Week 9 - Reassesment and Research

Senior Team Week 9 (10/26-11/1)

 We failed our attempt to challenge out of the Deep Dive stage, this was largely because we failed to convey the research we had done and how that had affected our design process. I do wish that Wilhelm had hurried the previous group a bit rather than simply my team off halfway through each slide of our presentation. Once we had taken a step back and looked at our presentation again we decided to make the most of our extended Deep Dive.

We had failed to show our research, this was easily rectified, in went the slides. We found that we hadn't finalized sound design or exactly what technology our weird war one was using and fixing these was much harder. Sound did not in fact get nailed down this week as the team shifted in opinion from meeting to meeting and I didn't keep track well enough or get everyone else to stick with one position. While we felt we had done enough research previously, the team decided that more research wasn't going to hurt the project.

My research this week focused on The Battle of Gallipoli itself and the conditions in the Ottoman Empire that enabled it to win the battle. One particular point that I was eager to determine was the exact reasons behind the battle (though not directly relevant to the game, it was a point of debate between team members which I hoped to win). Overall a decent amount of new information came up including a very interesting and helpful examination of how the terrain of the peninsula affected the battle, which would be useful for both art and level design.

Progress on the build this week consisted mostly of tightening up controls and networking. One point that we were particularly determined to deal with was getting the weapons to fire directly at the mouse which up til now they had steadfastly refused to do. Michael was finally able to get the guns working correctly by the end of the week. During the Deep Dive presentation our build had crashed repeatedly and we were startled by the bug because it had never happened before. Our Producer insisted that we find the bug before we tested the game again but we never found the bug, and the bug never popped up again even when testing on the same two computers.

Week 8 - Deep Dive Prep

Senior Team Week 8 (10/19-10/25)

This last week felt right, the team was focused on both getting our documentation together for challenging the next stage at the start of the next week.  We each had prototype work to do as well, Kody with getting art assets into the game, Michael was busy fixing and refixing the aiming of the guns and Aiden was designing the level.  My responsibilities were to implement the sounds and get the in game menu to work.  I start getting nervous when a week goes by and I don’t feel like work got done on the game which did not happen this week, unlike the last time we were preparing to challenge.  I was able to strike a healthy balance between implementing sounds, creating the Audio Pipeline, adding the in game menu and writing/practicing my slide for the presentation.

The main letdown of the week was that we did not manage to set up a Discipline Review with Professor Eric Sample who teaches Audio Production classes and who we had hoped would help us iron out the our Audio plans.  The only other Discipline Review we had planned to do this week was with Professor Wehmeyer and it went very well, we went in looking to get a better handle on our aesthetic and to see if we could get any help with our research on the Ottoman Empire. Professor Wehmeyer was a great help in these regards and was very interested in where we had taken the game since we had last talked with him.

We were confident that when we challenged we would be able to pass easily. This was because we had been constantly communicating our research to each other and we had spent each meeting for the last 3 weeks exploring our mechanics, world and story trying to figure out the best way to do everything.  However we were unable to get everyone to create their slides before our Friday meeting and so were unable to practice our presentation then, undaunted we planned to finish our slides by Sunday and practice then. Calamity struck when I got news that one my cousins had died and her funeral was on Sunday, Aidan also found himself stranded outside the state when he missed the bus back to Vermont. The Sunday meeting and presentation practice was therefore very understaffed and what practice the group got did not include everyone.

Weeks 6 & 7

Senior Team Weeks 6-7 (10/5-10/18)

At the start of the sixth week, we decided that we would proceed as if we had passed succeeded at our challenge. We looked at where we were with our game and where we needed to be by the 18th so that we could challenge the next stage as soon as we got back from break. After a review of where the code base was and where we were in regards to the design of the game we bustled off to ready the game for testing.

I ended up working primarily on the networking for the game during these two weeks. Getting networking testable took a lot of fiddling and long nights. It turns out that people don't write all that many tutorials for Networking in Unity and that there are just enough differences in networking code between 4.5 and 5.2 that it is an adventure to code. I got networking up and running on Wednesday 10/14, four days after I had wanted to move on to other important issues. However with networking in place several other aspects of the game quickly fell into place, specifically the game loop got it's first draft and AI/player interaction.

We knew that we would have to nail down the backstory for our game quickly because it influenced so many of our other choices. Our first goal was to figure out exactly where and who we were fighting. We knew that we were making a Diesel Punk WW1 mech game but we didn't want to retread the western front. After several proposed locations we settled upon The Battle of Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire or modern day Turkey. With our location decided we were able to limit our possible participants list down enough to choose whose side the character would be on. The decision was hotly contested and even brought up during QA and class, but eventually we settled upon the Ottoman Empire. In part we settled there because of our artist's love of the possible art styles but we also got feedback during discipline reviews that the Ottomans would make more sense to play as.

