Games Development
Year Two
Unit 10
The Global Game Jam® (GGJ) is the world's largest game creation event taking place around the globe, typically at physical locations. A "game jam" is essentially a hackathon focused on game development. It is the growth of an idea that in today’s heavily connected world, we could come together, be creative, share experiences and express ourselves in a multitude of ways using video games – it is very universal.
The weekend stirs a global creative buzz in games, while at the same time exploring the process of development, be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. It is all condensed into a 48 hour development cycle.”
Within this assignment you will work in a group to create a game demo that takes inspiration from this year’s Games Jam theme which is Lost & Found. The major difference being you are not tied to the 48hr turnaround time. Before any games can be developed, each learner will pitch their ideas for a game.
The chosen game will be developed by the group throughout the rest of the unit. It is important that this product meets the needs of the identified audience. Each learner will take a role within the team based on a skills audit.
Once the roles are assigned, development can begin and will be phased to include two Q & A sessions. All development contributions will be recorded in a development journal in a weekly entry. Games are developed by teams of talented developers each with their own skills and abilities. In smaller studios (which you are going to be mimicking), the development team all take
Research
Theme
The theme for this years Game Jam is called "Lost & Found", Within this theme, before partnering up as a team with other students I had instantly derived three-to-four different games all with different genres.
Game Alpha:
Game Bravo:
Game Charlie:
Game Delta:
Game Alpha, the First game type I had thought of was a simplistic low-poly Hide-&-Seek party game made for the PC only, this game would be taking place in small maps such as classrooms, office spaces (with cubicles) and warehouses. The Hide-&-Seek aspect of the game would have players choose objects to hide as and stay as still as possible with two hunters running around trying to find them, and make them hunters/spectators.
Game Bravo, I thought could be a Horror-esk game that involves you, the player hiding from a small batch of hunters within a large area, this game would get more and more difficult as the game went on, as well as hiding, you'd have to stay on the move as a "Fear bar" would go up from staying in the same spot too long. this accompanied along with stifled breathing and a heartbeat sound effect would add to the atmosphere
Game Charlie as a lost and found based game puts you as a resource officer, taking items out of a "Lost and Found" bin within a school and giving the lost items back to the students and staff around the building, an element I thought of whilst generating the game in my mind was having the player be able to get power-ups, slowing down time and/or allowing the player to teleport to their destination before the timer hits zero, signifying the end to the day (in game).
Game Delta was a funny thought at first, but then steadily turned more and more into its own type of "Lost & Found" game as it pitted you as a deity of sorts within a pixel art realm that delicately (and jokingly) made peoples wishes come true, the Lost and Found part of the game comes as the "Wishes" are on scraps of paper, that when delivered to the wish maker will transform them to what either they did or didn't wish for if it is correct or not.
Games Jam Research
Games Jams are small and quick 48hr game creation processes designed to give both new games creators and veterans of the industry a chance at either solo-ing or teaming up in groups, these game jams happen yearly, always having a different theme and date, usually taking place at the start of the semester for games students.
The themes changing every year forces teams to draft new ideas and switch up where people are placed within the teams as it needs to be a fresh team with a fresh idea, even if the core team itself is the same, basically what this means is that the team ca have the same people, but those said people have to be in different positions, E.G: a coder one year cannot be the coder the next year, and so on..
Games Jams are also a great place for games companies be it Indie or AAA to look for games developers, as some of the games created within the time-frame by solo can be on par as some Indie teams.
National Games Jam
National Games Jams are when a nation such as Japan will make games to a specific heading like "Lost & Found" and then make the games creators get voted on by the games community publicly to see who has made the best game with the heading in mind, a bit like a contest, but disallowing AAA companies and top Indie companies from taking part as it has shown that they will just win without contest.
Combatting that issue, the employees from the companies may enter in small teams or enter as a solo "contestant" but they will need to be branded as every other contestant entry such as "Solo entry" or "team entry". it stays completely anonymous.
