#lucaspope

Sfortunatamente, molti dei giochi basati su engine Unity hanno qualche problema con la riproduzione di audio, musica ed effetti sonori su determinati sistemi, in particolar modo Windows. A me, fino a questo momento, è capitato con due giochi: Return of the Obra Dinn di Lucas Pope e Hollow Knight di Team Cherry. La mia esperienza mi ha fatto capire che il difetto è molto probabilmente legato a una particolare incompatibilità tipica del motore Unity con alcuni driver hardware presenti sul sistema, motivo per cui ho deciso di scrivere questo articolo a beneficio degli altri giocatori che dovessero imbattersi in questo articolo.

Driver audio

La prima cosa da verificare, ovviamente, è il comparto audio del proprio sistema: è molto importante aggiornare tutti i driver audio e risolvere eventuali conflitti nel caso in cui il sistema monti più di una scheda audio e/o utilizzi cuffie, altoparlanti surround o altre interfacce basate su connessione USB o Bluetooth.

Asus Motherboard

‘Papers, Please’ creator debuts ‘Return of the Obra Dinn’

Return of the Obra Dinn, the first-person mystery from Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope, is now available. The game has been in the works for some time, with Pope revealing the project and releasing an early demoback in 2014, and it features a rather distinct aesthetic, due to Pope’s use of 1-bit rendering. “I’d like to capture the detailed black and white look of old Mac games in a…

You can download KLUB 99 here : https://toothandclaw.itch.io/klub-99

It’s been a while since I've updated the blog so I decided to do a little write upon a small project I did over the course of 5/6 days. I was recently playing one of my favorite Indie titles from the last few years called Papers Please. Created by Lucas Pope, Paper Please is a dystopian-esque passport/document checking game. Players are required to check documents of People trying to cross the border into the glorious Arstotska.  You have to check for various things like passport legitimacy, Visas and other documents. If you haven’t heard or seen this game I implore you to check it out. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds.

Link to Papers Please on Steam : http://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/

So as I was playing Papers Please I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to see if I could whittle down some of the gameplay features into a small mini game. After all, the best way I’ve found to learn how to design games is to cut down a game to its core features and focus on those. Instead of constantly adding features I focus down on chosen elements and work towards making them fun and user friendly. So, I decided on a theme that would best suit and simplified version of Papers Please. Instead of a Border crossing, I used a Club entrance. Then in place of a Passport officer, a bouncer/security guard who would be checking ID’s. The simple premise of KLUB 99 soon emerged into a shorter and more focused version of the Papers Please campaign. There’s five days until New Years Eve 1999, the Club owes debt collectors $10,000. You must earn this money over the course of these nights or else the Club will be shut down resulting in a terrible New Years Eve party. Winning (raising the $10,000 by the end of Night 5 or before) will result in a successful party and unlocking a High score mode where you must deal with as many People as you can in small time frame.

Identification cards are obviously a little more simplified than passports and contain less information. So the first thing I did was write Random name generator (for aesthetic purposes), a random date generator for the Date of Birth and Expiry date and finally an Occupation generator. I quickly started developing the logic for Score, gameplay, letting people in/Telling them to go away etc.

For the actual gameplay there are a couple things to take into consideration: The Person’s DOB, the expiry date on the card, the cards Logo and finally if the Person is drunk or not. Letting a person in while any of these things are not entirely in order can result in a pay(score) cut and an a strike. Three strikes result in you having to restart the night and a deduction of $2000. Letting people correctly will amount to more Money and better scores.

I didn’t focus too much on the aesthetics of the game as I wanted to keep it fairly “Old” looking or like something that would have been a cheap DOS game back in the day.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with the result. The game was more of a “Could I actually do something like that?” kind of experiment more than anything.  I don’t really ever do logic heavy games, so this was my real first foray into something like that. Hopefully this is the first of a few “Post Mortem” type posts to come to this blog.

Till next time,

The main character from Papers Please (PC, August 2013) developed by Lucas Pope, an American citizen living in Saitama, Japan.