The First Foray into Game Programming

As it turns out the game is coded in Unityscript, based on the work of the original Kourality programmer. But also, the same programmer now feels that based on what we want for Kourality, the game would be better suited to to be programmed in C#. I am not sure exactly why that is the case; that is the advice I was given. I know C++ so I am going to learn C# as well. Should not be a problem. I am also going to speak with the other programmer again and get the details about why our game is better suited for C#. After I get more familiar with C#, then we will work on converting the scripts that we currently have for the game into C# and progress with the rest of the game programming in C#.
Also I am going to spend a couple of days doing the game maven tutorial from crunchzilla to get some practice programming small games. So I'll let you know how it goes!

News and Small Wish List

Great news! I am going to tackle the game programming for Kourality!
Until now I was working (on at least part of) most of the other aspects of the game so game programming will be an exciting challenge.
The game is run in the Unity game engine so it's either C# or Unityscript (which I believe is based on Javascript). I know Javascript and C++ so that should make the transition to C# and/or Unityscript smoother.

Hopefully next time I update I will have figured out what the current state of the game programming is so I will be able to plan a course of action.  I am pleased that when I worked out the scoring for the levels I kept the programming in mind, which will obviously make it more manageable when I am working with it.

One of the other things I want to make is a list of what is left to be done for the first 3 levels of the game.

Also I want to be able to just send people a link to have them test the game in a browser or something, rather than downloading files and install software. Maybe Unity has has that feature? I will look into this also.

New Story

Update on Aesthetics

In regards to the aesthetics, no major decisions have been made. We are still mulling over the options that I set out for us in the last post.

Update on Story 

I am aware that at one point the story was about a humanoid and his pet dog going for a walk and getting lost in a temple. It has changed since then to account for the way the levels are set up and for ease of incorporating humorous elements that  would distract from the education. The current story is not fully developed, but I think the general idea is already off to a better start. The story follows a blobby humanoid who has suffered from memory loss and he has no idea who he is. He is hopelessly confused and many weird things seem to be happening to him so the player agrees to help him recover some or all of his memories.....

a few things that I want to work into the story:

• an explanation for the falling objects in level 2 
• at some point the blob remembers he is a philosopher, but he is not sure what philosophy he believes 
• minions start to follow him around so he understands he is probably an important philosopher 
• something is the cause of all of the weird things that has been happening (but I am not sure what) 
• it is possible that the other philosophers are pushing some of the trolley car situations on the main character to see if he will buckle under the pressure

I also would like to work into the game a feature where the main character starts to slowly transform into animal that represents his philosophy- a blob in one level, ears and a tail in the next, arms in the next, then legs and then finally he is a fox or bird or lemur. 

Obviously I won't be able to implement that until the tutorial is working and the aesthetics are underway. More updates soon! 

More on Aesthetics

Okay so there were a lot of ideas tossed around initially for the game's visuals. We managed to narrow it to four ideas to draw examples of. In some way they each represent a different aspect or theme of the game. Rather than overload this post with photos, I made a brief presentation of all of the different ideas. A few things to note before you look:

1. Recall that (this phrase shows up in my math book) I made a template for levels 1, 2, and 3. Each drawing is on one of the templates
2. Ideally the progression of each idea would be more gradual, but I only had the 3 levels to work with 
3. they are just quick sketches to represent the ideas, not refined master pieces 
4. and I sketched them with colored pencils in between classes

Now, you can check it out here: aesthetic options

Aesthetic options

• so i started sketching some stuff like that but it naturally developed into other ideas
• i made some color schemes with colored pencils to help decide on a color scheme
• also sketched different ideas for the backgrounds like trees, underwater, black to white to orange, black to white to blue, dark and cloudy to clear and designed
• explain how the ideas like trees and underwater and cloudy relate to themes in the game
• so i made a blank template that shows the main parts (platforms, trolleys etc) for each level and printed off many copies
• so now i have been sketching out examples of how each aesthetic would progress over the first three levels
• show examples of the blank templates
• none of them are finished yet but hopefully very soon i will be able to show them all and we can narrow down the options!
• wheeee!

