#sharedplaygrounds

This is a shot of Alleylight inside the Unity Editor. On the right is what the player sees, minus the water texture. On the left is how the scene actually looks, outside the bounds of the screen and with added perspective. In the middle is the island, which is a two-dimensional with a three-dimensional black capsule embedded in it. On the same three-dimensional plane, you’ll see the many vertical bars, each one spawning a specific floating object in a specific direction at random intervals. Each of those objects are also two-dimensional. This was done so that the workflow was easier on the artists, but also because we wanted the artstyle to be simple and understandable, so we made everything two-dimensional. The reason there still is a three-dimensional aspect, however, is purely technical, and partly because I was too lazy to deal with two-dimensional layers when it was just as easy, and perhaps even more organized, to fake layering in three dimensions.

Surrounding the spawners is a large grey border. That border is the “killbox”, and it deletes anything that strays into it. Essentially, this makes sure that anything that floats out of the screen doesn’t continue to exist and slow the app down. Instead, it gets deleted and makes way for new objects to spawn.

Finally, the grey plane behind everything is the “screen” that the water texture is displayed on. It’s translucent, so that the seaweed objects behind it show as if they’re underwater. Again, this was the cheap way to make the water texture layer correctly, in such a way that the island and floating objects appeared above the waterline, and the seaweed appeared below. This also all made for some collision failsafes, as all the collisions between objects are still calculated as if they were three-dimensional (albeit with movement on the Z axis locked, ensuring that objects can’t float into or away from the screen).

Today I worked on different ways of texturing the icebergs (hence the replica models). I was playing around with slightly different tones, edge paint distribution and differing levels of surface detail.  As a stylized game, finding a particular look that is simple yet has enough detail is important. As you can see with the large iceberg it has a stylized tone and soft edges, however it is very simple and lacks color variance.

As you can see below there are 3 icebergs, the same base models but minor differences each time. What I learnt from experimenting and iterating with the icebergs was - adding stronger white tones it tends to look less like a ‘rock’ and more like an iceberg.

So out of the 3 icebergs tell me what you guys think below in the comment section, drop a like, subscribe, share and check out my Patreon- Thanks guys!

Yesterday we set up our game for assessment. The end of semester four has arrived and we are getting this project marked on various points by the lecturers in BCT.

On Monday morning I got up early and arrived in studio to a bombsite. It was a complete mess everywhere with students rushing around getting their projects up and running for assessment at midday. We had most of the necessary parts already there and as more team members arrived we worked on getting things like the large TV display in place and decorated. As we had no wall we had to hang our posters from the display which I think is a bit tacky but it was our only solution as the pedestal we reserved never arrived. The business cards were printed nicely and we got heaps but the design includes no contact details. This was a very big mistake as they are basically glorified PostIt notes now.

Others were working on packaging the game and getting it up and running on the laptop. I basically went between everyone and helped where I could. We were working right up to the end in a very stressful final sprint to get the game working. Eventually we did with not a moment to spare.

We then had lunch and celebrated for the rest of the day and (some of us) into the night. Here at Project Kowhai we work hard and play hard.

To quote the end of my conceptual statement:

Overall I am happy with the game. There a few things we wanted to do if we had more time and skill such as animals, a few more mechanics, a larger map and true photogrammetry assets and environments. I have been able to learn a lot about Unreal Engine and partial open world level design as well as specific things like material and tech art visual scripting and particle effect manipulation. The most significant thing I have gotten out of this project however is my experience of leading this team. My skills as a people manager have grown significantly and I have been exposed to a more corporate business focused aspect of game design which can often be overlooked. It has also made me familiar with all the different sub skills and responsivities within the team on a broad strokes, holistic level. 

This has been a great project with and even better team. 10/10 would game develop again.

Over the past 15 weeks, I’ve been working on Project Kōwhai, a survival game set in the New Zealand bush and intended to teach middle-senior school students about safety and survival in the wild. I have been developing it as part of Kōwhai Studio, made up of Xavier Cooney, Garian Leighton-Anderson, Nathan Newland, Kavita Singh and myself.

We largely decided on the concept of the game at the beginning of the project. I suggested a game set in New Zealand, recognising a lack of games set in New Zealand outside of sports games and games with a variety of locations around the world (as seen in Wikipedia’s “List of video games set in New Zealand” (2015)). After throwing around several ideas such as a walking simulator and a text-based narrative game, we decided on the idea of a tramper getting lost in the bush as a premise for a survival game.

