Woohoo! It’s kinda a relief that the course has ended and it’s also quite amazing seeing how much progress I have made in this course. I greatly appreciate everyone’s help during the course, no matter from Ian – it is really beyond my expectation that our professor can be with us at 2 AM to solve the bug in our game and have a very friendly conversation with us on how to make our game better – or my group mates – I super value all the weekends we have spent together and how everyone devotes to the project 😢 – or the useful feedbacks & encouragement from my peers. This course is the most intense one I have ever taken so far, it is also the one that I learned the most from. Even though the workload is big, it is still very enjoyable to learn about games and how to make games from multiple perspectives.
Some personal suggestion for the course: it should have more prereqs 😛 Just as I have mentioned during our discussion, the course might not be that friendly to people not good at programming/new hand to Unity, especially when your peers already know something about them. So maybe have another intro-level course would make the general game track(area?) more clear and easy to learn, also gives students more time to touch on modeling/visual design/game design/ sound design and etc.
Hope we all can do amazing works in the future and see you guys soon! 😀
Which previous project will your final one be derived from? And why?
We would work on our Ant’s Adventure project for the final. Firstly because this game is more suitable for the final show. Compared to our previous puzzle game, Ant’s Adventure fits more in the chaotic environment, as the audience can interact with the game from any level and understand the core gameplay easily since the game could trigger the audience’s passion immediately without further, deeper thinkings. The scene is also broader and prettier to display on a big screen. Moreover, Ant’s Adventure is a progressive adventure game. In this sense, we could build more challenges based on the controller as well as the scene itself. Thus, in terms of developing potentials, Ant’s Adventure has more aspects to be developed than O.
Which aspects in that previous one will need more work? And how?
Firstly, we would improve our controller. In the former user tests, many players gave us the feedback that the start of the game was to difficult due to the ant controller.
Another envision is to develop a “mobile game version”, as the players will be able to directly play on the mobile or use the mobile as a controller to play the game. We want to use the gyroscope function as the main input to improve our general user experience. By using a mobile platform, the player is easier to have an immersive experience as well.
We will also work more on the scene & level design based on our changes of the controller, like adding more obstacles and improving the route design.
Could you reference good examples to your final game?
The play needs to control time to go forward by walking clockwise and go backward by walking counter-clockwise. Players need to take the advantage of this ability to find out a way to repair the time.
Scene
A circular corridor or road, which is actually a frame of a clock.
Broken & surrealistic objects → clues
Radio/tree/poster/river
Connections
People cannot feel the flow of time in their dreams. The story in a year can be encapsulated into 5 minutes.
庄子认为，生命是气的凝聚，死亡是气的消散。气消散后又会重新凝聚，就会变化成另外一种生物了。世间的生物就是这样生生死死循环轮回，永不停息，所以生并不值得高兴，死也不必哀伤。Zhuangzi believed that life is the condensation of qi and death is the dissipation of qi. The gas dissipates and condenses again, transforming into a different kind of living thing. Life in the world is such a cycle of birth, death and death, never stop.The player will live in an endless loop as Zhuangzi has described.
(⚠️storyline剧透预警⚠️）
Storylines
Start: “You” are a clockmaker. The game would begin in a normal-looking bedroom. Suddenly a clock hanging on the wall falls down and smashes into pieces, which signifies the breaking and abnormality of time.
General Scene: You wake up in a circular hallway and try to find ways to repair the clock.
Ending: The player will wake up in a room with the repaired clock, but all the same scenes as before so it is hard to tell which one is the reality.
If you want to try the game by yourself I would recommend playing it before watching the play-through video.
Gameplay
My inspiration comes from Wall-E. So the initial gameplay was:
The game would be a robot’s adventure on a deserted planet, he has to found&collect green plants and other stuff to save the planet while beating/avoiding evil robots and trash on the way.
I didn’t draw a gameplay chart since all I have is eating things, beating enemies… nothing else. But to add the fun of the game & to make the working flow more visible, I drew a map that I wanted to build, which also includes where to put the award/enemies.
