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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 11 - Reading
A coherent development team and work environment are crucial to designing successful games. Every member of the team should be able to either suggest interesting concepts or contribute to the realization of game concepts by using their specialized skills, and everyone’s opinions should be respected, valued, and listened to.
Communication is another vital aspect of game development. It is beneficial to decrease the hierarchy level within the studio, allowing developers to communicate more laterally and effectively. Adopting an agile development process like Scrum can greatly enhance efficiency where the studio would split its members into smaller teams that complements each other’s functionalities. These teams would have Scrum meetings on a daily basis and divide major milestones into smaller sprints to complete them in an iterative fashion. This way, the teams can work more effectively and better manage their time, targeting each day’s work with more focus instead of getting overwhelmed with too many long-term, major tasks on the horizon.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 10 - Reading
Many elements contribute to making a game fun. It could be the story, gameplay, or the game’s challenge level. Usually, all three of these elements would be combined based on the type of games the studios are making and the target audience. For example, the story would take a back seat in a souls-like game like Elden Ring, but the challenge level and the exploration element are presented more prominently. This is because the studio understands the type of game they want to create and the type of experience they would like to present to thier target audience. Souls game players have become accustomed to the genre’s daunting difficulty and enjoy the sense of accomplishment after defeating challenging bosses. The game presents this feature front and center and puts new spins on the genre’s difficult combat (players can use magic spells and summons as their primary form of attack). However, the creators also doubled down on improving their games’ accessibility by making Elden Ring open world. If a boss is too hard to defeat, players can simply run away and return later after they’ve leveled up further and acquired more powerful weapons. This made the game more user-friendly and seemed easier to play through. Making it more susceptible to newcomers, thus expanding the studio’s potential customers. What’s interesting and refreshing about Elden Ring’s open world is that there’s minimal path guiding. Unlike most open-world games, where the map is filled with side-objective markers and tells you exactly where to go to progress through the main story, Elden Ring only indicates to the players a vague direction they need to head towards to reach the next stage of the campaign. This further amplifies the sense of exploration that souls game fans love. I guess it’s okay to call the game’s open-world design two birds and one stone. It greatly improved the accessibility for new players and, at the same time, expanded on a gameplay feature of previous souls games for returning fans.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 13 - Assignment 3 postmortem
After completing this assignment, I must say that even developing a simple game project with a code-block-based engine isn’t easy or convenient. There were many aspects I think we did well and, of course, many that need improving.
Starting off, one of the good aspects was how passionate we were about creating Red Alert: Search and Destroy. Every team member worked on the game extensively, and I’m especially impressed by the sprites and animations our artists created. They looked super distinct and fluid and received quite a lot of praise from the playtesters. Another area we did well was communication. We were constantly discussing new ideas, assisting each other if any member ran into any problems, and sharing development progress on the part each of us was in charge of respectively. We also reasonably adjusted our ambition for the game according to our personal abilities, knowledge of GDevelop, and the amount of time left. For example, the team switched from creating multiple levels and bosses to a single one so that we could spend more effort in a more focused manner to make a better-polished game.
However, a major area we overlooked was planning and setting up milestones. I guess we all thought this game project would be relatively easy to develop, and as I said in the beginning, we were certainly wrong. Looking back to the past few weeks, our development process lacked structure, and that caused some delays. Some tasks just got dragged on for way too long, and some were not done until it was quite late. Such as platform tiles, background, and playtesting. These issues made the last few days close to the submission date quite hectic and stressful. This assignment really made me understand the importance of project planning and time management. If we had managed our development process better, we would’ve presented our game in a much more complete and polished state.
Next up, some self-reflecting... As I said in the previous post, I’m pretty inexperienced regarding 2D platformer level design, which made some sections of our level frustrating and unclear to the players. What I should’ve done was to play some relevant (similar to our design) 2D platformers myself, perhaps watch related GDC talks so that I could have a better grasp on what makes a platformer fun and how to combine all the available gameplay elements to create more meaningful challenges for the players to tackle. Rather than just analyzing level maps, reading through level design tutorials, and figuring out the rest on my own. I certainly will start doing this with every future project I’m a part of, even if the game I’ll be developing is from a familiar genre.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao 
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 11 - Assignment 3 playtesting
Before talking about the playtesting session, I want to share a quick update on the tweaks I’ve made to the gravity bubble mechanic, as well as the development progress.
