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devwitch · 7 years ago

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GDS210 : Just Us Post Mortem

listen, I know this post mortem is incredibly overdue. But look at it this way, at least I got it done in the end...

GDS210 JUST US POST MOTEM

ABOUT

Just Us is a 3D remake of the 80’s arcade classic, Asteroids. The game features updated 3D graphics, and some new mechanics.

SCREENSHOTS

TEAM

Hayden: Programmer, team lead

Eric: Programmer

Aeisha: Artist

Our team for this project consisted of 2 programmers and an artist (myself). The team lead, Hayden, also has skills in management and used those to keep us all on track.

TOOLS

Unity Engine: We chose to use Unity for our game engine because everyone on the team is familiar with it

Maya: This was the only 3d modelling program we were taught to use in class, so we went with it to be safe…

Clip studio Paint: I personally chose to use this because I was using my Surface Pro 4 to do all the art assets, and Clip Studio Paint is one of the only programs that will play nice with the Surface Pro 4’s pressure sensitivity. If I could have my way, I would have liked to use Paint Tool SAI.

Photoshop: Chosen because everyone in the team is familiar with it to some degree. I only used it when my Surface ran out of battery and I’d left my charger at home.

Famitracker: I was the only person on the team to use this program, but I chose it because I have a small amount of experience with it from my previous project.

COLLABORATION

Just like with my last project, we all decided to come onto campus on Wednesdays to work on the game together out of class time. We also communicated via Slack and organised our weekly tasks with a Trello board.

WHAT WENT WELL

Our team lead discovered the joys of post-processing effects in Unity and spent a lot of time messing with those. This was a good thing and also a bad thing. It was good because it’s made the game look very pretty. I will save why it was bad for the bad bits section.

WHAT DIDN’T GO WELL

We ran out of time towards the end of the project because we’d spent so long focusing on making the game look pretty. Controller support doesn’t work 100% and some of the UI is a little bit broken.

All of it

TEAM THOUGHTS

Eric: He’s a hard worker. He also likes to explain what’s going on with his code to me (even when I don’t ask), which I like, because that helps me keep up with everything going on in the project that isn’t art.

Hayden: Also a very hard worker, a great team leader and a really good programmer. For this project however, he might have focused on visual polish a bit too much, which left us with a few holes in the project. That being said, the game looks really nice.

Aeisha: I feel like I didn’t do too horribly on this project. I’m pretty happy with the way it looks, the 3d ship models aren’t the best, but with all the bloom effects and glowy-ness you can’t really tell that they’re bad. I probably could have done more coding for this project, but Hayden is pedantic about keeping all the code neat (and for a good reason), so I was kind of scared to attempt anymore code than I had to.

#iknowthisislateimsorrypleasedontkillme

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devwitch · 7 years ago

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GDS210 WEEK 9: Ye Olde VR (Mechs are Cooler)

I guess I never actually mentioned what our games were in the previous blog, so I will tell you now. We have to make a VR experience as a class, so we’ve split off into groups of 3 to 4 to make minigames for said VR experience. We’ve decided on an overall theme of a medieval tavern. I put forward the idea of theming everything around mechs, but no one really wanted to do that. I was sad. I like mechs. Who doesn’t want to knock buildings over while piloting a giant robot? Or fight kaijus like in Pacific Rim? It would have been so fun. Oh well, maybe one day I’ll be able to pilot a mech for realises.

Anyway, the 3 minigames we decided on were a hack and slash, a spinning wheel game and a medieval-style beer pong (this one was my idea. Imagine how much better that would have been in a mech. So devastated.) The VR experience requires us to also make a hub world. We’re going to kill 2 birds with one stone and put 2 of the minigames inside the hub world, which will be a tavern. Our original idea was to have all 3 minigames occur within the tavern, with some kind of progression system. But after considering play space limitations, the hack and slash game was moved to a new scene.

