Trash Dev Game Design

  Pictured, me and this semester but I'm not sure which of us is the one doing the punch. Its over! assignment handed in; we are done people. Thank you for the fun times and I hope you enjoyed the blog. I have actually enjoyed writing this blog and I intend to continue writing here as I keep up the game design work over the summer. Maybe I'll see you around.

I can't find a good image for this post, its due in three hours cut me some slack. Ok, we know the format at this point. Assignment 3 Lethel Cuts, good and bad, Successes and Failures.   Successes Everyone had fun, this is a big one. I was really afraid of going into playtests with a buggy game that people just didn't want to play but for the most part our testers had a great time. I know that it being multiplayer really affects this because even a boring game played with friends can be a good time but its still a good thing.  The intensity bar. Turns out to be a great mechanic once the players understand it. people enjoyed how it worked in a competitive match but also would experiment with it on friendly terms with their opponent to see what they could do with it and how it effected the game. art and music, many people said our game looked and sounded great which was something I wasn't thinking about until it came up but I'm very happy about it. All credit goes to the

  Just because I had to work on assignments doesn't mean I'm missing Halloween. I'm working hard, the whole team is, its coming up to end of semester and everything is due. After much playtesting and many meetings with the team we have agreed that some things need to change in Lethal Cuts. Blocking is terrible, its not fun or effective. Infact most people couldn't figure out it was a block without it being explained. The Air attack is kind of useless because it only works against other characters in the air and as there isn't any other reason to be in the air its just not used. Worst of all and maybe this is a result of the other issues, every match becomes both players slamming the attack button as fast as possible while standing in front of each other. The silver lining is that apparently thats pretty fun as most of our feedback has been really positive.  I think, and play testers agree, that the game need more movement and more reasons to move. As such I want to

  looks like there having fun but we need paperwork to be sure. In the last post about Assignment 3 I talked about the changes I would make to the game before going into playtesting. Of those changes we decided to implement the split Intensity Meters. If you don't know what I'm talking about go read my post "Assignment 3: Development Progress".  Now on to the topic at hand. We have begun the process of play testing. We know the game is buggy going in and obviously there are things we would like to fix before going to play testers, but we don't have the time for that so let's put out of scope out of mind.  First lesson is feedback comes fast in a playtest for a two-player game. The players speak to each other and because the game is player V player when someone gets the upper hand there can be a lot of yelling about it on both sides.   Looking at the feedback over the four playtests that we have conducted there are some clear patterns when it comes to gameplay

Hot tip; bet on YouTube Its time for me to go back to Tracy Fullerton. But I have to be honest, I have tried to write this blog post a few times. I read chapters over and over trying to find something I wanted to talk about but I hate this text book. Its painfully boring, unimaginative and lacks the fun and soul that makes game design mean something. I could write an essay on how much I dislike this Textbook, but I'm not going to do that. Instead lets do something more fun and more nice. I'm going to highlight some YouTube channels and videos that are infinitely better resources and free. so, lets begin.  GDC - https://www.youtube.com/@Gdconf/featured GDC (Game Design Conference) is a legendary channel, honestly its a gold mine. According to its own description "GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more." In short they get professionals in the gam

I swear its a logo officer, promise I didn't crop the Design Page Ok so, Lethal Cuts. Its a simple little fighting game but its got some interesting stuff going on. Lets start by going over the game as it was presented to the group and then ill talk about the changes I would (and hopefully will) implement as the lead designer.  lets look at the Design Page for Lethal Cuts. really this image should be all you need but ill explain anyway See that black controller? that's the most important information as far as I'm concerned. Move with the left stick, jump with A, attack with X, block with B. Ignore the Attack Direction stick, that's not implemented. The attack works basically how you expect and theirs a different animation if you attack in the air buts its pretty much the same attack. Block is a bit more complicated, your character turns to stone after a small pause becoming immune to hits for a short time. No health bars just if you take 3 hits you lose.  Now there'

the new project We've made it to the final boss so to speak. The last assignment for the game design unit, and its a group project. Remember that Sell Sheet and Design Page I made for actual Driving? Well everyone in the class did one and we all went around the room showing off our designs. People had done some really cool stuff and honestly, I was blown away by some of it. Everyone that saw the Sell Sheet for Actual Driving was very impressed and I managed to find four people to make a group easily. But here's the hard part, and why Actual Driving had its development so quickly brought to a close.  Once I had a group we had to sit down and figure out which of the four games was going to be made, that's the final assignment, as a team finish one game.  The Meeting went down like this, we all loved Actual Driving and each of us agreed that if we were going to go to a vote on which game we wanted made it would be mine, but one of the other games that was pitched was a very cl

