Hero’s and Stories

Stories are something that we’ve learnt about in college from day one. Because of our course content, it is our job to tell a story through several means, graphic design, film, photography and especially games.

The readings this week helped to refresh our knowledge on classic story structure, as well as the hero’s journey, why they are predictable and why we still use them.

In John Sutherlands article about stories in games, he takes us back through the classical story structure. It is made up of three acts.
In the beginning our hero has a normal life. This is then disrupted by the inciting insistent which throws their life out of the norm. Following this the hero is faced with their first obstacle which they must overcome, followed by a second which is slightly more difficult and then by a third which is the toughest of them all, which then will usually bring back their normal life. Most games are a comic structure, meaning that the player can complete the game and have a ‘happier ending’ although their are stories, take Shakespeares King Lear, where the ordinary life is not obtainable at the end and the story ultimately has a sad ending, these are known as tragedies. Most games will follow this three act structure, but you can build more obstacles into the game to make it longer.

The second article by Bob Bates, talks about the hero’s journey and how it is used in most stories and particularly those in games. This stems from the use of parable and stories passed down from clans and tribes. These stories usually have some sort of message that teaches the listener or reader a life lesson, Bates uses The Good Samaritan as an example ‘love they neighbour’ and all that jazz. Bates talks about how, yes their is evolution in terms of survival of the the fittest but there is also survival of the smartest. This is due to ancestors passing down stories and knowledge about how the hunt, where to hunt and where not to hunt. This meant that these tribes and clans lived longer then those who didn’t share these stories and kept the information to themselves.
The hero’s journey follows a very similar path to that in the three act structure
We establish the hero’s world, there is a call to adventure, be that of curiosity or due to bad circumstances, entering the world, the trials they must face, meeting ‘the Evil One’, gaining the prize and then returning to their people.

Signing off
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Week 9 Progress

Image found here 

Am I happy with my progress for this module so far this semester?
Not as happy as I could be.

I have gotten really bummed down about this module a couple of times due to laptop malfunctions, forgetting assignments are due and from being physically ill as well. Sadly I have not been able to make as much progress on this module as I would have originally hoped to. From the beginning of this semester to now, it’s been a like climbing a mountain range, going up for a little while and then back down again but I think I’m on a steep climb upwards at the moment. I’ve started to become more positive and just try and do my very best with this module rather than push myself too much.

As I have said in the past two posts, most of my blog posts and work are done either on the bus on the way home from college ( like this one here, gotta make use of those four hours) or in the evening after I’ve done a lot and I just want to go to bed. The latter is probably not the healthiest way to do this module and may be a contributing factor as to why I slipped a lot where I didn’t want to. I definitely could be doing better and getting things done on time to allow myself more time for actually working on the game itself rather then getting so worked up about the tutorials and commenting. I really do enjoy this module, even if it is most likely not going to be the area that I will hopefully go into after college. But you never know that could all change in the next two years.

Moving forward I want to get the weeks posts done earlier and not leave them until last minute. I definitely want to leave more time for the project so that I can genuinely feel like I have made progress and I’ve actually putting my skills to use. I’m determined to not leave everything until last minute, starting with this post being a day early and I plan on doing my feedback and commenting later this evening, leaving time for my project ( and maybe some fun extra credit as well!).

TIME TO DO SOME COMMENTING
signing off
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review week comments and feedback

Speech bubble art found here 

Feedback is something that we are getting a lot of this year. In comparison to last year, there is constant feedback and always someone suggesting something new of a different way to approach the project, not only in this module but in all of them. We have had several sessions, both in person and online or through audio files where lecturers have given us our feedback on our projects.
I think feedback is one of the most important aspects to our college course, especially when a lot of our work is done outside lab and lecture time and all uploaded online. The fact that the lectures and other students are interested in what you are doing really inspires me to work harder for the grades and final result that I want, be that from game design or graphic design or even film.

The feedback that I found most useful so far this year has been the people asking 'WHY' or 'HOW'.
These types of feedback really made me think about certain areas of my game ideas that i may have glazed over or just avoided altogether. One week in particular that the feedback was very helpful was the week we designed our GDD. the feedback from other students really helped to to go back and edit the work  i had done or fill in gaps that were missing.

As regards to the feedback that I am giving out, it really depends on what time of the day it is when I am giving the feedback. I’ve really enjoyed reading other people’s blogs and came documents. When giving the feedback I was trying to be as honest as I possible could while trying to give helpful comments and feedback. I think it’s always helpful to give someone your opinion because it can give them another point of view for their project, especially when it comes to our games.


From commenting on other people’s blogs I have learnt a lot more about the people in my year. By the end of last year I believed that I knew my year pretty well but there is even some new things that I learnt about my close friends through their game design thoughts or through their introduction. I’ve also learnt a lot about each persons style of design from the way they are designing their game or by the way that they have designed their blog.  I really enjoyed reading people introduction posts because I have learnt a lot about their personal lives outside of college that we haven’t been able to see due to our huge work load. From people’s work and career to their everyday interest and even their hobbies like performing, sports, art and even using their skills they are learning in college and putting them to use in the real world. It’s very inspiring and it makes me want to do more outside of college and my regular hobbies like art and ballet.