During the course of the first week we discovered that we had not actually passed the first stage and that to fully pass the first stage we would need to present three separate and distinct relationships between the pilot and the engineer roles. This focused us on resolving this thorny issue, if either of our roles wasn't as fun as the other our Co-op mech game would fall apart at the seems. The first two relationships were relatively easy to come up with as we had been wrestling with the relationship issue from the start of the project, but the third required a more imaginative approach. What Aiden eventually came up with was quite an interesting and distinct third option and it threw our previous notions of the best relationship out the window. Eventually we came to see that the novelty of third relationship was mostly just novelty but it did teach us some important lessons about player interaction.

Week 5 - Actually Challenging

Senior Team Week 5 (9/28-10/5)

This week was very important because this was the last chance to challenge the first stage before the break. Missing this deadline would have left us with 5 weeks to complete the rest of the game we chose. Knowing this we focused ourselves on hitting every item we had failed to finish for last week, we also improved our prototypes.

The feeling of this week was mostly paperwork and dialogue. I spent some time revising TRAs and other documentation based on feedback from the practice presentation we did in class last week. The main issue was the suggestion that Isometric cameras were easier to do in Unity than I had previously believed. After researching the matter I discovered Unity's built in system for creating a Isometric camera, however my research did not turn up a solution to the issues caused by the Isometric camera.

I also made the GIFs of the Plant game for the presentation, this was an interesting and sometimes frustrating experience.  Learning how to make GIFs and how to use fraps was simple but figuring out the little eccentricities was an annoying task. In the end though I came away with enough good gameplay footage to make two satsifying GIFs.

The decision for which game we would go forward with was the hardest decision we had to make so far. We each made our case for our currently favored game, we were just barely in favor of the Mech game. The next step we took was to formally cast our votes in light of the previous cases we had made. It came down to a 2-2 split between the Mech game and the Finnish game, Aidan was the deciding vote. In the end we went forward with the Mech game.

Also Kody made an amazing piece of concept art for the Mech game.

Week 4 - Challenge Prep

Senior Team Week 4 (9/21-9/27)

This week was both momentous and a letdown. On the one hand we got a lot of details that had been resisting actualization for a while, and we made a lot of progress with our documentation. On the other hand it didn't feel like we made much progress with the demos. During our meetings it felt like we were on fire, outside of our meetings, tasks were easily accomplished and then it felt like I was stumped for what to do next.

For Senior Team projects, each team has to convince their teachers that they have gone far enough with their game to continue to the next stage. It is a combination of test and assignment. If we don't understand and haven't worked on our own project enough then it does not go forward. Each team has to complete all the stages over the course of the semester to be eligible to present at the end of the semester and potentially continue on to the next semester.

We had initially hoped to challenge the first stage of the semester on the 28th but we fell shy of our goal.  Early in the week we determined where each of our prototypes stood and what other materials we needed to complete to successfully challenge. For me it was writing the initial Technical Risk Analysis for the Plant game and the Finnish game. For the group in general it was prepping for the presentation. The TRAs were a good and simple exercise that helped me understand how I was seeing the projects and their risks. As a group however we all got so caught up in our individual tasks that we completely forgot to prep for the presentation. This group failure was a part of why we decided not to challenge the first stage on the 28th.

Weeks 2 & 3 - Exploration

Senior Team Weeks 2 and 3 (9/7-9/20)

At the beginning of this sprint we decided which three games we were going to carry forward. We decided on a plant themed 2D side-scroller, a twist on the mech* genre where two players pilot the same mech and The Escaped Finnish Slave. The group decided that the Finnish game would make more sense to prove as a paper prototype, this would also allow us to feel out how the game would play before we committed ourselves in code. We decided that to make the best use of our two programmers we should each focus on one of the remaining games. Splitting our efforts allowed us to work more efficiently but reduced our communication. I think that the plan has worked out but it could easily have gone the other way. That one of my ideas made it to this stage helped pull me into the group. I still didn't always voice my opinions during the first week, but I found my footing in the end.

Plant Game:

A 2D side-scrolling, platforming adventure game where the player has a gun in each hand that the player can fire. The player can only aim one gun at a time.

