Big boy pants... ACTIVATE!Something that I have neglected as a designer is, oddly enough; design. So I put on my big boy pants and nutted out the design of Atl and Ollin. I started with an emotional flow chart that shows how the players should feel as they play through the game. This is only the desired emotional flow of the players. I will still need to tweak areas and mechanics after the first play test in order to achieve the flow represented on the chart. A good thing that came from this chart is that it gave me accurate measurements for the time lengths of each area. This not only benefits me as a designer, but also the audio composer of the game who will be working on all audio and ambiance tracks for each area. These are the times I derived from the chart: Beginning- 1:30 Middle- 6:30 Ending- 2:30 Thinking up a storm-Now that I have a solid understanding of the 3 main events that will be in the game, I can focus on the design of the delivery and lead up to them. One thing that I really want to achieve with this game is to bond the players. If both people playing the game are strangers, when EVENT 3 happens I want them to look at each other and feel as if they have genuinely felt some sort of connection with the other player and they only realized it in the death of their electronic personas (Atl and Ollin). But before I can do that I need the players to put all their trust into the shrines that are keeping them safe from the fog. I feel that by needing both players to praise the shrines and keep them safe it will create a sense of sub-trust in the game. You need to trust your counterpart's ability and skill to keep you alive as you journey. Team time-Since I am using a really simple SCRUM framework for managing the team, I am essentially the scrum master. With this fancy title comes the responsibility of making sure everyone in the team is capable of doing their work without any blockades or distractions. This meant putting a pause on my big boy design pants and giving my team the nutrients they need to make an awesome game. For the graphic designer I created a front view sketch up with a colour pallet of both players, since the posters he will be making will only show the front view of Atl and Ollin. And for the programmers I did a simple test area that can incorporate all the game mechanics in a small space and a bunch of placeholder 3D models for the puzzles and whatnot. Getting started on the world-Since the environment is either gonna make or break the game, it's an area of focus that needs to be well thought up and modeled to a high standard. I began by envisioning the areas and concepting simple artwork so that I didn't lose my train of thought when it came time to modeling them. I got a tad through concepting when I realized I needed to start making placeholders ASAP. I started modeling the areas with only minor focus on quality. I put my focus into getting the dimensions and scales correct so that when it came time to fixing up models I wouldn't have to worry too much about scale. Where it all started-It's always interesting to look back at your original idea. I began with a concept called Sole, it was about a lone traveler in a wide open desert. It was designed to bring awareness to the human impact on the environment. I won't get too much into it, but here's the concept art for it!
Conjuring a masterpiece- Prompts: How I ended up at 'Atl and Ollin'- After a weekend of sleep and recovery I found generating ideas to be quiet hard. The audio prompt however really opened the flood gates of ideas, and from that I found myself thinking of an Aztec world with a mischievous protagonist (the player) and a god like antagonist (the fog). In the beginning I was imagining a single player experience, but this quickly changed to a multiplayer game after consulting with the the theme of trust. I thought to myself- 'How can trust be an important feature if you are all alone?', sure trust of self was always an option, but I really enjoyed the idea of a shared experience. With every great duo comes the stereotypical character personalities (a conflict/ clash of portrayal in a way), So I thought of a female character who represented stability and responsibility, and then a younger male character whom was the embodiment of playfulness and mischievousness. The way the visual prompt influenced the game was by injecting surrealism into the equation. Originally I was picturing a rather realistic environment and context, but then I found out that the painter- Georgio De Chirico- played a key role in the surrealism movement by inspiring many famous surrealist painters. This opened up the door to an infinite number of possibilities for style and game play elements. This eventually lead to the creation of 'the fog', or the antagonist, and also the protective shrines dotted throughout the desert. Since surrealism was part of the picture now, when it came time to cutting scope due to time and personnel, the first things to get changed were the players, this removed the need for an animator (being that we didn't have one). Oddly enough from asking graphic designers their thoughts on the change, they said it was a big improvment! So while cutting workload, we also improved quality. The last thing to change the idea was the mechanic prompt. For this I chose praising since it would fit well with the already conceived world and context of Atl and Ollin. I wanted to get the main form of trust in the game and relate it directly to the mechanic prompt. This is how the shrines became such an essential part of the play through experience- you must put your trust in them to keep you alive (the twist is that only a majority of them work, some will fail you).