  Thats a win in my book Feedbacks in for the Design Page and Sell Sheet, as Predicted there were issues with the Design Page that dropped me a few marks, I was missing some core information I hadn't considered, but overall the feedback was positive. 24.5/30 comes out to 81.6666667% that a distinction and Ill rock a distinction any day.

Look How They Massacred My Boy  I have to admit I feel a bit sheepish putting this post out. I know I said at the end of two of my previous posts I would get back to developing Actual Driving and finishing the Off Hand mechanic but sadly this is the end for Actual Driving's development, and I haven't put any more work into it. Ill get to why that is but first let's do Successes and Failures of the development cycle.   Successes Firstly I think it's a big success that I have developed a 3D game, there's not much gameplay to it but mechanically it feels pretty good to drive and you can explore an open world, not many other students can say they did that! The artwork. I'm so happy with the graphics update, I have showed the game around a bit and everyone comments on it and how unique it looks. I'm also pretty happy with the game design and concept. My first two games were a bit bland, mostly thinking up an interesting coat of paint to put over very generic game

  Smash hit game of the year In my last blog post I talked about how I would be designing a Sell Sheet and a Design Page for Actual Driving. Well, here it is, Above is my Sell sheet, It went through a few iterations but hasnt strayed so far from my first attempt. (first attempt at a Sell Sheet) Mostly my feedback on the first attempt was that nobody could tell it was a video game due to the art style, hence why I added box art and a catchy "Wishlist now on steam" to the final product. Over all I'm proud of what I achieved with this though. I think it captures the energy and if I saw this as a poster at EB games Id definitely want to check it out.  As for the Design Page Among other issues, text size makes it a bit hard to read I wasn't sure what to do with the design page to be honest, When speaking to my tutors and looking at examples everything seemed to centre around 2D or 3RD Person games where you can see your character standing in the world or level. My game is

  I know what you're thinking, and yes. It is worth 30%. The first Assignment for my Game Design unit is this blog as an overall product, were still chipping away at that (obviously) so while were at it lets go over my 2nd Assignment. In short, I am to produce a "one sheet" and a "one page" design document for a game that I may go on to produce as my final assignment. the names "one sheet" and "one page" are horribly undescriptive and so easy to mix up so moving forward I will be referring to them as a Sell Sheet and a Design Page. In more detail; A Sell Sheet is an attractive, single sided, A4 pitch document designed to help readers understand the vision of your game and achieve buy-in. It is something you could hand individuals interested in helping to develop your game (as developers, publishers, investors or in other roles). Think of something halfway between a poster and a business card. Example of a Sell Sheet for a pinball machine A De

The most realistic graphics of 1993 I decided that the first thing to do to improve Actual Driving would be to give it a graphics overhaul.  I started with a sky box which was simple enough, one of the actions that comes with the With3JS Extensions is "Create 3D scene" I was already using it to make the 3D effect work but had neglected its skybox feature. When setting up the Create 3D scene action I just had to include a background image with an image ratio of 2:1 (1024:512 for example). The important part here is the background image section, "NewSprite4" Despite how simple that is this took me way longer than expected because I just could not get it to recognise my image, I added it to the scene and named it HCLDSKY2 ( I don't remember why to be honest), you may notice that in the above image I'm using "NewSprite4" though. That's because the name of the image in this case doesn't come from the name you gave the thing yourself but from wha