I think moving forward I would like to give more detailed feedback for people’s games. Most of the time when I have been giving feedback it has been late at night after I’ve completed maybe three other assignments so I feel I could do much more on that front.

I think that’s enough blabbering from me for one day
Signing off
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Week 9 reading and writing

the readings have been a time for me. Most of the time I would actually do the reading on the busses to and from college, because you know, don’t want to waste those 4 hours hours by doing nothing p. If I’m not doing assignments then I’m catching up on sleep or the other way around.

Not going to lie there has been a couple of times where I will wake with a start and think “THE READINGS”. But I think they have been beneficial. Coming into this module I hadn’t really thought about how much thought and prep goes into games, or how many different elements there is to consider. I suppose it’s just something I took for granted.

In the beginning they seemed like a bit of a chore but after the second week I really started to enjoy them. I think my favorite reading so far has been, week 6`s Game GDD. That week we really looked into the different game pieces and how the aesthetics of games effect the players overall experience. Like I mentioned earlier,this really seemed to be something that i have overlooked when playing games,even with my art background.even though i would look at a deck of cards and think , woah this deck is so pretty, I would ever consider, well why is it that you like it so much?
Learning about the way that color, shape and size DO matter when it comes to game design opened my eyes for my own assignment.

From doing these readings I’ve found that I absorb readings better in the morning and then writer better when I sit down at night after a day of college. I think this is due to me being more open and honest the more tired I get. This is something I’ve noticed even in my other college work as well as my own art pieces. I may feel like an old person who can’t stay up past 10pm but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do I suppose.

Am I happy with my own game project so far? I’m not going to lie, I’m actually a little disappointed in the lack of progress I’ve made so far. I had hoped to have a lot more completed by now but due to personal health issues and computer technical issues,that hasn’t been the case.

Art of witch found here 

This is probably my favorite image that I have found for this module. The image actually gave me the original idea for tomb town, the sort of soft spooky feeling, the softness being trough the use of low-poly assets.

I think i need to start doing the reading assignments earlier. Doing them on the Monday rather than an  hour before the deadline like tonight. Doing this may encourage me to spend more time worrying about my actual project and may even leave some time for some extra credit assignments (which i could really do with completing...).

That’s enough blabbering on from me for one night i think,
Signing Off
-AK

First playable scene

As per usual this weeks project seems to be causing me quite a bit of trouble. Aside from my software being extremely slow and trying to take 36 minutes to bake the scene, I have also managed to forget a lot of what we have learnt in previous tutorials so I have been going back and looking over those.

Before my software crashed on me several times to the point of suffocating my laptop and completely restarting it, again.... I managed to create the scene for ‘main street’ and the players home. Although you can not access the shops at the moment, this may be something I need to rethink when going at the game again within the next week. I have re thought the designs and I am considering having the NPCs outside their respective shops rather than inside (for time management reasons).
Here is a screen shot from during the development of the town.

Notice the baking ETA

It started on 1 hour 30 mins......



Although I would have originally liked to have a third person point of view, I am currently working with first person views and focusing on object collections and monsters.
Although there are no monsters in this scene I have to start collecting the assets for the next scene which is the forest scene where most of the battling will happen.

I am also trying to get the right skybox and lighting into my scene, using point lights around the houses and shops.

All in all, the game still needs a lot of work but I’ve gotten more done then I thought I would at the beginning

Signing off
-AK

Unity FREE Tutorials! what is relevent to tomb town

 Logo from here

This week our task was to find unity tutorials that suited our own games, something that tackled the right area of game we want to create and videos that will help us do what we want to do.

I first started searching for videos on monster design as well as character design and I came across a set of tutorials based around character movement and graphics. the tutorials are being created by a team of people, Brackeys and Sebastian Lagu. They are working together to teach users how to easily create functional characters. I took a look at the intro video and then the first tutorial, and I really didn't realise how easy making a character was. This has been the main thing that I have been mostly worried about when it comes to making my game.

 Brackeys first video on character movement

Another good thing about these videos is that all the source code is available on Github. 

I also started searching for more tutorials on how to implamnt a task bar, but i have not been able to ind a suitable one just yet. While looking for this video i came across a video about creating an inventory. I started watching it and realised that is was also made by Brackeys. I find his videos easy enough to follow and I don't end up losing interest half way through.

  This is the first video,this focuses on graphics with a 

really easy to follow way of teaching.

This is the second video, teaching you ho to code

the inventory to work within your game.

After watching and working with these tutorials, I am much more confident that between these codes and the assets in the unity store i will be able to make a gam that looks good, but also works.

Signing off

-AK

Game Fun

Image found on Pinterest from tumblr 

This week our readings were all about the types of people that play games and also why we find games fun!

