My contribution towards the 410 game creation - Leo's Adventure - are:
- learning and watching game maker tutorials
- learning scripting for the use of game maker
- write design document in terms of Core mechanics, secondary mechanics, and what relates them to make gameplays according to the stories.
The only thought now is that the mechanics are under some assumptions that the code can possibly do. If for any reason it is not doable, future patches or changes may be made.
Tuesday, 29 January 2013
Monday, 21 January 2013
Week 2 Contribution
My contribution to the team towards building Leo's Adventure is:
- Learning GameMaker as an engine to create our game.
- Learn some coding scripts that can be used for GameMaker
- Help revise and refine the concept document for the game
- Learning GameMaker as an engine to create our game.
- Learn some coding scripts that can be used for GameMaker
- Help revise and refine the concept document for the game
Saturday, 12 January 2013
Week 1 - Game Critique and Individual Contribution towards 410 Project
Skyrim - A critique on
Skyrim is an action RPG open world game. This game's sell point is the gameplay of the story. The design of how the story unfolds in Skyrim is a multi parallel arc where it is possible for every player to experience the story in a different way. Players can side to be in a specific faction, or be a ruler / chief in a specific city, and even build a story on top of their own skills. Skyrim is clearly aimed mainly for explorer and conqueror players.
Skyrim successfully managed to use how each player build their characters and affecting the story and decisions based on the skills that each player levels up. For example, players can raise lockpicking skills which will be easier to rank up in the thief guild and experience easier time in lockpicking chests in dungeons. Players can also raise their speech skills will be useful when persuading and retrieving information from other NPCs which will form as a shortcut to an otherwise dungeon that players may have to clear to obtain such information.
In graphics matters, the large and huge open world Skyrim provides is also a part of the interest that caught my eye. In my experience, Skyrim's landscape design is breath taking. Snowy mountains, desert areas, swamps, cities, villages are just examples of what Skyrim has. The graphics combined by the level design can really make players feel as if they climbed a mountain, or a fortress and felt proud if they successfully reach the top.
There are many things yet to be said about Skyrim. As many may have noticed, the dragons are one of the main bosses around the world. They are huge, strong and scary. The roar we hear when we are close to the dragon, the size which overwhelms a human size and the fire breaths that is very dangerous can really engage and immerse players when fighting the dragons.
But really, what keeps players playing for hundreds of hours is a specialty of Bethesda's games such as the Fallout series. The ability of customization through game mods is what sells the game by itself. It is as if the community of players made the game on their own once we modify the game. The community can build new textures, shapes, sounds, stories, and even places to be used in the game. If a player have enough mods along with his / her Skyrim, it can really feel as a totally different game with armors and enemies that other players may not even see. Bethesda provided a default story and a base game code for the mechanics, however players can really modify the game to look totally different in terms of skills, items, enemies, and even new story arcs. When someone is really good at modding, players can feel as if it is a new experience or a new game. Thus is a reason how someone can spend hundreds of hours playing.
Speaking promotional aspects aside, there are few sides that Skyrim can also improve on. I am well aware that technology, the ability of customizing (modding), file sizes all matter to this. However the movements do seem to be very limited. With a short gameplay time, we can see the repetition of loops in movements, attacks, casting spells, talking, and quests. The quests that we have to do are mainly given through talking with NPCs. The only part I appreciate is that they have a voice for every dialogue line that is in a default (not through modding) quests. Other than that, they just stand or sit and talk which makes the game feels unreal. Over a period of time players can get bored by just listening and not seeing enough actions and reactions in the dialogue which feels very dry. Although I understand that by this method it is really easy for players to mod new quests and stories.
Well, in conclusion, me and most of my gamer friends that I knew enjoyed Skyrim up to a certain point on their own. It does become repetitive eventually facing the same pattern over and over. Going through similar dungeon styles again and again. The experience it brought for the early sessions of gameplay is astonishing, but when we catch and feel the repetition the interest will switch only to unfold the story and achieving other goals. Once we reach the goal there aren't much reasons to continue playing the game.
One thing we can be careful of are the mods that we install. For me, the reason I stopped playing Skyrim was because I lost all the mods, and when I load the game after it felt empty. Yet it is no question that Skyrim is a well designed game and its uniqueness of the Elder Scrolls series is clear.
Recettear : An Item Shop's Tale - A critique on
Recettear is an RPG adventure game that has a Japanese visual novel styled character graphics and an 8-bit game graphics. This game is about a little girl that have a dad that is gone missing, leaving her with a debt that she has to pay off in place of her missing father. A fairy is sent to her to help her accumulate enough money to pay off the debt of her father. Thus, the ultimate goal is to eventually gain enough gold to pay the debt. However in achieving the goal, two main methods are given. These two methods are what interested me in playing this game because it feels as if I'm playing two games at once.
