Big Game Project, Part 7.

So, we’ve come to an end with the project, and what a ride it was. I learnt so much about sound design and level design that I’m having a hard time processing it. We were given some amazing feedback during the conference as well, and I believe a re-work of the game is in the idea-stages.

During the three days, a number of adjustments were made to the sounds inside the game, patches, if you will. Ranging from adding new sounds to handling the levels of sound intensity for different characters and the music itself.

Initially we had the problem that nobody could hear the boss talking at all, and Kei was far too loud. The music also was less intense than it should have been. I elevated the boss and music levels and diminished the intensity of Kei’s voicelines. This made a big impact on how the game was perceived.

Most of the feedback about the sounds and level was that there was far too much repetition within the voicelines in the game, characters saying the same thing over and over again. In regards to level, it was good, but confusing, people could navigate where they needed to go, but not in any clear fashion. I write about this extensively in my project report PM.

So the 7 weeks are up! Thanks for a great time and have a great summer!

Big Game Project, Week 6.

I’ve been struggling with finding adequate sounds for a walk cycle. It seems most of the available ones that are free to use are recorded outside, with lots of background noise, understandably.

It’s been a problem for me so much that (despite my necessary emergency trip home to stockholm) I will have to record some own sounds in the week and throw them into the game as quickly as possible.

The last sound that I can think of that we need is a glitching sound for when Kei uses her glitch/dash. In this particular problem it’s more of an issue that I don’t know what it should sound like. I’ve been thinking about this for a while but, how does a glitch sound?

Either way…

It’s going to be a stressful last few days. Going back to the island tomorrow (Tuesday) and will work my butt off to make everything acceptable.

Big Game Project, Week 5.

This is a late post. Again. My spontaneous bout of stomach illness last week has apparently compromised my immune system because I am now combating a sinus infection/flu hybrid. It is unpleasant.

The week went by abnormally fast, either to my joy or dismay have yet to prove itself.

Sounds are coming along great, as well as music too. I’ve taken liberal help from Alex(ander?) in the staff to help create the music, considering my lackluster composing skills. The rest of the project is coming along nicely too, most of the level is done, and though we have little testing time left I am confident that it will prove to be… sufficient but also… impactful!

Creating these sounds are time-consuming (due to my inexperience), but also fun. There’s a lot of fiddling to do, and again, I’m no expert at sound engineering at all but I believe that they are good enough if not for permanent use then for at least the demo level we will have ready for GGC. Most of the sounds are very digital, but the voice-lines have little to no effects on them. We shall see how it all plays out together.

Speaking of which, GGC is rushing towards us with ludicrous speed. I have no idea what I will manage to have finished at the end of the development period, and then have to do my essay as well… It will be… stressful. There seems to be less information going out about the essay this year around as well. An odd development.

My life has interfered quite heavily with this project. I am lucky to have been given an area that is less time consuming than the other aspects of this project, giving me the time to sort these things out. Peace out.

 

 

Big Game Project, Week 4.

Things are progressing nicely. The things we learned during the alpha that applied to me was 2 things.

1: We have not yet implemented any sounds in the game

and

2: It’s hard to find our way through the level.

Mostly though, the work has progressed nicely this week. We got most of the voicelines through processing so they will sound great at the start of today (monday, I’m writing this late.) I’ve also talked with Alexander and he will begin the creation of the music themes with me on Monday as well.

Most of the week was the creation of a few specific sounds though. I fiddled with a walk cycle but decided to wait until the character controller was implemented.

I tried creating some more weapon swing effects for the game as well.

All in all, successful week! Now to change some stuff around for the beta!

Big Game Project, Week 3.

This week has been unproductive on my side.

Monday started with continuous production of sounds for the first enemy in the game, spinning attacks, menacing bleeps and a hover effect for its movement.

Tuesday proceeded with recording of some of Kei’s phrases. The school staff has been most helpful in this regard.

