Game Design Document

What is up fellow people, so our next task was to create something called a Game Design Document or a "GDD" for our game idea. Opened the template for the thing and didn't understand half of it, but after some Googling I figured out what most of it meant. It was pretty confusing since we haven't been told what game architecture or abstract classes are, so just kinda filled out what I could. It was actually pretty helpful filling out the document though. Not only is it a good place to store your ideas but when you go through the document section by section you start to put some thought into sections that you might have forgotten about or haven't got to yet regarding your game e.g. when the document tells you to write about level design you put a lot more thought into what your level design will actually be. Through this process I actually elaborated on some aspects of my game a bit, so it was actually pretty beneficial.

Heres the link to my GDD:
https://www.dundoc.com/project/5855/2ux012sybu

(Possible example of how one of my levels will look, probably like this but made of 10 pixels)

Game: No Mans Sky

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Unity Tutorial 5

This week we returned to the teachings of Jimmy Vegas, we watched his tutorial videos number 6, 7 and 8. The first video covered how to use a dynamic hud, this involves creating a special cursor that only appears when the option to interact with something (e.g a collectible) is available. This process also took us over how to add action text to the scene such as "Press E to take gem" and also how to actually trigger the action itself.

The second video talked about how to create a weapon that your character can use in the game. This included creating/importing the weapon (in this case an axe) and then also properly positioning the axe so that it looks correct on the screen. The final video went over how to actually make the axe swing and make the animation look legitimate. Overall I thought this batch of tutorials were a little easier to follow than some of the previous ones and I think I can actually implement this into my final
project, since its such a versatile tool that can be used for pretty much anything, from using it action games as a combat weapon to using it as a tool to collect items, there's plenty of mechanics we can add using this feature.

(Thumbnail for Jimmy Vegas's tutorial video)

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Game GDD

This week I read up on some material about tips on how to improve on the user experience (UI) and rule writing for board games. User experience is how the player interacts with the game, for example the pieces in a game of chess. The research material goes into great detail about this aspect of board games, specifically how it affects the players overall experience of the game. A component of this mentioned in the article was making the pieces of a board game as identifiable as possible. This can be done by altering their color, their shape or in the case of card games, their suits. It was stated that many people suffer from some form of color blindness, so these mechanics can be vital to include these people and since the pieces in games such as card games cant be reshaped, suits over a solution for people who are visually impaired.

The article also talks about using legible font because it can be really annoying to the player if they cant read the cards/rules. One aspect it mentions to include is to differentiate the 9's from the 6's so that they aren't identical when viewed upside down. The material even talks about how different regions write their numbers differently, so for example in some regions a 1 may be mistaken for a 7 in other regions. So its important to put the effort into differentiating these kinds of things. One more thing that is mentioned in the material is the box that the game comes in. While this has no influence on how the game actually plays and how enjoyable it is it must be considered for a view reasons. Mainly for marketing purposes, for example putting the name of the game on both the horizontal and vertical sides of the box in big clear writing, this way the game can catch the viewers attention and the name/logo will be visible regardless of if the store staff stock it vertically or horizontally, this is something that is an aspect that is often overlooked by a lot of board games surprisingly.

("Monopoly", a game widely known for its diversely shaped playing pieces)

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Additional Research

"Game UI By Example"

An article by Desi Quintans that outlines the fundamentals of user interface and delves into some examples of the best and worst user interfaces in games from recent history.

"Common Mistakes In Video Game User Interfaces"

An article by Alexander Yordanov that discusses the pitfalls of user interface that countless games have fallen into, particularly picking on aspects such as slow UI that plague video games containing them.

"Learning From Board Games"

An article by Jim Ross that talks about how board games incorporate aspects of user design (specifically monopoly) and what kind of user interface he as a player and customer likes to see in games.

Game Vision Statement

My Half Baked Video Game Idea I Came Up With At 4am At Night

So the game I was thinking of making would be a kinda adventure style game,  it would be played in the first person and the emphasis of the game would be more about the environment and soundtrack than any kind of fast paced action, in a similar way to the game "journey".

("Journey" the game)

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The game would start the player off in a circular area with an alter in the middle, around this area there are 4 gates, each gate having terrain/mountains visible beyond it. Each of these gates will lead to a different area, with a large open landscape themed around an element. One area will be themed around fire (think volcanoes and lava), one around water (ice mountains), one around air (floating pieces of terrain), and one around earth (forests). Each of these areas will have a collectible at its furthest point, omitting a bright light into the sky that is always visible to the player in order to guide them, the player must traverse the terrain and acquire the collectible, they will then be returned back to the starting position, with the collectible filling the alter 1/4 of the way and prompting the player to enter the remaining areas to repeat the process. When they collect all 4 items the alter activates and teleports them to a world of shadows, for one final journey.

