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[benbct]

Against the clock

Western Heights Primary school has agreed to user testing at their school. I have written up the letter and sent it through to Alannah Lupe-Houben, the teacher of the class that will be participating. I now have to polish up the game and get it to a playable state for the kids to enjoy the experience. Hopefully I see some good results. I’m also really hoping that I can nail the team work part of the rubric by working closely with a school and Dianne Lummis. I guess we’ll see? Not much can change now, too deep to back out haha

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Update

I have completed the coding for the game and am now working on the artwork so it can be ready for a months time. Western Heights primary school has agreed to allow me to user test the game at their school. I am writing up a letter that can be sent to the parents/caregivers so they can hopefully sign it and allow their child to play the game. Everything seems to be on track and am looking forward to seeing the results. Unfortunately I always get the feeling that there isn’t enough in the game to make it fun but I have had to descope a lot and remove feature creep just so I can get it done on time. If this all works out then I plan to keep going with the game next year and make it bigger and better than it was before :)

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The road ahead

Unfortunately Kelsey, the artist, has found a job that will take over all his time so he’s not able to help with the artwork anymore so I’m back to being a 1 man band. I plan to meet this part of the rubric by working closely with Dianne Lummis, the counselor, and a school for user testing.

I am currently 3/4 of the way through finishing the coding for the game so it should be playable soon just not pretty. Everything is just different coloured boxes right now. I’m gonna have to rush through the programming and get onto the artwork and animation asap to bring it to a playable state so I can have kids play it and give me feedback.

I have a school lined up that may be interested so all that’s left to do there is finalize it and get the parents to sign off on their kids playing the game. I also need to bring the game back to the counselor to make sure she’s okayed it prior to the game testing. Just so I don’t have any ethics issues :)

I’m excited with how this is turning out. I’ve gone through many iterations. Unfortunately most iterations have been done to descope so I can finish at least a prototype but it seems to be turning out well and according to Dianne, in theory, the analysis can work. If so then this might just be the project I’m gonna work on until it’s completed and at a marketable state. If this can help even one kid then I’m happy :) I’m actually finally doing something with my time at uni and it feels great. Somehow, even with a lot more work, I’m a lot less stressed out and really just having fun on the journey.

Peace

[benbct]

New beginnings

I got to talk to a psychologist, Dianne Lummis, about my idea and how I can go about identifying a mental disorder in children. She was extremely helpful, giving me endless reference material and even going so far as to helping me research as well. We decided to stray away from labeling kids with possible mental disorders and instead show results of indicators that may lead to a mental disorder or illness. She’s shown me the DSM5 criteria which is the criteria of diagnosing someone with autism. My goal, with the help from Dianne, is to gamify the different criteria and make a scenario out of each. Then the information sent to the parent/caregiver or school will be, for example, that they have trouble handling emotions or prefer to be alone. This change, while narrowing down my scope, also allows for more flexibility in the information given so the parent can take their child to their local GP and see if that information leads to a diagnosis.

Through talking with her, I’ve decided on characters being animals and other ‘unhuman’ creatures. Kids have a tendancy to enjoy that more than actual people. Through iteration and talking to kids, I will find out whether they would rather play as a human or creature.

One thing Dianne brought up that would be good to explore if I had the time would be to involve physical actions that the kids have to perform in the game through MOCAP. The reason for this was kids love to be active and are more engaged in something if they are active. This is seen on many different kids shows such as HI-5.

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The difficulties of talking to someone with a busy job

It’s taken 5 weeks of pestering a lot of psychologists to be able to talk to someone. Fortunately an amazing AUT lecturer, Dianne, has agreed to chat and will hopefully be able to bring some insight on what to include in the game. 

I didn’t think it would be this difficult to be able to talk to someone who has knowledge of psychology but they are all very busy people and helping out with a uni project is very low down on the priority list. So I’m just gonna have to make the most out of the meeting :)

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A very late first blog post

This semester I’ve set myself a large scope. I want to push myself to achieve this idea I’ve had. I got unfortunate with how I couldn’t find anyone in course to work with but I’ve managed to get a friend to work with me to create the artwork while I am able to focus on coding.

