YEAR 2 - BA2b - Darkest Dungeon and Negative Effects on Characters

Darkest Dungeon is a Roguelike which has some relevance to Doll House because of the way it incorporates multiple characters psychology into the core gameplay. I watched Mark Browns Analysis of the game and he states that "Darkest Dungeon ultimately makes you the bad guy but it doesn't tell you that in the premise or as a twist in the story. You explore your morality organically simply by engaging with the mechanics on offer.". Doll House doesn't want the player to be the 'bad guy' but I do want players to be able to explore immorality should they please and I'm supporting that by allowing murder, cannibalism, thievery, sacrifices to the devil etc as mechanics that the player can incorporate into their stories should they please.

Darkest Dungeon makes the player feel the results of negative effects on the characters by giving the player lower chances of success and therefor leading to more negative effects on the characters. This 'snowball' effect is something I've been thinking about for Doll House. I feel like I can make the mechanics more interesting and more realistic by making one lead into another, which is why the interplay between variables (emotions) is so important. Seeing our characters fall into desperation and potentially go against their beliefs will make the dolls in doll house much more life-like than characters in other games even though they follow their own slightly skewed sense of logic. Looking at the effects of Stress, Sadness, Jealousy, etc is something that many games don't tackle so I think it would be something at least worth trying.

YEAR 2 - BA2b - Multiple Dolls and Initial Asset Tests

With some extended discussion and deliberation I've managed to figure out how to efficiently model my blueprint to minimize the amount of code repetition. Essentially all the dolls are duplicates of eachother and they all have the same instruction EXCEPT each doll has a unique identifier that means that when they sinc their variables (every 5 seconds) with a global actor it saves them as individual variables within itself. eg. D1_currentRoom, D2_currentRoom, D3_CurrentRoom. Then when the dolls want to reference variables within other dolls they just have to check what the variable in the global actor is.
Anyway, this took a surprisingly long time to figure out and implement but I like it so far. It should make programming much quicker and therefor testing and making changes quicker.

Also, I made a super low-poly bed to see how it would look in game (since the camera is far out I told the team that they don't need to make particularly high-poly assets as a lot of detail would be lost).
This isn't my best effort but more of a test to see how low poly we could go whilst still looking good. It's safe to say that 13 polygons is too little.




I went slightly higher this time for some bedroom assets and concluded that about 100 polygons was about the minimum you could go without sacrificing quality but I'm letting the team make assets as high poly as they like as long as they're willing to UV map them.

However, given that ideally we need about 100 assets in the game I recommended that they keep the poly count as low as possible.

YEAR 2 - BA2b - Movement and Room Understanding

Currently I've managed allow the player to move a doll around the house by clicking and dragging as you can see in this gif.

I've placed trigger boxes in each of the rooms that the doll references to figure out which room it's in and it seems to work okay but the doll jumps around a lot when the player moves the cursor. I think this is because it essentially set the dolls Y and Z axis to whatever the trace from player to wall hits. ie. when there are bumps in the walls it causes the doll to 'jump' to different positions as it's constantly trying to the correct position. I might need to include some kind of minimum movement threshold or limit the dolls maximum movement speed.

I've also set homework assets for the team to create this week since we're going to need to populate the house soon and I need to program interactions between the dolls and the objects in the house.

One problem I knew this project would have from the beginning is repetition of code. UE4 makes it really awkward to access variables from within other assets and even for the most basic interactions to occur the dolls are going to need at least 5 different main variables each but this number will probably increase drastically. I don't want to have to copy and paste bits of code from one blueprint to another especially since I want the game to allow for more than 3 dolls in the house at once potentially.

YEAR 2 - BA2b - Design Document

The first thing I did once we decided on the idea was to write up a design document for the team to refer to and to make sure everyone understood the concept. As you can see, I included a development schedule and an overview before describing certain areas in detail.

I'll include a copy of the design document when I hand in.

YEAR 2 - BA2b - brainstorm

We all decided almost immediately that (3) was far too open and so any ideas that fell into this category were not right for the project. (1) seemed like a healthy challenge but any ideas we came up for it seemed too small for the size of the team and the length of the project. The two ideas that really stuck out to us were both in category (2):

[IDEA1] Cat Ship (working title) (if FTL was an RTS)
 - A side on 1v1 RTS set on pirate ships controlled by cats. The player must invest in various cat based weapons, defences and production as they go with the ultimate goal of destroying the opponents ship. The ship itself is stationary but the player can invest in different upgrades (the different rooms of the ship) and this determines what they will develop. Clicking on rooms in the opponents ship tells your weapons to focus that room. You can use this to stuns the growth of your opponents plans and/or earn you gold for more upgrades.

The game could include multiple unlockable costumes and ship skins with the potential to be monetized with optional micro-transactions.

