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. 

level scale and level 3

scale

The time has come to fix the levels in terms of scale. Earlier we decided the size of everything- the philosopher, the minion, the blocks that the level would be made of, how high the philosopher and minion can jump. the units could be anything really.

the philosopher -- 2 units tall, jumps 3 units high 

the minion -- 1.5 units tall, jumps 3.5-4 units high (not tested yet) but he definitely jumps higher than the       philosopher 

the block -- the basic building structure for any level. 2 units long, .25 unit thick. 

so armed with the scale and the idea that all of the levels would be constructed out of the same block, I re modeled the first 2 levels.  They look much better, even if the aesthetic has not been implemented yet. The idea for the aesthetic is there, though which is an improvement. 

level 1 with scale, but without aesthetics (keep that in mind)

level 2 with rescaled objects

level 3

has been changed! yay! I have been turning level 3 over in my mind for quite some time. It did not seem clear what the player was supposed to do, it was difficult to create a scoring system for that level. It started to seem like the only redeeming thing about the level in its current state was that it was true to the trolley car problem. 

a very quick MS paint doodle of the level

a few quick announcements about this doodle. 

1- I did it very quickly, and it modeled after an actual sketch. 

2- the X marks the spot (ha) where the lever will be. 

3- the thing in the top right is a trolley car 

4- the double triangle in the background in an hourglass, with sand in it

5- the large 'A' and 'B' indicate the platforms

thank you, that is all. 

the re-worked level 3 looks like this. This version is less true to the classic example, but it is clearer what the player should do. I have begun modeling the level,  but the necessary animations are not yet complete. This is what I envision :

• when the level starts a trolley falls from the sky and squishes platform B (the one with 5 people instead of 1) and then we show a lever pointing to that platform
• player needs to understand that the trolley fell there because of the lever pointing that way
• player cant move at the point
• then the level resets and the hourglass in the background starts counting down
• when the hour glass empties another trolley will fall to a platform
• the platform depends on the where the lever is pointing

This seems easier to work with than the original level 3 idea. It seems easier for the player and most of it uses mechanics that have already been created for the first 2 levels, but of course if it turns out that it is still complicated I will consider level 3 take 3.

The main differences between the new and old versions of level 3:

• in the old version the player walked around a lot - in the new version the only moving they do is to move the lever (if they so desire)
• ideally the new version will have a tiny cinematic beforehand to show the trolley action (mentioned above)
• the new version features an interesting way to show time counting down , at least I think its interesting
• the new version has the trolley falling out of the sky rather than running on a track, this is less true to the actual trolley car problem. but that can be overlooked for the time being (and perhaps forever)

real life problems

the last thing on my mind has less to do with the actual game and more about how to get work done in general. In my workspace there is a cork board dedicated to Kourality and it has 3 columns- to do, in progress, and done. The board is filled with a bunch of small cards with tasks written on them. Everytime I am going to do work, I look at the board and decide what needs to be done. I was operating under the assumption that the programmer of this program used the cork board as well, but that did not seem to be working in terms of making progress on the programming for the game. I am going to work on some ideas to keep the game to do list in his face, besides printing a list and taping it to his forehead.

Action Paths and Assignment

Last time we were talking about the priorities of each philosophy and how we would use those to create guidelines for what actions would get you a result of each philosophy.
Currently the plan is to have the player play the first three levels without a tutorial and without instruction and to monitor their actions throughout the levels. After each level we would do a small assessment of the actions from that level and mark the player as K, O or U. That happens again after the second and third levels. So for example, the first level is simple so we were able to create a small matrix.

      key:
K -- kantianism
O -- objectivism
U -- utilitarianism
chest -- a treasure chest (with money inside, instead             of loose coins all over the map)
minion -- going to rescue the minion in the far corner                of the level
speed -- the amount of time it takes the player to                    reach the goal in the level (will be measured              in greater than of less than a certain time,                  but that specific time is not determined yet)

