Pete

Changes made through playtesting:

Straight away the first problem that playtesting revealed was the lack of variety in the story since I had initially written out an entire plot where the players would be in an American PoW camp and would be escaping while securing some intelligence from there, so with some suggestions I decided to take away the “GM” role from the captain character and make this into its own separate roll that would have another player who wasn’t taking part assume the role of what was essentially a narrator for the story. Straight away with some playtests this provided a much more exciting experience for the game (provided the player who was acting as the GM was creative enough to make it so) and there was loads of crazy stories starting to develop from my game. One example that was one of my favorites was when the players were face to face with an enemy bunker and the GM created an allied air strike to happen on their position which destroyed the entire building.

Variety remained the main theme for changes that I should make as with more playtests my friends began to tell me that if you were escaping from a British prison there was only so much that you could create, even with a GM. So bearing this in mind I decided to take inspiration from playing another tabletop game from one of my classmates and added in the ability for players to roll to select their scenario/mission and also to provide them each with an item to have on their character’s person at the start of the game.

Another initial plan that I had chosen was to give each of the squad members a simple role, for example one would be a sniper and one would be a medic. However after taking parts in play tests myself I began to realise that there was no real connection that the players could make to their characters. I wanted to see anyone who was playing really start to understand how their character would act in that situation so I decided to add a bit more of a descriptive “story” almost to each of the characters. This was by far my favorite change I made because it was great to see one of my friends really assuming the role of Hans Beckermann or “The Butcher” as he also known. He would play through all situations thinking “What would my character do here?” and he began to take absolutely no mercy on these imaginary NPCs that were being thrown at him.

Now that I have my solid theme my next move would be to research as much as I could into the German history of soldiers who would be taking part in operations behind enemy lines. Thanks to this research I stumbled across the “Brandenburgers” who were essentially the German special forces in WW2, tasked with infiltrating and disrupting enemy supply lines and operations. After reading about these soldiers I had decided that they were the perfect group to put my characters into. 

With more research into the Brandenburgers I discovered that they were mostly described as misfits which made me begin to like the idea even more, because this allowed me to work more on giving the characters more personality, instead of just being boring/generic soldiers. I had also initially planned to have a female character as one of my choices but it seemed that there was not many records of any women in the special forces so I decided against it.

After looking into German name history I had come up with names that seemed to fit the era that they were based in:

Josef Weiss Jurgen Fischer Hans Beckermann Ludwig Kirchner

After looking into other WW2 games, both tabletop and non I realised that there was a large concurring theme among them and that was that the players will almost always assume the role of the “Good Guys” whether it be Americans, British, Russian or any of the other allied forces, so I decided to change my initial idea which was the same and instead put players in the shoes of German soldiers who had been captured. This seemed to go down well when I asked for some feedback off my peers and also a few of my friends from home who were involved in the play testing.

So we were assigned to make a 10 page rule book for a tabletop RPG, much in the same style as dungeons and dragons. We also had to make sure that we had a lot of play test runs of the game done so that we could adjust and make sure things all worked correctly.

In summary after all this work I feel that my time should have been much more organised and I should have spent less time being hung up on 1 mechanic that I knew from the start I would struggle with. It was nice to see the game develop though as it turned into actually quite a fun process to create.

So after finishing it I think I managed to create a game in the essence of my original idea and also managed to include many of my original planned mechanics, however I am disappointed overall with my work ethic for this project and plan to improve massively for next time we do any work with this engine.

I managed to implement some extra abilities that utilized my energy mechanic, including a speed boost/teleport and also I managed to use the energy as ammo for the weapon. After lots of talk with others and Andy too I decided not to implement my skating mechanic as I felt it was too complex and would hinder my overall project if I spent too long on it. So my idea changed from a physics based first person shooter into a more parkour based feel, where I planned to have the player traverse an obstacle course and shoot targets along the way.

Heading into unreal I found myself still recognizing the basic functions and features which was nice, sadly I had also forgotten a lot so I had to do plenty of research, be it tutorials online or asking questions directly to Andy our tutor. Andy also commented on the fact that my skating mechanic would be very complex and I would have to put in a lot of work to make it work.

I finally ended up deciding on using a mechanic for my game where I will have an energy system that is entirely based around movement. For this system I planned to have it so that by moving the character, either 1st or 3rd person you would generate energy which could be spent to use a variety of abilities involving telekinesis and even ammo for a weapon.

Unfortunately I wasn’t at home for the entirety of the Christmas period so I had a very limited amount of work coming back into uni after that. However while I was away I planned out my story, plot and characters and conducted some more research into mental illness.

So after much struggling with twine I decided to just implement my 1500 word story into twine and provide a few branches and more in-depth descriptions of some things that Melissa will be observing in the world.