A reflection on the tragedy that was 'Happiness in Layers' Mmm... Where to begin? I think it is accurate to say that the very essence of my soul as a design has taken a big ol' uppercut right to the ego. What I 'designed' became reality in the form of a frustrating, confusing, rough edged clunk of assets that could barely even be classified as a game. What went right-
Collaboration and Management: For this project I worked in collaboration with 2 other students- 1 audio and 1 animation. By having their help creating the audio, player models and player textures I was able to focus more so on honing my 3D modeling skills. This was extremely good as the games environment could not be achieved with the default terrain system, it needed to be individually modeled and assembled. Since I was able to focus on the environment design, this area of the game was not lacking when compared to other areas (programming in particular). For managing the team files and communication I simply used Google Drive (for files )and Facebook (for communication). Since the project was only 3 weeks long (1.5 of which were scoping and designing), it wasn't fully necessary to use any extravagant management and file sharing software. Below are screen shots of the setup I planned out for the other team members to drop their files once they had been completed according to design documentation. This approach went extremely smooth and was probably the most efficient way of going about it for this project. Sine the project was a thin 3 weeks long a simple SCRUM management framework was used (me being the scrum master). If any problems surfaced with team members- be it design questions or general inquiries- I was able to answer promptly in person, text, and also via the Facebook messenger. The teams stand-up meetings consisted of 1 to 1 conversations every 2 days in which I ensured they were on track and able to finish their assigned work. By doing 1 on 1 meetings instead of whole team meetings I found it more effective in terms of the team member being able to nut out any problems and also get their head around future work, it was also good in the sense that I was able to keep track of each person more effectively. This approach to the meetings also meant more convenience for the whole team (since we have different schedules). What went wrong (everything)-
What players felt: Curiosity, fear, confusion, anger, motivation, claustrophobia, admiration, determination, accomplishment, joy and happiness (Noted from play testing). Only 2 people (out of 10) followed the emotional pipeline I wanted them to; power and love to loneliness and disparity. The controls were impossible for non-familiar players to grasp. They were clunky and made it a chore in order to maneuver the environment. Not to mention- due to poor coding of the player controller, once the doll got on a slope that was too steep, the player couldn't move until they reached a flat surface. Unfortunately I didn't realize this until it was too late and players were sliding down the starting area and breaking their emotional immersion and the game withing the first seconds of playing. A factor that ruined cognitive flow was the lack of fractal convexities relating to activity choices available to the player during their experience. This lack of sub-tasks was not the primary factor, giving the player freedom is not always the best option to do, especially when you as the designer wants a singular outcome of play experience. I shouldn't have been looking at ways to maximize freedom, I should have been refining the singular journey I wanted the player to embark on (making it exciting instead of boring and long). The thing that went wrong is that I tried to hard to draw attention indirectly, and unfortunately it was too indirect; leading to players feeling lost and confused. Good Link: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3738/emotion_engineering_a_scientific_.php?print=1 Wrong type of players. I noticed that as soon as they were allowed to touch the keyboards, the majority of play testers were beginning with the mindset of "FUCK YEAH!" instead of a preferred laid-back approach. Obviously a student isn't going to make Call Of Duty in 3 weeks, so why expect it? Baffles me. In conclusion:
The game looked good on paper. If I could go back in time a slap myself before I started making it, I would (even though that would create a paradox). Critical Design Changes (Optimizing Emotion) The emotions I was hoping to invoke in my original idea were power and regret (best way to describe it simply). After realizing that the main mechanic of the game was taking away from the desired feel as well as not even allowing it in the first place, I decided to hibernate for the weekend and rethink. In the original, the goal was to kill ghost like creatures, in doing so feel power. Then when they are all dead, you realize you are one of them, thus regret. I took a look at some games which were rather emotional and I uncovered something that the majority had in common (somewhat a personal theory); THE LESS THE BETTER. The ghosts were