Finals week is about halfway done now, however; my last final happened this evening for the game projects course. We ordered several pizzas and invited a number of other students outside of the class for one last presentation of our work. Every team exhibited the current state of their development, which was a first to have all teams in attendance. I think the most significant thing to come out of this last iteration demo was reflecting on all the accomplishments made this semester and to think about what the future holds. I am glad to say after such a busy semester, it's great to be finally over and have a break from it all. This semester brought new experiences and challenges, most notably was leading a team in developing a game. While I expected leadership to be difficult, having essentially two leaders, thankfully not three as the person responsible for the original decided to back off, complicated thing a great deal more. Not only does this make authority and roles on the team tricky to discern, conflicting thoughts and statements arise on several subjects especially when one leader isn't there at the time. Aside from that, I found it challenging to find enough tasks to keep everyone busy, even with team members helping to create stories. I've also ran into the issue teammates spreading themselves too thin, trying to do everything and getting frustrated when they don't see much accomplishment. I plan to address the later two issues in more depth at the beginning of next semester and will work with my co-leader and professors when needed. As for the break, we're not requiring team members to work on the project due to various complications each may face, such as lack of reliable internet, as well as its supposed to be a break. A few have stated they would not mind or even plan to work on a few stories, though not necessarily at the normal pace during the semester. I myself plan to work on some art assets over break and I hope to finish a significant number by the time we start the spring semester. Here are some examples of the art we've made this semester.

I would like to continue the discussion of winning and losing from the last update. In the previous post, I mentioned how I feel that games need some form of punishment for failure or else lose all meaning, as well as argued that failure in a game can be an enjoyable part and provide a different experience. Developers may find the balance between these two points difficult to achieve and either remove significant punishment to prevent players from becoming upset and turning away from the game or simply force the player to deal with the punishment for failure. While I do believe that players should face consequences, failure ought not to become a wall, and allow the player to continue onward while presenting another challenge to overcome, which brings me to my next point. Players should not care whether or not they lose. At the end of any game, a player ought to walk away being satisfied with whatever outcome they arrived at, and even better, have an entertaining anecdote to share with others. An example of this was a star wars role-playing game that myself and a few friends tried for the first time at Nanocon 2011, in which we were playing the role of sith acolytes attempting to become the next apprentice by secretly killing off all the other players. The game offered a very loose structure in the rules, and allowed for a lot of creative choices, and because of this we were capable of performing some crazy events. As the game progressed, I felt that my characters skills didn't offer much potential for me to win the game, but I was surprised when it came down to myself and one other person, in which the final duel came very close. I thoroughly enjoy the game despite losing due to the ridiculous antics we performed, my favorite being myself dashing down a hallway as far as I could in order to reach my friend's character before chucking and impaling a sharp triangular holocron into his face and nearly killing off his character. Branching of off this, I feel that developers put too much focus on winning or losing in a game rather than ensuring the game is fun for everyone. An example of this is the base version of Twilight Imperium. The game is fun in its own right; however, it had some major flaws, the main one being the strategy cards. If a player wanted to win, they were force to select the imperial card, which gave victory points, if they could, followed by the initiative card after so they could chose from the cards first next time. This forces the players' hands and prevents them from playing their way. The company made new cards in one of the expansions that allowed more choice and freedom in the game, and most preferred to play in a manner that was not efficient to win anyway.

This week, I plan to take a break from talking about the progress of Pendulum Ascension and instead discuss a subject that's been on my mind lately. Over the course of the semester I have worked on a few projects, as well as played several games and it has me thinking of the matter of winning and losing, with specific focus on the facet of losing. A large portion of games involve some aspect of victory conditions and on most occasions punish the player for failing to meet these. Generally, punishments tend to upset the player especially if they feel unjust and if failure occurs often enough, they may end up "rage quitting" and have a hard time enjoying the game. I want to make it clear that I am not saying that losing is a bad thing to have in a game, or that there should not be any form of punishment for failure. I believe that they have an important role to play with a game, for without them, a game can lose all meaning and lack enough challenge. An example of this is seen in the Lego games or Fable 2, when the player dies, they just get back up and continue onward. Sure in Fable 2 you lose unspent experience and gain a scar on your character, but these tend to be trivial matters in the long run as scars are just cosmetic and experience can easily be regained, or eventually becomes obsolete. Fights become a matter of perseverance as you will always stand back up in battle to continue to hurt the enemies until they are dead. In the end there is no real loss. That being said however, does not mean that failure in a game cannot be an enjoyable part of the game. Turning failure into a different experience, rather than just harsh punishment can result in a pleasurable outcome for the player. Heavy Rain took an interesting approach to this in that if a player fails an important task, their character will die and remain so for the rest of the game, however; the player given control of new another character and the game picks up immediately after, where the death becomes part of the story. During the development of a card game called Meme Complex, I developed an idea for a card in which if the opponent could make you laugh, they increase their score, and otherwise they decrease it. The idea was that if the player won, that player would be enjoying the game and if the opponent succeeded, likely winning the match, since the player is laughing, that player is still enjoying the game. To be continued

