Aamir's DevLog

What is this DevLog?

This is a carefully curated digital representation of the journey I embarked on to learn game development in 2021.....who am I kidding? I gotta do this or I'll fail. We all know how much developers love making documentation.

PROJECTS

What am I trying to accomplish?

The goal is to implement a spawn system for waves that allows multiple kinds of enemies to be spawned.

Resources Used

After a bit of scavenging for a recent tutorial on how to achieve this, I came across this brilliant tutorial on YouTube that showed how to do exactly what we wanted for H.O.P.E. and only needed to be altered slightly.

Single Spawn Point

We aren't looking to implement multiple spawn points at the moment, so I needed to adapt the tutorial for that and replace the array of Transform points for spawn points to just a single one.

Infinite Enemies

But, the number of enemies to spawn wasn't working. Instead of spawning the specified number of enemies for the wave, it was spawning infinite enemies.

Upon examination, I found that the function setting the Boolean value of canSpawn which is supposed to be false after the specified number of enemies have been spawned was only checking to see if number of enemies was zero.

But, since the enemy is spawned at least once and number of enemies reduced by one before the if statement, when the number of enemies specified is zero, it becomes -1 and the if statement is never run. Its an easy fix though, all I have to change is that it checks for less than or equal to zero. There won't be any wave with zero enemies, but its still a good idea to optimise it i guess.

Next Steps

Ten Page Game Design Document - H.O.P.E.

H.O.P.E. Game Pitch

What am I trying to accomplish?

Challenge is to clearly relay the mood, theme, setting and style of the game through the use of Moodboards.

Links to final products at the top of the post.

Moodboards

Final Conclusions based on results of Playtest - Float Force

What am I trying to accomplish?

The goal is to playtest a prototype as well as get a prototype playtested and draw conclusions from that.

Why would I want to do that?

Both knowing how to give feedback after a playtest and getting feedback on your prototype after its playtested are useful skills.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

Watched this Brackey's tutorial on playtesting and basically played the prototype for Hitboy. Filled the form the other team had created, and we had a call with them to discuss our findings.

What is the result?

Playable Prototype - Float Force

What am I trying to accomplish?

The Challenge is to implement the GDD in Unity and come up with a prototype that can be play-tested.

Why would I want to do that?

Having a prototype for play-testing is a great way to prove that your game idea works and figure out at an early stage what works and what doesn't.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

We divided our prototype into Level Design and Movement Mechanics and got working on it.

Research Methodologies

Prototyping (Workshop): Making of the prototype in Unity

What is the result?

The final result of this exercise was a playable prototype of an FPS game with Six Degree of Freedom movement system.

How is/will this be helpful?

It was definitely helpful diving into the coding side of things. There's a still a lot to learn, but this was a good start.

What are my next steps?

Final Ten Page Game Design Document - Hitboy

What am I trying to accomplish?

Expand one the One page Game Design Document provided to us.

Why would I want to do that?

To be able to flesh out an idea that is not originally mine by using what I learn from prototyping and other research.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

We mainly utilised the interviews we did with the original team and our prototypes to come up with the design document.

Research Methodology:

Prototyping (Workshop): Used the prototypes we made earlier.

Interview (Field): The interview we had with the swap team.

What is the result?

We came up with a Ten Page Design Document.

How did I validate these results?

We shared it with teachers for feedback.

How is/will this be helpful?

Game Design Documents are a staple of the Game Dev Industry, so knowing them is important and I'm certain will be useful when I work on other games.

What are my next steps?

Our group will be presenting this to the original team.

Final Ten Page Design Document - Float Force

What am I trying to accomplish?

Come up with a Design Challenge for Float Force that clearly states the intended desired outcome for the game, and set up SCRUM.

Why would I want to do that?

By coming up with a clear Design Challenge, you are able to come back to it if ever you're unclear about the direction your game should take.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

We iterated through various versions of Design Challenges we could come up with by improving on them through the feedback received.

What is the result?

Design Challenge:

Design a fast-paced, space arena FPS game inspired by the Battle Room in the movie Ender's Game and the movement mechanic of Overload and Hardspace: Shipbreaker, where you shoot enemies with laser guns in six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) as you attempt to save humanity by utilising your reaction and spatial awareness skills.

Trello Board

User Stories

How did I validate these results?

Final Paper Prototypes - Hitboy

What am I trying to accomplish?

Make Lo-Fi prototypes for the mechanics of the game concept we swapped.

Why would I want to do that?

Prototyping is a fast and easy way to test ideas and is widely used in various fields. Knowing how to prototype and being able to discard impracticable or boring ideas at the start is a huge time-saver.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

Attended the workshop and watched a couple of YouTube videos to figure out how to make a paper prototype for a shooting game.

Research Methodology:

Prototyping (Workshop): Making the paper prototypes.

What is the result?

We all divided various mechanics of the Hitboy game amongst ourselves and made paper prototypes for them.

How did I validate these results?

We combined our prototypes, presented them and got feedback from teachers.

How is/will this be helpful?

Final Concept Pitch - Float Force

Final One Page Design Document

What am I trying to accomplish?

The goal is to come up with a concept pitch for a game that expands on the Micro FPS template and make a One page Design Document for it.

