YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 3 - RNG chest

I couldn't decide which task I wanted to do more between making the chest and making the RNG for it so I did a bit of both.

On the left you can see 2 of the potential drops from the chest. I have 3 possible drops and the chance of receiving any of them is equal and decided as soon as the chest is spawned into the world.

I wanted to focus on the experience for the player so I put emphasis on the visual effects of the item coming out of the chest with lights and spinning to make it feel good.
I also wanted the chest to be easy to interact with so I tracked the players view point and created a visual indicator when they are in range to open it and looking at it. This way it is not ambiguous whether or not the player can open the chest or not.



The chest itself is 4916 triangles as per the brief and contains beams and grooves along the middle on which the lid slides back (as seen in the above gifs).

YEAR 3 - BA3a - SpaceNinja current state

This is SpaceNinja in its current alpha state. It's the game I've been working on, on and off for about a year and a half now. The game has gone through a LOT of different iterations and genres. Arcade, Arcade 2 2 player arcade, 2 player brawler, single player platformer, co-op platformer, metroidvania, and finally it's back to being a 2 player brawler but with the artstyle/ theme of the metroidvania.

I should note that the music I'm using in the game is placeholder music from Super Metroid and not music that I made. I use it mostly for keeping a consistent 'feel' to the games theme/ art whilst I'm developing. You can mute it with the 'M' key.

 For my project I'm going to finish off the game to a state where I can release it as a commercial product. I'm going to market the game and test it at meetups with NIGD and at events like NGF and EGX. I'll also develop promotional videos and advertisements for the game.

The game currently has almost all art assets and movement in place and basic scoring that tracks how many deaths each player has. I'm going to work on changing the scoring to allow for more variety in levels as currently the same one is just repeated. Generally I'm happy with where the game is at though. The movement is the result of hundreds of hours of iteration. I might also consider re-adding the 2 block high character to the game since it adds more strategic depth to the game. The only downside is how much more difficult to control it is. I might have to do some testing regarding that...

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 2 - Projectiles

Task:
Survival Weaponry.

An epidemic has broken out in Chicago leaving a section of the city cordoned off, under quarantine, and those stuck on the inside fighting for their lives. With limited supplies and an increase in crime, you are left to forge your own weaponry from everyday items to protect yourself. 

Indie Dev.
Using a premade model or your own, create two types of projectiles in UE4. You must consider how much ammo will be lost and how it affects the user.


Response:
I made an arena with a game in mind to test out my weapons. Obviously the rest of systems determine a huge amount about what makes an interesting weapon. For example, a gun with an extremely long range is no different from a gun with a short range if the size of the game space is small, or a weapon that you can drop off heights has no value if the environment is completely flat. Furthermore, the ammo usage of a weapon is entirely dependent on how frequently the player is able to acquire new ammo in the game. The design decisions I made about the weapons are based on the arena and game I made for it, as without this context I have to make HUGE assumptions about the scenario I'm designing for.


The game I made is essentially an FPS that pitches 2 players against each other in a small arena. Each players goal is to get into the opposing base and destroy its core whilst preventing your opponent from destroying yours. If you get killed you get reset at your base after a short period of time and your ammo is reset in your own base. The game has 2 different classes; defense and offense, which the player can switch between at their own base. Each projectile was made with only one class in mind.

The arena I made is relatively small and includes various routes over 2 main heights whilst remaining mostly symmetrical. It also includes small passageways which can be easily blocked off/ guarded and some special shortcut options only available to the offensive class.

The defensive class's first weapon is a t-shirt gun with a lighter on the end that fires tennis balls containing vodka. These projectiles move slowly so can be shot over walls/ledges and bounced a little around corners. They make good use of the verticality in the area. They can be used to kill the opponent as well as crowd control to block off small passage ways. They have a relatively high ammo cap due to their difficulty to hit and crowd control
usage.