Global Games Jam
Global Games jams are small 48hr long games creations that the world over can take part in, a Global games Jam is usually given a stricter or more vague heading such as "Repair", "Transmission" or "What Home Means To You". These themes are chosen specifically to challenge the brain of the entry teams and to also give novice as well as beginner games developers a chance to create something new and exciting.
The themes themselves are made by the "Theme Committee", who are a set group of Games Industry professionals such as artists, leaders and level designers, with the task of choosing a theme for the GGJ (Global Games Jam) there are also hard corners such as not having a theme the same as or near close to another game jam that happened in the years past as a team may just re-enter an old game with minor adjustments.
This committee has ultimate power over the GGJ, with a universal theme picked in the beginning months of the year or just shortly after the last one, the committee pick a base sixteen themes and slowly whittle them all down to one that all parties can agree on with the rules previously stated set.
Games Jam 2021 Games
Don't Forget The Stars
Don't Forget The Stars is "a 2D procedural
adventure casual game about a Slime that has Alzheimer and wakes up in an unfamiliar place without his most valuable Stars. He has to find all 4 Stars to remain calm and be able to sleep during the night. On the next day all 4 Stars gone missing again on different and more distant places and everyday the Slime is affected by his memory and starts to forget his initial purpose: Don't Forget the Stars."
The screengrabs from the game give off a more mobile experience, that similar to "Doodle Jump" and other 'Jumper Platform' games.
Finding Your Keys
Finding Your Keys is a game completely derived from having to find your keys after having lost them, this simple premise has played parts in all of our lives and has had us tearing through our houses looking for them.
"Find your lost keys in your room by tearing it apart!"
The Way Home
The Way Home is an "Experimental Ambience Game. Have fun wandering the strange place you're in and discovering why you are here".
From looking at the screengrabs on the GGJ site, I perceive this to be a game more focused upon the musical experience over the visual and story. Taking place in a forest just after dusk, this "Slender the 8 pages" styled game gives off the same experience and game play with fresh controls instead of the normal "WASD" or "arrow controls".
Memories
Memories is a game about a robot who "must remember what his purpose in the world is" and to do so the player must complete a seemingly randomised set of tasks around a small house the robot lives in to regain his memory.
Looking into the screengrabs from the games jam site, I see that this game is given a simple premise and that the controls are as normal, with a M&K base but controllers can be inputted to replace the mouse and Keyboard if it is easier for the player.
Game Jam 2021 Winners
Best Overall
Best Use Of Theme
Lost Buttons, Found Control
Hotel Royale Liechtenstein
"While on a walk back home from your local video game store, you accidentally drop your newly purchased GameBoy onto concrete. This then completely breaks all of the buttons, losing the controls besides the UP button! Luckily enough, this rare GameBoy has a feature of magically finding and getting back them by playing the games inside of them! Play the minigames to find the lost controls and find the secret code to fix the console!
Gameplay is similar to Metroidvanias, finding items to progress, but backtracking also helps to reach the true end goal. So try to unlock new buttons for controls that weren’t initially available in previous levels!"
"We are delighted to welcome you to Hotel Royale Liechtenstein. Through our complete assessment, today you will be the temporary staff at our Lost and Found office. Your daily job is to record lost properties and return them to our noble guests. Hotel Royale Liechtenstein has a long and fascinating history. The hotel was built in 1774 by the Frenchman Alain V Vallée and has since been a well-known landmark in Liechtenstein. History is written in the walls at Hotel Royale Liechtenstein. Here, we devote offering a Royale service. A detailed employee handbook will be presented to you soon"
Difference Between AAA, Indie and Game Jam
AAA
Indie
Game Jam
Fallout 4 is classed as a AAA game with the subtitle of Lost & Found as the main story is that after a nuclear blast, your son is stolen from you and that you need to find him, and along the way you encounter all sorts of beings that will either try to help you on your quest, or will outright put it on and indefinite hold whist they make you do what they demand.
Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime is an Indie game centred around the power of "love" as it states at the start of the game within a prologue cinematic. The game itself is about having lost the power of love to "anti-love" and that you need to get it back by finding it within the system of the love core, by freeing the trapped folks of the love-system.
Lost Buttons is a Game Jam 2021 winner that uses the theme of Lost & Found in a way that I personally find interesting, whilst within the confines of the game, you find buttons for the game-boy on screen, and as you go through the games on the mini screen, more buttons are obtained and the further you can progress within "Lost Buttons."
Planning
Audience Targeting
target audience refers to the specific group of consumers that will most likely want your product or service. Target audience is spilt into age, gender, income, demographics, interests, religion and etc.
With target audience the way you find out what's your target audience is through various ways such as an understanding of there ideal seller, messaging, seeing what are the most sought after items and etc. Another way to help find your own target audience is to Use Google Analytics to learn more about your customers, Create a reader persona to target blog content, Look at social media analytics, Use Facebook Insights, Check on website performance and Engage with social media audiences.
Types of Audience
Geographic- Where potential player of the game live and how they interpret it based upon culture and history.
Demographic- How many people play the game based upon purchases, reviews and other statistical data.
Psychographic- Works with the mentality of players that have bought similar games, putting yours in their feed.
Behavioural- Is the effect the game has on the consumer, this can work in tandem with Psychographics
Team Building and Game Choice
Team Creation
The Team and roles:
Glen- Coding, UI/UX, Lighting Art, Concept Art, Sourcing
Brandon- Modelling, Concept Art
Archie- Concept Art, Level Design, Modelling
Finley- Modelling, Texturing, UI/UX
When going through and having the teams created, our lecturer Joe Ratcliffe went through the class and saw which individuals spoke to each-other more often and which ones who were left to their own devices, and wit h the information he gathered, split the most conversational group up into two, putting both sides as two teams, then added on the individuals who never really spoke to both teams
With the teams now put together our lecturer went on to describe what we would be doing for the games jam, and that now that we were in our teams, to go off and start off with idea generation for what games to be made for the games jam
Deciding Which Game Is Going To Be Created
When I got together with the team I decided to take control as the leader and ask for us all after we completed our ideas separately to join into a Microsoft Teams chat that I had created and post the ideas for the rest of the teams to look at with once having done so to vote on what game idea they liked best. With the added ability to vote on their own if they so wished to do so.
Microsoft Teams
Going through the current Teams chat that I had set up, I had given a small meeting about what we had in terms of games jam Ideas that had the theme of Lost & Found. and with that, I had asked the team to post their own ideas to the chat so that we as a team may vote on what game to deploy as our Unit 10 practical.
Game Idea Generation
Having everyone put their ideas, it was all about reading through them all and seeing which premises were the best for the theme.
With some ideas being near original and lesson teaching in the grander scale of things such as Archie's first game idea, and others being too similar to pre-existing games I gave everyone the choice of three games that took their fancy.
Voting Game Ideas
Now that the games ideas were posted, it was just a matter of voting on what ones we liked the most, and as you can see, there was a five-way-tie for the games that we personally wanted to be created. As soon as I tallied up the choices by vote and told the team, Archie gave us an idea on how we could definitely choose two games to eliminate from the roster to give us three games to choose from, and then a way for the game to be chosen.
The way we did the deciding factor was by spinning a wheel with the names of, and creators of the game, with the ones that came up being eliminated from the roster.
After two games were eliminated, we all agreed that the third spin of the wheel would give us the game that we were going to start to plan out and create for the Games Jam.
Planning the Game Idea
As we now had our game idea, it was just a matter of researching quickly into the art-style, the way we would be creating the UI/UX and what we needed for the idea itself to take full fruition. With the team fully invested and adding more onto the base version of Archie's idea, we found ourselves in a situation where we started to head into the "Production" phase earlier than anticipated.
