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Unfortunately Kelsey, the artist, has found a job that will take over all his time so he’s not able to help with the artwork anymore so I’m back to being a 1 man band. I plan to meet this part of the rubric by working closely with Dianne Lummis, the counselor, and a school for user testing.

I am currently 3/4 of the way through finishing the coding for the game so it should be playable soon just not pretty. Everything is just different coloured boxes right now. I’m gonna have to rush through the programming and get onto the artwork and animation asap to bring it to a playable state so I can have kids play it and give me feedback.

I have a school lined up that may be interested so all that’s left to do there is finalize it and get the parents to sign off on their kids playing the game. I also need to bring the game back to the counselor to make sure she’s okayed it prior to the game testing. Just so I don’t have any ethics issues :)

I’m excited with how this is turning out. I’ve gone through many iterations. Unfortunately most iterations have been done to descope so I can finish at least a prototype but it seems to be turning out well and according to Dianne, in theory, the analysis can work. If so then this might just be the project I’m gonna work on until it’s completed and at a marketable state. If this can help even one kid then I’m happy :) I’m actually finally doing something with my time at uni and it feels great. Somehow, even with a lot more work, I’m a lot less stressed out and really just having fun on the journey.

I got to talk to a psychologist, Dianne Lummis, about my idea and how I can go about identifying a mental disorder in children. She was extremely helpful, giving me endless reference material and even going so far as to helping me research as well. We decided to stray away from labeling kids with possible mental disorders and instead show results of indicators that may lead to a mental disorder or illness. She’s shown me the DSM5 criteria which is the criteria of diagnosing someone with autism. My goal, with the help from Dianne, is to gamify the different criteria and make a scenario out of each. Then the information sent to the parent/caregiver or school will be, for example, that they have trouble handling emotions or prefer to be alone. This change, while narrowing down my scope, also allows for more flexibility in the information given so the parent can take their child to their local GP and see if that information leads to a diagnosis.

Through talking with her, I’ve decided on characters being animals and other ‘unhuman’ creatures. Kids have a tendancy to enjoy that more than actual people. Through iteration and talking to kids, I will find out whether they would rather play as a human or creature.

It’s taken 5 weeks of pestering a lot of psychologists to be able to talk to someone. Fortunately an amazing AUT lecturer, Dianne, has agreed to chat and will hopefully be able to bring some insight on what to include in the game. 

This semester I’ve set myself a large scope. I want to push myself to achieve this idea I’ve had. I got unfortunate with how I couldn’t find anyone in course to work with but I’ve managed to get a friend to work with me to create the artwork while I am able to focus on coding.

My idea is to create a game that can at least ballpark diagnose a mental disorder or illness for children. Counselling is expensive and parents can’t always take their child to it on a whim. With this game, they will have a clearer understanding whether their child will need to go to a counselor or not. Games are a massive thing for youth these days; with addiction to games becoming a reality for many kids. If you can’t stop all kids from being addicted to games then I want to somewhat use that addiction for a good cause. 

I’ve been researching different tests for diagnosing many illnesses and disorders and haven’t been able to find anything gamify-able so I’ve been contacting different organisations and psychology departments to see if anyone is willing to give me advice. I hopefully should be having a meeting with someone soon which will help a lot with the scenarios and actual gameplay.

My team member and I have created a timeline that we think we are able to stick to:

WEEK 3 – 4

Get in touch with psychologists

Get a group together

Get basics of game drawn out

 WEEK 5 – 6

Character movement

Character creation

Talk to psychologist

Design scenarios to gamify test questions

ART - UI design

ART - Character animation

 WEEK 7 – 8

Inventory system

Use and combine objects

ART - Character model/animation finalization

ART – Backdrops

 WEEK 9 – 10

ART – items

Input the different blocks into scenario

ART – Environment animations

 WEEK 11 – 12

Input the different blocks into scenario

Finalize scenario

Finalize art

 WEEK 13 – 14

Bug testing

Build executable

For the past week, I’ve been finishing off the last touches to the people of the simulation. People stopping to look at the view, chatting in the streets, on their phone. Trying to give a little bit of variety to make the city come to life.