Before wednesday could come, however, I was struck down with some sort of virus or bug…. I’m not sure, and I was bedridden wednesday-friday.

Big Game Project, Week 2.

Week 2 has been coming along nicely!

We’ve decided to use Elias Software as a base, and thanks to the schools connections we were able to save time for our demo production by using one of the pre-existing themes for the game to showcase what we want the game be like. The theme is called Smoggy Sundown, and is a very blippy / retro-gaming sounding theme.

Apart from that, I’ve been working on trying to bring more sounds to our characters in the Level. Kei herself has not been given a voice yet, but enemy number 1 and two both have a few lines and sounds that give them SOMETHING at least, for the alpha (28’th of April.)

It’s tough work. Most of the first week was looking through tutorials and video posts on how to use the programs built-in plugins and so on. I understand now how the programs work, but I still am not a composer. Music does not come easily to me. But the sounds are manageable..! I feel like I’m making steady progress in that department.

As far as the layout goes, I’ve made a first draft, and then a revisioned second draft. The main layout is still pretty much the same, however I have gone over it and thought about use of props and sounds in order to inspire the proper feeling for each of the areas of the map. Start->Middle->End.

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned.

Big Game Project, week 1.

This week has been quite a rollercoaster as far stress goes. Last week, I pitched a 2 day game idea for a third year project, hoping to inspire someone to take me on in their group, but that didn’t happen.

It wasn’t until this Sunday that I contacted Nayomi and asked to be part of her group, to which she responded that she’d need to talk to her group on Monday in order to see what was needed.

Monday comes along and I’m holding my breath, if this does not work out my options have all but run out in terms of finding a group for this course. But it does work out, and there you have it. I’ve been introduced to the group as the sound-designer for the game.

The game is known for now as Kei. Kei is a girl from Gametown, a town she left in her earlier years. Now she’s returned and the citizens are telling her that she’s no longer welcome.

The game is about the unsavory treatment of women as gamers, in a nutshell. And I’m to tackle a role I have no experience in, which should be a blast.

Due to this, my week has pretty much consisted of finding, downloading and getting to know various programs and sources of sound-samples. I’m sick and tired of listening to car-crashes, and I’ve got a whole 8 weeks ahead of me filled with it. But the group functions very well and I know most of the people there, so it’s already going great.

Apart from sound I am also responsible for thinking about level layout. A task which I will be sharing with another group member.

Game Development Blog 6.

Here’s a bit of music for you to listen to while you read, should you like to:

Brace for deceleration, we’re calming down.

So the last few weeks have been quite stressful for our team of 6 people. With one of our coders leaving the course and the never-ending updates and fixes that we can do to the game itself, it’s been pretty hard. That said we’re finally up in front of these things  and it’s looking like the game might be finished in time for the presentation.

This week I will be talking about 2 things. First I will be talking about the design behind our high-score menu, and secondly about the overall game and how it has been to develop a game during these 10 weeks.

So first, our high-score screen, and here it is:

It is important to note that I did not create this on my own. I supplied a vision and a design for our Lead Artist and he created this. My submission looked like this:

As you can see I supplied the design and overall idea of the image for a placeholder, and where my artistic capabilities fell short he supplied the knowledge and skills to create something complete.

I think it ended up looking very well, with the exception that it’s lacking a position for a “Back” button, but perhaps we can put that on the moon in the top-right corner.

We wanted to show the high scores of previous players on headstones to give the player the idea that all the previous thieves have been shot and killed, and their valuables etched into their headstones. This makes sense in one way, but if our player clears the map (our only map) it makes little sense that his high score would be displayed on a headstone if he escaped. However I think this is something that can be overlooked. I’m very pleased with the state-screen.