We decided to use Unreal Engine 4 to develop the game, for the simple reason that we wanted to learn how to use it, having learnt to use the Unity engine last semester. It lent itself very well to the realism of the project, allowing us to have very detailed graphics and sound effects, as well as letting us mock up mechanics very quickly and easily with Blueprints.

When planning out the project at the beginning, I proposed that we split the development time we had into 4 roughly equal portions of about 1 month each. My plan was for us to make 3 prototypes of our game, show them at the monthly Auckland Game Development meetup, get feedback, and incorporate that feedback into the next iteration of the game. The final portion would be focusing on polishing our game, which would have passed our MVP by that point. As I said at the time in a blog post, I organised our time like this out of lack of knowing what might be better. Our development schedule followed this schedule very roughly. We didn’t reach our MVP until the final week, there was little elaboration on exactly what our first, second and third prototypes would consist of, and the prototypes we had developed bore little resemblance to what we planned to have. I think that this is because we never truly worked towards the next GDM or our next prototype, but always worked towards the final outcome. In the future, I believe we should work towards more clearly defined prototypes with less developed ideas of what the final project should look like. I also think that we should allow more time that we think we will need for prototypes, so that we can try to finish them before the deadline.

This was the first time I developed a game with a group as large as six people - in my previous game development experience, I was always the main (or only) developer, with responsibility for and control over almost every aspect of the project. This project taught me a lot about game development in teams. I learnt the importance of:

Conventions in coding so that all team members can add on to and read each other’s code – Mark and I found it relatively easy to read each other’s code because of the visual nature of Blueprints, but there was still need for consistency, and there would have been much more need had we used standard text-based programming.

Communication between team members – development of the game went most smoothly when everyone had a consistent idea of what the project was heading towards and what we were aiming for, and stalled when everyone did their own work by themselves with no idea of what else was going on.

Having an agenda for all team members to carry out, on a daily, weekly, and per-iteration basis – while Trello kept track of some tasks that needed doing, I didn’t always know what I needed to be doing to help with the project. Making the goals and steps to reach them clearer would have helped me greatly with this issue. While I think I did an okay job of setting tasks for myself, it would have been better for them to be more centralised and set for the entire group rather than just for myself.

Keeping track of what every group member is doing and what still needs to be done – a similar issue to the previous one. There were times that I thought jobs had been done that hadn’t, and there could just as easily been times that I did work that had already been done.

Clear and organised structure in teams – each team member’s role was more ambiguous at the beginning of the project, which led to more ambiguous direction and less clear expectations from individual team members. Once clear roles in the team emerged and Nathan Newland took creative control, the group was more able to focus on their roles.

A clearly defined concept from the start that all team members agree on – it took us a while to decide on the educational nature of the game, and until we did, little work was done on the project due to a lack of purpose.

So short I don’t even need to compress the blog display length.

Tuesday

Fine tooth combed the level pulling trees down to the landscape and painting more landscape texture. Added some tree variety to the end tp zones.

Thursday

Implemented the picnic table at tp zone 8 or 9. The large open plain area. I had to invert the roughness with a 1- node on it's materials. I placed it beside the large field rocks. I then added a beer bottle and a tin of beans. I also added a radio that was recently modelled.

Garian added more noises.

Nathan tweeked some mechanics.

Zav and I printed a test A3 of the art poster. It has some printing lines but it was a good test.

Garian Leighton-Anderson, Sound Designer, Foliage Designer.

Conceptual Statement

“Project Kōwhai is a survival game set in the New Zealand bush, developed to educate people about the realities of surviving in the bush. The player is taught indirectly, through experimenting with the game’s realistic mechanics and learning the best way to survive through failing in a safe environment and being encouraged to try again through the entertainment value of the game.” (Project Kowhai Game Design Document, 2017). Being lost in the New Zealand wilderness is nothing to be taken lightly and Project Kowhai aims to educate people in the correct survival methods to employ when one is suddenly dropped into such a situation. Becoming lost can happen suddenly and without any preparation so it’s important to have prior understanding of survival to be able to bring a degree of familiarity to whatever you may face in an unfamiliar environment.

