Lucidity Log 2: God Save the Queen

Save functionality was another feature that I was excited to work on, though I became way less enthusiastic as time went on. I already knew about player prefs in unity but I wanted to experiment with different methods of saving data. One of the first methods I tried was an XML Serializer script which I found on the unity wiki. It worked but took a while to figure out. Eventually it proved too unreliabe and my tech lead Justin recommended a unity plugin. I took a look at it but it didn't allow for specific data saving. It only allowed for saving a whole state of the game. Eventually I decided to stop making things hard for myself and just use player prefs, a decision that I am very glad that I made.

Picture of player placeholder and a red placeholder save point.

Lucidity Log 1: Getting Things to Move

My first Task for Lucidity was to make the player controller script. I was glad and also slightly surprised that I received such an important task. I started off by giving the capsule that was my place holder for the player model a character controller component. This was important because the player needed to be able to move smoothly on a surface but also need gravity so I didn't use a collider or rigidbody. At the time we were using Trello to handle tasks. Functionality that had to be included with this script was:

• Forward and Backward Movement.
• Strafing.
• Rotating.
• Jumping. 

I only had a few problems with rotation but otherwise all the other features came pretty easily. The problems with rotation came from a miscommunication about how the player was going to be controlled.I thought the player rotation was to be controlled with keys when it was supposed to be controlled with the mouse. Thankfully that eventually got worked out.

Picture of the player place holder in the basement level.

What is an RPG anyways?

When I was young I had never played a western role playing game. I had never played an Elder Scrolls game or Fable or Fallout. The RPGs that I grew up with were Pokemon and Mario RPGs. At the time I didn't know them as RPGs I just knew that I liked them. I first became aware of the term RPG after playing Fallout 3. It was a game the likes I had never played before. Fallout 3 had an open world that allowed your character to do whatever you wanted them to. You could do quests, you could explore, customize your character or murder everyone on sight. The Fallout 3 world was your oyster. I bring all of this up because I think the term RPG describes something that the majority of  video game "RPG"s don't actually have, and that is Role Playing. The game that was inspiration for all modern RPGs is a Pen and Paper RPG called Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons was the very first RPG and the reason that we call RPGs, "RPG"s today. In Dungeons and Dragons you play a custom made character. The player defines their story, stats, race and abilities and then during the game the player plays the Role of that character acting and speaking as if they were that character. That is the reason that D&D was called a Role Playing game. Not because of the mechanics of the game but because players would act out their own characters. I doesn't make sense to me why we would call Pokemon an RPG when the player doesn't act out or give their character their own story. I think that what happened in the gaming industry is that when developers were making their games based off pen and paper games they categorized their games under the RPG genre even though the only thing they had in common were the mechanics and not actually the reason for which RPGs were named. Games that can actually be called true RPGs are games like Fallout or Skyrim where you can give your character back story and choose their race and class. I propose that we need to rename the RPG genre. The term RPG is misleading and Inaccurate.

~Jon

Language Superiority? ...Why?

As a young video game developer and programmer, I've been able to get my hands on a few programming languages throughout my developer career. I've tried Java, JavaScript, C++, C# and Game Maker Language. I am not sure why but there seems to be a lot of hostility between people who use more "Difficult" languages and people who prefer "Easier Languages".

 I often hear people bragging about how C# is superior to JavaScript or GML but I don't understand where all that pride comes from. I've recently realized that almost all programming languages I've used  with the exceptions of file format and syntax is written and works almost the exact same way. Declaring a variable in C++ is just like declaring a variable in JavaScript if you know the Syntax. So is calling a function or writing a condition. It is because so many programming languages share the same constitutions that after you learn your first language all the others come so naturally to you. I am glad that this is true because it makes learning and translating languages that much easier. I will admit that that some languages may have more applications than others but that does not mean that the others don't have valid uses also. I've heard a bunch of team members of mine talk about how Java Script is useless when programming in unity 3d but the majority of tutorials that exist online are JavaScript tutorials. The project that we are working on is using majorly C# because of the games overall complexity but that does not mean that JavaScript should be forever ignored. If we ever worked on a simpler project, using JavaScript could most likely benefit us, because it would increase the speed at which we worked. I don't think that certain languages should be considered unusable all together because if they are used properly they can be far superior to the more advanced languages.

~Jon 

The Ideal Length of a Game

I came to a strange realization just recently.  I've noticed lately that games that tell a precise narrative are too long. Games like Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham Asylum and the Metal Gear Games are awesome however they are very lengthy games that were only able to hold my interest for about two hours. The strangest part of this though was that the two hours that I played them, they were great. Why would I want to stop playing a game that i thought was fun and had a great narrative? The only answer that I can really think of was that my attention span was too small.

This is just my experience but I love to customize my character in game I love Minecraft, Skyrim and Saints Row the Third. All games where I can make my character whatever I want and make the character that I want to play.  Thats not to say that I don't enjoy all games like this. I loved Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock Infinite, both games where you play a well developed character. Though I did feel like those game were too long and werent paced appropriately. Bioshock Infinite is close to a 10 hour game but I feel like this game could have been seperated  into two or three hour increments that leave good starting up and leaving off points. I think that games should be paced more like movies or tv shows then the current 9 hour gaming epics we have now. Some games already follow the pattern that describe. If you look at the The Walking Dead game series they have been very successful making games that last around 2 to 3 hours. Also the walking dead is very story driven. If the entire walking dead series had been released in one package it would not have been as effective as it had been.

 The pacing would have had been ridiculous and players would put the game down before the end and possibly forgetting details in between the time that they pick it up again. Also this deal would also be more appealing to the player because instead of having to buy full price game they can buy the first episode for 10 dollars and then addictively buy the other 5 episodes as they are released. More episodical game releases would definetly improves the quality of game that the player is having as well as be benifical for the developer.