Secondly then on the project as a whole. It’s been hard work and at times infuriating. Most of my classmates seem to hate the games they’ve been developing at this point, and they want to move forward and do something completely different now. I don’t. I love my first production. It has many flaws, it’s rugged, not very consistent and lacks several elements to make it crisp and neat and complete. But it’s mine, and we did this over 10 weeks. Imagine what we could do with 2 years.

This course has been amazing, aggravating, hurtful and painful all at once. I’ve laughed and groaned, but we made it through and in one and a half week we release our very first production.

Thank you for reading this far.

There will be more to come in the future.

Signing off with a smile,

//William

Game Development Blog 5.

Dearie me, we’re all beat.

Everyone is working really hard in our group in order to get everything into the beta-version of the game. It’s starting to really come together, now, all that needs to be done is finishing up the level-design, add the pickups, and after that our coders can finally get going for real on the pathfinding.

As for what I’ve done this week, there’s been a number of small things, a few big things and some running about between group members. A lot of time has been taken out of the week due to other courses and work irrelevant to this particular course however, and as such I feel like there was a lot of rushing the last few days of the week.

Onto my work, and here it is:

This flowerpot, something that I drew today in fact, is a decorative  item for use in Ottos fancy mansion. It’s doesn’t do anything apart from look pretty.

As I’m looking at it now though, I realize the colours might be very wrong for something to use in a mansion that is mostly laid dark and carries with it a lot of gloom and neglect.  That said I am really happy with how it looks, nevermind the fitting in. I wanted to use some darker color for the pot itself, the purple, but got carried away with the decoration and ended up using a very bright cyan for the rim of the pot. After that the flowers themselves are by nature very colorful, and as such I used reds, yellows, and shades of green and blue to paint them.  I think this item will be seen again and again in quite a few rooms in the game.

This is the artifact I am most happy with so far, since it took quite a while to get it right.

This is one of the big things I worked on:

Its the options screen for our game, without the buttons. This thing I rushed through unfortunately, since I wanted it in the game for our presentation. I might clean it up, or not, we’ll see. I used colors from our wall-tiles to use as the walls in this picture, to simmulate that you are inside the Fancy Mansion. I also placed Ottos hat and his shotgun by the chair. The menu buttons can not be seen here but I spent more work on them than the actual background.

This is what I’ve done this week. Thanks for reading!

//Will

Game Development Blog 4.

So. Week 2 of Beta. Didn’t think we’d still be a team by now. We had a lot of bumps along the road, and some dangerous obstacles still in it. That said, we’re still progressing steadily as a group and having fun with what we’re doing.

This week I have been working with a lot of smaller things. I’ve done some audio editing with the sound we recorded with David Crosson as our voice for Otto. All of the sounds were stereo tuned and played only from the right speaker or earbud, which is something that needed adressing.  In order to fix this I used Audacity, a program used for editing audio in all its forms. It’s a freeware and very basic, which meant I didn’t have to learn the whole program in order to do this. Though I suspect I will have to revisit these sounds in order to edit the sound-levels so they match the other sounds we are adding into the game. I also looked at what sounds we are gonna use for our powerups, as the placeholder we’d been using thus far have been the same noise as when you pick up a small object without an additional effect applied to it.

Apart from editing sounds, I’ve been thinking of how to incorporate our secret level into the game logically. We have some brilliant ideas, but due to technical limitations in how we edit maps and levels, we are having some problems in how to do it properly.

As for an artifact I created this week, I chose to work on a sword that works as a powerup and pickup in the game. It remains to be seen if this particular artifacts makes it into the game as a powerup, though if nothing else, we could add it in as nothing more than a valuable pickup.  The idea is that the sword I created puts all the items in your immediate vicinity in your inventory, effectively cutting short the time it would take to collect them.  This, I feel would be a very cool and interesting powerup / game-mechanic, but at the end of the day it’s up to our coders to make it happen. The artifact itself is done, all that needs to be done with it now is to run it by Marcus, our lead art, and that should be it to put it in the spritesheet and have it finished for beta and Final.

That’s it for this week.