Based on the order in which you did the actions in the chart, after level 1 the players is marked as K, O or U for level 1. There is another (slightly different) scoring system for levels 2 and 3. After playing the first three levels the player would have 3 "scores" each K, O, or U. If the player has the same letter for two of the levels (scoring U in levels 1 and 2 for example) then we run a final check (for exceptions). If the player passes the exceptions then the player is marked as that philosophy and is informed of the great news! (keep in mind that the letter scores for each level and the exceptions are all managed internally and the player has no idea)
The exceptions
Even if you score a certain philosophy twice, there could still be a certain action that you did that means you would never be labeled as that philosopher. For example a Kantian would never end the life of another person. So even if the player was evaluated as a Kantian in the first and third levels, he would not be a true Kantian if he killed the minion in the second level. So if the player scores K in at least two of the levels it it would set off a flag to check the exceptions for Kantianism at which point it would check if the player had purposefully killed anyone throughout the first three levels (again all of this is managed without the players knowledge). If the player had killed someone during the levels then he failed the exceptions (not a big deal, just means he is not a Kantian). If the player fails the exceptions then they will get randomly assigned to one of the other two philosophies. This probably isnt a perfect way to handle the exception cases, but it will do for now until we find a better option.

This post was a little different because it had a a lot of thought that normally goes into the programming, but is skipped in the blog. But it seems important to understand the way the game is going to work (more than just on the surface level)

Hopefully soon we will get into aesthetics.

Action Paths and Priorities

hello!
We have decided (at least for now) to have the player play the first three levels without any instruction and not assigned to a philosophy. After the first three levels we will assign the player to a philosophy. The new story supports this idea and it is set up in such a way that it does not seem like a test (even though it is). The assignment to a philosophy is based on actions the player does in the first three levels. So it goes like this:

1. the game starts(yay!)
2. the player is in level 1 (there is no longer a tutorial) 
3. there are no instructions 
4. we monitor the actions of the player
5. based on those actions they are grouped into one of the philosophies
6. then they learn more about that philosophy and have to be consistent with that 

The best part is that the way the new story is set up, all of that makes total sense and (ideally) noone would question why any of that is happening, but more on the story next week.
Because the assignment is based on the actions in the first few levels we had to decide exactly what actions would constitute each philosophy. In order to do that we created a list of priorities for each philosopher. We then used that list to create an action path for each philosopher in each level; it is rough sketch rather than a rigid set of rules. Whichever path the player matches with the most will be the philosophy they get placed with. Some of the priorities had to be exaggerated from the original ideals of the philosophy, but that is to be expected since it is a game.

Priorities of each philosophy
This is intended to be a rough guideline for the philosophy. For example, the priorities of Objectivism might be something like speed, independence, absolutism and happiness, but most of those would not be priorities of Kantianism. Some of the priorities of Utilitarianism would include happiness and community, but not independence of absolutism.
Since one of the priorities of Objectivism is speed, we would monitor how long it took the player to go through the level (if the player explored the whole level it would take longer than if the player just breezed through quickly).    

Poster

Okay so let's talk about the poster.
        We designed it to represent the game at Digitech, which was an students+technology event at our university. We wanted to have the game there and have people play-test it, but we had class for the majority of the event so it did not end up working out. Luckily, we did have the poster there to represent the game and the people looking after the poster told me there was some interest in it throughout the day!