I had problems with fitting my entire plan of my story into a short 1500 word document, so, after lots of thought I decided to use my prologue as my short story and the main base for my twine work. Sadly this meant that the scenes where Melissa would be taken to the asylum had to be cut out. I was actually really disappointed about this but looking back on it I realise that maybe I overestimated how short 1500 words actually is for a story and I was quite naive for trying to fit my plot into that.

What I have learned - 

 - How to write code and create paths in twine to produce a story with various outcomes.

- To take into consideration the word cap for any pieces of work before putting together a plot and story and adjust my ideas to complement this.

- To give myself plenty of time when it comes to creating stories with multiple variants because this can take much longer than expected when having to essentially write multiple story-lines.

- Lots of interesting facts about not just Schizophrenia, but mental illness as a whole which I never knew before hand.

Research - I knew from the beginning that I would have to do a load of research when I was writing about schizophrenia because I never truly understood the feelings someone with the disorder experiences.

I spent quite a lot of time looking into different media based around schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, and after watching different videos and films with a similar theme I started to get ideas for interactions and changes to implement into my story.

SuckerPunch - This is a movie based about a young girl who loses her mother to illness, and, after her step father snaps when everything in the will is left to the daughters he manages to frame the girl for his murder of her sister. The facility she is sent to is one where she and the other girls are treated like the property of the owner. Basically it’s an abusive asylum which was the exact premise that I had going forward.

TED Talk about schizophrenia - I watched Eleanor Longden’s TED talk about her struggles with schizophrenia while she was still at university and this gave me a new insight into how people with the disorder struggle with extreme emotions. She talked about how she began to hear voices in her head one day all of a sudden and how as time went on these voices started to become more violent, hectic and aggressive, even to the point where she would do things that they told her to do because she began to get so afraid. I felt like I could use these voices in my story to provide my character with options to choose from. 

Back in November I was given the task of creating my very own Choose your own adventure style game. Instantly I wanted to steer clear of the classic Fantasy style CYOA games where you play as a knight trying to save the princess and take my ideas into a more serious environment.

So after a lot of difficulty due to various reasons I finally managed to get into the Foley Suite at uni yesterday and spent all day recording all of the sound effects that would be supporting the voice lines.

While we were in the Foley Suite we came up with some pretty inventive ideas for recreating sounds that would usually not be doable, for example, I used a piece of metal and ran it along a corrugated rubber tube to create the sound of the buzz saw revving up.

Here is how I created some of the more difficult sounds:

Running/Jumping on Grass - Tapping feet in a pile of cassette film tape.

Boulder Rolling - Chair wheel rolling on hollow wood.

Boulder Smash - Dropping one cinder block onto another.

Buzz Saw - Running a metal bracket along a vacuum cleaner tube.

Cart Crash - Dropping the padded end of a metal desk leg onto some wood.

Climbing Metal Ladder - Tapping 2 fingers on a hollow metal pole.

Creaky Light Sound (Unused) - Rocking a rusty scooter back and forth.

Lever - Twisting a typewriter mechanism.

Tyre Bounce - Hitting the vacuum cleaner tube with some wood.

Metal Scraping - Dragging a hollow metal pole along a sandstone tile.

The other sounds for example jumping sounds on wooden floor were made by doing exactly that.

When I got home I realised that I had no sounds that could be used for the scene with the water. I initially had planned to do this by getting 3rd party sounds from an online sound bank, but after seeing some of my friends using their phones to record some sounds in the Foley Suite I realised that the sound quality wasn’t actually as bad as I had first thought, so, I filled up my bath tub with a shallow layer of water and used that to walk/run in to create splashing footsteps sounds. I also then recorded the sounds of the water draining away to create the effect of water flowing. I had to play around quite a bit in audacity to remove some of the background noise which comes with using a phone microphone to record but that was fine and didn’t take much time at all.

There were some sounds however that would have just been impossible for me to record myself, for example I had planned to record some glass smashing sounds in the Foley Suite but after thinking about it more I decided that I wasn’t confident that it would be safe. The mosquito buzzing sound was also way too difficult to create as there was no way I was going to find a mosquito by chance and have my recorder ready to go. Also the electric shorting out sound is too distinct of a sound and I didn’t think I had the ability to recreate this to give the same effect as the real thing would, therefore these sounds were taken from online.

I was really trying my best to not use sounds from online as much as I could, seeing as my project is predominately voice lines, however I can not create my own music that would fit this so perfectly so I borrowed the bicycle track from Pokémon Alpha Sapphire (and referenced of course!) to create the happy journey feel to the trailer. 