Last week, I mentioned that our team made very little progress due to various events and an argument between the leaders of the team. This week, despite following a three day weekend, more than made up for the lack of accomplishment of the previous week. The issue between the leaders worked itself out as we cooled our heads and realized several things. The first is that we were obsessing too much over specific details and needed to let go, which was the major cause of the disagreement. The second was that we were drifting away from the core gameplay and that we needed to get the team back on track. With the focus of getting back to the core gameplay, our Monday meeting stated off by discussing the original concept of collecting morbid artifacts, placing them on the mannequin, and peering back into the past to solve murders. We had been struggling to incorporate the peering back in time mechanic into our game as we didn't know how to integrate it with our puzzles and it had only shown us the murder after we had solved it. Even the part of solving the murder lacked meaning as we just collected items and place them upon the mannequin. We came to the conclusion that just seeing a piece of the past limited the use of the mechanic too much and decided to revisit a very early idea of allowing the player to also interact with the past. What we decided upon is to create two different states of the mansion, a past which would likely show the mansion in its prime, and the present were time has decayed the mansion. This allows us to create more interesting puzzle in our game, and gave another purpose for the mannequin. The watch would have a limited amount of power to allow the player to interact with the past, and would steadily drain to the point where the watch must be used by the mannequin in order to recharge. Aside from some major mechanic progression, we also completed several art assets for the game. We now have the mannequin as well as several sprites of both our protagonist Martin, and our villain Usher. We converted all of our artwork drawn in a traditional art form into a digital image ready for temporary filler until the coloring is finished. I personally have worked on several assets important to several of our puzzles including a vase whose elaborate shape gave me trouble with the perspective until a professor suggested that I use a 3d modeling program to place a similarly shaped object in at the perspective I needed.

Happy Halloween! It has been quite some time since I wrote about the progress of Pendulum Ascension due to my recent trip to GDC Online Down in Austin, Texas. Since then my team and I have made great strides in developing our game. The art team produced several art assets with more currently in progress, all the while a few members adapt from traditional art to digital. The programmers implemented a number of mechanics into the game including the first puzzle, specifically the combination-lock for the display case containing the pocket watch. As of today, the narrative group hammered out story elements which solidified the connection between what the player does and the overarching plot. In the case of art assets, I created a word document and a story for every member of the team to contribute to two lists, the first containing art assets necessary for our game, and the second for optional/aesthetic assets. With this, we are able to prioritize what the art team needs to develop and begin working. From that list, I have created a few assets including an ornate style door of a mansion, matching walls, and the pocket watch. During this development we ran into an issue with our engine, Flashpunk, in which it does not handle vector art efficiently. Rather than change engines, which might not had even solved the issue or introducing new problems, we made the decision to change to raster art. From this change, we need to be more aware of the dimensions of our assets as we lose vector art's ability to scale. In the case of programming, I don't have much to say aside from an issue they brought during the last team meeting. They feel the narrative team has not communicated with them clearly, specifically on the creation of puzzles. As a solution to this, Tyler and I are discussing schedule changes in order to get people from both programming and narrative to have some work blocks together, and have already made one change. In the case of narrative, some members of the team felt the narrative was disconnected or underdeveloped. It wasn't clear what importance the murders had or how they connected with the plot other than having a member of the Usher family involved. Without diving too far into spoilers, we made a connection between the Usher bloodline and our main character Martin Levine, and the various murders involving a pendulum type theme (think about what a pendulum does), and gave our antagonist a motive for his actions. As this subject was discussed earlier today, I can't give much more detail as it is still a work in progress and is subject to change after the other team members have a chance to hear; however I believe we now have a solid foundation and hopefully will be able to present more soon.

