issues with my work but my other group members did so in an attempt I tried to help by working on construct a small amount alongside doing the art to try help fix the code however it wasn't extremely successful.
In the process of the project I think I have discovered new methods of problem solving and troubleshooting when it comes to technical skills. I have learnt many different methods on how to solve different issues when it comes to the "constructive" parts of a project.
After the project I would have to say I've improved on my leadership and communication skills greatly as I personally, don't like leading so this was a first for me but after the project I now have a better ability at leading if I ever need to do it again. Referring back to the previous point I've also improved my skills in problem-solving, considering I took up the producer role I wanted to be able to fix as many problems as possible within the group so over he project I significantly increased how good I am with my problem solving skills. Admittedly though having clear communication between my group was sometimes a challenge and wasn't successful all the time causing problems and confusion in regards to the project.
In terms of influence, nothing really influenced what I made besides my art inspirations for the characters, this being:
Great Goat - BERSERK
The reason I used this character as a reference is because of what the character portrays. Berserk is inherently a dark series following many themes of evil and hell, the great goat appears in a cave in the series running a cult that can be seen to be nothing but a dystopian group full of sinning. At this moment the great goat became a symbol of darkness for me so once the idea of the game was made I instantly wanted to include some sort of inspiration by it.
This variation/skin of the character Nitara from Mortal Kombat had a cool design to the outfit, her being inhuman made me associate the outfit with some sort of a demonic theme behind it so I ended up using the outfit in my 'succubus' character. The reason I chose the outfit is because its something unique and not seen so often which led me to believe that breaking whats 'normal' to wear would be more fitting for something that is not human.
Test Subject - Sekiro: Shadows die twice
As I was thinking about what to design a small and fast enemy as, I recalled to the game, Sekiro: shadows die twice, in this game I recall there being short and weak figures in the game that would pester you, with that idea I took inspiration but moulded the demon to look younger and more angry which led to my creation of the Oni.
In the final build of the game, to be honest I am quite disappointed with how its turned out because I personally believe our game had a lot of potential that was just never met, this was due to a multitude of coding issues which led to us having to water down our game, rending it underwhelming. Using this as a learning experience in my next project, Ill look to be less ambitious and more realistic with what I can do.
Within audience feedback, most issues came through with them just not understanding the narrative of the game much, with this I took that I couldve explained the story in a better way or made it more accessible to understand. Alongside the narrative being difficult to find, the general public also at times found the game to be a bit difficult. However, nearly all positive feedback was about the art and how well put together it was overall.
Overall I personally see the game as unsuccessful as there is still alot of content to add and bugs to fix but at a standpoint of a person outside of the group it may or may not seem successful. Over the course of the team project Ive learnt that sometimes i may need to be more pushy on group memebers as sometimes people might not be on track or understand what youre asking them to do. Ive also learnt that communication in a group is majorly important, this means to discuss everything with your group so everyone knows what theyre doing and how theyre doing it. getting team members to meet deadlines was the hardest part for me because on some occasions people dont do their tasks or they sidetrack with another task leaving problems behind and sometimes we arent in college, these are the reasons why managing deadlines was very difficult for me, taking this in account I will find remedies to any deadline issues by the next team project to make everything flow more swimmingly.
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