Creative Game Design

Suggestion for this course:

1. We often feel that we don’t know how to achieve some cool effects even though Ian and Youtube have already provided some methods. It will be better if we can have some technical workshop in person with technical stuff from Unity or the game industry. That will help our project get more approaching the industrial level.
2. I know this course is intended to teach students both design and development. But I think it is almost impossible to provide them all with a good teaching quality since we have limited time and teaching resources. My own projects are affected by this–sometimes my project looks g0od but not really playable; sometimes it can be played but looks bad. So I think to pick one to focus on can effectively improve the teaching.
3. The official catchup between teams and Ian can be more frequent. We really want to hear more advice from Ian. But it seems that the communication between Ian and us is more into problem-solving.
4. Anyway, the course is so great! I learn a lot.

Game video:

Since our game is based on VR, it is not accessible on the Internet. The video below is the recording view from the VR headset.

 

 GANTT CHART+Presentation Slide

Gantt Chart:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GV4ttZLVe1CEb409l8WmnFtZ9QgkcVaz00PK-49E4iQ/edit#gid=1342988346

Presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Z1l-wjaoYGbyQgx6e7_YLXd4XyD20CwXZ8bEVCNDUWg/edit#slide=id.p

The core gameplay

The story we are going to tell in our game is about vicar, the agent and representative of God in the human world. The player is one of the vicars. He is chosen accidentally, and he will be assign missions by God. In different missions, players will have different abilities to finish the task. The current mission we are building on is that player needs to use the ability of “control” to save people’s lives. The demo video is below:

The artistic expression in visual

Since we are talking about religions and the conflicts between humanity and the doctrines of God, we tend to use pure color to form a sense of solemn, player can tell that the scene is religious relevant and the player is supposed to feel that he has contact with God. The current scene we have is:

For further design, we will also use pure color as a theme to build a scene.

The artistic expression in audio

Audio in our project will play a role in atmosphere implementation. For the first scene, which is the first time that the player comes to the altar, the player will pass by many torches and light up the fire. The process of lighting up fire will also play a sound effect. For the general background music, we will use some mysterious, religious music to create a sacred and solemn vibe for the player.

For the final project, we want to make a graphic adventure game. We will build 7 different spaces, each space has its feature color and the objects in the space will try to construct a certain kind of mental situation and express a certain kind of feeling. Also, each space will give players some information, and all 7 spaces will together present a complete story to players. 

For the scenery in each space, we expect the objects are low poly and all in the same color. And the objects we use, the location of those objects, the light effect should be in harmony to match the theme of the chapter.

For project management, we will work on building different scenes at the same time. And we will write different scripts and be responsible for different functions. Basically, we will try to complete 2 scenes each week, and we will complete the basic gameplay mode and functions during the first week.

We want to build our gameplay mode based on the traditional sneak gameplay. So before this week, we have already built the driving system. And we have also built the turret which will detect the car when it comes into its firing range, and then there are two parts of the turret which can rotate on the vertical axis and horizontal axis particularly to make the guns aim at the car and the bullet where comes out from an empty object in front of the guns to hit the car.

This week, we have finished the three abilities of the car. For invisible, we change the shader of the car so the player, and we change its tag so that the turrets no longer detect it. For quantization, we also change the shader of the car, and we change the car’s collider to trigger so that it can come across the buildings. And for the transition, when the player clicks “z”, it will create an “echo” (a prefab of the car with another shader) at that position, and when the player activates this function, the car will travel rapidly back to the position of the “echo” and removes the echo.

Also, we have made three simple UI images to show players the left amount of the three resources in the game, hp, energy, and battery. The hp is easy to understand, the energy enables the player to use abilities and the battery provides power for the car.

There is a sentence in the video that I strongly agree with: Emergent storytelling is not the story itself, but a way of interaction. I think emergent gameplay is an immersive way for players to build and experience their own stories in the game world. Before watching this video, I had no idea about emergency game storytelling. I only know about open-world games and sandbox games. After having a further understanding, I found that like Minecraft, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wilderness game, players are in an open world, not stuck in a storyline, with no fixed route, players can entirely explore based on their own intentions, but the overall story can be changed or remained the same. The player can actually become an experiencer, not just a manipulator in front of the screen.