The defensive class's secondary weapon is a backpack full of rolled up sheets of aluminum (into cones). They have a very short range and can be dropped from height where necessary. They stick around for a little while and cannot be jumped over from ground height. Initially they could but I made them taller to avoid ambiguity which I felt could lead to frustrating deaths. The secondary weapon for both classes has infinite ammo because I wanted to incentivize idea of the game revolving around creative movement and impeding of movement.

The offensive class's first weapon is a nail gun with only the capacity for 4 nails. It can reach across the map almost instantly and doesn't drop due to gravity. It kills instantly but requires great aiming and skill to consistently pull off. I wanted the offensive class to have to really consider their shots to give them a high satisfaction of hitting them and to give them a different flavor to the defensive. I also felt that skilled players would be too strong with too many nails.

Their secondary gun fires inflatable storage containers that can be used to block off small doorways and stood on to creatively traverse the map. They take a while to blow up though so the player has to think carefully about how to most efficiently use them and what size to use them at. Large cubes can also be used to bypass spikes placed by the defensive class.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Finished Hallway

The hallway starts with a 20 second elevator ride. I wanted to create the impression that the hallway was in a remote location so I imply that the player is far from ground level. This also gives the player time to get a feel for the controls and most players will try to click the buttons during this time because they have nothing else to do. Although the buttons have no function, they do react to the player clicking on them. I did this to teach the player early on that they can click on things in the game because it's an important function used later on.

The first thing the player sees when the elevator doors open is basically pitch black. The lighting from the elevator shines out onto the walls to let the player know that they only need to walk forwards. I intentionally left a fairly large gap between the elevator floor and the ground because I want the player to feel uneasy walking over this gap and into the dark hallway.

The window with bricks is a nod to David Lynch's Eraserhead and I use it few quite a few things. Firstly it acts as a visual marker in the pitch black to allow the player to judge their bearings. It also acts as a dim light source which can only be seen from the blue room causing an inconsistency in the players mind as well as making the hallway more visually interesting the second time through. It's also intended to make players uneasy (especially ones with a history of horror game), since it's a space where something could jump out at you when your back is turned. Many players walk backwards away from the wall. Finally, I was hoping the absurdity of a window leading directly to a wall should put the players on edge. A bit like how the hallways don't link together in a reasonable way in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

There's a piano (downloaded a royalty free model) in the hallway that is a major set piece and requires interacting with to progress. To make this clear I've raised it up to bring more attention to it. I also try to teach the player that they can interact with things by making the buttons in the elevator pressable in the long sequence in the beginning. I've tested the game with 2 different people who don't normally press games and both of them have figured out fairly quickly that they can interact with the piano.

After touching the piano the door previous swings open. I was considering adding a swinging sound effect but because of the obvious light difference every one has noticed fairly quickly. I made sure the door opened in such a way that it didn't obscure the players view of the light from the blue room.

This door leads to the second part of the hallway which has another major color change. Once the player is inside, the door swings shut and piano music starts to play (Funeral March, Op. posth. 72). Because the player already knows where the piano is, this music gives them the goal of finding the piano again to find out who is playing it.

This part of the hallway has a very dark section and I've hidden a trigger box in it that teleports the player into the dark part of the other bit of the corridor. This allows the player to escape the room whilst playing with their sense of geography.

When the player gets back to the piano the elevator opens again allowing them to leave. I give the player the choice of messing with the piano a second time for a bit of an 'alternate ending'.

Given that the player has no other direction to go in here, they eventually find themselves back at the open elevator where I restart the level.

Throughout the hallway I'm trying to imply some kind of narrative about this huge man and possibly some kind of water related death but honestly that just sort of developed as I was making the hallway and was not planned from the beginning.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Level Design

I've been thinking about what to do regarding audio for the hallway and I've been collecting audio from freesound.org. I've also been recording my own audio.
I've made the players walking speed a fairly realistic slow walking pace because I can use it to create tension as well as making the player feel more in the characters shoes so to speak. I've also recorded a stepping noise and used variations on the noise to create real sounding stepping sounds for the same reason. I also intend to fake out the player by creating stepping noises from around corners etc
Another reason for the stepping sounds is to subtly cause the player to pay more attention to the audio, since I'm intending to use it a lot for guiding/ scaring the player.

