GDP2 - Grind Quest: Objectives

My top ten favourite games of all time would be the following (orders do not matter):


1. Eternal Fighter Zero

2. Melty Blood Series




3. Guilty Gear Series
      
 
4. Dead or Alive Series

5. Portal 26. Pokemon Series7. WarioWare8. Rhythm Heaven9. League of Legends10. OutLast

The above list is my ten favourite games at this point of time. As you may notice, I am a huge fan in fighting game. That is because I enjoy seeing how characters move and fight in a fancy way. In a fighting game, I am interested in seeing how unique each characters move/ fight and how they affect in making combos.

For Dead or Alive, Guilty Gear, Melty Blood, and Eternal Fighter Zero, they all have great combo system, combos are easy to make but hard to master, and each character generates different looking combos. In Dead or Alive, the rock-paper-scissors system really helps to present the characters and enhance the gameplay a lot. It also gives players opportunity to study the opponents' moves in order to counter, which is more flexible compare to other 3D fighting games such as Street Fighters, Tekken, or Virtual Fighters, etc. In Guilty Gear, all characters move are very creative and well presented with the use of body language and tools(eg: weapon, animal, trap). It also has some of the best fighting character designs I have seen so far. For Melty Blood, it shares similar quality with Guilty Gear in a different aspect. The character designs are rather common and simple, but I can tell there is a lot of work put into their moveset designs. The animation is also very smooth and each of them flows well with each other, hence the combo you make is always fascinating to look at. Although the sprites are done in lower amount of pixels than many other games, the effects and backgrounds are well designed and defined with good quality. Last but not least, for Eternal Fighter Zero, one of the earliest fighting games made in 2000's, it borrows characters from different anime and turn them into fighting characters. The designers did an amazing job on the movesets of characters even for those who do not seem to fight in their anime, such as a musician, a typical mother, or a sleeping person. Besides the impressive moveset design, the fighting system is also very exciting. Many of the attacks are pretty short, therefore, it requires players' quick reaction in order to make the combo lasts. Overall, I like how fighting game presents their characters through the way they move/fight; the more creative the better it is, and the combo system has to be easy to understand(but not as easy as just pressing the same button like Naruto or Persona4), but hard to master(it takes time to study each move and arrange them together to make combo lasts longer).

Besides fighting game, I also like different types of games that are creative and able to provoke many ideas or imagination to players. I found these elements in games like WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven, which they are very creative in their gameplay and how they present through the use of graphic and design; the style is very cute too. :D

For Portal 2 and Outlast, they have very special game mechanic, storyline, and interesting puzzles. Portal 2's gameplay is fantastic and the story is very well presented along the game. On the other hand, Outlast's story might not be as strong, but the atmosphere and the use of camera are used very effectively to provide an excellent thrilling experience.

For pokemon, it is a great RPG game. The experience players can have from it is just simply amazing. Players can capture pokemons, pet them, organize them, use them to compete with other NPC or players, explore the map along them, socialize with other players with them; you can just do so many things with pokemons. 

Lastly, I like League of legends because the game play is constantly changing depends on the players, the items they use, the composition of the team, and most importantly the champion they use. When two teams filled with intelligence players playing against each other,  the possibility is endless. Therefore, players would never get bored of it. Moreover, the art of characters are very well-done to match each of their lore, therefore, I like it more than other RTS game.

Overall, the similarity I find in my favourite games is that they have to be creative, visual appealing, and best if possible, though-provoking.

GDP2 - Knowledge Keeper Quest #2

So last class we had a guest speaker, Alston Tan, to talk about his internship experience in Ubisoft. Over the summer, he made a game, Shine(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvpms2dL2Kw), in a team of 37 people. During his presentation, he talked about all aspects about the internship, how to register, what are the benefits, what would be good to do and what would be not in a team work environment, etc. Basically, it is an amazing opportunity for any game dev student to have before getting into the industry. Especially for Ubisoft as Alston mentioned, people who have participated the internship would have a higher chance than other people to join the company not only because of their skills but also their personality and how effectively they perform in a team. The entire presentation during the lecture was very informative about the internship and made me very excited about it.

In order to participate this internship, we have to make a prototype of a game and submit it through the school. Team who wins the major categories awards would be guarantee a spot for every member in the team, however, they also select outstanding individual from other teams to form the finally team for the internship project.

So I am really excited about it and hope I can participate when the time is here. In a game development team, my best skills lies in 2D art, this mostly includes concept art and texture. In order to meet the industry level, I look up to the requirements for senior concept artist in Bioware, which they concept artist to be able to do the followings:

• character design
• interior design
• vehicle design
• environment design
• creature design
• and possibly HUD

environemnt design for GDW3

character layout for GDW3

character design for GDW3

My best interest in concept art lies in character design, however, I should start trying other areas of art to eventually meet the industry standard. Besides 2D art, I am also passionate to be a 3D artist in a development team, however, since I am learning more in-depth about modelling technique this year, I will be focus on learning it while mastering my 2D art skills as preparation. 