For the gravity bubble, I added a scene timer called bubbleSpawn, and it will start right after the bubble gets deleted. After 1 second, a new bubble sprite will spawn at the previous bubble’s location. This solved the problem I talked about in the last development post, where the only way to let the player dash out of the bubble is to delete it, but I don’t know how to bring it back. I was a bit confused about how to respawn the bubble. I missed an obvious solution, and now the problem is solved.
Development-wise, our artist created some beautiful sprites for the tiles and platforms, and we also designed a boss character - "enemy scientist". He was created using the player sprite and will challenge the player at the end of the level. The scientist sits on a moving platform and throws grenades at the player, and the player will have to jump onto the platform to shoot him and jump down when he uses projectiles.
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As for level design, I tweaked the level layout slightly to make the player always move toward the right. This change was made to reduce confusion on which way to go. I also incorporated additional platforming sections to prolong gameplay and, of course, added the final boss fight stage. Some parts of the level now feaure additional platforms beneath the main path to allow players to backtrack and try again if they fell from platforms.
Now, onto the playtesting session.
I was the only one from our team that went to the Halloween playtesting party, and as a result, I only did a preliminary playtest with a single person. There was quite a bit of positive feedback. The player was surprised by the mechanics we incorporated into the game, and he found them very interesting to use. He also praised the fluidity and intricacy of the character/object animations. However, the blandness of the background and the inconsistency of the recoil jump mechanic hindered the gameplay experience.
After the team made some further tweaks, we conducted more systematic playtests across 5 players. This time, we received a lot more constructive criticism that would help us further improve the game.
First of all, playtesters all stated that the inconsistency of the recoil jump severely affected the enjoyment of the gameplay since most of the platforming sections require the recoil jump to complete. This made going through the level quite frustrating, and At the current stage, the gun’s recoil needs multiple shots fired beforehand to activate. With each shot, the jump distance would increase, and after a certain amount of shots, it would revert to an unfunctional state. So far, we couldn’t find a solution for this major issue, and we suspected the only way to solve it is to switch to a physically-based engine.
There were more complaints regarding the level design. Most players pointed out that the level felt quite confusing as they often couldn’t figure out which way to go, and some sections of the level were simply not fun to traverse or too frustrating to get through. This would obviously be an issue on my part. As a first-time level designer, I’m quite inexperienced when it comes to making a level feel fun to play. I also haven’t played too many 2D platformers, which further increased the difficulty of level design for me.
Some additional problem lies with some of the experiments and enemies. Players often don’t know what to do with the friction gel and the gravity bubble and stated that the enemies felt weak and unchallenging to fight against, as both their attacks and movements are quite slow. So fighting them was more of a chore rather than a compelling challenge.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 8 - Racing game development
Overall, the development exploration went relatively smoothly. I followed the workshop tutorial and fiunished the racing game example, and I felt like this is one of the more diffcult example out of the 3 games. I didn’t experience any issues until I got to car and tree spawning, they were either not spawning or spawning too much. I had to keep ghoing through the tutorial over and over again to check if I had misssed some code or created any variables the wrong way. Another problem I encountered was witht he score system. I checked that I had the exact same code as shown in the tutorial but the score always remains at 0. Later I found out it was because I didn’t select an opject for the for each event. At this stage, every system work as intended.
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[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 10 - Assignment 3 development
Team Kori Venda consists of 3 people, Wilson, Liam, and I. And the game we’re working on is called Red Alert: Search and Destroy. It was originally Wilson’s project and my role in the team is focused on level design as well as minor game design elements, and for the past week, I’ve been working on creating a compelling level that meets our 3-5 mins playtime target. So far, the design aspects have been progressing smoothly and I’m satisfied with the level that I produced. We were originally considering creating multiple levels and having a boss fight at the end of each level. However, after some discussions we quickly realised that we are taking on too much we can handle and we obviously needed the scale back the game size. Eventually, we decided on only creating a single level and making it the best version we can. So that we are able to be more focused and have more time to complete other sections of the assignment. 