Why would I want to do that?

This is a great exercise to dip my toes into the world of actually designing my own games.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

First steps are to actually play the base Micro FPS game and look at what mods other people have made to it.

Then we proceeded to brainstorm and just put down ideas we could come up with.

Research Methodology:

Community Research (Library): Looking at the mods made by the community on Unity.

Pitch (Showroom): Pitching the idea we came up with to the teachers.

What is the result?

Our first idea was of a Tower Defense game with an FPS element inspired by Sanctum 2. However, after our initial pitch the feedback we got was implementing it in the given time constraints was a tall task. So upon revisiting the idea, we came up with a zero-G 6 degree of freedom based game inspired by the movie Ender's Game.

How did I validate these results?

We gave a pitch to our teachers.

How is/will this be helpful?

This was the first time making a game pitch and coming up with the one page design document and will definitely be helpful in the future.

What are my next steps?

Final Deliverable - Adding an Enemy to DEEP

What am I trying to accomplish?

The Goal of the exercise is to learn to seperate myself from player experience and be able to look at games through the perspective of the designer.

Why would I want to do that?

To be able to build my game design vocabulary, identify existing game elements (mechanics, dynamic, aesthetics) and analyse the reasoning behind the use of these elements. As well as figuring out how changing these elements would affect the player experience.

How do I go about trying to accomplish it?

The assignment provided a structured way of going about this. The task of adding an enemy that fits in with the aesthetics of DEEP but make it more challenging was a decent exercise in Game Analysis.

We analysed enemies in other games like the Cacodemon (DOOM), Evil Eyes (Heroes of Might & Magic), Barnacle (Half Life) etc. Among the things we looked at were what the enemies added to their respective games, how would the game change if they weren't there and how would adding an enemy like that into DEEP make it more challenging.

We also looked at the already existing enemies and features that unified them. It was our consensus that having an enemy as mutated and/or from the sea would make it fit nicely into the aesthetics of DEEP.

Research Methodology:

Available Product Analysis (Library): Looking at enemies in other games.

Problem Analysis (Field): Asking the teachers questions to clarify the task at hand.

Stakeholder Analysis (Field): By considering the experience of players and making sure our solution does not take the immersiveness out of the game.

What is the result?

The enemy we came up with was a mutated version of the Pufferfish. It was our opinion that DEEP lacked enemies that utilised the vertical space and by introducing an enemy that attacked from above would increase the difficulty of the game by forcing the player to pay attention to what was going on above him as well.

Kaloyan designed an enemy based on our feedback and it was presented to the teachers.

How did I validate these results?

Our Group presented our ideas to the teachers in an attempt to validate our solution.

The feedback we got was that we should provide more concrete examples of other similar games that have used a solution similar to ours. This would validate our findings.

Futhermore, our description of the enemy we were suggesting needs to provide details in a way that can be coded e.g. Damage, Movement, Weight of attack and other similar stats. We amended our solution to include those and can be found in the deliverable document at the begining of the post.

How is/will this be helpful?

This exercise was helpful in understanding how helpful a skill it is to be able to analys games from this perspective and I expect it to prove invaluable in the future.

What are my next steps?

Mechanics, Dynamics & Aesthetics (MDA)

What exactly is the MDA framework?

The MDA framework was presented in a paper by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc and Robert Zubek.

Why would I want to learn about it?

I think understanding these three components and being able to identify them in other games is an invaluable asset. It helps in figuring out what makes a game fun and brings me one step closer to coming up with ideas for making fun games by mixing and matching the many mechanics and dynamics I identify ( I still can't get the idea of mixing the mechanics for Golfing and Tetris out of my head.)

How did I try to learn about MDA?

We were provided links to the paper and blogposts on MDA but I sorta ignored them in the beginning. Got most of my information from the workshop and jumped into practically trying to identify these 3 components in one of the 5 games they told us to pick from.

The game our group chose was Deep and I was horrible at it. I spent way too long trying to reach the end, but that didn't happen. I of course knew that I did not have to finish it, I just couldn't help myself. I guess that tells you a bit about the aesthetics of the game. Or my psyche.  

Research Methodology

I find it a bit difficult to categorize my research methods in a 'technical' way, but here they are:

Literature Study (Library): Went through the MDA paper.

Community Research (Library): Read the blogpost - Mechanics and Dynamics by Ian Schreiber

YouTube Video: Aesthetics of Play - Redefining Genres in Gaming - Extra Credits

Played the games to identify their Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics.

What were the findings? (End Product)

I learnt what MDA were, how to identify them and how useful they can be. Our final product was a document listing out the MDA for Deep.

Link to MDA Findings for Deep

How did I validate these findings?

Mostly by comparing them with the feedback given by instructors to us and other similar findings.

How is/will this be helpful?‌

It will be helpful when coming up with ideas for games. Having starting blocks like a few mechanics and aesthetic you want in a game can be a huge help in kicking the idea generating sessions off.

What are my next steps?‌

I'm never playing games again, I'll be researching the MDAs in games from now on. Sounds way more productive and definitely a better excuse.

Final One Page Game Design Document - H.O.P.E.

What am I trying to accomplish?