My idea is to create a game that can at least ballpark diagnose a mental disorder or illness for children. Counselling is expensive and parents can’t always take their child to it on a whim. With this game, they will have a clearer understanding whether their child will need to go to a counselor or not. Games are a massive thing for youth these days; with addiction to games becoming a reality for many kids. If you can’t stop all kids from being addicted to games then I want to somewhat use that addiction for a good cause. 

I’ve been researching different tests for diagnosing many illnesses and disorders and haven’t been able to find anything gamify-able so I’ve been contacting different organisations and psychology departments to see if anyone is willing to give me advice. I hopefully should be having a meeting with someone soon which will help a lot with the scenarios and actual gameplay.

To de-scope my project, I’ve chosen to go with 2d graphics and only tackle one disorder. If I get that working, then I will continue on to more disorders and hopefully be able to use this game to help children around the globe. I’ve also gone with only point and click movement and gameplay. Both of these ideas not only benefit me for having less to do but also benefit the game as they are a lot easier to understand the gameplay and can run on older computers.

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Timeline

My team member and I have created a timeline that we think we are able to stick to:

WEEK 3 – 4

Get in touch with psychologists

Get a group together

Get basics of game drawn out

 WEEK 5 – 6

Character movement

Character creation

Talk to psychologist

Design scenarios to gamify test questions

ART - UI design

ART - Character animation

 WEEK 7 – 8

Inventory system

Use and combine objects

ART - Character model/animation finalization

ART – Backdrops

 WEEK 9 – 10

ART – items

Input the different blocks into scenario

ART – Environment animations

 WEEK 11 – 12

Input the different blocks into scenario

Finalize scenario

Finalize art

 WEEK 13 – 14

Bug testing

Build executable

Final aspects

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Stay in line

After all of our preparation we of course eventually reached our open studio night and presented our project to as many people as we could. Despite some issues faced during and prior to open studio, I felt that we had a successful night with some great feedback and opportunities to learn.

Keep reading

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Final touches of animation

For the past week, I’ve been finishing off the last touches to the people of the simulation. People stopping to look at the view, chatting in the streets, on their phone. Trying to give a little bit of variety to make the city come to life.

I also had to change one of the characters in the boardroom since her animation didn’t loop. She would randomly teleport back to her starting position. So I changed it to someone talking on her phone without the pacing. 

Unfortunately I also came down with a cold and have been bedridden for a week now. I was luckily able to finish my work before getting the cold but I’m not able to give a helping hand to anyone that needs it. How is it that I always manage to get sick at the worst times?

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Getting there

With only a couple of weeks left of studio. We’ve been on a 24/7 grind to complete everything we need. This week I have completed a board room scene of characters arguing over a conference table, an ending sequence for one of our endings (which somehow became corrupt and I now have to redo) and an overview of the apartment at the start of the game to stop the players from moving around while the introductory narration plays. 

While we were having playtests, one of the big things was that our utopia ending felt like nothing was achieved and nothing happened so I asked the participant if an end sequence would help towards achieving an ending and they agreed that it would help wrap up that path. So I drew up a quick storyboard of the player stepping off the elevator and joining a line of NPCs and walking in the line with them so it showed that you were being a sheep and questioning whether your choices were correct.

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Splining a pathway for mechanical feeling humanity

The past couple of days I have been prototyping a system that will allow people and vehicles to go through an intersection on a timeline so that they narrowly avoid each other while still maintaining the same speed. The animation should imitate this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFrrdhbC6pg . This should hopefully give an uneasy feeling to the simulation as it all seems inhuman and more of an algorithm than people just crossing an intersection. Basically I have created a modular system that spline tracks can be set along a modeled intersection that will act as pathways that the vehicles and characters will move along. Their speed will be of the same factors or multiples of those numbers so that when the action loops, they won’t loop in a different order, possibly causing objects to move through each other. The track will lead from behind a building to behind another building so that the player cannot see when the cars reset along the track. Their starting position along the spline will be set so as soon as the character comes into contact with the scene, they will already be in motion.

