This week I continued to work on creating a Menu UI for our VR game. After a lot of research and package downloading I finally created a version that worked in first person mode. From there we needed to make sure the menu would work in VR. My teammate and I spent the last part of the week making code so the menu will load the next scene when we click on it. This took a bit of research and a touch of original coding but eventually we got it to work.
Next week I'll focus on creating a Credits scene to get into VR sometime next week. Next week I will: -Create and implement a Credits scene
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It has been a short while since the last show of Dead Man's Cell Phone ended and I wanted to talk about what I learned during the process of creating the sound for this show. While I think I did much better during this show than when I did Anne Frank there are certainly still stuff I could improve on. So let's cut to the chase and talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Dead Man's Cell Phone sound design.
First let's talk about some of the things I improved on from my last time doing sound for a show. I was much more organized this time. I kept everything I was working on in one centralized folder which I mirrored in an updated google drive folder. This meant I spent a lot less long looking for assets and could instead work on what I needed to do. My teammates could also find the work I had done easier as well as add there contributions to a place where I could find them. My editing skills have also gotten better over the past year. This time I had to edit an entire song to be filled with voicemails and phone sounds. I was able to do this quickly and easily the first time. This song was also set to choreography which i was able to time some of the sounds within the song to. There are of course things I should still work on. Setting up the speaker system involved a lot of trouble. We couldn't get sound at first and once we got sound it only came out through a certain model of speakers. What this came down to was simply the unfamiliarity of the hardware we used to me. I needed to do more research on the sound system we were using so I could more effectively create a working speaker array on the first try. All in all the show went well. I'm looking forward to doing more sound design in the future and continuing to get more familiar with setting up the actual speakers and running the sound board. In the blog post: -Debrief from Dead Man's Cell Phone -Better organization -Better Editing -One thing I should work on for the future There are many things one can do to convey messages in video games. The fact that we have an art form that is so versatile gives us a wealth of ways to toy with player's emotion, thoughts, and actions. My personal favorite is how a good game artist can use sound to affect the mood of an area and set the tone of a game. However there is another even more basic, but incredibly important, way game designers set the scene in games.
Character art is one the the most important ways to convey information to a player. They will often spend hours of the game play staring at the graphics of their player. What better way to show the person playing your game something important about the game's atmosphere. In an apocalyptic game for example you wouldn't want your character to look like a cartoon anime girl. Instead you might want to take that cheery model and muddy it up somehow. Ordinary objects like footballs turned deadly with added spikes for example. This tells the playing that something has gone wrong in the world. It says yes this may look like the world we once new but it is far more dangerous, far more deadly. Another example of this is seen in the Pokemon franchise. Pokemon games are often based off of specific regions in the world. To highlight this fact, the designs of pokemon in each new region often reflect the attitudes or defining characteristics of the place they represent. Alolan Exeggutor looks like a tall palm tree making it look more pacific islander than its normal, squatter cousin. The garbage pokemon Garbodor was introduced in Pokemon Black and White a game representing... well America. As you can see there are many ways to use character design to convey messages of tone and place to your player. By utilizing this you can make your games unified in theme and even more immersive for your player. In this Post: -How to give subtle messages to your player in games -The advantages of using good character design -Examples of how to utilize good character design in games This week in Advanced Studies I focused in on creating a UI Menu for our game. Along the way I discovered several challenges in making a working menu. The first was that I had never used buttons in Unity before./ I had to acquaint myself with this new component using sample codes and prefabs I found on the Unity standard assets package. I also found several tutorials to teach me about making menus but unfortunately they were all blocked by our school's security net.
The next step was trying to figure out how to make my menu work in Unity. I found several assets on the store that claimed to have examples of UI in VR. However I kept getting errors when I tried to import these assets and could never fully find an example that would work. Next week I will: -work with my UI menu in world space to make it interact-able in VR -work with Ryan to import the menu assets into our game and make sure they work This week was filled with a lot of random ends to tie up and projects to start. I finished all of the pig animations. There is now a running pig animation as well as a pig attack animation. After that I decided the best thing for me to do would be to start working on UI. We're going to need several types of UI for our game including a menu and a score keeper.
To start, I looked on the asset store to see if there were any free menu scripts I could use. Eventually I found that in the standard assets there was a menu and I was able to track it down to it's source script. From there I spent my time trying to understand the script and get an idea of how I would have to adapt it to work in VR. Next week I will: -Work on adapting the menu script to fit our needs -Create 2d assets for our menu and score |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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