One of the most challenging aspects of my tasks was creating the “Experients”, 4 types of interactive platforms ( Bounce Gel, Ricochet Tile, Friction Gel, and Gravity Bubble) that players can use to their advantage to solve puzzles and help with traversal. The first 2 were fairly easy - Bounce Gel and Ricochet Tile. For the bounce gel, I simply applied what I learned from the first workshop, where, if the player falls onto the bounce gel they would automatically jump again. As for the ricochet tile, I did some research to quickly find that there’s a built-in function that allows projectiles to bounce off of another sprite at a specified angle. I only had to fiddle with the collision masks a little bit.
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When it comes to the friction gel, a lot more experimentation and exploration were needed. When a player steps on the friction gel their speed gets reduced and they are unable to jump, however, if they use their gun to fire in either direction, they would be propelled in the opposite direction for a large distance in a very short time. I first used the built-in function to adjust player speed and disable jumping which was easy enough, but when it comes to propelling the player there were always problems. Initially, I used the recoil system Wilson had developed, which was to use “add a force” to propel the player in the opposite direction of the bullets. But whenever I stepped on the friction gel the player sprite would glitch out, constantly shifting from left to right, and would get repelled by the friction gel. No matter how I tweaked the values in his events or altered functions, the issue still persisted. I then tried using the tween function similar to how I did the air dash ability in my own platformer project and it worked. It simply teleports the player in either left or right direction for a certain amount of pixels in a specified time frame and it works perfectly without issues.
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By far the hardest experiment to do was the gravity bubble. It’s a mechanic similar to the sphere in Celeste, where, once the player collides with the bubble they would get suspended in it and once they choose a direction to get spat out, they would be launched out of the bubble for a long distance. The way I did it first was to fix the player's position to the bubble’s x and y coordinates once they collide, but I quickly found out the player would get stuck inside the bubble (which is to be expected). I also tried to let the function only trigger once but, either player would constantly bounce off of the bubble and even if they successfully entered the bubble, it obviously only works once and the bubble won’t interact with the player anymore. At the current stage, the only solution I came up with was to delete the bubble once the gun shoots and tween the player's position to either left or right based on their arm orientation. This worked fine, but the obvious issue is that it only works in two directions which would limit player mobility and I have yet to find a way to make the deleted bubble respawn. The gravity bubble mechanic will need further exploration and tweaking.
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Lastly, I found the level design process itself was a lot more complex and time-consuming than I expected. There are quite a lot of aspects to consider at each given moment -- level layout, enemy, health station, checkpoint, and experiments placements. I find it extremely difficult to strike a balance between difficulty and accessibility, and how to evenly place all the elements into the level or combine them together to create puzzles and challenges. As I mentioned in the beginning I am currently satisfied with the level design, it took a few dozen tries to finally make it feel right. I would make adjustments after conducting playtest session based on player feedback.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 7 - Racing game elevator pitch
Game title: 
Audience: players older than 10
Player experience:
Fast-paced racing game where the players’ reaction and aim will be put to the test as they aim and shoot incoming enemies while controling their car.
Control scheme:
A & D to move left and right.
Mouse to aim
Left mouse button to shoot
Elevator pitch:
In a distopian world, more than a hundred years after the apocolypse, you are a lone survivor in search of hope and a new oasis to live. To get to your destination, you will need to cross hundreds of miles of no man’s land and hostile settlements. On this journey, you will encounter countless foes that try to stop you and take what’s yours. So strap into your armoured car, demolish your enemies, and achieve your goal.
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Prequel To the Post Apocalypse Vehicle Build
Image retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l_21UlIs8g
Unique Selling Points:
Multiple car mounted weapons to choose from
Vehicle upgrades
post-apocolyptic art style
#elevator pitch
#game development
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 6 - Asteriods Developemnt 1
This week I followed the workshop tutorial to complete a basic asteriods game which I thought was a bit simpler and easier to understand than the platformer game. Though there were a few events in the code block that I have to figure out myself. Such as starting the timer for firerate and asteriods spwaning as well as adding a score counter. Over all, I really enjoyed the asteriods game development exploration and next I’ll have to add additional mechanics and deign elements according to my elevator pitch.