Game Engine Design & Implementation - Blog#2

There was one class we got the Doom engine and we tried to see how they do things in a game engine. Later on that day, I was hoping to see how it would work and how is it different from the game that we are making for GDW. So I started to discuss it with my fellow team member, Michael(@MikeDaProgramma). One thing he brought up was the culling function.

Culling function have impact on the efficiency of the game as it determines what is going to be drawn on the screen. Whether it is a first-person shooting game(eg: Quake) or third-person view(eg: GTA), many objects are loaded to screen and ready to be drawn. But how do we know what objects need to be drawn on the screen? A first-person view and a third-person view may use different culling methods. For example, a game like Doom may use portal culling and a game like GTA may implement occlusion culling.

Last year GDW, we did it by setting a radius around the character. Anything within the radius will be drawn and anything outside of it will be remove from the screen. This worked for us because we had a top-down view; this will not work for a third-person view.

As the person moves to the left, the chair disappears, apple stays on the screen, and the kitty enters the scene.

This year, we want to make a big city involves with many geometries in the environment. So what would be an ideal way of doing it? We discussed that it could be done using occlusion culling, described in the following diagrams.

Since the building is in front of the camera, it is going to be drawn, but not the tree that is being cover at the back.

Although the building blocks most of the tree, part of it can still be seen on the camera, therefore, the tree will be drawn too.

Since we are building a city, there will be lots of tall building that will cover many other objects behind it that does not need to be drawn. Therefore, if we can decide what should be drawn and what does not, we can definitely optimize the system and speed of doing things(eg: rendering). There are third part libraries that are dedicated to solve this problem, for example, Umbra 3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYZqlBzt_dU). However, since it costs thousands of dollars, it is not an option for us. By culling geometry that cannot be seen, we can signifcantly lessen wasted GPU usage allowing us to put more effects(eg: more lights, particles).

GDP2 - Emotional Contagion

Last time I played a game that have gripped me and moved you emotionally was Outlast. Outlast is a first person horror game developed by indie studio Red Barrels.

I like this game a lot because it can deliver an extremely thrilling experience to the players. The first-person view really gets players into the game and the textures are very realistic and well-done. There is also no HUD in regular mode and it maximizes the first-person experience with the least distraction on the screen.

In game screenshot

What make this game stands out from other horror games I have played before is the camera vision mode. During the game, players often have to travel in the dark, by dark I mean pitch dark where you cannot see a thing on the screen at all. At this time you will have to activate the camera night vision mode in order to see. This effect reminds me of the movie Quarantine where the whole movie is filmed with camera. Things always could happen in the next corner when you are not expected and vision is very limited. In Outlast, the camera mode has the very similar look to the movie except players have to take their own actions in the game. It really brings players into a horror film and let players explore by their own will. Moreover, the battery of the camera will eventually die, so players have to constantly look for batteries in order to have vision in the dark. While trying to figure out a way to home and avoiding the unfriendly creatures, players also have to worry about batteries. With all these tensions put together, it keeps players busy and pay full attention all the time.

In game camera mode screenshot

Outlast also increases the thrilling atmosphere by putting players into a helpless position with the limitation of the players' action. Players often encounter hostile beings in the game and the only options they have are to run away from them, or hide and hope they will not be found. This deprives the ability to fight back and keeps players frighten to explore because they always have to escape in an environment they do not know about. For me, I get panic very easily every time I encounter those hostile beings because of it. :( However, this is what makes it a very impressive game and I like the features a lot.

A hostile being in the game

Besides the visual and gameplay, the sound effect has a significant impact to the overall experience. Most of the time, there is no sound but the breathing sound of the character. However, special sound effect would be triggered as players hit to a certain part of the map, which makes it very dramatic and emphasizes the sudden change of atmosphere.

With all these elements successfully done and put together, players are able to feel the game closely and follow the story as like if they are in it. Therefore, although the story is not super amazingly written and the ending was an easy guess, the overall experience players can have is incredible.

Game Engine Design & Implementation - Blog#1

                    Hi, this is my first blog for Game Engine Design & Implementation aka GED. In this blog, I will mostly cover my GDW progress up to this point.

                    Since GED is going to be a hard course this year, I want to get things clear and working for my GDW game early . So I started to work on the design of the game with my fellow teammates yesterday. This year, we want to make a game similar to GTA (grand thief auto series), and sleeping dog. Of course we are not going to make a game as polish as these two, but at least have an idea of what we are doing and heading towards to.

                    So it started off with the design of the city. We wanted to have a 1:1 ratio city in our game and major reason why we wanted 1:1 ratio was because last year, modelers made models in different sizes and it was a pain in the butt for programmers deal with. So we thought of building everything in 1:1 ratio would be easier.