Project Kowhai is essentially an environment simulation made to look and feel realistic. This is achieved through realistic graphics, sounds, and game mechanics typically associated with survival games such as hunger, thirst, and body temperature. All the mechanics are constructed to replicate how they would work in real life. These mechanics come together to affect certain aspects of the player character’s wellbeing. For example, the more you run, the quicker you get exhausted, and must return to walking. Although not to quite realistic scale, these mechanics add to the simulation aspect of the game and to the intention of giving people realistic expectations as they play and fail and try again. The player is intended to survive though playing and learning and figuring out the best things to do. This is to do with the idea of ‘learning through doing’ rather than teaching by telling.

One main aspect of Project Kowhai is the lack of a main user interface that players in the gaming community would come to expect from a survival game. This aims to provide players with only what they would know if they were in the situation. For example, there would be no visual feedback indicating how hungry or thirsty you were, a person would just feel it. To substitute, Project Kowhai relies on the use of sound cues to tell the player whether they are hungry or thirsty etc.

It was discussed to use HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) audio for realistic three-dimensional sound interpretation for the player. HRTF was successfully incorporated in the project and adds to the realistic feeling of the environments however in the process of packaging the game it causes issues and all audio becomes stereo panning. This makes the game a little less real feeling, but it is something that you wouldn’t miss unless you were looking (or listening) for it. This leads us to explore and discover how to package Unreal Engine games with the Steam Audio plug in that was used to achieve this audio effect. All audio for the project was created using Foley techniques and music making techniques. The main music for the game is used to give and uneasy feel while blending into the background of the environmental ambience. This is another if the instances where realism was sacrificed for feeling. Although not exactly how I intended, the audio for Project Kowhai still encapsulates the main purpose which was to add to the realistic experience in the New Zealand Wilderness.

Contextual Statement

Project Kowhai sits amidst the likes of Fire watch and other open world games while developing and incorporating survival based mechanics to develop the educational aspect of the Project. Inspiration in the development of the environments was drawn from games such as Fire watch (2016), Tomb Raider (2013), The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), Battlefield Bad Company 2 (2010), and Assassin’s Creed III (2012). As described by Nathan Newland. Educational aspects are inspired by survival programmes such as Man Vs Wild. Specifically, the New Zealand editions of the show where Bear Grylls demonstrates how to survive in the New Zealand wilderness. We took the open world wilderness aspect from these games and combined them with an educational approach to produce a New Zealand relevant ‘Interactive Educational Experience’. Rather than for purely educational purposes, Project Kowhai is intended to be a ‘Serious Game’. A serious game is a game developed with the purpose of being useful to the player (Girard, Ecalle, & Magnan. 2012). The game aims to educate people to the realities of New Zealand wilderness survival. According to Chalmers & Debattista, 2009, serious games that teach people situational experiences through simulation must have a high level of realism for the player to associate those simulations to the real world. This was one of the reasons for Project Kowhai to be based on real world locations and environments, and to take on realistic graphics and survival mechanics that apply to real world experiences. In terms of foliage, all tree and plant models are based on New Zealand indigenous species of Plantae. Using such foliage added to the New Zealand based environment and learned through game play testing at events such as the Game Development Meetup that there was an emotional investment with players from New Zealand given that It’s set in their home land, a very under used environment in the game making community. The need for realistic graphics in the game enforced one of the Team’s goals which was “to capture New Zealand’s natural beauty and increase its appeal.” (Young, N. 2017).

The audio For Project Kowhai was intended to be a heavy lifter in terms of realism. For instance, in lieu of a visual HUD, the player would gain feedback on their wellbeing based on sound cues. Also, the environments heavily depend on accurate audio representation to enforce the realism; a key element in the development of Project Kowhai being a 'Serious Game’. The game’s environmental audio is all based on New Zealand natural environments. Foley in the gaming industry is quite like that of picture film. Foley is a technique developed by Jack Donovan Foley, which is basically the imitation of sound to later add to a film to be more believable. Inspiration for the game’s sound track came from the likes of Fire watch (2016) OST and Journey (2012) OST and according to the mood that Project Kowhai went for, was made to feel eerie and tense.

    References:

-          Cooney, X. Leighton-Anderson, G. Newland, N. Singh, K. Yeoh, M. Young, N.  (2017). Project Kowhai. Auckland: AUT University. Unfinished Project.

-          Girard, C, Ecalle, J & Magnan, A. (2013). Serious games as new educational tools: How effective are they? A meta-analysis of recent studies. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29, 207–219.

-          Chalmers, A & Chalmers, K. (2009). Level of Realism for Serious Games. UK: University of Warwick.