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[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 5 - Platformer Postmortem
I was able to get all of my core systems and mechanics working by starting off from scratch and redid everything. The amount of work was no joke... Again, I’ve decided not to implement any of my art assets at first and I just wanted to see if everything worked. And thankfully they did. However, in hindsight, I should’ve at least done some of the art first, especially character sprites. The problem was that the sprites I found on the assets websites were at a different pixel count (height & width) than the default sprites given to us. This resulted in a lot of time spent on tweaking the variables in my code blocks, cropping, scaling new sprites and changing their hitbox points. Whereas I could’ve used this time to move on to platform design and placement. In my next project, I will definitely try to strike a balance between mechanics development and art implementation, so that I don’t spend too much unnecessary time on making tweaks.
Shrink
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Dash
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Playtesting 
This time around I found 2 new testers that have never played the previous half-finished demo. I simply handed them the control scheme and my laptop and let them start playing. This is of course following the testing process discussed in Game Design Workshop (Fullerton, 2018), providing the testers minimal instructions and introduction to your game, so that you can see how accessible or intuitive the mechanics and gameplays are.
To my surprise, both testers got used to the game very quickly and started to try out both abilities and combine them, using both at the same time. Which is my intended way of playing the game.
The results are mostly positive. Both testers stated that they felt the abilities are definitely the highlight of the game and are intuitive to use. However, with the shrinking ability, they thought it would be better to make it activate by pressing the Z key once, instead of having to hold it down. As it can get quite hectic and unmanageable when they have to use both abilities at the same time or in quick succession while multiple enemies and platforming are involved. On top of this, they also found the multipath level design interesting. Where they have to think a little bit before choosing which route they want to go. Though they did suggest toning down the colours of the platforms a little bit, in their current state, the colours feel slightly fussy. Lastly, Both players wanted the checkpoints to stand out more and the blue gems to have a higher contrast to the background image, as they can get blended in quite easily.
[email protected] | Shenghua Gao
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 5 - Asteroids Game Elevator Pitch
Game title: The Abyss
Audience: players older than 10
Player experience:
Players will feel tension as enemies closes in on them from all directions. As well as the adrenaline rush and and satisfaction from evading the enemies and killing them.
Control scheme:
WASD to move up, down, left and right.
Mouse to orient and aim
Left mouse button to shoot
Space to use ability
Elevator pitch:
Step into the shoes of the expedition crew of Odyssian, an advanced probe ship,  as they head into a giant sinkhole that appeared on the earth's surface. Traverse the endless darkness of the abyss and fight through hoards of monsters with powerful weaponry at your fingertips, ready to obliterate any incoming foes. Use your ship’s agility to to manuver around enormous monsters to survive your journey and live to see the sun again.
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Cave Dark Images. Retrieved from:
https://stock.adobe.com/in/search/images?k=cave%20dark
Unique Selling Points:
special pick ups to clear the screen
charge up abilities with score
Eerrie visual design
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 8 - Reading
Before coming into this chapter, I couldn't quite differentiate between QA testing and what the book refers to as playtesting. I often thought they were the same thing.
While QA testing focuses more on the technical aspects, such as finding bugs, playtesting focuses on whether or not a game has achieved its player experience goals, the kind of emotions designers wants the players to feel and the accessibility of the game.
Playtesting is one of if not the most critical parts of the iterative design process. Designers can use player feedback to continuously tweak the gameplay at every stage of development to achieve the player experience goals eventually. Designers should conduct playtesting as often as possible with their target audience to gather feedback so that if something doesn't work, it can be discovered early and not at the end of production and unable to make changes to the core mechanics.
While recruiting playtesters, it would be ideal to find strangers rather than acquaintances or friends because they will provide the most unfiltered opinions and suggestions, which is the most helpful in improving games.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]  
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 7 - Reading
Curiosity is key to coming up with good game ideas, designers shouldn't limit themselves to just playing video games all the time. Instead, they should increase exposures to other types of media such as, films , books, music, etc. and meeting interesting people. The more a designer is susceptible to new experience in life, the more they are likely to get an "aha!" moment.
Brainstorming is a systemetic way of generating ideas and it takes practice to get good at it. There are several suggested rules to follow. The first one is to come up with a specific challenge to tackle for each brainstorming session, as this is more likely to generate interesting and creative ideas. Secondly designers shouldn't crticisize each other's or theor own ideas, write down everything (quantity over quality) and do quality filters later on. While in a group session, always accept others ideas in discussion and only provide constructive suggestions. Otherwaise it might disrupt the flow of ideas and discourage people. Thirdly, creaing a fun and playful environment can help designers relax and think more creatively.