As a result of attending GDC Online 2012, as well as generally having a busy week, I was unable to post an update to the blog on October 10th. To start off with, I began working weekends back home on an every two weeks schedule as my financial situation is looking grim and I need to make money in order to buy necessities such as food. After the weekend I had to pack and catch a lengthy flight to Austin, Texas and didn't arrive until nine o'clock Monday night. The Narrative Summit at GDC began Tuesday and a number of events filled the whole day, though I will only elaborate on the most interesting. The first panel I attended was "Writing the Romance-able NPC: ICING the Content Cake" with speaker Heidi McDonald from Schell Games. The session raised my curiosity as I haven't seen a game that I feel effectively implements a romance system. I was a little disappointed the panel didn't discuss the implementation; however, I still found the talk interesting. She explained that one importance of romance in games is that it fills at least four of Maslow's hierarchy of needs with a potential of safety as the fifth, if the game offers the need to protect the romance-able npcs. She also listed in a ven diagram traits that over five hundred players in a survey determined were attractive or unattractive in npcs; childish and helpless being two of the most undesirable traits. Clara Fernandez Vara from MIT hosted another session entitled "Environmental Storytelling: Indices and the Art of Leaving Traces". Of all the sessions I attended, this one in particular proved to be the most beneficial to Pendulum Ascension. She explained the three types as defined by Charles Peirce the first being an icon which conveys an idea by resembling it (photo), the second being a symbol in which the object and meaning are arbitrary (bio-hazard symbol or languages), and finally an index which is physically connected to the idea (where there's smoke there's fire). The session focused on the third sign, Indices, which leave traces or pieces for the player to create their own story. I'll leave the discussion of this talk to a later time as there are plans to have Clara skype in and discuss the use of indices. The rest of Tuesday I attend a few other panels and the expo floor, though the night was filled with networking events. Right after the sessions ended for the day, I headed over to the Amazon.com party at the luxurious Four Seasons Hotel. The Amazon networking event was by far the classiest and lavish party I have ever attended. They offered open bar and food including caviar, artisan pizza, and delicious oriental food. There were few tables around, which greatly encouraged socializing with people as you needed a place to set your drink. I managed to engage in several conversations this way, which was far easier than other networking parties. After that I went to the GDC opening party with a fellow classmate, though I left early as the party was too loud, dark and crowded to socialize with anyone. My night ended at a place called the Gingerman in which most of the narrative summit people met. There I met Dave Mark, who spoke half of my favorite session at GDC in San Fransisco, and engaged in a very enjoyable discussion.

This week I began working on creating filler art assets with Tyler for our programmers to implement into the white box of our level for testing purposes. I performed an image search online for some references of a mansion foyer and focused on one that consisted of wooden panel walls and arches. I designed a door based on these reference images that could potentially modify it to utilize it as the walls. After completing the door, I felt that it was far too small and did not have enough pixels to design it well and scraped the image. Working with higher resolution I redesigned the door, adding overlay effects to create texture on the door as well as using a custom brushes to add a unique engraving. These initial art assets were intend only as filler art and, I hate to admit, regardless of that, Tyler and myself became a little too involved in designing these assets and were not able to finish this particular story. Aside from that the team spent remainder of the week preparing for our first iteration demo for the other game design students on campus. Maria built the presentation in prezi and did an amazing job on that, in which we all contributed pieces. With the prezi presentation completed we spent the next meeting practicing the demo making changes and giving each other advice on how to improve. Today, after letting the other team go first as to allow a late member to arrive, we presented our iteration at noon and it went better than our practice runs. As for problems we've encountered this week, there were a few minor and one major issue the team faced. The first minor issue was that only a few members have been using svn to save their work, which causes problems for team members as they don't have access to it. The other issue was that the team was becoming too specialized in areas such as programming or narrative meaning that if one member was gone, others would not be able to continue on that area. . I talked with a few of the members today, and will be putting up stories on trello to help resolve the issue. The major issue was the attendance of one particular member and its getting out of our control. We asked for the professors for advice and possible intervention.