My group is in charge of the spinning wheel game. Not the most exciting game, but for some reason I didn’t put my hand up for the other 2 minigames. We’re doing a mix of a wheel of fortune and a darts board. The player will be shown an icon, and they’ll have to throw an object at the corresponding icon on the wheel as it spins. So far, we’ve decided that the icons on the wheel will be musical instruments from back in ye olde days, and when you hit the correct icon it’ll also play the sound that instrument makes. I know, mechs would have been so much cooler.

Next week we’re all starting on our 3D models. I’m in charge of doing the swords. I’m ok with this because swords are cool (and easy to model). I’m not very good at 3D modelling, so I’m half expecting the pc to burst into flames when I open Maya. Pray for me.

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devwitch · 7 years ago

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GDS210 WEEK 8: Being a Team Leader is Scary

Being a team leader is scary, and it’s something I’ve never done before. I think I must have been possessed by some kind of horrible demon, hellbent on making me suffer, because I’ve put my hand up to be a leader for this project.

But for realises, I decided to take on the role after being given feedback from my lecturers. They mentioned that I should take on more leadership roles. So I did. Well actually, I put my hand up as a joke, but they didn’t let me back out of it, so here I am.

This project isn’t like the previous 2 in that we will all be working together as a class, but separated into small teams to complete mini games for a VR experience. There is going to be someone overseeing and managing the entire project, which makes my leadership role seem less like a leadership role, which I actually don’t mind. Almost makes it fell less stressful, since there’s someone else there to clean up my mess, should things go horribly wrong (I hope that they don’t go horribly wrong).

This week was all about allocating roles and completing our game design document. I am very glad I wasn’t in charge of this, because I can barely organise myself, let alone 11 people. Hayden is the project lead, so he was in charge of that. He’s also in my group, so I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be bossing him around, or if he’s supposed to be bossing me around. I guess we’ll both just boss each other around and hope it doesn’t end in a bloodbath.

Next week we actually get to start doing game things, instead of boring (but necessary) planning things.

Catch y’all on the flip side.

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devwitch · 8 years ago

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GDS210: ASTEROIDS!

Hi again! We’ve just finished week 1 of our second project, let me fill you in.

Brief: Re imagine a popular 80′s arcade game, low poly 3D art style, local multiplayer

Team:

Hayden: Programmer/ team lead

Eric: Programmer

Aeisha(me): Artist

We chose the game Asteroids for this project, and we’ve added a mechanic where destroying asteroids charges up a bar that allows the player to fire an ultimate attack that clears asteroids off the screen and damages the other player in multiplayer.

As the artist my first task has been to design the player ships. Here’s some concept art/sketches of the 2 ships. I’ve yet to come up with a design for enemy ships.

-insert images tomorrow when my internet is not being silly-

I kept the design for the player ships simple and boxy, because I have to model these, and I have never touched a 3D modelling program before. I’ve already re-made the first player ship once, and knowing how I am I’ll probably want to re do it again. -insert screenshot/s of 3D model after Hayden reminds me to on tuesday-

I’ve also finished the background for the game (pending the approval of the rest of the team) and I’ve finished the splash screen art. I’m already very tempted to re draw it because that’s just how I am, so I’ll have to ask my team to yell at me whenever I bring up wanting to re make assets minutes after I’ve finished them

I’m in charge of the particle systems for this project. I’m happy about this, because I get to make them all neon and glittery. I’m also doing shooty sound effects, some scripting on the menus, and models for player and enemy bullets/lasers.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully in the next blog I won’t be talking about how I’ve completely re made all my assets 50 times over. I need to be stopped.

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devwitch · 8 years ago

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GDS210: Disco Wizard Post Mortem

Our first project for this unit been completed, you can find it at the link below.

---> DISCO WIZARD <---

Disco Wizard is an endless bullet hell game for Android devices. The player must dodge the enemy’s bullets and stay alive as long as possible. The enemy can’t die and will continue to level up over time, however the player can shoot the enemy to delay them leveling up and to accrue points.

screenshot:

Team members:

Lucky: Team lead, programmer

Shawn: Programmer

Shien: Programmer

Aeisha: Artist

Our team consisted of 3 programmers (Lucky, Shien and Shawn) and 1 artist (myself). Lucky,Shien and Shawn are all strong programmers and hard workers, as such the team managed to stay on track for the duration of the project and finish it without rushing in the final week. I have a background in 2D art and was able to provide most of the visual assets. I also have an interest in creating simple audio assets for our future projects.

