Love for Creation -- Week Ending 16 Feb

Happy Valentine's week! Just remember that if you don't have some investment (dare I say "love"?) in the games you are involved in making, it would be wise to step back and reevaluate your role. What can you be passionate about that you can offer to its creation? How can you be passionate about your assigned tasks?

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Last March of the Dodos

This week was somewhat of a stake in the ground for Dodos. After another presentation of the current state of the game and our intentions for finishing it up, the faculty had a meeting with our team to define the remaining needs. We laid out our plans, and we're in a great place to finish up as we have been hoping as long as we all stay on top of our responsibilities.

One of the biggest changes to the game that was determined was that the pre-level trap store is being eliminated. Members of the faculty feel that it detracts from the meta game rather than enhancing it. While I have my opinions about how it actually enhances the game overall, I'm willing to trim out that particular feature if it helps us focus on the more pressing and important features.

We've revisited our backlog, and we're once again set to make a final push for the next two months. I'm primarily responsible for designing and determining achievements and level designs along with Charlie, so that has been my focus during this past week and will continue to be so. I'll also have a hand in the sound design. Here we go!

The Leonardo Project

Breakthrough! We're going old-school. The design of the game revolves around stated sets of rules that people can adapt and change, but those rules are not enforced by the game itself at all; it is entirely up to the players to negotiate and play by the rules as stated. We tested the concept at our latest meeting, and it was actually a really cool experience. It definitely brought up conversations, and it got people interacting with each other in interesting ways.

There will be several sets of rules established for players to choose from ahead of time, but players will also be able to create their own sets or modify existing ones. People can then vote on them, and the most popular rules or sets will be more readily visible.

With these changes and decisions, our experience is now about player interaction as they negotiate the rules and the spaces of games, and how they hold each other to those negotiations. In addition, the idea of modding and popularity/visibility in digital spaces is also present with the meta game of creating individual rule sets.

As for controls, we're leaning toward arcade trackballs, as they're probably the most unique and yet truly representative mode of control when it comes to old-school video game play.

I think we're all the most excited about this particular experience than any of the others we had previously come up with. Our design meetings and rapid prototypes have definitely paid off!

Reveal
Things keep moving forward on Reveal as well. We had a few more design meetings this week, since it felt like we were floundering a bit in finding truly compelling experiences with such a broad range of mechanics and expected player procedures. In short, we've cut combat from our prototype release backlog, and we're focusing on exploring and interacting with the environment via the Pulse and the EmberWave.

The game is now primarily exploration with tension coming from the unknown and from accidentally irritating the environment to the point of trying to harm you. Puzzles involve "activating" certain plants with the EmberWave and taking advantage of the environment's actions to make your way to your destination. Exploration is still primarily conducted with the Pulse, as it functions like a sort of temporary paintbrush that lets you "feel" the general shape of the environment by making lights brighter for a limited time.

My contributions this week have been managing our Agile process with HanSoft, conducting sprint reviews with the team, and contributing during design meetings.

The Macromancer
Assets keep falling in place little by little on this game. Our artist, Eric Rios, has been hard at work creating environments and other objects, while our engineers continue to iron out the controls and the AI of enemy units. Not a ton to discuss this week, but progress continues!

Elders of the RuneStone: War for Darkhan City

I've been having a lot of fun on this personal project this week. It's often been frustrating fun (ha!), but the prototype is definitely coming together. It's a 2D side-scrolling platformer that is controlled entirely with touches (mouse clicks on computers) on various elements of the screen--there are no virtual buttons or D-pad.

I'm building it in GameMaker, and so far I'm really happy with the engine. While it has its own hurdles, it has proven to get me a lot of simple playability very quickly. Right now, I'm refining basic movement and collisions with the environment, and I'm tuning all of my own player physics for the world (running, jumping, gravity, friction, momentum, etc.). Further, I've also implemented the ability for the player to--in real time--swap between the two different characters I've created. At the moment, the only difference between the two is their spritesheet, but all it will take to differentiate them is to adjust certain values in their movement actions. (Also note that the current spritesheets are ripped from the Nintendo DS game Thor, developed by WayForward. This is simply for testing with full spritesheets, since I do not have my own created yet.)

The next step is to get enemy units in that can be attacked when tapped or clicked while the player is in close enough proximity. It's all coming nicely along, though, so keep an eye out for more, and test out the current (and very buggy, especially with wall collisions) build **here**!
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I love making video games! :)

- Troy