Last week I mentioned that the goal for our next team meeting we would finalize our overarching narrative to void branching out into too many directions. When the meeting came around, we reviewed the four different narrative paths to refresh the ideas in our minds and ensure that everyone knew them. Each of us voted on the choices we favored and explained our reasoning to the group in hopes of persuading the team. I favored option one, followed by number three as those two gave us the opportunity to make the collector appear as an evil, villain only to be revealed at the end to be neutral or a victim as well. In the end, however we decided on option four in which the collector attempts to take possession of the protagonist's body. On the note of the group meeting, we ran into several problems concerning attendance, one of which sparked serious tension among the team. On Friday, we had one member send a message informing us that he would most likely miss the Sunday appointment. When Tyler inquired as to the reason, he responded with a less than satisfactory reason about playing Borderlands 2, which quickly turned into a heated debate. The excuse he gave was a poor decision on his part as it turns out there was more to it and a more legitimate reason to miss out on Sunday. Thankfully Lacy intervened and helped calmed everyone down before things got out of hand. We decided to be lenient once we knew the whole story and this member has done an excellent job up to this point and he agreed to Skype in during the time block. Along with this problem, another member messaged us right before the meeting saying that he also wouldn't be able to make the reason but would Skype in as well. The Skype calls didn't go as well as actually attendance and thus we came to two conclusions. First, Skyping in slows the team down too much, and secondly, when you know you will me missing a meeting, it's extremely important to inform the team as soon as you know. As for the rest of the week, I began production of the tutorial level with several members of the team. The development began with planning the layout in a white box of the level as well as determining how the narrative would play out. After completion of this white box, we handed it off to the level design team to implement it into Flashpunk. In return they asked us to begin creation of filler art as they worked in the game engine. I've began creating some art, however; at this point we haven't completely decided on an art direction or style to aim for making asset creation difficult. The next major goal I have for the team is to decide on this so our efforts do not go to waste.

Pendulum Ascension continues to progress well as we near the end of the first couple weeks of the semester. The team developed a number of great ideas in narrative as well as mechanics during the brainstorming sessions and now has a general plan for the course of the game. Our programmers, Jeremiah and Phil have researched into 2d game engines for our project and decided on the Flashpunk system as our development tool. As of today, the team successfully installed tortoise svn on their computers following up with modifying and committing changes to a text file for practice. Delving deeper into the narrative side of things, we fleshed out details of our story beginning with the name of our protagonist, Marti T. Levin. Two factors went into the decision of this name, the first being that it is based off an anagram of "time travel" and secondly, it is a reference to Marty Mcfly Back to the Future. Inspired by the music box level from Castlevania as part of a discussion with Greg, we decided to make the setting of our game inside a clockwork mansion/museum which provided us with a gothic/Victorian steam punk art style. The idea of a clockwork museum also greatly increases the narrative possibilities of our puzzles. Speaking of puzzles, we decided upon creating two types, mechanical, which requires interacting with the environment and the use of abilities, and cerebral puzzles that entails clever problem solving. As mentioned earlier our programmers decided on Flashpunk as our game engine and have been hard at work creating essential functions for our game. I had recently talked to Phil this afternoon about some questions I had for implementing the level design and was pleasantly surprised what features they had working. Jeremiah already has an inventory system working within the engine and implemented placeholder assets for testing. Phil's work involved developing a pause feature and working out the bugs/ problems such as losing changed states of the game as we entered pause. This same problem also spells some trouble for level design as at this point we are unable to load a different level without losing changes made in game to the previous area. Over the past week I've noticed one problem I hope to have resolve by the end of our next team meeting. We have brainstormed many great ideas for the narrative portion of our game, however; at this point we seem to be branching out into numerous story ideas that do not fit with previous ideas, and seem to drift further and further away from important elements we wished to include. At the next meeting I plan to have the team settle on a specific narrative and lock it down so we can focus on creating for it.