I watched a GDC talk recently by Brendon Chung on Youtube recently called How to Tell Stories and Guide Players through Level Design and he talks about using things like buttons to force the player to look in a certain direction so you can do things behind their back, so I've included the ability to interact with certain objects in the scene so I can put this to use.
He also talks about making the geometry easily readable by putting bends at the ends of corridors and not hiding important passage ways behind sharp corners. However, since part of this project is about disorienting the player (whilst still guiding them through a space) I actually have hidden a passageway around a corner in the dark because I don't necessarily want the player to notice it on their first time walking past.
I do use light at the end of a hallway trick though because I DO want to guide the players in that direction.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1 - Theme

I'm only intending to grey-box the hallway for this project with basic textures for the walls but I still feel like it's important that I have some kind of theme or if this hotel is set in the real world, a decade. The reason for this is because the theme determines so much about the layout of the hallway, the context for why the player is there, and the visual and audio ques I can use.

considering this hallway is a place once lived in it's tempting to go for the 1920's, given how lively everything was back then and the jazz/ swing music of the time elicits a feeling of age. My biggest concern is how cliche it might seem given how popular that time period is in current media (Fallout, Bioshock, etc).

One route might be to set the game in the future and have 'the past' as the current day. Perhaps I can reveal this in some kind of twist ending.

Here are some pictures of atmoshperic hallways I collated. Generally speaking the more lavish looking hotels seem to have wider hallways, more use of reds, carpets, seating and wall mounted pictures. The more 'atmospheric' looking hallways seem to generally have mostly unnatural light, generally darker 'mood' lighting and lots of variation in width, where small passages lead off to more doors etc.

YEAR 3 - BA3a - Task 1

By their very nature, hotels are designed to teem with life but

when business dips and owners can no longer afford to keep the

doors open, the building’s inviting atmosphere dissipates.

Lobbies once choked with people become yawning and shadowy.

Wandering down hallways with darkened rooms flanking either

side becomes an exercise in courage. In these places, the mind

plays tricks, inventing footfalls, laughter, and snippets of music

from a bygone age

- or perhaps some guests really do never

leave. 

My first task of the year is to create an atmospheric hallway with this description. As a games designer/ indie developer my goal is to make what is essentially quite a small area into something interesting to traverse despite limited traversal options. To do that I'll be guiding the player using audio, lighting, level geometry, and I'll be looking for interesting ways to reuse the same space. Where possible I'll be using lots of tricks to keep the player on their toes and to imply some kind of narrative.

Thematically I liked the idea of the 'infinite hotel' also known as 'Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel', which is an infinitely large fictional hotel used as an aid in describing the notion of infinity. I figured a hotel of infinite size would have it's own ecosystem, transport, leisurely spaces and due to it's infinite size would also contain entire fields, cities, continents, and planets. Which is why I think I've concluded that it's actually quite a bad theme for this hotel; it has no direction.

But I do like the idea of an impossibility space. Corridors that link back to themselves, architecture that makes no real sense, walls that shift and change shape. It also got me thinking about a game called Bernband by Indie developer Tom Van Den Boogart. A large part of this project is the atmosphere and in Bernband, the real atmosphere comes from the feeling of existing in a real world. The Bars scattered around, the sound of people making their daily commutes, and the quiet spaces away from all the noise.


For my hallway I can't have people walking around as it goes directly against the brief, but I can certainly trick the player by playing audio of what once was there, and make them feel like they're living in a real space by building it as if people really did live here.

Here are a few initial ideas:

Audio:
Footsteps that mimic yours
Music from within other rooms
Traffic from outside
voices that mock the player
Scuttling sounds

Echo, reverb?

Visual:
Dim the lights
Put the lights out
Change the time of day
Fake flooring/ walls

Ludic:
Change the players height
change the players speed
Loop the hallway back into itself
Change things behind the players back

Thematically I'm still a little bit stuck and I'll cover that in the next blog post.