[Good Points]
- Very marketable (everyone likes pirate cats)
- RTS is starting to gain popularity on ios (Clash of Clans) but has yet to fully engage the casual audience so it has the potential to fill a gap in the market.
- A good ratio of 2D to 3D with a healthy dose of design and programming (perfect for our team composition)

[Challenges/ Problems]
- The scope might be a bit small
- Similar theme/feel to a lot of other casual games (might blend in too much)

We also had plans for a (worms-like turn based version of the game)


[IDEA2] Doll House (subversive 'The Sims')
- A story telling game for lets players and fans of The Sims and subversive play (The idea originated from reading chapter 2 of Mary Flanagans book 'CRITICAL PLAY: Radical Games Design' and wondering what would happen if someone made a virtual doll house about subversive play)

A side view of a doll house with a 7 day/night cycle where the player has the ability to move dolls from room to room by clicking and dragging. the dolls each have their own randomly generated stats and desires and this determined how they might react to any given circumstance (taking into account what room they're in, who they're with, their mood, wants etc). The layout of the house may have some element of RNG too . It is up to the player to decide where to move the dolls but what the dolls get up to is of their own decision and the unexpected is to be expected. Over the course of 7 days in the house random events can occur including ghosts, mole infestations, zombie uprisings, squatters, plane crashes, alternate dimensions and more normal things like daily deliveries of packages. Whether the dolls end up happy, dead or something else is up to you (kind-of).

the idea is that if the player wants to they can try to keep these characters alive and learn about who they might be whilst surviving weird events and creating a new story each time OR they can subvert the play and try to get the characters into ridiculous situations where they are forced to murder/eat/attack/cheat on eachother or other entities in the house.

Also, after each playthrough the player can unlock new potential room types, character traits and objects.

The game could be monetized with expansions such as:
Medieval Edition  - torture dungeons, famine, witches, cults
Fantasy Edition - various fantasy races, dragons, questing

[Good Points]
- Very Marketable
- The kind of game that lets players would love to play given the huge amount of potential interactions and creativity they can bring to it.
- Never been done before (as far as I'm aware)
- High replay value
- Potentially cover real world issues and is quite shocking and weird. Should get lots of publicity on social media.
- Lots of fans of The Sims > No good Sims games released recently
- Good quantity of work to keep us busy for the whole 6 weeks
- Good ratio of work. The game should keep all 5 of us busy.
- Large scale but flexible. All we really need to make this good are the core systems and a few variables and interactions but it's almost infinitely scale-able and the more we do, the more open ended the game will feel.

[Challenges/Problems]
- Potentially boring players if they lose the feeling of being autonomous or nothing interesting happens
+ Possible fix would be to include achievements for various events the player can try to cause, lots of RNG, daily (ingame) events and packages with new objects the dolls can use
- Potentially very complicated programming and prone to bugs given the RNG and that it's not the kind of game I've ever made before.

YEAR 2 - BA2b - 1 Button Ruleset Clarification Classification

For the next 6 weeks myself, Connor, Tegen, Geena and Ben will be collaborating on a game with the theme '1 Button Game'. It's a rather vague mechanical theme rather than a contextual one so brainstorming was a little slow at first but it did give us the freedom to work on any pet projects we may have had in mind. Before the brainstorming session, myself and Connor discussed ways we might go about minimizing chaos (since last time we all worked together for the 4 day game jam the idea generation stage got fairly hectic). We concluded that meeting up in person this time would be beneficial, also I think we were more relaxed given the longer project length.

Before we met up I created a classification we could use to categorize our ideas and to outline the limits of our brief. This was to help organize our ideas and to more effectively analyze them.
The categories are:

(1) Strict - Literally 1 single button as the only input. Uses:

inputs - button press, button hold, button release

different contexts - eg. which part of the screen the character is at when the input is inputted.

Analogue input - how far down the button is pushed could determine of the character for example

(2) Mid - Allow non-button inputs too such as analogue sticks, mouse control and touch screen.

Possible custom controls like sliders, twists (like Bop-It)

Possibility for on rails shooter, point 'n' click, racing (where mouse_x = turn_rate) etc...

(3) Not-strict - Where the 'single button' refers to the 'action button' and other buttons can be used for other things.

(4) Other:
Subvert the theme - All button except for 1
physical buttons in the game that you can move around as a character
Single button with loads of different ways of interacting with it.

Continued in next post...

YEAR 2 - BA2b - Ambivolence Can Collaboration

For our 1 week collaboration project with the Graphic Design and Design for Publishing students we were given the task to re-purpose the object (Tin Can) with an emotion in mind (Ambivalence). The first thing we did was to discuss ideas for our object and a concept for a ballot box caught our attention. The tin cans would become containers of information and the public would place a ring pull in the can for the cause they felt the most strongly about. It was suggested that the question be something people are often ambivalent about and I suggested that the ballot be rigged to make a statement about how all the answers to the question are actually the same but reworded. I made us all a slack group and we used it to discuss ideas further and share files and research between one another.

The next day when it was pitched that rigging could be achieved through random chance via a hidden pachinko machine. The pins in the machine would be metaphors for everyday things that could sway your decision. The surprise is when the ball ends up in a can that you didn't expect and we reveal the influences that changed the outcome. A few of us started working on a playable mockup that would be shown on screen during our presentation. I did everything in UE4 (The general layout and programming), Matthew made the assets and Natalie made the 2D art.

By Thursday the mockup fully working but given that we still had 3 days we brainstormed some more ideas and Ross came up with the idea that the can could be a container of blank dice. You write outcomes on the dice and they make decisions for you to solve your ambivalence. Me and Matthew made another mockup using maya and UE4. I animated the can turning and the dice rolling out onto the game board. This was shown during our presentation.

A gif version of the animation we made

We made sure to include the audience where possible in our presentation where possible to make it more engaging and to test our product out. I think it went well. We got a good response to the presentation and we worked together as a team very well. I've kept in contact with some of the team members and we are planning on collaborating again at some point.