Progress
Workflow
replace background image/user sprite -> map design -> enemy design -> fruit design -> movable obstacle -> new animation + scene update
Highlight
Along with the original gameplay, I added a moveable object (another one later) to help the player jump to a higher place. This is inspired by Ori I played – later I realized that it is very commonly used as I remember this in 森林冰火人. I also updated the scene so that one object can be used twice, as the object will be pushed onto the trashes and works as a bridge to help the player pass the dangerous road. I modified the box colliders to make the falling position more accurate.
Another change is that the score becomes important. The player can accumulate scores by eating fruits and beating enemies, but when touching the trash/enemy the score will decrease. When the score is below 0, it will directly lead to death.
Improvement
Showed the game to some of my friends and they said the floor is too slippery. So next step may be to modify the code about the platforms. I also want to make a user guideline page/ more sound design, like when the play eats the fruit or gets hurt/ camera zooming in when meeting the enemy.
Among the games, I chose Ori and the Will of the Wisps to play as I heard the first two games really need hands – I am kind of famous at being 人体描边大师 and I am personally fully aware of that. I am TOTALLY AMAZED by the game’s visuals, and so happy that I didn’t start playing it when I was in high school or my academic will be a disaster as it is so attractive. I somehow understand the fun of playing a game. Since the game can only be run on Windows and pretty big, I went to an internet cafe with my friend for the first time in my life. After we finished playing for 4 hours my friend asked me: “Can we go out to play again during the Spring Festival?” (Update: We did so and made it to 夸洛克地穴 17%!)
I love big screen 😢
Now go back to the game itself. As mentioned above, the visuals of the game are so amazing from the very beginning. I didn’t finish the 迷雾沼泽 part, but I already experienced so bright, vivid, and harmonized scene design. I am not sure if this game is in the 2D game category but it gives me the feeling of 3D. I did some researches later said that they have 7-8 layers of the art design for the game scene, which struck me a lot. Every second is like walking inside an Avatar world, the juicy, shaking mushroom when you jump on it, the shining fluorescent blue plant where you can stick on, the floating trunk in the center of the river, and the sunshine shining down on you from a distance – all the visual effect and interactions on them trigger by the player is so realistic and incredible. Even though I have only taken the first part of the game, the character design also surprises me a lot. The first two characters (库’s parents) reminded me how diverse and interesting characters can be – they are human-like, but you can clearly feel that they are not humanized. I am sorry for using so many praising words, but for a game green hand, it is like a whole new world. Along with the amazing visual that I cannot describe well, the sound effect also contributes a lot to the immersive experience. I cannot fully remember them now but there was a wolf boss at the start of the game, where the music suddenly got intense and I was truly shocked. Generally, the music is soft and creative, and adds to the feeling of “exploring a magical world”.
Sunshine from the distance in the background layer
Since I haven’t played so many games during my life, I cannot really judge the design of the technique of the game. Something I highly appreciate is how they design some hidden spaces like you need to break the obstacles by yourself and then push the game to the next level. How you transfer in a 3D way in a 2D world is also cool. The map is very well-designed and pretty complicated, as I think it would be better if there is a small map since I often got lost and need to stop to check where am I (a small map may destroy the whole visual effect though). I chose the normal mode to play the game, but many parts of the game are still challenging for me, for example, my friend and I spent nearly 20 minutes on the first wolf boss and a lot of time exploring the way of escaping/collect different resources.
I have heard some people saying that the technique part, such as the level design and collection design of the game is worse than Hollow Knight, but from a new game player’s perspective, games like Ori and the Will of the Wisps is more attractive to common audiences as it doesn’t require a high level of gaming ability, and has incredible audio & visual experience. There is an additional part in the game called 精灵试炼, where the player will compete with the ghost AI player and see who got to the destiny first. It is pretty difficult and I failed, but my friend spent nearly 1 hour on it and finally made it – she was so excited – I think some additional designs like this is great, as it does not influence the whole experience but could add on to the difficulty and enjoyment of the game. Generally, I would say, at least for me and my friend, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is definitely an amazing game with an appropriate difficulty level that attracts us to keep going forward.
