Well I’ve completed one of many scenes for the performance, the side on walking scene.
This scene shows the robot walking along a road through the city and is intended as a bit of a filler. The “buildings” at the front of the scene are reactive to music and pulse according to the intensity of the music. This is intended to help tie the action on screen with the music, because the robot’s walkcycle will not be in synch with the music beats.
The buildings in the background are just parallaxed sprites with a blur on them, these are intended to add visual variety and add depth to the scene.
I’m currently working on creating the scene where the robot fires his gun – this needs to be awesome because it will be the start of the climax of the piece.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
