Falling Game Contribution

This post is about my contributions to the Falling game during Fall semester 2012.

Zombie Divers Design

After we decided to cut Graviators and change our game to something else we came up with the idea to splat zombies. As the designer I was responsible with coming up with a new design that fit the basic idea we came up with as a group.

My initial idea was to drop the zombies down a pit. This was so we could make tube based levels. Tube based levels would allow us to get more obstacles into the level and populate the entire length of a level more effectively. Obstacles also serve as reference points that contribute to the sense of falling and speed.

I modeled a quick reference of things the artists should start concepting and building.

After I presented the idea to the team one of the artists on the team immediately said he wanted to make the game so that the player drops the zombies off of buildings instead of down a pit. He claimed they wanted to build buildings instead of pit sections.

This seemed like it was ok with the rest of the team and we thought we could make buildings work with the design in place of doing the pit based levels.

At this point our Zombie idea still needed to be passed off on by the professors. So we got a prototype working and white boxed a level.

I then put together a quick trailer that we could show our professors to get them on board with the idea. The professors liked it and gave us the go ahead.

Zombie Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpC1SpiYi0s

Zombie Design Document

I wrote and maintained a design document so that team members could refer to it.

Here is a link to the document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PxFvyB_Rd5hSvU90APQGfojIjw5Na8xJH81VgrWyvms/pub

Falling control scheme

Can be seen in the design document above.

This is the last tangible contribution of mine that is still in the falling game.

The falling controls are similar to the actual movements of skydivers, while still being relatively simple.

This was designed based off actual motions a skydiver would make to move while falling. The moves are quite exaggerating compared to a real skydivers motions so that they are large enough motions for the Kinect to easily differentiate between different moves.

Death of Zombie Game

We came under pressure from several people to change our game again! We started hearing from the professors that they were not very excited about the theme being zombies anymore. They were claiming that it wasn’t “indie” enough and that we needed to have a good reason for using zombies. The main reason we had chosen zombies was so that we wouldn’t be disqualified immediately for violence when we submitted to IGF.

Secondarily we wanted to use zombies because they are very popular in pop culture. One of the artists had taken the stance that because they were popular they were overdone and we shouldn’t use them. I disagreed with him on this stance. We then had a visit from a professor from another school that had had a project make it to be a finalist at IGF. This professor cautioned us that even our zombie deaths might get us disqualified. So at this point we were hearing from multiple sources that zombies were not a good choice.

The team got together to go over our options. I framed the situation for the team as such:

1.  We go forth with zombies, which was already an approved thesis idea and had a good amount of design already done, and say screw it if we get disqualified from IGF.

2. We go back to the drawing board AGAIN and think up a new game/theme. By selecting a new game the majority of all of the art and design work would have to be thrown out.

I voted for option 1. I was against changing the game because we had already changed once and I thought it was ill advised to keep changing the game.

It turned out the team wanted to change again...

So we all pitched a new round of themes for the game.

I pitched a game called Bear Down

Bear Down Design

I chose to do the design document on a wiki, however the following link is the document in pdf form. It is somewhat out of order.

This design was simple enough and within scope so that we could have it ready and polished for IGF.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9EuVhmu1NflNUp1d3IxbkRrdzA/edit?usp=sharing

Switched teams

This is the point where I was switched to a different team so that I could help them get their game far enough along to submit to IGF.

Dodos Semester Wrap Up

The following is what I contributed to The Last March of the Dodos Fall Semester 2012.

Modeled all three current levels

My biggest tangible contribution to the game was getting levels constructed. When I joined the team they didn't have any decent levels modeled at all. They had a boxy weird level that didn't work very well. So the first thing I decided to do was take some of designs Troy had drawn on paper and turn them into something playable.

These are the drawings I was given by Troy to build the levels from. The drawings are immediately followed by the model that I built that are now in game. The models have some weird geometry that is a result from having to have the rocks built into the level so collision works properly.

Level 1

Model of Level 1

Level 2, not in game currently.

This shows level 2 in the first stage of construction.

Level 3

Model of Level 3

Level 4

Model of Level 4

Textured/Painted/Added Doodads to all three current levels

Texturing the levels took a little bit of thinking about how it was going to be done. Brandon and I ended up deciding to go with a vertex painter that we found on the Unity Store. The vertex painter was effective because we could paint a level relatively quickly and designate areas to have different textures. We could then swap textures in and out and also change how often any texture tiles very easily. The biggest limitation we have using this method is that the vertex painter is limited to only 4 different textures per shader.