3D is back on the menu  boys Actual Driving Be careful people because Vincent Threat is in on the roads. Ever felt like the speed limit could GO #@%! itself!? In each level drive as fast as you can, smash through anything that gets in your way, and flip off other drives as you race toward the finish line. But be careful because if you slow down too much or come to a stop the cops are going to put an end to this.  How its Played W to go fast, A and D to steer, S does nothing because we aint going backwards. Shift key to go really fast and Spacebar to do mad skids and power slides. No brake button, who do you think we are?   Also while controlling the car with one hand, the other will be free to angrily point at or flip off other drivers which will be controlled by the mouse. pointing and clicking on cars as you drive by for a huge point bonus.  The controls are intentionally a little wonky to simulate the feeling of driving like an absolute mad man with only one hand on the wheel. Three

  Goodbye Merciful Space Its the end of space, on to the next dev cycle. So lets look at what happened here.  Same as last time, few things that went right, few that went wrong. Successes I actually have a playable game. I didn't kick every goal I was going for but unlike my first game this one can be played and you can be good or bad at it. I even found myself getting distracted by playing it when I should have been working on it. The art assets aren't as high quality as those given out but these ones are mine and they have character. Its got soul, and I am so proud that I'm using my own art. It also makes the game feel so much better because every part feels like it fits together.   I made a game that was my game and not just the game being used as an example in class, everyone else made a copy of asteroids. Asteroids is a good game but Merciful Space is my game, and I feel like I did so much more for that. Failures Ok so I didn't talk about this in a dev post but oh

  Looks at that exciting gameplay As you can see from the screen shot this is a playable game, a lot faster than the first dev cycle. In fact I'm not sure I could say the last game I was working on ever got to this point.  Some simple code got a score counter in the top right and I just set the bugs to move down the screen and get a little faster as they go so there is some ramping difficulty.  bit of a bodge job This is how iv set the bugs to spawn, I just have about 200 (couldn't get them all in a screenshot) of them go set up and spawned in at the start of the game. Very lazy but it works. Also all those lines and fields at the bottom are limiters for player movement and bullets. I think the game could be really improved from here by a way of spawning in enemy's procedurally or something, so lets have a go at that.  Very important red box Using the same tech for respawning I figured out in my last game I now have a red box that can spawn bugs, I also used the code from t

  Behold 10,000 hours in msPaint A new game begins, I spoke about it in the post mortem for my last game and I am happy to say that the first step of this game was to create my own assets. Pictured above are the two enemy bugs I designed, I think their kinda cute, and I already have ideas on how they might act differently and challenge the player. But before we can get to that lets sort out the most fundamental parts of our development.  First thing first, movement. This isn't our first rodeo so...  WASD, the best controls Now we can move and that screen limiter stops us from flying off screen and getting lost. So lets spice things up with a little bit of shooting. B E A UTIFL And I am on fire, this feels good. Kicking goals. We can fly about the screen and shoot, Iv even gone the extra step of shooting actually doing something by deleting the bugs my bullets hit and adding to a score variable. Next post, lets start looking at gameplay.   

Back at it again with the textbook things Last time we sat down with Tracy Fullerton's Game Design Workshop I wasn't impressed. It seemed to me that it was very introductory for a textbook. I had hoped that this would be maybe a bit more in depth, but then I suppose that in such a technical world as game design I would expect that the really in-depth stuff would be found in a more technological space, rather than an old-fashioned textbook. But I also said I would give it another shot, so today I am reading chapter 3: Working with Formal Elements. Chapter 3, Part 1: Players  First thing is an activity about changing the rules to Gin Rummy, I have never played Gin Rummy so attempting to parse this activity just confused me, moving on. There's an interesting section here on the invitation to game and the way this allows for players to move into a different head space where they are open to act in ways the usually wouldn't. It seems to me that this is mostly applicable to b

Welcome to the starship Merciful Merciful Space   Join the starship Merciful on its quest to save the galaxy from the alien hordes. Level by level encounter more and more swarming alien ships, each with their own movement patterns and gun types with a boss encounter at the end of each level. At the end of each level choose from a selection of ship upgrades before shooting off to the next battle in the stars.  How its Played Simple controls are best and as Merciful Space is being developed on my laptop why not go with WASD for movement around the screen and Spacebar to shoot, I can play with one hand. Your ship will always be facing forwards and so movement will be about lining up your guns and dodging enemy projectiles. In many SHMUPS there's really no reason to not be shooting so you would just be holding the space bar the entire time. To combat that your ship will move faster while not shooting allowing easier dodging.  Three Unique Selling Points Randomly generated ship upgrades