        The idea behind the poster was to explain the elemental tetrad of the game (Mechanics, Aesthetics, Story, Technology) without boring the reader to death. We wanted the poster to be halfway between a typical game poster (lots of flash, little explanation) and a research poster(lots of explanation, no flash). We also wanted to find a way to represent all three philosophies of the poster without it being visually overwhelming. Over the course of drafting, redrafting and redrafting the poster we made some changes to the story and aesthetics, which I am personally very excited about. So without further ado, here is the poster.

poster that we made for Digitech
Here is a link! (in case that is your style)

        We managed to represent all aspects of the tetrad and have some flair! The title has a color to represent each philosophy: orange for Objectivism, sky blue for Kaniantism,  gray for Utilitarianism). Under the title there is a small blurb that explains the game: an educational philosophy game that focuses on the differences between three philosophies, higher levels simulate trolley car problems. The elements of the tetrad are spread around the poster, and story is at the top because it is useful to know when considering the aesthetic, as well as the overall design of the poster. The story explains that the translucent purple humanoid on the poster has no memory of himself, his values, his likes and dislikes. He needs your help to find himself and figure out why the little robed guys follow him around offering to help and to figure out how he keeps ending up in weird situations.
        The humanoid is standing in front of a 3-sided mirror and there is a different character in each face, one for each philosophy. The humanoid is one of the three characters, throughout the game he figures out which one. In the poster the humanoid is translucent because everything is uncertain for him.
        The minions in the background represent understanding of the philosophy (because you get more of them in the game by demonstrating an understanding of the philosophy).
       The black to gray gradient in the background represents the aesthetic, which is dark and blurry in the beginning (because that is how the mind of the humanoid is-fuzzy and dark and uncertain). As the game progresses the humanoid remembers more about who he is and what he values. As that happens the aesthetic get lighter and more detailed.
        The mechanics and technology have not changed, since the last blog post about them. I like the changes we made to story and aesthetic. Hopefully the thought we put into the poster translates to the viewer. It might be one of those monkey cage situations where it makes sense to me because I have spent so much time working with it. The people that saw it seemed to understand what we were trying to get across, so that is promising!

Kourality

WE DID IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Eventually we decided to call the game Kourality, at least for now. 
I still like Die Ethik, but it sounds kind of serious (and this game isn't even a little serious). Kourality seems to better represent the game. It is a word we made up by combining Kantianism Objectivism Utilitarianism and moRALITY. We can change the title later if we think of something more fitting. It is very exciting to have even a working title!!!!!

In addition to thinking of a name I designed a poster to represent the game! I understand why it is not usually one person's job to think of concepts, design and model characters, create and debug levels AND make the posters. I really enjoy doing all of those things, but there are not even close to enough hours in a day to do it all. During the poster making process we decided it would be better to have the player play through the first 3 levels without instruction and to monitor them during that time and assign them to a philosophy based on that(but more on that in a later post.) The poster gave us new ideas for the story and aesthetic. We ended up re-writing the story and that led to us finally deciding on an aesthetic! WOO HOOOOOO! 

It was quite the action packed week, at least in terms of game progress. We are trying to keep up this momentum as we work on the weird bugs in the 3rd level and map out possible actions in the first 2 levels to certain philosophers. Next time lets talk in depth about the poster! 

Game Title

stop the presses! We have thought of some names for this game! Finally!

So we got together with a pseudo focus group and we all brainstormed names and then narrowed it down and asked some more people. We are still in the ask more people phase. But the main two names are

                         Kourality         and             Die Ethik 

So that is what we have going on; ideally we will make a final decision by the end of the week!

Thank you, that is all!

Start and Stop Progress

Stuck 
We seem to have been stuck for a while. Something about the first levels is not quite right and we keep rethinking the way they should be to accomplish the bigger goal . Now we are thinking that instead of forcing the player to pick a philosophy blindly we should let you play through the first few levels without any instruction. During those levels we will monitor the players in-game actions and the combination of those will determine which philosophy you align closest with. Then the player will play through the rest of the game as that philosopher.
I think that if we go this route we will have to have the first few levels for monitoring, and then the next levels will be about instructing the player about that philosophy? But that sounds like it could get boring, so perhaps we could have the first 3 levels for monitoring and then for the following levels implement the sliding scale idea in which the player sees a sliding scale with an ideal range that the player tries to stay in by performing certain actions. See? There are so many ideas floating around, it is hard to just pick one to implement and test.