Reference Images
Reference images supplied our team with what trees and logging equipment we would then use as benchmarks for what we we would be creating within MagicaVoxel, this software fits with our 16-bit aesthetic for the game and level that we would be designing as a proof of concept to then if we so wished, continue within our own time during the college year.
Art Style
When our team looked into the different art styles on the second session, we all decided to stick with the ide that the game would be in a Voxel style and have limited higher definition objects such as smoke effects and fog, with the art style chosen and how we would be modelling the game when we got to it, it was now just about creating said voxel characters, coding them so that the game worked to an extent and implementation of the created voxel made sprites into Unreal Engine.
Characters & Player Character
Now that we were on Characters, The Player Character and how everything should look, we were at an impasse on what the Player Character should look, like, and if there was one at all. After much debate on what we should have and a deliberation on what would be easier, we settled on a player character that essentially was invisible, but could interact with the trees and foliage around them, allowing our initial game design to take place, that being having Mother Nature take over a forest that is dominated by logging and fracking companies.
The enemies of the game would look like Logging factories, Loggers themselves and small machinery such as diggers, with the possibility that we could add one of ourselves into the game as an Easter-Egg.
Assets and Characters
Factory: The factory image created by Brandon Russel in our team is an imagination of what we wanted one of the logging companies to look like, it being a standout White and blue to signify that the level and difficulty of enemies that the factory produces are in a ways easier to most over AI logging factories.
The colour of the smoke stacks is done on purpose to make it seem like they are cigarettes and the blue line around the factory is to give the look of a cigarette box. other colours for other difficulties on the factories are to be Red & Black, Yellow & Red and a Black & White one, all of them are to have their own logos as well as a star rating for difficulty to help tell the player how difficult the factory is.
Fox: The Fox is an animal that is made to be a part of a pack that goes out from friendly positions and scouts out towards where a player has clicked, and if the AI finds an enemy or more importantly a Factory with a star rating that matches the same number of foxes within the pack, it will go ahead and attack the factory as well as mark it out on the map for the player to see on the players integrated world map.
Fox packs will start off as one fox on its lonesome, and the further the player progresses into the game, the higher the "GrandFather Tree" will get, the more roots will dog into the ground and in turn the more foxes will spawn in the packs
Tree: The main tree of the game, "Overrun", will start out as a withered, leafless carcass, without much health or space to move, but as the player takes control and makes moves using the AI controlled bushes, grasslands and wildlife, the more and more the tree will grow into the "GrandFather" status, getting as big as what we as a team planned to be three full hexagons wide (including sprouting roots).
Pitch, Realistic Takeback & Planning Ahead
Pitch
After designing our team pitch, putting it out to the class and receiving their questions, comments and queries, we as a team came together and came up with a new plan on what we realistically could achieve, especially with such a small amount of time left as beginner game jammers, we all decided it best to do a tutorial level of sorts, that way we could still pull off the technical attributes that we originally wanted to get done, but as we only had four members, along with our lecturer giving some insight, we knew the original idea was farfetched.
Pitch PowerPoint:
Realistic Takeback
The realistic takeback from the pitch and idea that our team was thinking of doing in the long and short of it, impossible due to time frame, as put by the lecturer it'd take us far too long, and even after Christmas we wouldn't have it completed as it was just too ambitious, even if the whole class had been working on it.
With that in mind as constructive criticism, our team decided to fall back onto plan B for project Overrun, and decided to instead do a tutorial like level that showcases the technical side to the game such as the "fog of war" element of the game that was meant to be implemented into the full version of the game, this was to make the player more cautious of where they sent their troops, rather than just blindly "sending it" into the darkness.
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Brandon's Higher Voxel count Digger is what we will be putting in the game, this component will be roaming around in a wide area of the deforested landscape, much like a scout would for a team or force, and the hope is, that when the player encounters it, the lights (eyes) of the vehicle would change colour to a deep red and alert other units to the players location so that they can help fight.