Goodbye Dagonet Sadly I have come to the end of the time I have for development on Sir Dagonet. So lets go over how the development went.  to bring some structure to this, lets go over some things that went well and some that went less well.  Successes I learnt a lot about Gdevelop over the past few weeks working on this project. figuring things out  like  h ow to use a Boolean value to call functions, and also smaller things like just getting my head around the dev environment. Death and respawning. I was so happy when I got this working. Death meant that my game had stakes and a player could fail to pass a level or challenge. Respawning means a player that fails a challenge can attempt it again rather than being left on a empty screen.   Thinking in design. I did two pitches for platformer games, the first I realised required technical skills I don't yet possess and also might have stretched the ability of Gdevelop. I now have a much better idea of what can and cant be done along

  Now I'm afraid Not afraid of the pink blob, I'm afraid of object-oriented code inside of Gdevelop. Turns out Gdevelop doesn't like it. That made implementing a kill function a bit difficult, but I got there in the end. Let's have a look at how it works now that it does work. Its working! This little chunk of code lets me use a Boolean like a function, if its ever set to true we run our code. Its a pretty simple thing, if I want the player character to be killed by something I set the value of kill to true.  like this You might notice that in the first code block I don't just delete the player I also create a new player object at "SpawnSprite". Well as part of this kill code I have also implemented respawning. The little guy is the spawn sprite When the player touches a flag the spawn sprite moves to sit above the active flag. When the player dies he respawns wherever the sprite is.  Now that a player can die and respawn I actually make a game

  Simple Beginnings  So we begin with real development. I attended a workshop where we were given assets and walked through creating a basic platformer. The little alien guy will be a stand in for Dagonet and lets call that little pink dude a terrible warrior in the employ of the wicked Mordred. Following along with the workshop I have basic movement all sorted using built in behaviours from Gdevelop. Platformer Object, Advanced Jump, Wall Jump, and Remap For Platformer all come together like Voltron to create premade platformer controls that work and feel exactly how you would expect. It does feel a bit like cheating, and I wish I was really learning to do this myself but hey I have something playable in about 5 minutes which is pretty cool.  The little pink blob is a stand in for an enemy and he actually took some real work, not just plug in behaviours.  Strikes fear into your heart, doesn't he? First thing was getting him to move, See those blue orbs with arrows in them? Those a

  As part of my assessment I am expected to read this textbook, Tracy Fullerton: Game Design Workshop, and include reflections of its content. Today I sat down with the book and read through the first two chapters, sadly I have to admit that so far I have found it quite dull. There is nothing here that couldn't be found in a much more interesting YouTube video and most of the ideas and concepts being explained are very introductory. Although of course I have only read the first two chapters and maybe it gets more compelling further on. I did enjoy reading the "Designer Perspective" interview sections, specifically the interview with Warren Spector was a good read as I am a fan of his work at Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm. Although again as the interview is mostly a list of game recommendations, I'm sure this content can be found in YouTube video. There were also five exercises presented through the first chapter which I thought might be fun to have a go at. Of t

After my first pitch I came home from class and thought about it again, I'm happy with what I managed to accomplish in 15 minutes but as I'm expected to actually create something from my design, I decided to give it another go. Also, there is a Gdevelop game jam running right now, sadly I only realised this now that there is 14 hours left to submit a game of the 9 days that were originally given. This being the case I know I won't be submitting for it, but I think that in the spirit of the thing my game should follow the game jam theme. The theme is Off/On. Sir Dagonet! Sir Dagonet is a member of king Arthurs court who is in reality a jester in a suit of armour and is quite cowardly. While in his armour Dagonet puts on a brave face to do combat with evil, in this mode Dagonet can swing his sword as well as perform standard movement and jumps. However, if Dagonet takes damage from his foes or the environment (such as spike traps or falling boulders etc) his armour is knocked