Archive for the ‘ DMDN 412 - Emergent Aesthetics ’ Category
Tutorial section development
Over the last couple of days I’ve been working on creating that start of our level, with a focus on easing the player into the concepts behind our gameplay. At the moment it starts off with teaching the player to move the character left and right, then jumping, then switching. Next up will be introducing the character to the idea of moving the camera/light to shift shadows and then teaching the player to switch in mid air.
I’m turning my thoughts to creating a character as well. I’m well aware of how many problems can arise when trying to get an animated character into Unity so I don’t want to leave it much later!
Development
Today has seen a new object being added: a waterwheel. The idea behind this will be that there’s a waterwheel that only gets powered when you’re in the shadow mode because a water flowing out of a pipe does not line up with the waterwheel.
Implementing this section of gameplay looks promising and would be an ideal final puzzle before transitioning to the cave area, but has caused some headaches in the character controller and collision department.
A couple of tweaks to the way the light and camera follow the character have also helped to make the game feel a little bit more polished but it’s still not 100%.
Bamboo!
I’ve started to make some meshes in Blender to create our level with – the idea being to get away from just using the Unity cubes to make our level more interesting. I have been using a Japanese style aesthetic as inspiration, so I’ve made some bamboo and a Japanese-style archway. Using a backdrop of bamboo creates some interesting movement in the shadows which I think is really successful.
We intend to create one level which transitions through a number of different zones, each with it’s own palette of colours and objects yet retaining a cohesive aesthetic. Currently the plan is to have an outdoor Japanese bamboo forest zone and a cave/volcano section with lava. At the moment I’m making models for the Japanese zone and Jason is working on the cave.
More development
I’ve continued to build the level, adding some complexity and showing off the kinds of levels we intend to create post-beta. We’ve got some trees and rocks in there, as well as some moving platforms which help to add a bit of a challenge to the levels.
Jason has made a mock up of the character, he’s made to look like a little stick puppet.
Progress, pre-beta
I’ve been able to get in a little bit of work on the game in between working on my 311 robot.
I’ve cleaned up the code a bit, so that the player can switch between light and shadow modes with just 1 button as opposed to having a button for each mode. While it’s just a small change it’s made the game much more intuitive and enjoyable to play.
Physics have been added to the surfaces of all the colliders so the player no longer sticks to the side of walls (as much), and the character controller has been tweaked to feel tighter.
Slight changes to the lighting in the non-shadow mode have made it a bit brighter and natural.
Also, an extra layer/plane has been added behind the player’s layer, allowing us to have elements in the background and increasing the game’s sense of depth.
The camera is now attached to the spotlight when in light mode, this allows for more variety in views and helps the player to understand that they can control the light (and therefore the shadows).
I’ve also begun work on bringing in objects from blender so we are no longer forced to build our levels out of cubes!
Here you can see the 4 different planes we are able to work with, and the revised lighting.
Getting a little wild with some Plato style.
The last two days have seen some great progress on our game. We experimented with different types of gameplay we could create around the idea of Plato’s cave and playing the game from only being able to see the shadows and we stumbled across a very interesting concept.
After numerous attempts at trying to express the concept through text, I’ve given up and posted a video on YouTube.
While it is still a little bit rough at the moment, the majority of the mechanics are sorted. We will now begin working on adding a bit of polish to the game in the form of more interesting level designs and better, more varied textures. I forsee that the next couple of days will be spent with me working on cleaning up the code and Jason doing some level and texture design.
Overall I’m quite excited about where this is heading!
I wasn’t happy with the kind of gameplay that was developing in the experiments shown in the last blog post so I tried out another idea that I had floating around in my head.
The concept is based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
From Wikipedia:
Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.
In the Unity game experiment I have created, the player’s movement is constrained to a two dimensional axis and the camera is set up so that the player is only able to see his shadow which is cast on the wall via a carefully placed light source.
While this has the potential for developing an interesting and unique narrative, the gameplay is still essentially that of a 2d platformer. It may be interesting to explore ways in which we can create more complex gameplay through extending this experiment.
More!
The last couple of days have been spent focusing on trying to introduce some gameplay elements to the components we have created so far. Basically, we are now trying to get a game out of these experiments.
I created a system where the player could shoot a ball of light which exploded into a shower of particles when it hits something. These particles hit invisible blocks that the player can not usually interact with and make them visible and solid. Conceptually, this mechanic is rather similar to White-Space and doesn’t really make for very exciting or fun gameplay, but with some development could be interesting.
Going crazy for hidden mazes!
Last week was consumed by a 311 hand-in so progress on the mazes has been a little slow but will be picking up now.
After getting the hidden maze finalized I tried expanding on it by extending the level into a 2.5D maze by adding 2 more planes of maze. This created an obscenely difficult maze to navigate (and create!).
Players become extremely disoriented in this 2.5D space because the maze loops back on itself (albeit on a different plane), meaning that the player cannot simply aim to move toward the end zone – they are forced to consider all directions as possible solutions.
I couldn’t help but tweak the particle effects, Tom consistently commented that the particles looked like blood so I’ve switched the texture to something more pleasant. A slight glow has given the particles a firefly/glow-worm kind of look which I think is quite effective.
After this, we created a different type of particle effect which attempted to simulate a sonar-like mechanic. The idea behind this was that there would be an invisible level much like we had done before, but rather than having the particles stick to the maze, they would bounce off like sound waves, allowing the player to gain glimpses of the level.
While it’s not entirely clear from the image above, there is a cube in the centre of the player’s vision. (You can almost make it out from the area where there are no smaller particles in the centre)
I am currently experimenting with making the objects light up (by changing material ala White-Space) when they are hit by the particles. It is still a little bit experimental but I think it has some potential.
Johann is going to bring in some maze-related literature tomorrow which can hopefully give us a bit of substance to our primarily game-mechanic oriented creations.
Hidden Maze revamp
In addition to completing the maze layout for the hidden maze, I’ve tidied it up to make it more playable.
Added:
- Start and end doors to show the player which direction to start heading in.
- A death zone that resets the players position to the start (but keeps the timer running) if they fall off the maze.
- The script that moves the camera to a top down view and shows the trails when the player completes the maze.
TimDoesBlogs
Recent entry
- 2009-10-26
- Tutorial section development
- 2009-10-25
- Flight of the Butterfly Documentation
- 2009-10-21
- Development
- 2009-10-19
- Bamboo!
- 2009-10-15
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