Tools we used:

Unity engine- We chose to create the game in Unity as all of us are familiar with this engine.

Famitracker- Everyone was introduced to this program during a class. We discovered it was pretty easy to create simple sound effects with it, hence why we stuck with it.

Clip Studio Paint- I chose this program because, well, it’s on my surface pro and I know how to use it.

Photoshop: Chosen because most of the team know how to use it, and it was readily available to all of us on the campus computers.

C# programming language- Chosen because everyone on the team is familiar with it.

Collaboration:

Our team organised to meet up on campus out of class time every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and early before class on Thursdays. Face to face time ensured that everyone knew what each member of the team was working on and allowed any issues to be resolved easily.

Brainstorming:

We were given a few hours during our first class to come up with an idea to pitch. We actually didn’t go through many ideas before we settled. Referring to the very messy brainstorming session I recorded in my notebook (and I will list exactly what I wrote down), our ideas were:

endless runner- This was the first idea put forward courtesy of Shien. An endless runner where the player is being chased by a big koala (of the mutated kind, I would assume)

car!!!- Shawn suggested a game where you dodge cars, or where you’re the car. I don’t actually remember because I didn’t write these down properly.

bullet hell!!!!- Shien suggested this one, and it ended up being the idea we went with.

Then we went on to brainstorm some more ideas of what we could do with a bullet hell. Some of the ideas included:

- rotating the screen to dodge bullets

- the enemy bullets are bees

- a mechanic similar to blanks used in Enter the Gungeon (Dodge Roll, 2016)

- enemy doesn’t die

- gun vs wizard

- disco wizard

Process:

week one- player controls, music implemented, enemy sprite + some transformations completed, UI animations, basic enemy bullet patterns

week two- enemy AI, player sprite/player health sprite, balancing difficulty/ enemy bullet patterns

week 3- start screen art, balancing difficulty, added light up “dance floor” background, sound effects

I found that throughout this project, I wasn’t keeping track of what the rest of the team was doing. I would just complete the tasks that our team leader asked me to do each week.

What went well:

The team was really hard working and we weren’t rushing to finish the project in the final week, I think this can be attributed to all the time we put aside to come onto campus and work together as a group.

Personally, my favorite part of the game is the music, Lucky did a good job of finding music that fit the genre well. I also think Shien’s bullet patterns are really cool, he plays a lot of bullet hells so he had good ideas for patterns and combinations. Shawn’s UI animations are really good too, apparently that was his first time doing any kind of animation in Unity and he spent a lot of time on it, and it turned out great.

What didn’t go well:

Being a typical artist, I don’t really like how most of my visual assets turned out. The style feels inconsistent.

We also had a small issue with balancing the difficulty early on. Shien had made some really cool looking bullet patterns, but they were too difficult for how early on in the game he’d put them. He didn’t really want to change them, but after discussing it as a group we were able to balance the difficulty a lot better.

The sound effects are a little bit annoying. More specifically the player bullet noise, because the player auto fires and the sfx is a bit too shrill (that was my fault) and the sfx on one of the enemy’s attack patterns. When the pattern first starts, the sfx is in time with the music, but if the enemy levels up and the music changes it falls behind and gets pretty annoying.

What’s next:

Some team members expressed interest in putting the game up on the app store, personally I’m not fussed. I’m ready to move on to our next project and work with new people (not to say I didn’t like my group! They were all great and there was very little conflict). I believe the next project requires 3D models, I don’t know if I’m terrified or excited.

Team thoughts:

Lucky: Lucky was a great team leader. He let us work on what we wanted to in the project, so we wouldn’t fall behind trying to finish something we didn’t enjoy doing. But he also made sure we completed the tasks we needed to in order to meet all the learning outcomes for this unit. He’s also a really great programmer and designer with a strong work ethic.