~ Jon

My Reflection on CSG 110

After being thoroughly reemed out by my professor during my CSG 110 class I decided that i needed to reflect on all of the things that went wrong this semester. One of the biggest fuckups that happened this semester was that our group did not kick people out who were dragging down the motivation of the rest of the group. This was definetly the root of all the problems in the group. Most of my team wasnt motivated to make cuddle bloodies. and that consequently brought down the moral of the people who had been keeping moral. People wouldnt do the things they were told to do and many people stopped showing all together. I learned that i need learn how to let people know they suck because im awful at that. If a person is sucking ass they deserve to know it. I learned this semester that the buisness end of game development is by far the most important because at the end of the day the guy with the most money will be able to do more cooler stuff than anyone else. Even if i am not going to be working with the buisness side very often i still need to learn all the buisness stuff because I need to know how and why the industry runs. It is also very important for me to learn agile which i felt that i should have taken it more seriously. If i could redo this semester I would definetly start out more enthusiastic than i did  this semester. I would do this in the hopes that it would inspire other to work hard and care more about what we were working on. Also I think that if more people cared they wouldnt be so layed back about people not working and they would work harder to get rid of them. I look forward to working with Raid+ on Lucidity this summer and next semester. It appears that their team functions much better than Firehelm did.

Wow! Leadership Is Important

Walking into matc as a noob to video game development I thought that much of my education would be focused on actually making the games but as it turns out the most difficult part of making games isnt actually building the games. One of the harshest lessons I learned was that in game development leadership is key. Right from the start I realized that we didnt have any born leaders on team firehelm. At first an awkward lad named Kevin took up the lead position just because he thought it would be funny, but he was dreadful. I decided to take up Kevins position and pretty much became leader. I was the CEO of my csg 110 group. I was team lead of my 115 group. At first I started off strong. I researched a few things about being a good leader and i was enthusiastic to start creating new ideas for games we could make. About half way through semester I saw that moral was dropping fast. This was where I made a fatal mistake. I lost moral too. I was only going to class for the grade and so were my classmates. If I could go back and do things differently i would definetly be more enthusiastic. Another way that I failed as a leader was that nobody feared me which ment that nobody respected me either. I wish that I had fired all the people that fucked up and didnt deliver work consistently I wish that as a leader I had been more organized and kept track of peoples absences. At the time though I didnt realize that things were so bad. It was only after seeing how our opposing team Raid+ functions did i see how screwed up my team was. Raid+ had been structured just like an actual company. And they got rid of people that didnt work. I am disapointed that my team fell apart but im excited to work with all these hardworking people next semester.

The Evolution of Cuddle Bloodies

My group project for my Vicom 110 class is that me and my group have to design a game that will make more money than the opposing team that shares the class with me. Our Idea  was that we could market a free to play first person shooter where you play cute cuddly teddy bears. The characters you were playing were really cute but did terribly violent things. This idea was sort of inspired by the show happy tree friends because we needed a theme that was likable but memorable. The gameplay hook of the game would be a destructible limb system where a players would be penalized if if they lost a limb. For example if one of the bears lost his arm the players accuracy would decrease. The way that this game was to generate revenue was that we would charge for cosmetic upgrades similar to League of Legends. Me and our one artist did some concept work for  what a bears would look like and the rest of the group discussed what classes we would have in the game.

We eventually realized that this game was best played in a third person perspective so that the player can see their character constantly and be more encouraged to upgrade their characters appearance. We eventually decided on 6 classes. The soldier( basic class), the cyborg(The heavy), The sniper, The ninja(stealthclass), The seamstress(medic class), The scientist(the engineer class). Each of these classes has a differing play and visual style.

WID Journal 4

Its been a few weeks since my last blog post and the deadline for Wait Im Dead? is drawing closer. The 16th of may is portfolio night and the night that we will be showcasing WID. I feel that in terms of art we are still very much behind. I havnt seen any models for ground or flying enemies and there is still no background image just a solid blue color. There is also no model for the skeletons boomerang attack and I hope that the designers will come up with much of this stuff when i go to class today.
I myself have been working on the ground enemies because it seemed that the previous enemy scripts had been lost somwhere or had been deemed unacceptable for some reason. I based the scripts of the normal enemies on the timer type scripts of the main boss. The designers will place enemies down in an area and then adjust the timer so that the enemy wont ever move out of bounds. If this game were larger I would have written a script that detects if there is an object in front of the enemy and that will turn it around but seeing as this game is so small i figured that manually setting each enemies timer wouldnt be such a hassle.
I also finished the boss about a week ago i couldnt get him to ever jump so the designers said it was ok to just have the boss move back and forth in the arena and then damage the player on contact. I really wish i could have gotten the boss to jump but we are running out of time.
~Jon

WID Journal 3

Ive completed the the projectile script that I talked about in journal 2. I changed it however so that the projectile works like a boomerang to be more consistent with the weapon that the designers had in mind. The way that the boomerang works is that when the boomerang is instantiated a timer is set and when that timer hits zero the direction reverses. My new task is to program the boss for level 1. Like the projectile the boss is also going to be timer based. At this rate however this is going to be the only boss in the game. I've worked on  programming bosses before in works that I've made in game maker and even with a drag and drop interface it still takes some time to program. Right now ive got the boss to walk left and right on a timer, ive programmed the game object that triggers the battle, and ive added the colliders to the boss as shone below.

I still have to add the beserk mode where the boss follows the player. Im not sure how well this is going to work with the timer system or if i have time to even add beserk mode at all. After having a meeting with the designers i realize that many of them are working very hard actually. Though i still wish they knew the difficulty to code some of the things they design.

~Jon