As a new school year begins, so too does a new game project and this time I am a team leader. The game, called Pendulum Ascension puts you in the role of appraiser trapped within a morbid collector’s clockwork museum, where you must gather antique artifacts from a plethora of cursed collections in order to solve past murders by arranging these artifacts in specific combinations and peer into a previous pocket of time. The first week involved introductions of all the members of the team, familiarizing them with tools we will be using, and other tasks to get the team ready to start producing a game. From there we began flushing out ideas for the game and produce the high concept document. Each meeting we have we generated great ideas and have already planned out several mechanics, level design and narrative elements and will soon begin implementing them into our game. The only issue I have seen so far is that league of legends has shown to be our Achilles heel as it greatly distracts the team, but has yet to prevent us from accomplishing work.

Over this summer, I had the privilege to work on the Virtual Sanford Underground Research Facility (vSURF) project. The vSURF Project is a collaborative effort to enrich the learning of science and research through computer technologies including immersive simulations and games. My job required me to improve the aesthetic quality of one such simulation designed as a virtual tour of the deep underground science and engineering laboratory (DUSEL) under construction within the Homestake Mine, in Lead, SD. I enjoyed the modeling, texturing, and implementation of the models, and expanded my knowledge on tools and techniques used in this kind of work. I further expanded my skills through reading and following the tutorials in a book called Creating 3D Games with Unity & Maya. The book is great for game design and often has sections for hints and tips, as well as why sections to explain the reasons behind steps of the tutorial. I spent the rest of the summer on my own project following the character modeling section of the book.

This week I've been modifying the level to better fit with the level layout plan. There were too many lights which initially caused confusion as to the route the player was to take and where assets needed to be placed. With the removal of the excess lighting, we created a specific path as well as adding to the narrative of the main character's fear of shadows. What I'm currently working on now is placing all the assets into the map.

Here what it looked like before...

and after...

Much of the last week has been preparing and starting work on the final build of our game. This required finishing up several assets and compiling all of thee assets for importing into. We also had to sort out confusion over files, their locations, and which work station and build of UDK we were using. Once I managed to import all the 3D models I discovered that we needed to clean up our UDK package which had duplicates, excess files, and assets that out of date and needed to be fixed.

The last couple of weeks I've working on two high concept documents and game pitches.

Sight beyond Sight (working title)
Collin Gosmire

High Concept
A sinister force has awakened and its presence is corrupting the spiritual world from within the crystalline forest surrounding the ruins of an ancient temple. With sight beyond sight, the task falls upon the shaman Kusesuri to investigate the cause by communing with spirits, navigating ethereal pathways, and opening rifts to the spiritual world. She must work to solve supernatural crises by appeasing spirits to rest, exorcising demons, and purifying the disrupted environments of elemental spirits.

Features
The Sight beyond sight ability changes the appearance of the world, effects what objects exists, and modifies the level. This vision mode allows players to decipher messages and locate clues to puzzles

Various navigational puzzles include ethereal pathways, such as bridges or portals, which become accessible with sight beyond sight as long as the player does not run out of energy/manna.

A 3D environment including various elements inspired by Japanese and Shinto influences, such as Shimenawa, shrines, and bells.

Ringing bells purifies an area and wards off demons and enraged spirits that otherwise threaten or inhibit the player.

Player Motivation
The player is tasked with locating the source of the corruption by solving various puzzles, overcoming obstacles and investigating the mysteries of the ancient temple.

Genre
Action/adventure, solving mystery rather than primarily horror

Target Customer
Players interested in the fantasy and mystery of the spiritual world as well as Japanese and Shinto influences.

Competition
Portal’s gameplay centers on navigational puzzles and uses similar methods to progress through the level, but it does not have vision mode that alters the environment nor a mechanic for purifying the environment.

Hungry Ghost also has a purifying a mechanic and putting spirits to rest, however; its puzzles are based upon items rather than navigation.

Unique Selling Points
Sight beyond sight vision mode

Ethereal pathways to navigate the environment

Using bells to purify areas

Target Hardware
Personal Computer running windows os

Design Goals
Mysterious: An exploration of the enigmatic nature of death and the afterlife

Expansive: A feeling of insignificance in comparison to the world around you




Herding Cats (working Title)
Collin Gosmire

Will Johnson

Eric Forsting

High Concept
Gather your kittens, lead them through the environment, and keep them focused on the task at hand. As the mother cat, you must use gesture controls to help the young kittens as you lead them through obstacles such as climbing stairs, crossing streams, and avoiding catnip as you try to get back home.

