Work work

Been dividing my time between a lot of school work and gaming time recently so I haven't had much time to update here. Partly because I have to update my work book. You haven't missed it have you? here's the link, just in case! http://workbookmh.tumblr.com/

Ambiguous endings, as long as they're consistent with everything that came before, are perfectly valid. Most of the plot in Dark Souls is arrived at through exploration and consideration. Both endings carry with them enormous implications. If you choose to sacrifice yourself, are you really doing the right thing? There's various bits throughout the game that suggest that you aren't, and that you are, in fact, just delaying the inevitable and forcing future 'heroes' to sacrifice themselves as well. And if you deny the sacrifice, the implications are totally unknown, since you're entering a new age that has never been seen before. Just because it takes a little thought to arrive at the conclusions that the game wants you to make does not mean that the endings are bad.

Unity for the coding impaired pt.4

A bit late in writing this, but here we go! This weeks theme was God, and Cleaning up. Perfect for a story/action driven game in spaaace, right?
We wanted to make a prototype for our little summer project, and we saw this week as a chance to do so. We sort of implemented the themes into the lore a bit to make it work. the story of the prototype is basically that you are a member of The Crusaders, an organization of zealots who after an incident with the 'warp portals', portals that send ships into another dimension, and then back out to travel between galaxies almost instantenious, collapsed and spread strange anomalies around them. The crusaders now acts like gate keepers around the portals and hunts down anything that comes out or becomes twisted by the strange occurences that happen.
 In the prototype you play as a Crusader who's investigating a derelict ship. It mostly just have the basic gameplay elements in it, as well as the visual style that we wanted to achieve.

After summer class has finished we'll continue working on this. But we're going to go away from the whole Crusader theme I think. It is pretty similiar to WH40K's Space marines in a lot of aspects. The theme we're shooting for is more of a detective/explorative feel, with a hint of horror. Think Cthulhu meets Han Solo or something. Yeah, I know, what an epic combo!

The game is a isometric 3D game, mixed with 2D graphics and a strong pixel art style. It will also be 'episodic', but more in the sense of several semi-seperate adventures that all take place in the same universe. Rather than being continous like, for example, Tell Tale Games episodic games. This will also allow us to work on multiple, seperate episodes at the same time as well if we want to. Nifty!

Unity for the coding impaired pt.3

So, new week new project. The previous game prototype turned out pretty funky, but mostly it felt more like a warm up on unity, and the summer class in general. that said Forak from sea was a pretty cool prototype showing of the horrors of giant sea pixel... giants.

For the new project we got the themes Bubbles and The unknown. We brainstormed more in depth around this and even discussed some gameplay as a deciding factor, instead of just doing something freaky and random. Forak From Sea's only gameplay was to smash things or die, there were no points being scored or story being told, it was a giant sea monster simulator at its bare minimum.

For this week I felt we took some more time to talk about ideas, casper pacing around the class room and throwing out awesome crazy talk and me drawing doodles to support the stuff we came up with, pretty sweet, even though I overslept and only arrived at school after lunch. I didn't manage to catch a lot of sleep, bloody warm and humid air is messing with my sleep pattern. Might have helped my brain to spawn wierd ideas though so it wasn't all bad! Anyways, we came up with a few ideas, to mention a few we had an idea were you typed text in speech bubbles, but the letters that popped up would be complete jibberish and the characters around you would react differently to whatever you typed in. A game were you played as a crab trying to attract them lady crabs. And some other stuff. Super normal ideas as you can tell by these examples.

What we finally came up with it's of course still horribly fantasticly freaky and random. And wierd. You play an alien called Fish Face who entertain himself by mind controlling people in a house to horribly kill themselves when no-ones watching. he does this by sneaking around outside the house and peeking in through the windows. Pretty freaky huh? Also, he has no pants. I think the Hoborine has met his match. Or a perfect member for his super wierdo team ...

I'll have a lot of graphics to do this time around too, since we're not using the pixel style for this one it'll probably be up to me to do all the graphics this time. which is kinda fun, it's just too bad I can't help on the coding as well.

Unity for the coding impaired pt.2

So summer class has started, we've gone through some basics of unity. and some coding that didn't leave me any smarter or more able to code. It did however made me wear my glasses so I could better see what the teacher wrote, so that I could copy it with less compiling errors. Whoop di doo.

Then we divided into groups of two. me and Caspalot joined forces, just as planned, and formed Forak productions. The teacher then handed out pieces of paper with words scribbled on them, theses were to be our themes that we should follow when making our prototype for this week. we got 'Eat' and 'the depths of the sea'. It also had to be a first person shooter because whatever or something.

So naturally we made a game about a giant (Forak), emerging from the sea to wreak havoc amongst the humans and fight space ships. like my previous prototype this game is also a 3D game with 2D graphics. It's something both me and Casper like, and it's fun to mess around with as it creates some unique elements as well as some obstacles that we have to solve. I also just love the way it looks. Forak from (the) Sea, or Ffs, as we're calling it revolves around smashing up villagers and houses with your arms (and feet), and smacking down space ships who comes in from hyper space to pew pew pew their lasers at you. You have to smash down obstacles in your path to advance through the game and perhaps make a meal out of an angry protester or two.

The first day, we're just doing whatever we feel like doing. Casper made some kickass pixel art graphics, and I'm fiddling around with some music. This way we get to be super creative and not boxed in by any rules more than it has to be semi-useful to the project. It's a fun way to start and a good way to discover in what direction we want to take the game, and what we need to do to get there. Plus we get some resources to work with when it's time to get down to business properly (tomorrow).

Unity for the coding impaired

Been fiddling around in Unity, and as I'm taking a class during this summer (vacation is for the weak!) in game prototyping I'm hoping to broaden my skills in this field to more than only graphics, and maybe I can make my own games sometime in the distant future. Or at least be more all-round when making games in teams, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of game design and all that under the hood stuff that I usually let others worry about.

So far I've managed to make a camera follow the player, and the player can run around. I have some randomly roaming creatures thanks to a script from the unity community ( that rhymes. I know, I'm so crazy sometimes) I've added a song that loops, and some buildings and other objects. So it's really basic at this point, but the class hasn't started and no harm in getting a bit of the basics figured out beforehand, right?

There's no gameplay what so ever in the game I'm making, in fact it's the epiphany of a 'not-game'... game. It doesn't even have a story. Or any cohesion. The player is wearing a tie, there's jellyfish floating around, and farm houses from the dark ages are dotting the landscape, together with some wierd stones and a sign post that don't make any sense. in short it's lovely! seriously though, It might get some gameplay elements and stuff in there as I continue toying around with it.

Maybe I should explain the first bump in my road of ignorant bliss in the field of game prototyping, my 2D player in his 3D world needs animations for walking in different directions. It would be super easy if he was a 3D model like a normal 3D game, but nooooo I made him in 2D! just for kicks, it really doesn't add anything. Except it looks cool. I know it'll 'work' with sprite sheets, but I'm not sure how I can switch between animations this way. I've tried a method in Maya that looked like it should work but it didn't go very well in Unity. Bugger!

I also want at least something to do in the game. maybe add some villagers that roam around the houses and you can talk to them or something. That should be a start. I also want to be able to gather resources and build things, like cottages and tools etc for the village. I also need to make a song that fits the game, the one I got now is super creepy but the game is more of a cozy game, well, that's how I imagine it anyway.

Now I need to finish making a tree in Maya, and tomorrow school begins again!

So that's all for now, have a good one peeps!
*MWAH*

This.