removing the emotions from my game. I then rethought the game and decided to remove the ghosts and essentially all complicated mechanics. This is because I want the player to reflect on the game as a whole, not the things in the game (If that makes sense). The entities were blocking the player in my game from reflecting and brewing these emotions inside of themselves. eg: If there is a tough enemy that continuously blocks your progress, you begin to hate the enemy. However if there is no enemy yet the difficulty still remains, you begin to feel a sense of undirected hate within you (this is what I want in my game). Locus of Control: The extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them; internal locus of control meaning individuals believe they can control events that happen to them, and external locus of control meaning that individuals believe they are powerless to control outside events (this concept also applies to emotional projection). By making the player have an internal locus of control, they will come to project the emotions on themselves, and not the objects in the game. If you have nothing to blame, you begin to blame yourself. Good links: http://www.itsjustanevent.com/Tool3.html http://gamedesigntheory.blogspot.com.au/2009/07/emotions-in-games.html Atmosphere of 'Happiness in Layers' The prototype took a rapid turn. Instead of creating the original idea, I have created its doppelganger, which I am surprisingly pleased with in the aesthetics area of the game. It still needs some fiddling in the mechanics department in order to get a certain feel to the game as a whole, that can wait though. I want to focus on the environmental ambiance. After reading a blog on emotions in games it made me realize how much visuals, audio and general atmosphere can effect the emotions of the player. The emotions of my game shift from sadness to joy. With such a broad shift in emotions I was able to conceive some simple to make area which I feel would convey the emotion of the area efficiently. With the environmental colours I am relating them back to the emotion wheel. The game will change your emotional state via the use of the corresponding colours. Oh dear god, did someone say Terrain??? yes. My skills in 3DSmax have improved significantly. Although I'm still no pro, I know how to do what needs to be done. I have also grown a strong hatred towards modeling cave systems. That is all.
My laziness has bested me once more! Starting this second project off, it was a bit of a slow start, but after the team had been set in concrete it's building momentum and plowing down all who stand in its way. Unfortunately documentation exists and it must done (this is definitely what invoked the sluggish start). The joys of audio- I'll admit, any type of programming to do with audio is a huge weak point of mine. But since audio is such an enormous factor in creating emotional gameplay, I have taken it upon myself to hone my skills. I want to fully utilize LERPs and SLERPs in order to bring my new game to life, instead of the usual dodgy audio start and stops I used to do. I was lucky enough to grab myself an audio student, this makes it that much easier to breathe life into gameplay as well as create emotions in the players (hopefully). So far he has produced a draft track for the ambiance in the beginning of the game, and it is AWESOME! 100% what I was hoping for, and 100% what the game needs. Delving into design- By listening to a speech in which Jenova Chen talks about the design of JOURNEY and games as a whole was a real eye opener for me in terms of the mindset I should be in when designing games. Something he said really caught my attention- "We have a craving for freedom and empowerment, we want to feel that we are important and that we can change the world." This really made me change how I went about the design of my current game. I want to give power to the player, but as the game progresses, take that power away. I want them to go from 'king of the world' to 'less than average joe'. However in doing this, I want to make an interest in becoming weak, and that's where I feel that my game will stand out from other cliche mechanics and poor designs. Level design? pssssh I have neglected level design in my older games and I feel that it has immensely taken away from the overall experience that I was hoping the player would have. I am putting a strong focus on level design in this current project and am pleased as to how it is coming along so far. Below is a picture of a draft piece of my level: To feel? Or not to feel? That is the real question. In the new project emotion is not just something we can 'do' if we want to, It must be done. I really wanted to base my mechanics off of COGNITIVE DISSONANCE-
the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. I want the player to have this feeling when playing my game. It's a big topic and I will probably go through it in my next blog. |
What is this BLOG about?This is basically my thoughts and whatnot as I improve as a Developer. Archives
June 2017
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