I can’t really think of anything he could have improved on in this project other than making us check the Trello board for our weekly tasks, instead of having to tell us himself.

Shawn: He’s also a super good programmer, and he went out of his comfort zone to do all the cool animations with the UI. Great work ethic too. What could he have improved on? Getting more sleep I suppose? He always came into class looking so tired.

Shien: Again, a great programmer with a really good work ethic. Besides the bullet patterns, he did a really good job on the sprites for the bullets. They look all nice and glowy, like neon lights. I think the only thing he could have improved on was being less adamant about not changing the difficulty at the start of the game, we kind of needed the player to make it past the enemy’s first phase.

Aeisha (myself): Oh boy, self evaluation. I’m not too good at noticing the things that I do well, so the only thing I can think of was when I was able to bust out a sound effect in 2 minutes after some feedback from the lecturer. I’m happy with at least one of the visual assets I made (player health sprite). I also turned up to our designated group work hours (except Mondays and Friday, but the team was aware of that). I definitely could have contributed more than one script to the project, but everyone else seemed to have everything under control and I didn’t want to hassle them.

I think my main issue with how I performed during this project could have been solved by me just being a better artist. I ended up re doing the start screen art 3 times, and I nearly re drew the enemy sprite in week 2. But I forced myself to leave it because I didn’t want to keep the group waiting on me to finish the assets.

That’s it for this post mortem, see you next week!

References:

Dodge Roll. (2016). Enter the Gungeon [video game]. Austin: Devolver Digital.

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devwitch · 8 years ago

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GDS210 week 3: Impending Doom (due date)

The project is due this week! This team has been really good, and it doesn’t feel like we’re in crunch mode trying to get this done in time. As I’m typing this, the only thing we need to finish off is our documentation.

I’ve realized I haven’t covered much of this project outside of the visual assets I’ve been doing. That’s mostly because I’m not a particularly good programmer, and I don’t understand much of what the rest of the team was doing (because it was almost all script writing) I’ll make sure to go into it on my upcoming projects, I promise.

Speaking of writing scripts, I did have to contribute at least one. The rest of my team members are really strong programmers, so they dived into all of that day 1 and seemed to have a handle on things. There wasn’t much left for me to do, but I did write something that grabs 2 sprites from the resources folder and loads them at runtime. This was, literally, only 4 lines of code. But I needed to contribute something and it was a reach to find something I could do since everything else was taken care of.

After some feedback I also made an SFX for when a player bullet hits the enemy. I also ended up tweaking the player bullet SFX to be slightly less shrill and annoying.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a whole bunch of things I could talk about here, but I’m going to keep this entry short, because my brain feels a little melty.

See you next time!

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devwitch · 8 years ago

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GDS210 week 2: I Don’t Know How to Pixel Art Very Well so I Look at a Tutorial

Hey! It’s me again. Did you miss me? I missed you. If you haven’t already deduced from the title, I looked at some pixel art tutorials this week, because I realized that I don’t really know what I’m doing.

This first one is just something I stumbled across while having a scroll down my twitter feed. It’s not on any pixel art techniques, but more on techniques used in animation applied to pixel art. This is more helpful for when I need to do sprite sheets. Pixel art motion blur

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This one was much more helpful, and more relevant to my problem of not being very good at pixel art. It covers a lot of basic pixel art techniques like dithering and anti-aliasing. It also includes a step-by-step of their process. Very nice pixel art tutorial

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I’ve been resisting the urge to completely re-do the enemy sprite. I’m no longer happy with the style and I got right onto working on the sprite without looking into proper pixel art techniques because I didn’t want to keep my team mates waiting on me to finish things. I’m going to leave it as is, because I have other things I need to do.