Speaking of references I had planned to do some more research into how you correctly state them but after asking some of my course-mates last night I understood it quite quickly. Although I was having trouble finding the initial author of the Pokémon track I used so I just referenced the company that made the game.

When it came to editing the actual sounds I had some previous experience with audacity thanks to using the program in Secondary school, A-level music tech, and also just some personal projects and messing around at home. However there were some things that I had to use youtube tutorials and guides for, for example cutting out background noise and echo from sounds.

For that I used this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10FFKl_0GSA

I needed to know how to cut out these sounds because the microphone which I was using to record my voice lines at home, as much as I love it, picks up so much background noise from random things so It had to be done or else I would have a tonne of static sounds in the background of my voice lines and the quality would have just been overall poor.

Luckily for me I have a friend who is doing a uni course which involves video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro, so any questions I had about using the software was a simple task of just asking her what I should do or how I should do something, this saved me so much time and hassle of trying to find specific answers on youtube or google (Thanks Mai). However I did have trouble adding in the still image of the references at the end of the trailer and she wasn’t available to help me, so, I managed to find this video for that 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SPzZMcRG1k

For help and reference for writing the script I looked at quite a few examples. At first I had planned to tell a story using the premise of the boy in the trailer talking alot about his journey, however after initially trying this I realised that the trailer itself cuts between scenes very fast and suddenly so this format didn’t really feel good for what I wanted, so, instead I went for some quick lines where they boy explains what is happening to him at that specific point in his journey and this seemed to fit much better to the flow of the trailer. After realising that I needed short quirky lines I looked at games like “The Stanley Parable” which does a great job of telling a story using narration about what a character is thinking at that time.

I also watched a lot of comedians that use one liners as their style for some inspiration because of the fast delivery. Milton Jones and Steven Wright were some of my personal favorites for this and I tried to have some of their style help me with my project. However after initial tries I had decided that my script didn’t even need to be comedy, even if it had some comedic value, because I had shifted to more of an adventure theme.

Overall I think the project was a success and also a nice challenge to take on. Looking back I would have actually liked to try and create the classic old school disney theme that I had initially planned to do when we were handed the brief, but I am proud with what I managed to create and the sound recording was actually really enjoyable, whether it was actually recording the sounds themselves, or thinking of ways to create more abstract sounds. Had I had oppurtunities I would have liked to recorded some more complex sounds in the Foley Suite, but, like I said in my earlier blog posts I had some unfortunate reasons for not being able to, however these would have just been a silver lining for me personally.

This week I have spent writing and iterating on the script for all of the voice lines that I plan to add into my trailer, and I think that I have reached a final copy. I just need to add them into adobe premiere and sync them to the video as best as I can. 

I had some struggles lately due to illness and other problems which stopped me being able to record my ambient sounds for the background but I plan to get into the foley suite as soon as possible to get those done. Luckily because most of my trailer will be based around the narrative and the voice lines I won’t have much to record in there.

I have found some sounds online for some of the effects before and after the voice lines, for example I have an alarm clock sound for the opening of the trailer which shows the boy’s start to his journey to school.

I had initially planned to make the sound of glass smashing in the foley suite at uni, but, after thinking about it for a while I thought this might be difficult and or dangerous, so I went with a sound from an online sound library for that.

I also spent some time this week looking into how to correctly write references to sounds and music that I have used for the project.

I plan to show my work to some friends and family and also some other people that they know in order to gain some more constructive feedback on what I’ve done so far.

Today was our first feedback for the work we had done so far on our limbo trailer project. Unfortunately I only had research and Ideas to show as I have not yet created any of the voice lines I had planned to implement. Because I plan to make my trailer have comedic and upbeat theme I intent to look heavily into comedy script writing and deliverance.

Hopefully this weekend I can get a draft of the script written up and, if possible, actually begin to record some of the lines so that I have some work to show on Monday for feedback. 

I have plans to use the Foley Suite next Friday to record most if not all of the background and ambient sounds that I will use. I already have plans for how I am going to achieve these sounds but I just need to get them recorded now.

I was given the task of creating a game based around the industrial revolution era, which was a massive transition to a new process of manufacturing in England between 1760 - ~1820.

My idea for the game would be a high intensity time based game which the player assumes the roll of a factory worker being assigned tasks of creating different things which you will be given in intervals and trying to complete them and dispatch them before time runs out. (See Overcooked).

The theme would be a very gritty dark color scheme with a cell shaded art style.

Certain levels will have environmental hazards where the player can die and have to restart the level.

Controls ---

(Controller would be necessary)

Thumbstick - Move character.

X/A - Assemble parts.

Square/X - Pick up objects.

Triangle/Y - Jump.

My game is planned to allow players to experience the hectic nature of factory work back in that time period while also providing a fun and arcade style of gameplay.