Archive for September, 2009
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.
Robot treats!
I have been putting finishing touches on the robot, I could spend weeks adding bits and bobs but I’ve decided that I’ve spent enough time on him already and it’s time to start working on the animations.
As you can see, he’s gained a bit more armour on his legs and torso as well as cables on his back and gun. I think that these really add to the look of the robot and help to fill him out visually. The wires have the added benefit of being a bit elastic which contrasts the rigidness (rigidity?) of the rest of him. I added a light in his torso which makes for some nice moving shadows when he is animated.
Next up I moved on to creating a walk cycle. I had done a walk cycle before which meant that I was able to get something quite decent fairly quickly. I tried to focus on adding a sense of weight to him, I might also experiment with shaking the camera when he steps to make him seem even more immense.
Since the walkcycle animations are less than a second, they arent viewable on Youtube, so you can download them here (front view) and here (back view).
I am currently hunting around for some open source music to base my performance around. So far opsound seems to be my best bet.
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.
Final post before presentation
Have added a little bit of armour bling to the robot in the form of shoulder and knee pads. It goes a little way to filling out the robot’s skeletal look but I might need to add a little bit more.
I’ve also got a powerpoint ready to go for presentation.
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.
A different maze
After some chats with Johan, Jason and I came up with an interesting interpretation of the maze. In this example, the maze has no walls and the floor is invisible. The player is able to spray out some coloured particles which allow him to see the maze and therefore navigate it.
Our initial observations are that this kind of maze is especially hard to navigate and master, and by adjusting how long the particles persist, we can adjust the difficulty of the maze. Manipulating the size of the particles also has a noticeable effect on difficulty.
Lasers pew pew pew!
I’ve been working on another scene for the presentation where the robot shoots his gun. It’s made in After Effects and is essentially just some blurry shapes and some colour effects.
It’s not as awesome as I had hoped but I’ll keep working on it.
More robot progress
Development of the robot progressed pretty quickly once I got into it and after about a day or two I had the robot pretty much fully meshed and rigged.
I tried to stay true to my original idea of having as many interesting joints as possible so that when he gets fully animated he appears as dynamic as possible. He does have quite a skeletal form which I’m not sure if I am quite happy with, I am considering bolting on some armour plates on areas like his shoulders and upper arms and legs to fill him out a bit, but that will probably be for project 3.
After getting the mesh completed I started to add some colour for variety. I also mocked up a bit of an environment to add a sense of scale (those cubes in the background are intended to represent buildings).
Next I moved on to making some of the other scenes for the performance. I wanted to have a scene where the audience sees the scene from the robot’s point of view, complete with a snazzy GUI. So I mocked something up in Photoshop.
The central reticule would be set up in Quartz to follow the mouse pointer so that during the performance I could move it around. The other elements would be animated to add movement to the scene.
And then I made it in Quartz to test it out.
I’m working on polishing up things and creating a presentation for hand-in tomorrow.
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