With a few of these dotted around the map, the main thing for the player is to destroy these enemies first as they will just keep getting re-enforcements to fight the player, with the longer the digger lasting, the harder the waves of enemies will become, up until they are unbeatable and the player will lose the zone they just captured.
Along with Brandon's High-Voxel Digger, he also created a rendition of an excavator bot, these will in the theory our team did, spawn in when the digger comes player sprites, and attack the forest that the player has built up, starting off in the classic yellow construction colours but slowly go more and towards the black and red all over to signify difficulty as well as grow in height, dealing larger hits against the forest the player controls
the saw arm would do swipe action that would "cut" away a part of the health bar and the pincer in the other would "crush" away branches in a small animatic.
Archie's Tree he made in MagicaVoxel which we coined as the "Grand-Father Tree" would be what the payer starts out with, a big tree, the last of its kind in the game, and on its last legs, withering away before the player takes control. The way the game would be played out at the start is that the tree finally has enough with his surroundings being barren and void of life. so it, with the players help extends his roots outwards into the surrounding area, starting the new beginning of a life cycle, as a few new smaller trees and flowers start to sprout out of the ground, this accompanied by a few instructions on how the game works, will be how the game starts out.
The team agreed to work on a prologue to a game over a full game as the limited time scale as well as my absence due to illness would put the full game project into peril if we went for a full fledged game.
Archie Also created a mini world within MAYA that we would then utilise as a tutorial level, which would incorporate how the player would start the game, how the UI would work and what to expect within the game.
The green areas would be where the player can walk around and utilise the possible characters available along with give an area where the said characters are given some room to breathe in a sense that allows for combat and abilities to be used.
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Tutorials
Tutorials are what people with not much knowledge of a thing use to gain new information and learn new techniques on how to create, design or even just texture what they need to get done. These tutorials below helped me out in how to create a glass and water effect as well as lighting, colour theory and rendering.
Exporting from MagicaVoxel to Unreal: Click Here
Creating Water within MagicaVoxel: Click Here
Creating lights in MagicaVoxel: Click Here
Rendering within MagicaVoxel: Click Here
Game
Snapshots
These semi-final snapshots within Unreal Engine 4 are akin to what and how I would have liked the game to have looked, Missing out on the UI/UX side of the creation together with coding and filling out the light properly leave it with an unpolished look, but aside from that I feel as if the team did a hell of a great job, especially due to my own absences and poor communication within the team.
Creating the scenery as best I could with small timeframe left for the team project, I then decided to push a small factory area that is fully controlled by "AI" into the level, as seen in this image, new AI "Re-enforcements" are being carted off of the factory line and into the world for the player to go up against.
It is important to note that the different bots have different colours to signify difficulty.
For this snapshot, I wanted to get a good picture of the AI to be fighting/defending an area, such as with this tree, and squirrel, the starter defence AI having a tough time as it's 1vs2 with the backup of other squirrels rushing from the Grandfather Tree to help defend the area. The factory in the background of this image truly shows that in the start of the game, how the odds are stacked against you, especially if you play it the way I did, which was purposeful to get players to realise you can just run and gun it. this game requires strategy.
Colouring The scenes was a strenuous as I was forced to remove the original colours from the assets as they all turned a bright, neon variation of the colours originally chosen within MagicaVoxel. To do this I had to enter the materials list and overwrite the set material list so that when the new colours where put onto the assets, they wouldn't go full on eye-blinder again.
This was the intended version of the game main screen along with a few more of the assets to have been placed in, our teams intended idea for the game is that we wanted the Grandfather tree to be surrounded by machinery and ruin as if there was nothing left for the wildlife, with the game as you, the player talking it back, and after every game checkpoint, when you stopped playing and/or restarted the main menu would be considerably cleaner in terms of rubbing and a greener look to the UI, right up until you faced the final Boss, in which we agreed to a fire effect, as the final AI boss, (the factory) would start burning things to the ground,
"A scorched earth policy."