Keeping game ideas realistic is another thing to remember as a designer. Sometimes our ideas are just not possible to achieve with the current technologies or the avaliable hardwares, though you should still take notes of these ideas because you never know if one day they will become feasible. During this ideation process desginers should constantly refer to the formal elements of gameplay and not just focus on the story and setting, and get carrie away too far.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 6 - Reading
At the testing stage, the most important thing to remember is to make sure your game is functional, complete, and balanced. These 3 aspects can only be learned through continuos practice, and the accumulated experience of the game design process. Another thing to note is that your game have to be accesible and engaging to play, where players should be able to pick up and play with relative ease and drawn into the game through its gameplay.
A functional game means that even in paper prototype stage, players are able to play the game and understand its rules without the help of the designer.
Testing the completeness of a game is especially crucial. During this stage, designers should observe play testers to discover loopholes or confusing rules within the game system. A game simply isn't complete until these issues are resolved. However, it is interesting to note that certain "loopholes" can be turned in to a feature, adding additional layers of epth to the gameplay. A great example would be the "rocket jump" and "ghost jump/jump bug" mechanics in Quake and Counter Strike respectively. They were both loopholes/glitches in the game's movement machenics originally, but player can exploite them to boost mobility and reduce movement noise, and actually make these games more technical to play. It’s a balancing act for the desingers to choose whether or not to fix some of the loopholes.
I personally think balancing a game is the most diffcult and demanding job for designers, since there's just so many elements to condiser. This is especially true in a PvP multiplayer. Designers have to condiser the starting position of each team, layout of the map, the pro and cons of each character or weapons, so that they can counter each other and no single unit is significantley more powerful than other, and no player will have a definite advantage.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 4 - Platformer development
In this week’s development I aim to create and test the core mechanics of my game - shrinking and air dashing. According to Fullerton, designers should first work on and fully test out the core mechanics of a game first, and then moving on the level design and art.
The thinking behind these 2 mechanics, as I’ve mentioned in the elevator pitch, stem from “It Takes Two”. Where player also have the ability to shrink down in a particular and I find this to be quite interesting. I want my players to not only be challenged by platform placements/movements, but also think about how they want to traverse the level. I’m thinking of having 2 routes per level, where one could only be accessed by shrinking down. The 2 of them can intertwine, meaning players can enter or exit at different sections, and offer different levels of challenegs and enemy placements. This offers players the ability to makes choices themselves and add to the sense of discovery/exploration, and autonomy. It is important to give playes the illusion that they are making meaningfull decisions insetad of following the only option set by the designer.
Shrink:
For this mechanic, I first decided to use the scale fucntion to rescale the player sprite upon key press. However I found the transition to be quite jarring, theres no easing/smoothing when a larger sprite is rescale to a smaller one. After some research, I discovered the “Tween” function, where it allows smooth trasitions when scaling.
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Air Dash:
I find this one to be a lot more diffcult and confusing to implement. Ther’s only one tutorial that I can find online. Basically it uses the tween behavior to move the player sprite certain amount of pixels in left or right direction with a specified duration in miliseconds, to create rapid movement. On top of this, in order to make the player not drop altitude during the dash, I setup a variable stating the player y position during dash.
To create a ghosting effect during dash, I followed the tutorial to use the Shadow Clone extension to animate 10 copies of the player that follows the path of the player sprite during the dash animation and delete themselves afterwards.
For some reason, no matter what I do, the dash function just wouldn’t work. I tried to isolate each section of the code and test them out and nothing’s working. I went back to make sure I did it exactly as shown in the tutorial, still nothing. And this is the same thing with my checkpoint system, not matter what I do, when the player dies (after toutching the checkpoint), the player sprite always gets spawned at the very beggining of the level.
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Play test:
With a limited portion of my mechanics working, I tested the shrinking ability with some of my friends, and they all stated that the ability is easy and smooth to use. The 3 testers all stated they felt a sense of freedom because they can shrink down and up at will, and fit through small gaps between platforms and duck beneath incoming enemies.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 2 - Platformer Game Elevator Pitch
Game title: DimensionMania
Genre: 
Action-adventure side-scroll platformer
Audience: 
Players with platformer experience, suitable for both younger and older audience.
Player experience:
Fast-paced platforming action with challenging level design. The primary goal is to get through levels unharmed and avoiding enemies instead of defeating all of them.