I also had to change one of the characters in the boardroom since her animation didn’t loop. She would randomly teleport back to her starting position. So I changed it to someone talking on her phone without the pacing. 

With only a couple of weeks left of studio. We’ve been on a 24/7 grind to complete everything we need. This week I have completed a board room scene of characters arguing over a conference table, an ending sequence for one of our endings (which somehow became corrupt and I now have to redo) and an overview of the apartment at the start of the game to stop the players from moving around while the introductory narration plays. 

My job in the group is lead animator. I’m not very well versed in animation as I only found my passion for it in year one of BCT but I have quickly grown obsessed over it. My goal in every animation is to paint a picture. If I’m animating characters then I take into account what sort of character they are, how they hold themselves, how they walk, how they interact with the world. It’s been a stressful journey of throwing myself in the deep end of 3d animation without knowing the basics but from 2d animation I had at least the fundamentals and knowledge of how it should turn out.

While our team was deliberating on what sort of project we should turn our idea into, we started to lean towards making an escape room. I contacted my boss at The Great Escape to see if we could have a meeting with him and discuss how it may work. We told him about the details of what we were planning to do and what it was for and he was able to give us a sound answer...it won’t work. Since the open studio is such a small time space, we wanted to give each participant around 5 minutes in the room. Tibor, my boss, told us that 5 minutes is far too short of a time to have people solving puzzles and trying to work their way through a room. In my personal experience of being a escape game controller, teams will typically take around 10 minutes of looking around the room and pondering before they start to solve any of the puzzles. Having this meeting was unbelievably helpful since it allowed us to move away from that idea and broaden our horizon. We then went back to the drawing board started to work on a new project that would fit our restrictions and still convey the message of our idea.

For a while I was not on the same page with the new idea as I didn’t know what was happening. I feel like there wasn’t enough communication within our group to make sure that everyone had the same goal in mind. At this time my laptop had broken and I was without a computer for 2 weeks, so I got to work on concepts. But without a clear picture of what I was doing, I didn’t even know where to begin. Fortunately Max came to the rescue. He got the team together and we all discussed what we were going to create. We came up with a sort of sandbox room where the participant(s) is able to do whatever they want within the time frame. Whatever task they decide to do will give them a little bit of information that will amount with how many tasks they do. The idea is to allow the participants to create their own story of what’s happening in the simulation. We will do this by giving different information depending on the task they achieve.

Over the past few weeks that I have had my laptop back, I have been creating animations for the first person character in our experience. Due to many different technical issues I have had to redo these animations around 4 times now :( but I think I have finally found a way to animate the character so fingers crossed that this works :\ Luckily I have been able to sort of reconstruct the animation that I made at the start but apparently Maya loves to change their axis around so Unreal engine and Unity3d’s axis are mapped differently. Took a bit of figuring out but got there in the end. WOOP WOOP. Just in time for break as well...Now just gotta graph the animations so it looks more fluent and organic

There is a quote I live by when creating or designing games. “I would rather play a game that’s an inch wide and a mile deep than a mile wide and an inch deep”. I think this quote explains depth vs. complexity. While complexity can be good in games such as MMO’s, The real magic of games is when every single object, every action, every mechanic has meaning. Mario is the least complex game I can think of. You can walk side to side, jump and sometimes throw fireballs. When they created this game they chose a mechanic they wanted to explore and then created the whole game based off of that mechanic. Mario’s jump allows him to get through the levels, usually set in the sky, it allows him to kill his enemies, and it became the defining feature of the game. Such a simple action that is able to do many things, that is depth. A good rule of thumb is if the game has to have a prompt on the screen with the control scheme when you start then the developers are either lazy or the game has a very complex control setup.

Positive feedback loops are when players that are in the lead get rewarded. This is used to speed up the game and end it quicker. A negative feedback loop is when the player in last is given a boost so they are able to catch up to other players and make the game more interesting. This is mostly used in party games to keep everyone interested and no one knows who the winner may be. This can even be something simple like extra points after killing someone when you have been dying a lot in a multiplayer fps.