The two methods of obtaining gold are through dungeons or opening a shop. These two methods can go hand by hand when players get bored of a method. When the story starts, the fairy will help players open a shop to sell some items that they have. Through interactions and exploring the city, Recettear (the little girl, main character) will manage to have friends that are dungeon hunters. They will help Recettear in fighting monsters in dungeons and getting items from them to sell in the shop while we pay the hunters depending on the difficulty on the dungeon. Inside the dungeons, we control the hunters that Recettear hired to clear the dungeon. A different hunter will have a different gameplay in defeating monsters within the dungeon which makes the game have a little more variety to it. Once a dungeon is cleared, Recettear will sell the loots at her shop to gain profit after paying the hunters.
Now about selling, one of the interesting mechanics that I thought made this game unique is the bargaining. For each day we open a shop and not go dungeon hunting, we see people coming in and out of the shop. Firstly, we have to put the items that we wish to sell on a slot at the shop, the locations where we put the items also decides how many customers we will receive that day. For example, by logic we have to put our best items to sell by the window so people outside the shop can see and come into the shop and browse for more items or buy the item at the window. This is used to attract specific customers that we wish to sell to and gain their favor for dungeon hunting or specific quests. When customers come and tries to purchase an item, they usually bargain for the price that we set. The game will tell us the average price of the item being sold that day, and normally we put 150% of the average price. Then we try to bargain with the customers so that we can sell the item for over 100% for profit. However there are also circumstances where we just want the customers to buy the item for specific gameplay purposes and in this case we may sometimes want to sell the item really cheap so that we don't miss the opportunity of them buying it.
In my overall experience, running the shop in this manner really brings a unique feeling in the game. The design of running a shop in the game really makes me forget about the graphic style that they use. My mind was mostly focusing on obtaining the most profit I can from the customers. Trying to buy an item as cheap as possible to resell them at the shop, or just focusing on the text based dialogue and try to figure out the limit of people's purchases. I don't normally enjoy reading too many texts of dialogues in a game, however this really changes my opinion towards such games.
Individual contribution to team project
For this week's goal, we have to come up with a game concept to be presented. Present a proposal to the professor and give reasoning as to why someone would pay us to make the game.
My contribution this week is
- Generate and imply game ideas
- Trying to keep a flow of discussion going for ideas
- Figuring out what kind of quests and gameplays are possible to make the game interesting.
- Figuring out how to sell the game in the presentation
- Being in a team to design the overall game as a concept that would work
Skyrim - A critique on
Skyrim is an action RPG open world game. This game's sell point is the gameplay of the story. The design of how the story unfolds in Skyrim is a multi parallel arc where it is possible for every player to experience the story in a different way. Players can side to be in a specific faction, or be a ruler / chief in a specific city, and even build a story on top of their own skills. Skyrim is clearly aimed mainly for explorer and conqueror players.
Skyrim successfully managed to use how each player build their characters and affecting the story and decisions based on the skills that each player levels up. For example, players can raise lockpicking skills which will be easier to rank up in the thief guild and experience easier time in lockpicking chests in dungeons. Players can also raise their speech skills will be useful when persuading and retrieving information from other NPCs which will form as a shortcut to an otherwise dungeon that players may have to clear to obtain such information.
In graphics matters, the large and huge open world Skyrim provides is also a part of the interest that caught my eye. In my experience, Skyrim's landscape design is breath taking. Snowy mountains, desert areas, swamps, cities, villages are just examples of what Skyrim has. The graphics combined by the level design can really make players feel as if they climbed a mountain, or a fortress and felt proud if they successfully reach the top.
There are many things yet to be said about Skyrim. As many may have noticed, the dragons are one of the main bosses around the world. They are huge, strong and scary. The roar we hear when we are close to the dragon, the size which overwhelms a human size and the fire breaths that is very dangerous can really engage and immerse players when fighting the dragons.
But really, what keeps players playing for hundreds of hours is a specialty of Bethesda's games such as the Fallout series. The ability of customization through game mods is what sells the game by itself. It is as if the community of players made the game on their own once we modify the game. The community can build new textures, shapes, sounds, stories, and even places to be used in the game. If a player have enough mods along with his / her Skyrim, it can really feel as a totally different game with armors and enemies that other players may not even see. Bethesda provided a default story and a base game code for the mechanics, however players can really modify the game to look totally different in terms of skills, items, enemies, and even new story arcs. When someone is really good at modding, players can feel as if it is a new experience or a new game. Thus is a reason how someone can spend hundreds of hours playing.