This idea baffled me at first. Initial details had been light and I did not understand what differentiated the game from it's inspirations. As the newest member of the group I had thought that the ideas that the team had thought up during their summer brainstorm had been more fleshed out. I felt like I was feeling my way in the dark beyond the base mechanics. I did get input and help from the rest of the team when I needed it. We were also struggling with the art direction for this game which left me feeling rather isolated. For the first week I didn't even have any idea what the main character was. During our meeting on 9/14, I brought these problems up. We were able to settle on a general art direction and soon after I knew what the main character was and what he/she were fighting. After we started to get a feel for the art, the rest of the game started to fall into place. The movement system has proved to be difficult to nail down. Movement had already changed once by the end of the first week. After consulting with Micheal** I came up with a third system that felt much better. This third method has so far worked together with other mechanics in a simpler manner.

When we presented our game ideas during our Discipline meetings this game was generally thought to be the most in scope. We did get another important piece of feedback from the faculty though. Platformers, especially side-scrolling platformers have been done to death as senior games. If we go with this idea we will have to get the mechanics perfect or we will likely fail to continue on to the next semester.

The Mech Game:

A 1st(ish) person mech game where the mech is operated by a pilot and an engineer. This game started as a multiplayer battle arena game and is currently a coop mission based game.

The group unanimously voted to make this one of our three game ideas. Despite our shared enthusiasm for this project we were told during our Discipline meetings that this game was wildly out of scope. I have had less involvement in the coding side of this game so far. The main idea that we have been iterating within this game was the role of the second player. A crucial aspect of this game is making both roles fun, neither role should be the role everyone wants to play. When we started we loaded the second player down with a bunch of puzzle and action mechanics. After reviewing the roles we realized we had to have the second player commit to either the puzzle aspect or action aspect. The direction we went with depended on the feel of the rest of the game. One option was making puzzles central to the entire game by abstracting some of the activities of the game into puzzles. The other option was to fully commit to the first person action side. We decided that the game we wanted to make was more traditional and went with the first person action side of the mechanics.

The Finnish Game:

Too many puns. A survival game about a young escaped Finnish slave making the journey back home through a foreign land in 1100AD. Emphasis is on your isolation from the people surrounding you. 

When I come up with a game concept, it often has more story than mechanics. This was true here, but in this case the story ended up furnishing us with flavorful mechanics. We decided on a paper prototype for this game. When we started work on each of the games this one felt too large to make a good initial sale with. Early on we did not feel like we had a solid hold of the mechanics of the game. Every time we talked about the Finnish game we solidified and constrained it. This game is the most fun for me to work on because I love the history behind it and I love sharing that history with others. My initial worry was that the scale of the journey would be impossible to do in one map. I was also worried that problems would crop up trying to populate the sheer amount of space in the game. We solved these issues by breaking the game up into a linear series of incidents. In each of these incidents the player has a sandbox of choices of how to deal with the incident. An example of an incident is coming across a river that the character can't ford and having to find a way across.

*A Mech is a fictional humanoid tank usually operated by one person.

**The other programmer, and the original programmer for the team

Week 1 - Ideattion

Senior Team* Week One (8/31-9/6)

This last week I spent more concentrated time on my couple of ideas than I ever had previously and I think I came away with a better system for planning out projects than I had previously used. I started by spending an hour just spewing out ideas on my own, at the end I was left with about ten nuggets. over the next couple of days, whenever I had an hour or two free I would spend worrying away at one or another of the nuggets, thinking about what made it interesting and unique. On 9/4 my senior team had a meeting to decide on which ideas we liked and would present to the class on 9/7, of my nuggets, two were chosen and I picked my favorite of the remaining eight to be my third idea. I took these three nuggets and delved into them, by 9/7 I had grown each of them into a solid game idea.

This process took a lot of the pressure out of coming up with the ideas. Instead of each idea having to stand on it's own right out of the gate, I could churn out several stories looking for mechanics or mechanics looking for stories. By allowing the two parts to be separate I was able to develop the nuggets first and discover the parts I liked and disliked about each nugget. By the time of the team meeting I'd already dismissed three of the ten nuggets because of flaws that overshadowed their strengths.

Once the nuggets started growing I had a better idea of where each was headed, such as one of the nuggets the team ended up settling on, The Escaped Finnish Slave**. The initial nugget was based on the Farcry series and an article I found online about the Baltic slave trade in the Middle Ages. As I nurtured the nugget it became clear to me that the game didn't want to be the murder-fest that Farcry games tend to be, but rather it wanted to be a game about survival against the odds where living from day to day meant avoiding fights rather than picking them.

*Senior Team is the first semester of a year long graduation game project
** You play as a Finnish slave who has escaped his captures and is fleeing home, also not the final title of the game