The picture below shows Level 1 after it was painted and had doodads added to it.

This picture shows the same level but with the old color scheme.

Reworked the Hammer Trap model

This is the old design of the hammer trap. The entire contraption looks rather weak. It needed a redesign desperately.
This is the current model for the hammer trap that I remodeled. I rebuilt the stand to be more bulky. This design makes the entire trap more visible from the camera perspective in game. I also added a few more edge loops to the head of the hammer to make it look more curved.
This is the current look of the hammer. Jesse made the texture.

Animated the Bear Trap model

This is the animation for the bear trap. Like the hammer trap I hopped in to relieve pressure off some of the artists to get some work done so they could focus on other things. Making this animation was pretty straight forward. however, we did have a problem with getting into Unity properly. The animation would play for the individual traps wouldn't disappear as they were supposed to. We originally used the visibility channel to try and make them disappear, which wasn't working. Then we tried to scale them to 0 when they were supposed to disappear but that didn't work either. Eventually we settled on just moving the used traps in the -Y so that they would instantly jump below the playing field and would disappear when they were supposed to.

Figured out FBX pipeline that all animations with models (traps and dodo) were exported and imported with

There was an issue with the way animations were getting into the game. We were exporting our models and animations to FBX format, then cutting up the animation into takes in Motion Builder so that it was easier for our engineers to handle in Unity. The problem was that the way we were exporting it would make the animation wig out and the rig and model would deform in unintended ways. At this point I worked on the process via trial and error until eventually figuring out the proper way to export so that everything worked as intended. Unfortunately the discovered export method didn't work for the squash and stretch deformers we had on several models and I didn't have the time to figure it out before our IGF submission. Overall this was very helpful because it freed Brandon up to continue working on the art while I figured out the problem.

Designed water/lava system with Kamron and others

I worked with Kamron to decide how to make the water and lava look better. The water looked too static, especially against the shore of the levels. We decided to apply the undulation that was on the lava to the water as well. This decision helped break up the shoreline a bit and make the water looks more dynamic. There were some problems with making the water undulate and maintain its reflective shader. However, we were able to figure out how to make it work.

Helped Brandon and Jesse manage art pipeline and assign tasks

The main thing that the Dodos team needed when I joined was art support. The art pipeline was in bad shape. This was basically because Brandon was overloaded. Christine was struggling with contributing usable assets. Dave was working on things that weren't even going to get into the game and working at an incredibly slow rate at that. All of the artists needed to be sped up on their asset creation. The first step to speeding up the art creation was to organize the pipeline. Once I was helping with art I was able to bring Jesse into the art pipeline as well. Pretty much every 3D asset was then touched by me, Brandon, and Jesse once we started cranking on things.

Assisted Jesse on Color Palette decisions

I helped Jesse figure out a color palette to apply to the game. Our original colors were just the colors that came with some textures we were using. The colors weren't necessarily working well together so we decided to make a more unified color palette  We used Adobe Kuler to help generate the initial palette then we tweaked it a bit from what Kuler spit out. We will be continuing to work on the color palette until we feel its just right. This is just a step in the right direction.

Cut the long trailer/Gameplay Demo

I made the first gameplay demo for our game. We needed a demo to submit with our game to IGF so the judges would know how to play and be able to see the key points of the game. I fraps'd a lot of gameplay footage of myself playing and edited it down. I also made a voice over to the demo to make sure everything was clear about how the game was supposed to be played.

Cut the short trailer

I also made the short trailer. This trailer is less than a minute long and is comprised of shorter cuts. This trailer is more of a true trailer and not really a gameplay demo. I still need to do some work on the informational transitions.

Heavily influenced new trap functionality, new color indicators, encouraged chaining

One of the other problems that Dodos had when I joined the team was that it was very hard for a player to actually chain traps in a meaningful way. I pushed heavily for the ability for the player to choose where movement traps, the boot and hammer, knocked dodos to. First the player could see the minimum and maximum range that he traps could launch dodos to. This range was shown by the green ring that appears around a trap during placement. During placement the player could also choose exactly where the dodo would go and the arc that the dodo would travel on. This was displayed with a visible arc that moved based on where the mouse cursor was.

This image shows the player using the new system with the boot trap.