Speaking promotional aspects aside, there are few sides that Skyrim can also improve on. I am well aware that technology, the ability of customizing (modding), file sizes all matter to this. However the movements do seem to be very limited. With a short gameplay time, we can see the repetition of loops in movements, attacks, casting spells, talking, and quests. The quests that we have to do are mainly given through talking with NPCs. The only part I appreciate is that they have a voice for every dialogue line that is in a default (not through modding) quests. Other than that, they just stand or sit and talk which makes the game feels unreal. Over a period of time players can get bored by just listening and not seeing enough actions and reactions in the dialogue which feels very dry. Although I understand that by this method it is really easy for players to mod new quests and stories.
Well, in conclusion, me and most of my gamer friends that I knew enjoyed Skyrim up to a certain point on their own. It does become repetitive eventually facing the same pattern over and over. Going through similar dungeon styles again and again. The experience it brought for the early sessions of gameplay is astonishing, but when we catch and feel the repetition the interest will switch only to unfold the story and achieving other goals. Once we reach the goal there aren't much reasons to continue playing the game.
One thing we can be careful of are the mods that we install. For me, the reason I stopped playing Skyrim was because I lost all the mods, and when I load the game after it felt empty. Yet it is no question that Skyrim is a well designed game and its uniqueness of the Elder Scrolls series is clear.
Recettear : An Item Shop's Tale - A critique on
Recettear is an RPG adventure game that has a Japanese visual novel styled character graphics and an 8-bit game graphics. This game is about a little girl that have a dad that is gone missing, leaving her with a debt that she has to pay off in place of her missing father. A fairy is sent to her to help her accumulate enough money to pay off the debt of her father. Thus, the ultimate goal is to eventually gain enough gold to pay the debt. However in achieving the goal, two main methods are given. These two methods are what interested me in playing this game because it feels as if I'm playing two games at once.
The two methods of obtaining gold are through dungeons or opening a shop. These two methods can go hand by hand when players get bored of a method. When the story starts, the fairy will help players open a shop to sell some items that they have. Through interactions and exploring the city, Recettear (the little girl, main character) will manage to have friends that are dungeon hunters. They will help Recettear in fighting monsters in dungeons and getting items from them to sell in the shop while we pay the hunters depending on the difficulty on the dungeon. Inside the dungeons, we control the hunters that Recettear hired to clear the dungeon. A different hunter will have a different gameplay in defeating monsters within the dungeon which makes the game have a little more variety to it. Once a dungeon is cleared, Recettear will sell the loots at her shop to gain profit after paying the hunters.
Now about selling, one of the interesting mechanics that I thought made this game unique is the bargaining. For each day we open a shop and not go dungeon hunting, we see people coming in and out of the shop. Firstly, we have to put the items that we wish to sell on a slot at the shop, the locations where we put the items also decides how many customers we will receive that day. For example, by logic we have to put our best items to sell by the window so people outside the shop can see and come into the shop and browse for more items or buy the item at the window. This is used to attract specific customers that we wish to sell to and gain their favor for dungeon hunting or specific quests. When customers come and tries to purchase an item, they usually bargain for the price that we set. The game will tell us the average price of the item being sold that day, and normally we put 150% of the average price. Then we try to bargain with the customers so that we can sell the item for over 100% for profit. However there are also circumstances where we just want the customers to buy the item for specific gameplay purposes and in this case we may sometimes want to sell the item really cheap so that we don't miss the opportunity of them buying it.
In my overall experience, running the shop in this manner really brings a unique feeling in the game. The design of running a shop in the game really makes me forget about the graphic style that they use. My mind was mostly focusing on obtaining the most profit I can from the customers. Trying to buy an item as cheap as possible to resell them at the shop, or just focusing on the text based dialogue and try to figure out the limit of people's purchases. I don't normally enjoy reading too many texts of dialogues in a game, however this really changes my opinion towards such games.
Individual contribution to team project
For this week's goal, we have to come up with a game concept to be presented. Present a proposal to the professor and give reasoning as to why someone would pay us to make the game.
My contribution this week is
- Generate and imply game ideas
- Trying to keep a flow of discussion going for ideas
- Figuring out what kind of quests and gameplays are possible to make the game interesting.
- Figuring out how to sell the game in the presentation
- Being in a team to design the overall game as a concept that would work
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