("The 4 Elements")

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Obviously this concept is going to rely on beauty and visual impact to connect with the player, to assist in this I thought I would add build-up instrumental music, songs that can get the player invested in the game. I thought a nice touch would be to use a unique song for each area, each one representing the kind of environment the player is traversing.

Potential soundtracks I've identified so far

Air Realm (Epic) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IknGOnwZ1xc

Fire Realm (Fiery and intimidating) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga8yUafqiLM

Water Realm (Chill) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RepXOI13fVI

Earth Realm (????) -

Shadow Realm (Mythical) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zvVGJrTP8

In terms of story and narrative i'm not sure how heavily they will be featured, currently i'd need a theme of the collectible objects and a reason for the players actions and journey to complete a full storyline but i'm open to the possibility of leaving the story's meaning as ambiguous, which could be the better option but i'll put more thought into that and get back to it.

In regards to production, the game should be easy enough to make, it more than likely wont feature any super advanced features unless I find a way to incorporate them. For the most part the player will be walking, swimming, jumping, collecting collectibles and potentially moving objects to solve puzzles in order to advance. Of course i'll probably need to spend a quarter of my life creating the landscape for each area but i'll cross that bridge when I get there. 

Overall I'm looking forward to expanding on this game, it definitely has potential to flop and be mind blowingly boring but I think that if I get everything just right I can create something enjoyably unique. Anyway, that's my game so far, thanks for reading.

Unity Tutorial 3

For our latest Unity game editor tutorial we were taught step by step how to create a working clock that operates in real time. Thankfully we were given a break from Jimmy Vegas videos for this one, instead we were given a step by step article to help us out.

To make the face of the clock we used variations of shapes such as cubes and cylinders and reshaped and re-positioned them to match the layout of a clock,  we then used C# coding to animate the clocks arms to move in conjunction with the correct time. In assessment I wasn't actually a big fan of this tutorial, yes we were able to learn some C# but only how to use it to do this one specific thing (make the clock move), I don't think this can translate very well into a functional tool we can use to create our final game. As well as this I had some problems with the editing itself, I don't know if the guide was using an out of date version of unity or if the instructions were unclear but I had trouble correctly setting each hour indicators at the correct rotation, plus the option to change the color of them was grayed out and I've no idea why. So ultimately while my clock did end up working it resembled a pancake more so than it did a clock.

(How our final effort should of looked, mine did not look like this at all)

Source: catlikecoding.com

Games MDA

There was a lot of useful information within the material that I researched for this article. The material discussed the aesthetics of video games, particularly it delved into the topic of "fun" in games. It talked about how we derive eight different kinds of fun from different games. These eight types are sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery expression and submission. Finding a game as fun is upon inspection a very loose blanket term, it indicates that we enjoy the game but this could be for so many reasons, this material discussed the reasons why we enjoy them.

It used some examples of games, such as Quake, Final Fantasy and party classic Charades, we like Quake because of its fast paced action (sensation) and its competitive nature between each and every one of its players, but that isn't why we like Charades, we like Charades because of its comradery (fellowship) and its fun nature. There's no solid equation for enjoyment of a video game, instead its a mix and mash of various different aspects. 

Most games contain models, as talked about in the reading material models are a collection of game mechanics, shooters contain fast action gun play while strategy games contain methodical turn based movements. By unifying this information with the aforementioned eight types of fun we can see a link between video games that we haven't seen before, because when stripped to their core these games contain identical fundamentals to others based on their genre alone. This MDA framework helps to break down games and helps people to better understand the relationship between game producer and game consumer.

"Quake Champions"
Source: Polygon.com

Here are some additional readings I did relating to this topic

Why are video games so fun?

A short article by Wesley Yin-Poole on why we find video games so appealing, he goes into detail on the mental aspects, explaining how we into the foreign characteristics we inherit. while playing video games.

Using the MDA Framework as an approach to Game Design

An article by Jenny Carroll discussing the MDA Framework and how it can be utilized in our analysis of video games.

The Game Design Theory Behind Games

An article by "Marco" talking about the core aspects of the MDA framework, which he defines as the bridge between game development and game design.

Unity tutorial 1

After viewing some of Jimmy Vegas's introductory tutorials on the Unity game editor I worked in tandem with them to create aspects of the editor shown in the video. For this set of tutorials I was thought some of the basics of Unity, including how to spawn in objects and terrain and reshape them as needed. This same video also showed us the very basic fundamentals of Unity but I don't think I need to talk about them in much detail.

In the next video Jimmy showed us how to utilize that aforementioned terrain, not only how to reshape it in multiple ways but also how to use imported textures to color it and make it usable in our games as environment. Speaking of environment Jimmy also shows us how to add trees and plants into our game before going on to explain how to add collectible objects into the game which he goes on to elaborate on in future tutorial videos.

Overall all of these new features will be fundamentally vital to our final project, of course because the map design features we learnt will be necessary for our games and there's also a requirement that we must include collectibles as well.

(Terrain in the Unity game editor)

Source: Unity3d.com