Style
I still have access to the HUGE book about Game Design by David Perry, I think it would be beneficial for me to schedule some time with the book daily, just to think and what have you.
Also I regret to inform you that there has yet to be a style commitment. It feels like something that should develop naturally, yet I do not see it happening; so that is cause for some concern.

Digitech 
There is a small thing at our university where students show things they work on that are technology related. We would like to have the game there to see some people play-test the game. This will be beneficial so that we can continue moving forward with the education. If it seems like people are picking up on the subtle things we are trying to get the player to learn in the first few levels then thats great! But if not, we will need to return to the drawing board. This also might be a good opportunity to create the several versions of the first 3 levels that we keep bouncing between and we could have people play different versions throughout the day and see which one gets the better response overall.

Two very important things that we need before the event (besides a working version of the game):

1. a title for the game 
• or at least a working title, just SOMETHING
2. a poster to represent us and the game 
• since we have classes the day of the event we will not be able to be in attendance all day
• but we still want the game to be represented 
• it is unfortunate that there will be times when people will not be able to play the game because when we are gone, our computers will be gone
• perhaps we can have the poster to represent and also have some sort of "contact us if you want to playtest this game for us!" type of deal, but I do not want to just have my email lying around for everyone to see..hmm.. any ideas? 

okay so, think about all of that over the next few days. 

Ker Blam!

Education

This week is about education.
The education in the first 3 levels is very important. The player needs to understand how to think like the philosopher thinks in order to succeed in the trolley levels. As of right now it seems like it will be hard to know for sure if we have given the player enough information/the right information for them to complete the levels successfully. This is something we will know more about as people play the game.
But as far as we can know we have the information that we think the player needs to know about each philosophy for the first 3 levels. So the problem is that we know what we want the player to know and when, but we do not know exactly how to tell the player what they need to know.
At first we thought about just explicitly telling the player each thing they needed to know, but then we kept getting stuck on the wording and keeping with the story. We tossed this idea back and forth for a while.

And then we consulted someone else who suggested we tell the player a few attributes of the philosopher and they show a sliding scale with a marked ideal range while they play the level and have each action affect the scale. The plan is that the player would then be able to modify his/her actions to keep the scale in the right place and in this way get an intuitive understanding of each philosophy.
This seems like a good idea so we are going to make it and if it does not work out well we will find a new plan for education. Currently I am working on using the list of attributes of each philosophy to create categories for the sliding scales. Ideally by next week I will have the categories and scales finished with an idea of where each philosophy stands in each.

The other thing on my mind this week is style. Style seems important and deciding the style of the game seems like a daunting task  that we will have to stick with forever. I know that is not the case, but it seems to be the feeling that is stopping me from developing the style of the game. So the secondary mission for next week is to decide and sketch the style. It is time to commit so the game can develop further.

thank you, that is all

Heavy Things

This week has been focused on modeling. Specifically on modeling the objects that are supposed to fall on the player in level 2-the heavy objects.
The ideas we tossed around for heavy things were a safe, an anvil, an anchor and an elephant. I would have liked to make a piano, but it seemed too complicated for such a small part in the overall game.
It is difficult to keep in mind that these models are supposed to be extremely lo-poly since they are not the emphasis of the level. While I want all of the models to be detailed and perfect it is not what this situation calls for. Understanding moderation seems important.

The safe was easy to make since it is a pretty standard shape. It was the first "heavy object" that I tackled and finished it quickly. I tried to move onto anvil afterwards. In the end anvil did not communicate what it was very well so I put it aside and will most likely return to it in the future but for now it is out of the project.

 It took several attempts to get the anchor right, but it was a fun process! It does not look 100% right, the top seems like it should have a hole in it, but I think it will serve its purpose in the game excellently. I want to go back later and give all of these models amazing textures, but that is not the most important thing right now. Priorities.

