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Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! Last week, I had the pleasure of attending Kilkenny Animated, a festival in visual storytelling. This was the very first year of the festival and it exceeded expectations.  The festival attracted amazing talent from far and wide. With talks from illustrators, character designers, directors and more. As a creative individual, I'm a big believer that in order to create, you need to expose yourself to so much media from books to film to art and games. Sometimes it can be difficult to get that motivation. Immersing yourself in an event like Kilkenny animated was not only artistically satisfying, but also so very inspirational and motivating. Seeing such wide and varied forms of artist creations filled me with a renewed sense of motivation and creative desire. I found myself thinking of old ideas in whole new ways as well as being flooded with so many new ideas. Walking around a city steeped in medieval history that I'm proud to call home, I found a new appreciation for the mythology of the city and its rich history.  I was also very lucky to be among the few who got to see the hometown premier of the Oscar nominated The Breadwinner. The movie was beyond amazing. It's a movie rich in culture, with rich narrative, characters and such fierce, raw emotion. It's not just a wonderful and moving experience to watch, but also a movie that needed to be made and I'm glad it was made. Kilkenny Animated has left its mark on me and I can't wait to see what next year's festival brings. For now, feel free to take a gander at some of the photos I took during my time at the festival. Until next time! Hey Gamers and Game Makers! This week's blog is somewhat of a recap of what has been going on over the last while. As you may already know, Hide The Body is currently out on Gamejolt and Itch.io. Hide The Body is also coming to Steam on the 28th of Feb too. This is a bit of a big deal for me on a personal level as it's going to be my first Steam release and I think Hide The Body is the perfect game for that. It's a game I'm very proud of and I feel it may entertain a lot more people that may not have seen it had it not come to Steam. I'm giving a presentation on the subtractive game design used in the making of the game in the next couple of weeks. Once that talk is over, I'll take the slides and basically post that presentation here as a blog for those who may be interested in reading about it. As for life as a mature college student, it's kind of crazy to think it but, I'm nearly finished year 1 already. With a little over a month to go, final exams are looming and project deadlines grow closer. I'm happy enough that I've somehow managed to not only balance college life and game dev but to actually consistently keep getting really good marks in college.
On a education related note, I'm considering running some Game Design workshops over the summer. Exact details need to be sorted out but I'm hoping to do a two part workshop. The first part will teach the fundamentals of Game Design through table top games using pen and paper. The second part will continue on with those fundamentals but introduce coding in a very basic form. You'll wright an interactive text adventure using Java or C#. I'll post a blog specifically on this once I've sorted out details completely. As for what's next. Now that Hide The Body is releasing on Steam at the end of the month, I have time to look at my next game. I do already have a game I've been wanting to make and I'm currently concepting and prototyping it. I hope to be able to dive into full production at the start of the summer. It'll be a while before I'll be sharing anything on it but fear not, there's something in the works. In the meantime I'll be managing the Steam release of Hide The Body and its updates. Busy times ahead! Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers! This week I'm going to be talking about designing win and fail states for games and why it's no easy task. So, first off, what is a win and fail state? Well, in games unlike movies and tv shows, we can't 100% script a scene to play out exactly how we want unless we take full control away from the player a and force it to become a cutscene. Now, I personally don't like forcing cutscenes on the player or removing control from them if I can at all help it. Doing so breaks the immersion of the game, taking the player right out of the experience they were so invested in and making them feel like an audience member rather than an active part of the experience. In a movie we can have a very tense scene building up to a climax and it always plays out exactly as it should because the actors know what they have to do and always do it. I mean that's what they get paid for. However, in a game we can script certain elements to always play out a particular way. The one thing we can't ever fully control no matter how well a game is designed is what the player will do. While we can guess through design and testing what the majority of players will do at a particular point in a level, we can't always tell what some players will do. So, we have to account for this unknown with win and fail states. Now, a games design should always be clear enough that the player should always know what to do or where to focus their attention. A simple example of a win and fail state is in my game Hide The Body. In HTB, you have to hide all the elements of the crime before the cop busts in. The cop busting in is a constant. This will happen no matter what. So how do we distinguish between an obvious win or fail in such a way that the player knows as quickly as possible if they won or lost that level. In HTB, audio and animation play a key role in this. If you have successfully hidden everything, when the cop busts in the player character animation is a positive air punch with a positive dramatic audio cue. While if the player fails, the player character drops to his knees crying as a more menacing audio cue plays. Now the player is very aware that they lost.
An important factor to keep in mind for a fail state is, how quickly can the player get back in the game? Assume the player is going to fail a lot. If they end up having to wait a minute or more to get back into playing that level then they're going to get frustrated with the game and stop playing. Make it as fast as possible for the player to jump back into the game after losing. In HTB if the player loses a level the retry menu appears very quickly and jumps back into gameplay all in less than twenty seconds. Designing fail states for narrative games can be tricky as we need to maintain immersion while still conveying to the player that they aren't doing the correct thing. This comes down to good level design, writing and audio working hand in hand to convey a fail state to the player while still appearing as an expected event within that games universe. Another simple example from adventure games would be if you have a key and you keep using it on the wrong door. The games audio cue should be something like a door lock or door handle rattle without opening along with a dialogue cue to the effect of "That doesn't work" or "It doesn't fit this lock". When it comes to designing your games win or fail states, you need to imagine what someone who has no idea what is going to do. We as designers have the advantage of knowing everything about our game which in turn proves to be a big disadvantage when designing these states sometimes. Get others to play the game and don't guide them. Simply observe what they do and don't tell them where they went wrong. Make the necessary changes and observe if they do what you wanted them to this time or are they at least getting offtrack less. That's about it for this week's blog. I may do another blog on win/fail states with a focus on more narrative games or open world games as they prove quite a challenge for these states. As always, I hope you found this to be of interest and if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or get in touch. Until next time! Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!
In this week's blog, I'm going to be talking you through some tips for Unity that you may find helpful in your projects. 1. Work To Scale: Designing a scene and working with your various art assets can become very tedious if the scale various between each object. So, decide on your unit for scaling and make all your objects follow that scale. For example, Unity's physics system expects 1 meter in the game world to be 1 unit in the imported file. Keep your Scale Factor consistent. 2. Keep Prototype and Project Separate: When first building your prototype version of a game, the prototype project can become quite messy with all the various aspects you've been testing. Some of which can cause game breaking bugs because they simply didn't work or there's bad code in there. As a result, once you've achieved what you wanted with the prototype and are ready to move on to full development. Document the code that you know you'll need and start the full development in a clean project, taking in only what you need. This will reduce bugs right from the start and make life a lot easier. 3. Reduce Amount Of Updates: Sometimes as you're working on a project, a new version of Unity or an update for a plugin you are currently using might be released. While updating to the shiny new stuff is always tempting, try to avoid doing so in the middle of a project unless the update is to fix a bug in your project. Updating mid project can cause more problems than it fixes sometimes. 4. Understand What You're Using: Unity is a powerful tool and yet a lot of us jump into using it without knowing fully what we can do with it. Take the time to read over some of the Unity documentation as I'm sure you'll find plenty of stuff you didn't know about and it'll improve your workflow. 5.Know Your Lighting: Unity has a pretty powerfully lighting system when used correctly. Sadly, a lot of people jump into designing a scene and throw in a bunch of real time lights and suddenly notice the performance drop. Using too many real time lights will put performance of the best GPU under pressure. When designing your scene, decide what lights need to be real time and what lighting you can simply bake. The better you become at balancing real time and baked lighting, the better the performance of your scene. Until next time! |
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