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Simulating the Simulator

Yesterday marked an important part in the life cycle of the project. We ran the first ‘Playtests’. After a brief discussion with Andy we came across the idea of sending people into an empty room to see how they’d respond, and after a quick chuckle at thinking that might be silly, we actually thought about how it could give us insight into our project, and begun doing just that with the small Quiet room we plan to use as our space that we set our project up in.  We started out just having the participants start in the room and we would explain to them that they were to “escape the simulation”. However most often people would just walk out of the room, sometimes after asking if they can leave, as we expected to be the “winning” criteria. While some would look around briefly most often they would just take the opportunity to ask if they can leave. We decided to refrain from giving the participants as much information as possible and would instead just reiterate the “escape the simulation”. As we tested a bit we changed up the circumstances by leaving the room after explaining the goal and by leaving a note in the room that explicitly stated “Do not leave the room” while we explicitly stated to “escape the simulation”. This started changing up how participants would look at the room, and would often start looking around the room for puzzles and options and things to do in order to reach the goal. Most often they still got to a point where they would leave the room, but it changed the experience from being 15 to 30 seconds to up to 5 minutes where we would step in. This was great for giving us insight into how people consume an escape room type scenario especially since there was the preconception that there would be puzzles or activities in order to achieve the goal we were setting. Notably there was the safe inside the room that many of the participants asked about or went to try while trying to find useful information for their escape. We also had some feedback from the participants that, unsurprisingly, definitely showed a lack of satisfaction when they did find the result, even if they found it out fairly quickly. After this exercise, we have gotten a sense of what people do when faced with an escape room type scenario, and what people are looking for. We plan to do further testing as we add more content to the room to see how it changes with activities. Since we have been looking more at doing a puzzle room in less of a sequential format than the typical escape room, I think that this building up of things to do will really help us identify, through feedback, how to display it in a way that makes the participants not just want to reach the end, but a bit more to play and explore, which is more in line with how we want them to explore their perspective on reality.

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Food for thoughtful animation

My job in the group is lead animator. I’m not very well versed in animation as I only found my passion for it in year one of BCT but I have quickly grown obsessed over it. My goal in every animation is to paint a picture. If I’m animating characters then I take into account what sort of character they are, how they hold themselves, how they walk, how they interact with the world. It’s been a stressful journey of throwing myself in the deep end of 3d animation without knowing the basics but from 2d animation I had at least the fundamentals and knowledge of how it should turn out.

While our team was deliberating on what sort of project we should turn our idea into, we started to lean towards making an escape room. I contacted my boss at The Great Escape to see if we could have a meeting with him and discuss how it may work. We told him about the details of what we were planning to do and what it was for and he was able to give us a sound answer...it won’t work. Since the open studio is such a small time space, we wanted to give each participant around 5 minutes in the room. Tibor, my boss, told us that 5 minutes is far too short of a time to have people solving puzzles and trying to work their way through a room. In my personal experience of being a escape game controller, teams will typically take around 10 minutes of looking around the room and pondering before they start to solve any of the puzzles. Having this meeting was unbelievably helpful since it allowed us to move away from that idea and broaden our horizon. We then went back to the drawing board started to work on a new project that would fit our restrictions and still convey the message of our idea.

For a while I was not on the same page with the new idea as I didn’t know what was happening. I feel like there wasn’t enough communication within our group to make sure that everyone had the same goal in mind. At this time my laptop had broken and I was without a computer for 2 weeks, so I got to work on concepts. But without a clear picture of what I was doing, I didn’t even know where to begin. Fortunately Max came to the rescue. He got the team together and we all discussed what we were going to create. We came up with a sort of sandbox room where the participant(s) is able to do whatever they want within the time frame. Whatever task they decide to do will give them a little bit of information that will amount with how many tasks they do. The idea is to allow the participants to create their own story of what’s happening in the simulation. We will do this by giving different information depending on the task they achieve.