Features
2D game intended for mobile touch screen devices

Gesture controls, such as pinch, swipe, tap, hold, and drag, control the moment and actions of the mother cat for an easy interface.

A herding mechanic keeps the kittens in a group unless they encounter their personal distractions or the mother cat is not within area of control.

Chibi anime art style conveys a lighthearted mood that is enjoyable for all ages.

The player has to think fast to counter act each of the kittens’ different problem causing behavioral quirks and the environmental obstacles.

Use the kittens special abilities to overcome the environmental obstacles and help the other kittens.

Player Motivation
The player takes on the role of the mother cat trying to get her kittens home by overcoming environmental obstacles and puzzles.

Genre
The game is a casual, Indie platform and puzzle game.

Target Customer
For customers of all ages who want a causal game for touch screen devices.

Competition
Escape Plan has similar elements to Herding Cats, however its art is full 3D uses only a black, white, and shades of gray color scheme. It also has a darker atmosphere and lacks several mechanics in Herding Cats.

Unique Selling Points
Gesture controls

Comical chibi art style

Herding mechanic to control kittens

Target Hardware
Android os enabled tablet and mobile devices

Design Goals
Simple controls for a easy to pick up game

Light hearted humor for all ages

Not much new this week though I almost have the whole house normal mapped. Its was more work Than I had anticipated and it has made me rethink how I should have created the textures of for the house from the beginning which may have avoided many issues. After the normal mapping is done, I plan to make a few more hue variations and work on the windows and doors.

GDC 2012 and maps

Over Spring break some fellow students and I attended GDC 2012 in San Francisco. This conference differed a great deal from our last trip at GDC Online in that it was much larger and the topics were more varied. It was also much more difficult to network as there was so many events going on and very little time to meet with others. What was most surprising and interesting about this trip (aside from the emergency landing, the earthquake, and the mysterious milk that appeared in our room) was that the many of the most interesting talks I went to were over topics I was not particularly interested in hearing about.


Over the next two weeks after we got back I've been working on creating other diffuse maps to give our houses more variety. For this I simple just used photo shop to colorize the siding of the house a a quick and easy method.











I've also been working on generating normal maps to give our houses a more detailed look. This was unfortunately much more complicated than I had anticipated and was more time consuming.

This week I finished the second decks texture and created a third roof and garage texture based on the version of the small house extension.





I've began looking into creating normal maps to give more depth to the models, and will be going over a udk gem for character lighting to improve the way our character looks within our game.

Aside from doors and windows, I am done modeling the houses for now.

This week I plan to go over how I have gone about making the textures for the building pieces and show some progress I've made with the new deck piece.

The texturing process involves creating and modifying what is called a UV Map. A UV Map takes a 2d texture image and tells which parts are applied to specific areas of the model. Maya has several methods for creating UV Maps, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, of which I chose to use the automatic mapping feature due to its ease of use, and accurate UV proportions. The major flaw with the automatic mapping is that it can create a messy UV layout which needs cleaning up.


One of the reasons this UV Map is messy is that it places every UV/polygon face in the map so that nothing overlaps which can a good thing except when there multiple pieces that will have the same texture. These UVs can overlap in order to free up space and lessen the amount of texturing needed. Freeing up space also allows us to scale up the UVs and in doing so, raises their resolution. Another part of this cleaning process is to fix, or rearrange the seams between UVs. When there's a seam in the UVs, there is a noticeable edge in the textures that would otherwise not exist. Seams are unavoidable in UV Maps as they are 2d images on a 3d model. The solution to these seams is to hide or place them in areas that are appropriate(such as a corner on a rectangular piece. Here is a cleaned up version of the deck's UV Map.
As you can see I grouped similar pieces and scaled the image up with more scaling on a few of the smaller pieces in order to get more detail.



Here are a few examples that show the progression of the textures on the deck model.

Its been a while since I've posted anything and I have a lot of things I've been working on to show. I've switched gears from working with materials and effects in The Unreal Development Kit to creating buildings for our game.


This is a fully textured house that will create the basis of our houses in the game. It currently has no doors or windows due to the modular nature of the models. This modular design means that we can take the same pieces used to make this example, and create numerous variations.


The second house uses a different roof, but otherwise has the same pieces as the first. Eventually there will be other textures, doors and other accessories, and a deck/tower combination I'm currently working on.