In the first article, we learnt about why we enjoy playing games and how it has been passed down over thousands of years.
Our ancestors from over 30,000 years ago would have used games as a way of developing their hunting skills in a safe environment out of harms way.
There are usually three types of people when it comes to this sort of thinking and the article uses hunter gathers as an explanation.
Type A- those who go and hunt and then once they have caught some food and returned it to their family, will go back out to hunt for even more food. This puts them in danger even when they don’t need to be.
Type B- those who go out and hunt, bring back food and then go straight to relaxing. This may give them more energy for the next hunt but it does not build their skills or develop their fitness.
Type C- those who once they have caught food and returned it to their family, will spend time in a safe environment practicing their skills and building strength by playing games by for example trying to knock over stacked rocks.

The article refers to these as ‘natural funativity’ this being a mixture of natural selection and game funativity.


The second article talks about the different kinds of people who interact with games, particularly MMOs.
They refer to this set as diamonds, spades, hearts and clubs.
Each of these types of people play games differently and receive a different experience from them

Diamonds- these are the achievers, they want to collect and achieve as much as they can in the game.
Spades- these are the explorers, they want to learn as much as they can about the world and gain as much information as they can.
Hearts- these are the people that empathise with others.
And finally
Clubs- they intend to cause harm to other players. They hit people over the head with their clubs.


Signing off
-AK

Actually building tomb town! The beginnings of a prototype

So this week I started to actually build my own game!

Let me tell you, these past couple days have been a whirlwind, from laptops crashing to having to factory reset, but we got there in the end! 
Due to all of these happening, I am further behind on this part of this project then I would have hoped, but i took the time while waiting for my computer, to draw out some maps of how I want different scenes of my game to roughly look!

Going through each part of the game, I've realised i want to create roughly 5-6 main scenes, as well as the inside of buildings and such. Although this sounds ambitious, i really want to test my self.

Sketches of level designs by me 

This week i spent my time going back through the unity tutorials from previous weeks on how to set up and going back over terrain. The terrain of my game really will be one of the most important things for me, as two of the scenes are forest based, that's a lot of trees!

 screenshot of the basic terrain without trees for the first forest scene

 I have not gotten to adding in elements like houses or objects just yet and I do still need to thrall through the asset store for a while, but I think once i really get stuck in with this game building, it will be up from there(until we get a bug I suppose) .

signing off 
-AK

Unity Tutorial 06

Logo from here 

So, this week on unity tutorials we looked at skyboxes, wind, fade screens, bug fixes and adding different asserts into the game.

I really enjoyed this weeks tutorials because they are definitely something that I have been thinking about a lot the past few weeks. Especially when it came to creating my GDD and thinking about how I wanted the aesthetics of my game to look.

The skybox part of the tutorial was actually a lot easier then I thought it would be. For my own game I’m looking into a darker scene, due to it being based in a spooky town, so having just the default blue sky was not going to work for me. I did try a couple of the different options that were available while watching the tutorial and then followed along with it so I didn’t get lost. I know I can definitely find what I am looking for in there.

When it came to wind, I actually hadn’t really thought about it up until this point. Although I do know that a scene in my game will be set in a forest this was something I had forgotten to think about. Changing the different intensities of the wind and learning that we can use a radius to effect the things around our character actually gave me more plot ideas! This was something that I did originally find hard to find the complete right intensity.

Learning how to the bug fixes really helped me because I had noticed some issues and I was starting to freak out thinking I had done something wrong or I hadn’t placed my assets in the right well, place.
It is good to know that all the bugs can be fixed and I’m sure there is also plenty of forums to help if there is any problems in the future

The tutorials of making the environment look better really brought into focus the different assets that are available to us to use in our games.
When Jimmy Vegas used the old house I was immediately dragged back into the video because that is something I really have to think about. I did how ever find the use of the normal maps difficult and this is something I have struggled with before in previous tutorials so I will have to go back and watch that video a couple of times to get it right.

All in all this weeks tutorials really surrounded all the questions I had been asking myself about my game design!

Signing off
-AK

Game Decisions

Woah okay so this weeks reading took a WHILE.
It was really interesting though  had absolutely no idea that so much thought and process has to go into making MMOs.
Although, with trying to create our own games, I have come to realise, that game development and design definitely are not my strong suit, That being said, I am enjoying making this game and doing all the reading on the different ways different types of games are made.

This week our reading (linked here)was based around creating MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) games.
Although we are not making these games ourselves, this reading has helped.

The first thing the article talks about is "Borrowing from social psychology".
The article talks about the different ways that game makers build their games, as to make the players as close to each other as they possibly can, in reference to the game.
- Friendship
The single bond between two people. This is the essential part of the bond that is needed for the players to work together through the game.
-Dunbar's Layers
This is the research on the structural distribution of relationship bonds. This states that a humans can only have up to 150 friends, and the closer those friends are, the less there is.
-Social groups
Multiple individuals with similar interests.

Friendships develop due to several factors
Proximity- being close to one another for long periods of time
Similarity- similar interests
Reciprocity- engaging in escalating back-and-forth interactions
Disclosure - safe sharing of weakness

These are key in the way that interaction is designed within games
opening- opportunity for player 1  to ask a questions, etc.
opportunity- allows player 2 to answer
response- acknowledges player1 and answers
acknowledgement- player 1 acknowledges player 2's response
the loop is complete

This way of communication really allows the players to get to know each other, therefore building the bond that they need in order to continue through the game and so on

signing off
-AK