My first task was to create animations for the interactions of the participant in the game world (sitting down and standing up from a chair). This seemed like a piece of cake since I’ve done camera animations before but only in Unity3d. I taught myself how to use Maya and Unreal Engine’s sequence animator to be able to work with the team. I first created the animations in Unreal Engine but I found that I had created them to world orientation instead of a relative position to the player character. This lead to the animations snapping to a random space and playing the animations instead of next to the chair. So after about a week of sifting through UE4s tutorials and forums, I was unable to find a way to create them relative to the player. I then used Maya and found that to animate a camera in Maya is very choppy and I didn’t think I would be able to produce any quality animations. So I then went to Unity and created animations in there and exported them with a cube mesh as an FBX format which I then attached to the player character and hoped that it would work...which it didn’t (probably something I’m overlooking). After another week or so of struggle, and with the help of Max, we found that there is a button in Unreal Engine that makes animations relative to the player so I then created the animations for the fourth time and have put a lot of effort into making them feel organic. The only thing I could do was laugh at myself for putting myself through weeks of stress to find such a simple answer, but I am now back on track and through redoing the animations over and over I feel like I have improved a lot. I keep showing the team my progress to make sure I’m on the right track and to get criticism on what I should try to fix.

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Soooooooo this is awkward

Turns out Max has found a relative point tool in Unreal Engine 4 so I am able to create the first person animations within the character controller. This give me a lot more control over the animations so I am to redo them. While I am pissed off with myself for not seeing this tool, I guess I am sort of happy though at the same time since this is a lot more powerful of a tool and I am able to do better animations using it.

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Animation chaos

Over the past few weeks that I have had my laptop back, I have been creating animations for the first person character in our experience. Due to many different technical issues I have had to redo these animations around 4 times now :( but I think I have finally found a way to animate the character so fingers crossed that this works :\ Luckily I have been able to sort of reconstruct the animation that I made at the start but apparently Maya loves to change their axis around so Unreal engine and Unity3d’s axis are mapped differently. Took a bit of figuring out but got there in the end. WOOP WOOP. Just in time for break as well...Now just gotta graph the animations so it looks more fluent and organic

PS If you’re gonna make first person animations. I recommend not using unreal engines level sequencer or maya. Unless you’re creating one off animation interactions, then go hard with UE4 but still stay away from maya..........

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Week 5

This week Max created a project planner so we each knew what activities to do and what we needed to achieve before the end of the week. I have really been excited to get back into animation now that I have my computer back. I have been spending my nights watching GDC videos about animation tips, tricks and essentials. I have also been looking into game postmortems as we are creating a sort of “game”. Just to see what made classic and popular games good or great is a great place to see what might help our project. 

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Week 3 readings

There is a quote I live by when creating or designing games. “I would rather play a game that’s an inch wide and a mile deep than a mile wide and an inch deep”. I think this quote explains depth vs. complexity. While complexity can be good in games such as MMO’s, The real magic of games is when every single object, every action, every mechanic has meaning. Mario is the least complex game I can think of. You can walk side to side, jump and sometimes throw fireballs. When they created this game they chose a mechanic they wanted to explore and then created the whole game based off of that mechanic. Mario’s jump allows him to get through the levels, usually set in the sky, it allows him to kill his enemies, and it became the defining feature of the game. Such a simple action that is able to do many things, that is depth. A good rule of thumb is if the game has to have a prompt on the screen with the control scheme when you start then the developers are either lazy or the game has a very complex control setup.

Positive feedback loops are when players that are in the lead get rewarded. This is used to speed up the game and end it quicker. A negative feedback loop is when the player in last is given a boost so they are able to catch up to other players and make the game more interesting. This is mostly used in party games to keep everyone interested and no one knows who the winner may be. This can even be something simple like extra points after killing someone when you have been dying a lot in a multiplayer fps.

A good game feels responsive to the player. This is not only shown by pressing a key and your character moves. I think game feel is made mostly of SFX, animation and VFX.