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
Friday, January 24, 2014
Friday, January 17, 2014
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:
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.
Is it problematic that all of the "heavy objects" are gray?
Goals for next week:
- put these objects (and other necessary objects) in level 2
- work on the camera movement /how much of the level the player should see at once
- 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
- 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!
Friday, January 10, 2014
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)