-          Hibbard, M. (2015, 18 March 2015). Recording Foley and Sound Effects: The Fundamentals. [Weblog]. Retrieved 28 October 2017, from https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/recording-foley-and-sound-effects-the-fundamentals/

-          Baumgartner et al. (2006). The emotional power of music: How music enhances the feeling of affective pictures. Brian Research, 1075(1), 151-164.

-          Pitkanen, P. (2013). Creating and Designing Sound Effects for A Mobile Game. Finland: Tampere University of Applied Sciences.

-          Campo santo. (2016). Firewatch. : Panic.

Yesterday, I thought that I was pretty much done with the project and that I almost didn’t need to come in today. I made the player character die and return to the menu, implemented most of the sounds, and just generally cleaned everything up.

I thought I’d just pop in to quickly playtest and be out. Easy, right?

WAIT CRAP I SAID THE E-WORD I’M SORRY ALDO PLEASE FORGIVE ME

I’d programmed the hunger system so that it took the player half an hour to die, I’d made it so you couldn’t die of cold, I’d implemented about half of the sounds I needed to, and just as a bonus, the water detection was munted again.

I fixed all that, though, so don’t worry about it. There’s probably not even a need.

I’m focusing all my attention on my statements now. I’ve finished my conceptual one, but my contextual needs writing, the poster needs copy, and I need to write all the supplementary stuff for ARDN612. Fun fun fun for everyone.

I’m coming in early on Monday to try to package the project one last time, seeing as I’m still the only one who knows how (although anyone else should be able to do it, as long as they have the right software and aren’t using Nathan’s computer). I’ll probably come in about 10 o’clock to make sure we have enough time, although I suspect 11:30 would be fine.

And the great thing is, I can’t pull another all-nighter because I don’t have the project on my laptop

The last three weeks have flown by so fast! I am sitting here, coming to the end of the last week of uni - with mostly of my work done. The only stuff our group needs to do now is to set up our studio - add all the extra bits we have needed to complete such as the process book, children’s book, posters printed etc.. I have also realised that this could potentially be my last blog post for the semester, which is a scary thought.

A little update on what has happened over the last 3 weeks leading up to submission (which is 4 days away):

Website - Our friend, Walter has kindly designed and coded our website for us who specialises in this and gets paid for doing tones of design work. He developed a website in a few days that showcased our personality as individuals, as well as the brand, Doodle Dolls.

Children’s book - Katriel and Sophie have been working on this section, with Kat doing all of the drawings and colouring, and Sophie getting it binded this week. 

Packaging - Sophie was working hard on completing this, though she unfortunately didn’t feel well near the end of week 12 - therefore Amanda took over and started to design the inside and cover pages for the packaging. We kept to the same colour scheme as the website. 

Statement Writing - our group managed to write up the first 500 words of each statement that was the same - to then go into the next few hundred talking about our individual processes and concepts/research. Ben gave us a lot of feedback on this and stated that writing the first section as a group would be the best way to keep it consistent. 

Portfolio/blog Update - I have updated my portfolio, with a new design and new information on Doodle Dolls. I am currently updating my blog.

Posters - This task has taken a lot longer to process, where I have gone around in circles for the past week developing these. After developing our three posters (Two freestanding poster banners that will stand on the side of our exhibition + a huge wall banner with all of our contact info on. All posters will be 600x1600mm and will be printed externally), we were able to gather feedback from a couple of lecturers. Ben’s feedback was by far the most critical and comprehensive. We did unfortunately gather this feedback after we sent the posters to the printers, resulting in a stressful email to the company asking them to delay our printing until we could make the changes. We learnt our lesson straight away - to wait for all feedback before we sent them off to printers. About 24 hours later, Amanda and I came up with new and improved versions. We don’t think they are perfect because we were pushing for time, but we hope the lecturers especially Ben, appreciates the improvement.

Process Book - This was my job over the last two weeks, which included the collation of everyones write ups for each section of the book (we had roughly 80 pages worth of content - including images and references). This process was also a lengthy one, where I individually designed each page for the book, labelling each file in order so I could combine the pdf’s, and then print for my first iteration to take back to the team and get any feedback. A few things were changed, though we kept a lot of what Ben’s feedback was from the posters, and I tired to implement certain aspects into the book, to follow the theme and communication. This will be getting printed tomorrow in time for Monday’s deadline. 

The final bits and pieces we are finishing off now is our construction of our exhibition and the final bits like printing out our statements for assessment etc. 4 more days left and we will be all done! Very excited!