Outside Image Links & Evaluation
Outside Images List
From Left to right:
https://ohiotimberworks.com/blog/2013/12/logging-equipment-and-processes-part-1/
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/forestry-logging-equipment-harvesting-tree-1642553914
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/deforest-thailand-destroys-nature-oil-palm-763990411
https://www.theclunlogcompany.co.uk/the-kiln-dried-logs-process/
Evaluation
Going through this Unit, I personally feel as if I pushed the team too far into Archie's game idea with not much REAL brainstorming. Looking around at each-others five minute game ideas, we in my opinion went to quickly into the voting stages and picked off contenders far too eagerly, leaving us within ten minutes of starting the unit, with our game idea and what we were going to do with it. The first session as a team was all about how we were going to accomplish the task, already having taken control the first time, I decided to take charge again, but give Archie the reigns to the project as it was his idea initially, this first real session we started our map design as well as the character designs and the way the game would be played, all of us unanimously settling upon the isometric round-based RPG section of all the genres available.
With our Genre and play style now chosen, we started drawing up sketches of the world and what we all in our own minds thought the game should look like in this style, All of us in the team having chosen similar looking sketch choices, with hexagonal flooring for a turn based RPG, this now settled we moved on into the art style and what we would be choosing, with the many styles to choose from, and with artists in the team, that being Myself, Archie and Brandon, the three of us looked into the different types and what WE could draw, and that helped us narrow it down in terms of ability.
The assignment brief and the Games Jam heading of "Lost & Found" was still firm in the teams head as we looked into the way the game will be played, the main objectives were all about how the player would find new types of plant and wildlife within the robotics sent to destroy, taking a page out of the classic versions of Sonic, where destroying a robot or a mini boss such as a small factory would free a whole load of wildlife and add the to our armoury as defences or attackers depending on what was freed from said factory, depending on the colour of it, and biome the factory was set within.
MagicaVoxel, The software we all used with Myself spearheading the designs and helping the team along with queries with how to use the software started finishing off the Alpha variants of the models we thought we were happy with, but still needed finishing touches. The Beta model designs looked great on the software as we all now had a general idea of what we were now looking at, which was a 16-Bit isometric top-down, round-based RPG. As it started to all take fruition I fell ill with Pneumonia and thus missed around two weeks of the project as well as the last week before the Christmas holidays, with the allowance of finishing the project the first week I got back after the seasonal period.
First day back after being off essentially four weeks I immediately started working on the implementation of a set of UI/UX to go with to game assets and finished product but again fell short which upset me a great deal as this had made me feel as if I had let my team down for a second time, with the end of the week quickly arriving, I had to let the team know that the UI/UX would not be done in time and that it'd be way easier to abandon the project un-started than to have made a start and leave it dead in the water. The coding and lighting jobs now in my view with 24hrs left on the clock before hand in, I knew along with my team that because of my absences we were now going to either finish with a badly created product or have the demo level still in alpha testing and incomplete.
Combating the issues as I found them when booting up the test alpha level, In did my best to colour correct and put the game into the correct view for the player base to at least be able to get a glimpse and a semblance of what the game was supposed to be about or look like.
With all the complaints from myself and the team about myself, and trials and tribulations out of the way, I can firmly say that I would personally love to do this Games Jam project again with the same team, but this time with the knowledge of how we are supposed to take the planning phase slow but serious, along with the design and production being fast paced, I wished to originally have known that this Unit would be as stressful as it was, and to have never been ill or put out of of commission by the vaccination reaction which absolutely destroyed me. I would also do better to communicate and allow others the opportunity to talk more than I did this time around.
To finish off, I believe this unit has changed my outlook on team efforts and exactly how stressful games development especially games jams are, and that whoever actually completes them and wins definitely deserves the trophy. when going through the creative processes of the game, I had a great time when learning how to do advanced lighting in Unreal Engine and hope to be able to create a nice scene or even an experience entirely within the universe that is the Game Engine UE4.