      This week I have been developing the aesthetic of the game. I have had a few moments of spare time between finishing the modeling and remodeling and re-scaling of the level. In my mind it does not make a lot of sense to try to make more levels for the game until we see how these levels play out, especially with assigning the player to a philosophy and all that jazz. While we finish tweaking the mechanics I have been sketching ideas for the level backgrounds, platform designs and things of that sort. Currently I think that the overall aesthetic of the game should be very dark at the beginning when the main character has no memories, and then progress to white, pastel and brighter colors as the main character's memories return. I began to sketch some stuff like that, but it naturally developed into other ideas, so I started again by creating some color schemes with colored pencils to decide on colors. I also sketched different ideas for the backgrounds that I thought could relate to different themes in the game - trees, underwater to sky, black to white to orange, black to white to blue, dark and cloudy to clear and designed. I will explain how each related to a theme of the game when the sketches are finished, so the visuals and explanations will be revealed simultaneously.
      In order to create designs that took the platforms of each level into consideration I created a template of each levels that has the platforms and any other important features of the level. I printed off several copies of each and I have been sketching out examples of hoe each aesthetic would progress over the first three levels. None of them are finished yet, but hopefully very soon I will be able to shwo them all and we can narrow down the options! Whee!

armatures

quick progress update-

since the first three levels have been modeled and scaled and the courses of action as they relate to each philosophy now I am waiting for the programming to get up to the same place. So in the meantime I have been learning about armatures.

An armature is a skeleton that you can use to move the mesh around for animation purposes. I watched this Blender armature tutorial as well as some others.

Here is a picture of my first go at the armature. It correctly moves the mesh around, but I am not sure if it is supposed to look like this. I am very inexperienced with armatures and animation, so I will have to watch more videos to see if this looks correct. I will let you know about progress that I make in this area!

The process was not super smooth sailing. At first I was having problems with figuring out which way the bones should go. Once I figured that out I was having issues with the bone envelopes. It turned out that my humanoid model was too pudgy to be controlled by a bone in the center of each limb. I was not sure how else to fix it so I slimmed the humanoid monster, he is no longer a pudgy little guy. Now he is a slim purple humanoid. Now the next step is to use the armature to animate the humanoid. And then to repeat that process with all of the other characters! Looking forward to it! In addition to working on the magic of animation I am going to start doing some sketches for the visuals of the game (level backgrounds and platform design). Yay! progress!

Turtle Molasses

I am thinking about designing a background for this blog that is representative of the game. It could have one color for each philosophy and a design that reflects the game development process. So I will keep that in mind and see what I can create.

Woo hoo! We had a meeting! (all of us!)
We put the remodeled/re-scaled level 1 in Unity. I was worried that we would have to rebuild the level in Unity instead of simply importing it, but that was not the case. hurrah! The main character walks and jumps in the level and all of the objects have colliders. We are also working on animating the platforms that will soon be moving platforms.
Surprise, surprise we changed the scoring for level 1 again. The scoring for this level has been weird so far. Originally we had the score matrix. Remember this?

The numbers represented the order in which each of the actions were preformed. We were thinking about this idea in terms of writing code, but something was off about it. The new idea is to keep the spirit of the matrix (like the order in which the player does the actions is significant) but the process and code is more like the other levels now. Now it (at least in pseudo code) a series of if-statements. In level 1 there are 3 big actions- the chest, the minion, and speed (which is recorded as above or below a certain number of seconds). The game will keep track internally of the player's first and second actions and then perform the following check: 

        if action 1 is minion and action 2 is speed then you are scored as a Kantian 

        if action 1 is  minion and action 2 is chest then you are scored as a Utilitarian 

        else you are scored as an objectivist 

Keep in mind that the player has no idea what score they receive after the first level; the player gets a score (in terms of a philosophy) after each level but they do not know any of that until after the third level when the 3 scores are evaluated together. (This was explained in detail in an earlier post, so check it out!) 

The other thing I would like people to keep in mind is that level 1 is quite basic, hardly anything happens so it it is difficult to categorize certain actions as aligning with the ideology of a philosophy. In reality each of the philosophies is complex and a lot gets lost when you narrow it all the way down to valuing gold or speed or selflessness. That is one of the reasons that we hold off on telling the player anything about the philosophies until a few levels have been played out. The game will get into the deeper parts of the philosophies in the later levels and in those levels we expect that we will teach the player some of the core principles of each philosophy.

 I cannot stress enough that the score you get in the first level is not a good representation of the philosophies and the player (who will learn about the philosophies throughout the game) does not even know anything about the internal scoring for this level, think of this as a secret about level 1 that I am sharing with you, rather than actual information about the philosophy. 

Okay so we are making progress after a lot finals and delays and a family crisis, but the process feels really slow, like a turtle on a lazy summer day who is leisurely walking through molasses.