I am pretty happy with this icon I made for our player health sprite however:

And now I can introduce you to our antagonist! His name is Randi Krash, and he’s a glam rock hero. I got the name from an online glam rock name generator. I didn’t know those were a thing, but I’m glad that they are. I started sketching out his design during class (I don’t have any nice scans or photos of these pages. I’m sorry) but just like the wizard it involved a lot of scrolling through google image search results, this time of “70′s glam rock fashion”. While I don’t have any clear sketches of his design to show you, I do have another fun visual asset to show you. This is for a little splash screen before the game starts. I know Randi is looking a little messier here than the wizard, but if you take a step back from your monitor and squint a bit, everything looks fine.

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I’ve also been messing around in Famitracker, since I need to provide at least 1 audio asset. I’ve made an SFX for the player shooting, which is just 1 note that increases in pitch. I’ve been thinking about how this could be an annoying/distracting sound since the player is always auto-firing at the enemy. I might edit it down the road.

I completed some accessories/clothing for when the enemy levels up. It’s just another disco ball to go on his hat and a jacket that happens to be heavily inspired by Michael Jackson’s thriller jacket...maybe. That’s all for this week though, the rest of the team has been busy writing scripts and Shawn’s been doing some fancy things with the UI.

Until next time!

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References:

Medeiros,P. [saint11]. (2017, June 6). And here's my #pixelart #tutorial about motion blur! More info and other tutorials here: https://www.patreon.com/saint11/posts?tag=tutorial … [Tweet]. Retrieved fromhttps://twitter.com/saint11/status/872098481057517568

Yu,D. (2013,February 9). Pixel Art Tutorial. Retrieved from http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/42648699708/pixel-art-tutorial

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devwitch · 8 years ago

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GDS210 week 1 : The Legend of the Disco Wizard

A new trimester begins, and I am now starting the first of my studio units. I have returned from the break feeling refreshed and full of optimism. We will see how long this lasts. Anyway, enough chitchat.

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The Brief:

Work in groups of 3-4 to create a 2D mobile game with a pixel art style.

The Team:

Lucky- Team leader, programmer

Shien- Programmer

Shawn- Programmer

Aeisha (that’s me) - Artist

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I whipped my shiny new notebook and glitter pens out of my bag, and the team began brainstorming right away. Shien put forward the idea of a side scrolling, endless runner where the player is chased by evil koalas and Shawn offered some kind of top-down involving cars and dodging said cars. Then Shien said “bullet hell”, and I snapped out of my daydream about doing pixel art and responded with a very enthusiastic yes. We all pondered on what kind of theme we could go for with this bullet hell, and I jokingly wrote down “disco wizard”. I didn’t expect anyone to take this seriously, as I immediately scribbled it out and said “haha guys just kidding!” but for some reason everyone liked this, thus disco wizard came to be.

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Mechanics:

We wanted something cool to make this bullet hell a little different from every other bullet hell out there, so we came up with a mechanic where there player can never level up but the enemy does, and the enemy can never die. This turned it into an endless bullet hell of sorts. We’ve decided to have a power up spawn every so often and bounce around the screen. The player can destroy it before the enemy picks it up, gaining points and delaying the enemy’s inevitable level up.

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Aesthetic:

70′s disco. Obviously. Neon, light up dance floors, iridescent disco balls. You know how it goes. I’ve been put in charge of character design for the disco wizard and the protagonist. No idea what the protag is going to look like at this stage, but I have some ideas for the disco wiz.

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Audio:

We’re going to do this cool thing where every time the enemy levels up, a new track like a drum beat or a melody is added. It’s going to be disco music, of course.

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Since I’m the team artist, I’m going to be going most of the visual assets. However we’re all required to contribute at least 1 visual asset, 1 audio asset and 1 script to each project, so my team members get to do some art too.

Here’s the design we’ve settled on for the disco wizard:

I did go through a few designs before this, trust me. I didn’t save the sketches because I’m silly. I spent a lot of time staring at pictures of ABBA and their crazy outfits, I also spent a lot of time staring at some very pretty pictures of neon blue and purple dance floors, so I guess that’s what inspired this colour pallet. Sparkles because he’s a wizard and needs sparkles. Why else.

I’ve finished the enemy sprite too, but for the sake of this entry not stretching half way down my blog, I’ll save that for some other time.

Tune in next week for the next thrilling instalment.

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