                    So we came up with a very rough sketch of the city, 1km by 1km. The middle is the dowtown of the city surrounded by 4 districts.

Then it looked something like this in Maya.

Then we created a 1.6 meter height cube to represent our character and it looked something like this.

See that little box in the center? That's how big the character is in the city. If we switch  to the perspective of GTA or sleeping dog, the map is going to be HUGE! With a huge map like this and we wanted to build everything 1:1 ratio with proper measurement on all objects (width of roads, sidewalk, building, etc), the design of the map is going to be important and it seems kind of hard to do it. We tried to make the same size image in Photoshop, but of course it crashed because the image is just too huge for it to handle. Then we decided to use 1 pixel in Photoshop to represent 1 meter in Maya. We drew 1 pixel straight line on map and here was where we ran into another problem.

A 100 pixels wide straight line drawn in Photoshop. Looking good.

The line lines up perfectly with the blocks like we expected. (we divided the 1 km by 1 km by 10, so each block is 100 meters wide and there are 100 blocks across the city).

But then when we zoomed in to the character, the 1 pixel line took up 4 blocks on the grid (each block on the grid is 1 meter wide and we set it in Maya by default) and at this point we were all confused. Despite the mystery of the line somehow enlarged itself in Maya, we were not able to figure out why Maya cannot render the solid line in Photoshop; the line became blurry. We tried changing the scaling settings in Photoshop, the rending settings and the texture resolution setting in Maya, and the line still stayed blurry.

                    At one point, I was thinking to make the city in a relative small scale and then once it is finished, we can scale it up to the actual size. However, a fellow team member pointed out the since we are using the Havok physic engine and the gravity setting in it sets to 9.8 m/s. When the size of the objects in the scene changes and the gravity remains the same, weird things might happen. Unless we play around with Havok to change it to the way it allows us to do so. We will continue this idea until we have better understanding of the Havok engine.

                    We tried another method of creating a city, which is using scripting in Maya. We used a third party script and we ran it in Maya and this was what we got.

                    It looked pretty nice despite there were a lot of polygons. However, we found that this is not every flexible as each unit is set to be built within a plane; no building can be bigger than 1 plane. Also, we were not able to use our own models to replace the ones the came with the script. Due to all these reasons, we moved on.

                    At this point, the method of creating our city remains unknown. However, after some brief discussions with fellow team members, classmates, and professor Fullerton, it seems like we can use a third party engine called Esri - http://www.esri.com/, to create our city efficiently with our own models. The only problem is the issue of licensing. Since it does not seem like they are giving out student licence, we might have to figure out something else or we have to buy the full licence for a couple thousand dollars. Hmm, fun stuff.

GDP Blog#1

                    The first lecture of Game Design & Product was great. It was great to see everyone, our TA, and Dr. Lennart again after the summer. This year, GDP has a whole new system regarding to the assignment, aka missions, that is waiting ahead of us, and I am looking forward to it after understanding how this system works.

                    The level system is introduced where students have to earn XP by completing different kind of tasks, for example, questing, crafting, and fighting monsters. Some tasks can be done only once and some other ones can be done multiple times before reaches its limit. However, every attempt counts. Students will not receive XP by completing the tasks if they already exceed the limit regardless of how well or bad they do. There are rules and different types of quests in the system but I will save it for later on. After all, students receive grades equal to the XP they earn over the semester.

                    Last year, we had a course Computer Animation featuring a similar XP system, however, I find this one is more interesting. First of all, it has a level system which allows student to level up. Leveling up brings in 2 benefits - to unlock higher quest and skill on avatar. For the former one, I, as a gamer, like challenges and achieve goals in game. It gives me motivation to work on those assignments. For the latter one, it helps me get into the system better by having an avatar to deal with everything in it, and as I make progress I gain more privilege (in this case, I can unlock 2 more skills that God knows what I can do with them).

                    I am looking forward to this course because I noticed the system is very similar to a level in game. Here is the list of 10 principles for good level design by GDC 2013 (http://www.edge-online.com/news/gdc-2013-10-principles-for-good-level-design/), and I find quite a few of them match the education system.

"3. Good level design always tells the player what to do, but never how to do it"
In GDP, tasks are given and it is always up to us and our knowledge, imagination, and creativity lead us to the final result. Fun stuff.

"4. Good level design constantly teaches the player"
Definitely or hopefully, we are all going to learn something at the end of the semester to be a qualified game designer.

                    Since this GDP XP system is so interesting, I also did a little research on how game and education relate to each other and teach us things. Here is the link to the document I found, Video Games and Education: Designing learning systems for an interactive age - http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/tenure-files/02-squire-ed-tech-refchecV3.pdf, it has 27 pages. I only read the first 2 pages and I found it very informative.


                    As for now, my avatar name is Hadva and I am current level 1 with 0 XP.