Most of this past week was spent trying to solve one very specific issue. The school's internet stopped allowing our VR computer to use Google Drive. This meant we spent several days trying to figure out how we could access the assets we had put there in order to get them into the game. Unfortunately nothing we tried worked and we eventually concluded we would have to use a flash drive to transport any additional assets.
After we came to that conclusion it took roughly the rest of the week of the computer to wipe the flash drive then store all of the assets and scenes we had to it. Now that that's done we're finally back on track and next week I should be able to finish the UI menu. Next Week I will: -Finish the UI menu
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This week in advanced studies I focused on creating a script that would revive you when you died in our horror game. We decided the best way to revive a dead player would be to create a timer that’s automatically reloads the scene a set time after death. To create this script I mostly used my prior knowledge of coding UI elements as well as a code for a timer that I found online. The code was worked and I was I able to hook it up to the proper UI elements and finish my scene. Next week I can work on hooking it up to our game and fixing any resulting bugs.
I also made artwork for our credits scene which I can create next week as well. Next week I will: -Put the respawn script into our actual game -Create a credits scene off the main menu 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 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 This week we continued to work on fixing glitches that we found while testing in VR as well as other individual tasks. I finished the last of the chicken animations and plan to start working on boning the pig model next week. In coding I helped I little bit to try and debug the chicken. Right now the chicken can't seem to figure out how to go back to it's patrol points after chasing the character. I'm confident we can figure out what's happening next week however with some more intense debugging.
The full map of our school building is almost done being modeled and I hope we can get that imported into our scene soon so we can make sure it won't lag our game too badly. If it does I plan to work on a script that would help us load different areas of the game separately. This would solve some of the lag issues if it worked. Next week I will: -Help debug the chicken -At least start to bone the pig First I would like to say that I don't want to sound ungrateful in this blog post. There are many schools both in Durham County and elsewhere that don't have as nice computers as we do. We are lucky to even have a game design program at DSA. However before working on a school computer there are certain survival tips one must master. These machines are completely inadequate for running the programs they are expected to run and thus must be led through the process gently. Here are a few tips on how to use a piece of public, educational machinery.
The most important thing you need to know is that you will never be able to do research on these things for games. Between the tight security network banning any forum where questions could be found to the lovely tendency for all tutorials to be restricted, there is no lack of lack of research material. If you can't find the answer to a coding question on the programs main site, (some of which are banned under the shopping category) you might as well give up until you have time at home to look. Youtube videos are banned willy-nilly with almost no seeming regard to their content. You can expect to be able to watch an episode of Bob Ross or even a do-it-yourself make-up tutorial, but anything that you might need to learn how to code is assuredly completely shut down. Beyond this you may not even need the internet to find the limitations of these machines. The graphics cards and RAM on the computers here are laughable. When we use programs that are known for needing good graphics processing and that leak RAM all over the place (looking at you 3ds Max), There's simply no way these poor machines can keep up. Even if I wanted to manage my RAM usage while I work, I find that i'm blocked from the task manager by admin privileges. All this while my computer is practically giving off smoke trying to figure out how to bend the knee of a 3d chicken. Therefore you must always remember to save every two to three seconds. That way as the computer tries to force shut a non-responsive program you can at least show your teacher that you have gained a little ground during the roughly hour-long period. I hope these tips helped. I hope these hints were taken. -A quick disclaimer -Internet "security" -General computer specs This past week I got back to the grind of making our VR game work. I created a chicken animation for when the chicken attacks the player. This was much easier to make than my past animation as 3ds Max seems to have magically fixed its issues overnight and figured out how to bend chicken knees. Now that it's working better (knock on wood) I should be able to finish the remainder of the animations quickly and get them imported into the game.
We also put our game into actual VR test mode for the first time in a while. It worked relatively well. The game looks and sounds good and the chicken monster is very scary when it chases you around. We did find a couple glitches that we'll continue to work on in the future but I continue to be optimistic about the turnout of this project. Next week I will: -Create the rest of the chicken animations -Start to do pig research and come up with ideas for the pig animations |
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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