Control scheme:
Arrow keys - move left & right, jump
Z - hold to shrink, release to resize
X - air dash
Elevator pitch: 
In the action-adventure “DimensionMania”, an experiment gone wrong has made a scientist stuck in an alternate dimension with no way out. Players will step into his shoes, harness the power of dimensional abilities to navigate the treacherous world of the alternate dimension while escaping mysterious monsters. And It is up to the players to help the scientist travel back to reality. His fate is in your hands.
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Interdimensional Art. Retrieved from:
https://sketchfab.com/blogs/interdimensional-art-gallery/
Unique Selling Points:
The shrink ability offers great versitility, allowing players to fit through small gaps and duck beneath enemies.
High mobility traversal with the dash ability.
Challenging and visually interesting level design.
Inspiration:
The inspiration of DimensionMania came from “It Takes Two”. Where, in a particular level, players have the ability to shrink down and resize at will.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 2 - Workshop 1
GDevelop fundamntals:
In the first workshop I used GDevelop for the first time. It’s simpler than I expected. Though, I still find the interface to be quite confusing. Largely due to the differences between the verisons of GDevelop picture in the tutorial and what I’m using, which is a new version. Things begin to clear up after about an hour of fiddiling around, as I became nmore familiar with the UI and logic of GDevelop. 
In this first workshop I created an simple scene of a platformer. Where I’m able to create animation for waking and jumping, etc. with the assests provided. The fully finished scene features a platform which the player can walk on, and a enemy that can move from right to left of the platform and turn to the other direction once it reches the edge. It can also be killed by the player by jumping on top of it.
This tutorial is pretty straight forward and a good starting point for creating my own platformer game. In the following few weeks I will be futuher exploring the functionalities of GDevelop and aim to build an simple and interesting platformer experience.
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Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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y-u-u-u-u-u · 2 years
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Week 4 - Reading
The chapters required for this week’s reading presented an exhaustive level of detail on the various elements and systems that make up a video game. With the formal elements, they are a set of structure that forms a video game. Designers are encouraged to mix and match formal elements to create unexpected results and unique ways to play. In the competitive games industry, most genres of games are highly saturated such as multiplayer fps, platformers, fighting games, etc. It is important to put a fresh spin on existing models of play to capture the player's interest, and not copy the existing structures of already popular games. Nier: Automata would be a great example of breaking the expectation of what an action-adventure game would be. The game mixed multiple types of gameplay (hack and slash, side scroll platformer, bullet hell, and top-down rogue-like) all into one single package and switches between all these styles during each section of the story to constantly give players new perspectives. On top of this, Nier also incorporates multiple playable main characters, multiple endings, and different storylines with each playthrough. It is constantly trying to provide new experiences in unexpected ways. Nier did come with an entirely new style of gameplay, instead, it mixed and matched all sorts of existing elements and put them into one to create a multi-faceted gaming experience. 
Dramatic elements indicate the story-telling and emotional aspects of video games. One of the points I find interesting was that the challenge level is the main contributor to the emotional tone of each level. Set the level of challenges according to the type of emotions you want the players to experience. ideally, we want to create a sense of flow for the players by utilizing intense and mellow challenges to keep players in a certain state of mind, not too bored, not too frustrating, and keep wanting more. it is important to increase the difficulty for both types of challenges as the player experience grows. However, if designers wish to convey emotions such as desperation and fear, ramping up the enemy count or difficulty would be a viable option.
Lastly system dynamics refer to the various system inside a video game. Such as controls, in-game economy, and object properties, just to name a few. All the system components should work in relation and interlinked to each other and not in isolation, otherwise, they wouldn’t form a system. Each of the components needs to be robust enough to form a coherent and balanced gaming experience. The enjoyment of a game shouldn't come from the fact that a player beats the entire game and reached the end goal, but rather from the process of actively playing. A well-thought-out and laid-out control scheme will increase the overall feel of the fluidity of a game, whereas balanced enemy damage stats and multipliers will create a more entertaining combat experience. Though difficulty vs. enjoyment is a very subjective criterion. Similar to how some gamers find souls games’ brutal difficulty thrilling, while others agonize and quit in frustration (I'm definitely the latter). it all depends on the target audience of a given game.
Shenghua Gao | n10561935 | [email protected]
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