After I saw how well Noah was doing with the Main Menu screen, I have the idea of add different image or theme to that screen because it seems pretty simple to me. But I was looking from the distance, when Noah actually showed us what he was trying to achieved, it was awesome! It seems like a real holographic floating window like sci-fi movies with even fake glitches and everything. So after discussed a few minutes with Nate we decided let it just the way it is right now. Noah did a amazing job honestly. I was thinking in something like this for the first screen. But I was wrong.
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Following the idea I applied with the weapons I tried to replicate it with the armor. I felt even more comfortable with Armors because they "don't have to" do an active effect like weapons for example. Armors in general can have a wide range of effects that could apply to the bearer or no. In this way, it was easier for me craft non explicit effects attached to the flavor texts, for more of them at least. Of course, I keep almost the other half of them with more traditional design: short description and explicit effect. To find those one I also did a little research through the vast dnd documentation looking for cool effects or other examples I could use on mines. Overall I think I did a fair job (nothing special) with those ones and several of them were actually use in our play test with funny results.
Today I worked almost the entire class closed to the artist. I gave some feedback to Nick background (which are completely awesome), discussed about it with Ethan because the transitions between screens were a little abrupt, so we exchange one background with another and asked Nick if he could draw a new one for the character selection scree. Also I was discussing with him (Nicholas) the final design for Queen Lilit, the result was pretty similar what I was thinking on while I designed her. But it is obvious Nick is specially good with environments. As I needed a rock to cover the only obstacle I inserted in one of my tiles, I asked Carly if she can design a rock that match with the background. She struggled a little but in the end she gave me a good looking purple outer space rock. Finally, I wanted so kind of weird intergalactic public sitting on background with hats and popcorn. Nuhi understood completely the idea and drew a few aliens with a insect shape which match smoothly with the style of the game, I can't wait to see them on the game! Alien enjoying the race. Nicholas Design.
The process of positioning all the platform for every single tile was a awful nightmare. The first step was calibrating characters jump high and making sure they can actually reach most platforms even the highest ones. That was pretty easy. The real problem appears when we tried to match the platforms with the transition of the tiles. As the following tile will be randomly generate we need to make sure a tile could match smoothly with any other tile and with itself. In order to accomplish that Scott had this awesome idea of breaking the platforms in half in the borders of the tiles so we can overlap them whenever the next tile is generate. That worked perfectly fine. But Lining up all those platforms locations was really challenging, luckily Scott and I split this work between the both of us, eve so was really demanding to do.
I started to playtest this simple chess game and quickly found a few or maybe not exactly. After playing for a while trying to win one single piece (taking control of both sides). The match ended in a draw for some reason I couldn't figure out. I search a little and found out that there is this "stalemate" situation when if the king doesn't have available movements the match end in a draw. Cool but there was no explanation at all. That were I realized that this game (the model we are using to build our stuff is focus on player that actually know how to play chess). Which is not a problem but we should explain why or how you lose or win. Also, I found out that there is a problem with "Reverse Last Move" because if you leave the machine play and hit the bottom there is some kind of bug when you can not play and the PC doesn't do anything either. So this trigger a dead end situation, there are probably a lot more but I don't want to keep looking because we don't have time to fix all of them. I actually don't know if we are going to have something to show or even pass this class...
One of the main task I am actually interest in for the next sprint is weapon creation. Although I haven't played Souls saga as I would like to (mostly because It isn't that much appealing to me) I love how they storytelling use so tiny details within the game as weapons flavor text to actually tell major dramatic events. It isn't only about writing a huge paragraph per weapon but how they also twisted the way we understand something that simple: they are also flavor text that doesn't say anything "useful" to the player, is vague, ominous even mysterious. For me this is a huge step forward to understand the games more as artistic creations and less like "product" or "services". Not everhing the game put in front your eyes has to had some practical use to the player, that's too basic...
So I did a little research to learn how Dark Soul weaponry flavor text to integrate within the game as a whole and tried to do something similar. Several times at least, being dnd most weapons need specific effect, attack and range. But overall was fun and interesting the attempt. Finally! The part I didn't know I was waiting for. Testing! At the beginning I just started testing our tiles: how the interact between each other and specially with the player. Are they actually fulfilling its role? Add some value to the game in general? Most of them answer positively to these question but there were also a few we had to get rid of them or make important changes. Here was when I discovered we will need to add lots more coins to ensure longevity of each match. I changed the coins sheet several times. On the top of all these, I obviously found a lot of bug or polishing which needed to be done. So Ethan gave me the task of recording every single one on Kanban, Which I did the best I could:
We ended deciding set only 5 tiles for now. It was important keep in control stick to the small but concrete scope Ethan was asking for in this Beta version. With these tiles I had the idea of forcing players encounters, their navigation through the entire screen and making a division between upper and lower level as Scott wanted to. With all this in mind I designed a "wall tile" which suppose to force players to jump over a medium side wall to land in the upper level or in the ground level if the calculate their jump a little more. This division will be establish by come kind of obstacle which will place strategically right after the pit in the ground level. Scott loved this one just like me. We will use it for sure.
Today I wanted to write the flavor text for the weapons. It could sound like a meaningless detail, but I believe it actually was one of the (many) important elements which help to build the huge success of Dark Souls. Be able to tell through descriptions is one of the keys in any kind of narrative. Use even then smallest space to deliver the message was the main lesson Dark Souls taught us. So I started searching and looking specific examples regarding how to approach this new challenge. It wasn't long when I sadly realized that most of the weapon aren't done yet and (more important) Leo told me that I should be working on Bird Mama boss. That was pretty much what I did this class, apply the same technique: look for the official numbers from creatures of DnD and mix up with others to finally adding my own ideas. I hope they don't need too many corrections.
Scott and I were talking about the general game speed. Which is actually a pretty critic point of the game being (in a way) a runner. I started going a little research regarding other runners games to see how the approach screen/character/range of vision. The first obvious decision was make the characters always faster than the screen so they can reach the right side and eventually win. The speed of the screen is going to be controlled by the coins you will be collecting through the game. At the beginning we were thinking a number between 12 and 15 but after the a few play test it was pretty obvious we will need a lot more. I ended leaving 50 coins in total in order to win, the number seems high but it only take a minute gathering those 50. After reaching this conclusion I put all the date in the following doc so everybody can check it whenever they need it (Nate specially):
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AuthorI want to study Video Games in a theoretical way. Archivos
May 2018
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