The elephant was the most challenging. The body, legs and tail were simple, but getting the trunk, head and ears to look "natural" took many attempts. It still does not look perfect, but it has come a long way. Elephants have weird necks. Also making the trunk look natural is like making a tentacle look natural. After staring at this model for a long time I realized the head wasn't prominent enough and the ears were in the wrong place, so now you are looking at the closest to accurate version.

Is it problematic that all of the "heavy objects" are gray?


Goals for next week:

1. put these objects (and other necessary objects) in level 2
2. work on the camera movement /how much of the level the player should see at once 
3. finish the educational textures 
• a side note on this
• it turns out unity uses textures that are powers of 2 and if your texture is not that size it stretches and distorts it to that size
• since I did not want distorted textures I had to figure out what size to make them 
• so I took a break from working on the actual textures to write a quick program to list powers of 2 and tell the user if an input number is a power of 2
4. make a complete list of what NEEDS to be finished before people can play test the game 

so next week I will be back to tell you that I accomplished all of these things! (at least that is the plan)

cheers!

Level 2

Hello!

Somehow we managed to do some work over the holiday break. Mostly we have been working on level 2 and continuing the quest to implement the educational aspects of the first 3 levels.

         The second level is about minion control. It shows the player the differences between the minion and the philosopher and how to use both of them to accomplish goals. As usual I will share with you the original sketch I made of the level, that is barely one step above a napkin doodle. Remember that the player can control the philosopher as well as any minions under his/her control but the player can only move one character at a time.

             okay so the thought behind this level was to create situations that highlight the differences/advantages of the philosopher and the minion. The major differences between the two are size (minions are smaller), speed (philosopher moves faster), and jump height (minions jump higher). We might add more differences later, but for this level these are the ones we are working with. In this first half of the level all of the platforms are too high for the philosopher to jump onto. So the player has two options; the minion is smaller than the philosopher and jumps high enough to make the platforms, or the philosopher can jump on top of the minion and then jump again onto the platform (like leap frog). If the player jumps onto the platform with the minion then there is a button (the bright blue box) and when the minion stands on it a ladder will appear and the player can control the philosopher to get him onto the platform.  If the player thought to just skip all of the opportunities to go to higher platforms then the player could walk to the right and try to go through the door in the bottom right. When they got to the door they would realize the philosopher is too tall to go through and only the minion is short enough to go through. This was intended to get the player to understand that the philosopher and minion are different sizes and therefore are used for different things. 

         This is the second half of the level. The only difference that we had not showcased at this point was the difference in speed. To achieve this we created a series of things that fall from the sky and would squish the minion if he tried to run under them, but would not squish the philosopher.








          The heavy things were an opportunity to put humorous things in the level! To the left you can see some of the ideas for heavy things. Initially I wanted to use a safe, a piano, and an anvil, but now I have a couple of other things in mind, like elephants and anchors so we will see what is more fun to model in 3D .







       The main goal of this level is to teach the player how to use the philosopher and minion(s) effectively. Because this is the case we are not sure if this level will have a scoring matrix that is split up by philosophy. We might implement one later, but as of right now we want the focus of the level to be the minion actions rather than what each specific philosopher would do.
        That being said we are still teaching the player aspects of his/her chosen philosophy in this level. In the last post I mentioned that we were working on creating educational bits of information about each philosophy. The idea behind these is that the player will only see ones pertaining to his/her chosen philosophy and that they will be worked into the layout of the level, rather than being in front of the screen. The tips should give the player a clue about how the philosopher would act in that level and future situations.
It has taken me some time to figure out how to communicate aspects of each philosophy. It was difficult to figure out how to say a lot about each philosophy with a small space and a few words. I have a list of what the player needs to know at certain checkpoints to score the maximum on the scoring matrix; I am working backwards from that to create the small bits of information and where to put each one. Hopefully next week the list will be close to complete so we can talk about that.