Interestingly, such game interaction mechanics are no longer limited to 3D RPG. This game mechanic is also used in 2d side-scrolling action games – Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight also applies emergent gameplay mechanics. Players can get to a place in different ways, and they are also free to choose which area on the map to explore first, and they are free to choose how the story develops and end. We have to believe that emergent game narrative will be a very popular design approach for the future of game design

Since we want to create a cyberpunk industry scene in the game, and we think delivery man appears frequently in cyberpunk novels or games. In addition, we have a successful driving control system, we won’t let the player act as a deliveryman and engage in a small narrative scene. And the player should be able to explore the whole scene and get familiar with all the available operations and skills in the game during he/she experiences the story.

The core operation of the game is the typical driving system with delivery quests (go to the aim point). And the player can choose to sneak around the city with careful observation of the enemy or drive fast with excellent skill and use the special abilities at the right time to shake off the enemy, They can also combine two ways together, be discovered first and then find a good place to hide to return to sneak status.

For the special abilities, we want them to be very cool and give the player a feeling of hi-tech futurism. The first ability is invisibility, and when as we all know, the enemy can’t detect the player when the spaceship is invisible.

The second ability is called quantization, when the spaceship is at quantization status, it can pass through any rigid body. For example, the player can drive the spaceship through the buildings to make the enemy can’t see himself/herself anymore.

The third ability is called space transition, the player can save the spaceship’s current position, and he/she can do it multiple times, but only the latest one will be saved. And then the player can choose to go back to that position.

The first two abilities should consume certain energy when they are activated. We will make an energy bar and an HP bar. And the third ability should have a long cool down.

And until now, we have designed two kinds of enemy, the normal one is like a policer which will chase after the player once they detect him/her, and it can shoot bullets to hurt you. But it can’t see the player when they are invisible or behind the buildings.

The second one is like a surveillance camera, it can’t move or attack, but it can see the players when they are invisible or behind the buildings. And once it discovers the players, it will report their positions to other enemies.

Link to the working file

We’re going to make a cyberpunk first-person shooter. Instead of a design game that takes place on the ground, we wanted to do a design game that takes place between buildings, above the sky. So we designed the place to take place on the bridge connecting the buildings so that players could experience the cultural atmosphere of cyberpunk in the process of passing through. We also wanted to design tools for the characters to fly, so that they could move between buildings.

This article takes immersion as a starting point and analyzes the pros and cons of several mainstream game perspectives and their performance of immersion. The article covers five game perspectives, namely 2d horizontal view, top-down view, first-person view, third-person view, and “Over the shoulder”. I’d like to share some of the perspectives I’ve played with and express my thoughts on the immersion performance of these games.

2d side-scrolling was one of the first kinds of games I played. I played Megaman, Sonic, and Contra. Personally, I think the immersion offered by this type of game is terrible. 2D games provide more of a sense of manipulation and mastery of skills. In my opinion, the immersive feeling of games like this is mostly provided by storytelling and atmosphere creation, rather than the perspective itself.

Top-down, a little bit better than 2d games. I usually call top-down “2.5D”. This kind of perspective is usually found in strategy games such as Red Alert, Warcraft, Age of Empires, StarCraft, and Civilization. They provide the player with a unique sense of immersion, a sense of control, which this article also mentions.

The first person perspective and the third person perspective are very common, so I won’t go into that. But I want to talk about the perspective of “over the shoulder”. Because one of the games I played recently took this perspective. It is “God of War 4”. This is the first time I’ve experienced this perspective. I have to say that this new perspective mode that combines first and third perspective can provide players with better story experience and strike experience, which I think is the big trend in the future. In addition to these perspectives, I would like to present here a new perspective that I think is likely to be developed in the future. It is the virtual reality perspective. Yes, this is the ultimate answer, the most immersive perspective, is to become the protagonist himself. I really hope to be able to experience virtual reality perspective games in the near future.

From the perspective of a 2D game lover, I can clearly feel the demise of 2D games in this era. It’s hard to see the public going crazy for a 2D game again, transferring their passion for Mario and The Rockers to games like Dark Souls. Previous 2D games, such as Mario and the Legend of Zelda, have been transformed into 3D games. All in all, 2D games are really a form of gaming that is gradually being forgotten because it is difficult to provide a better sense of immersion than 3D games. But that doesn’t mean 2d games are bad. In my opinion, 2D is cheap to develop and easy to get started; 2D games are not only more entertaining than 3D games, such as Stardew Valley but also as difficult as Dark Souls, such as Locker and Death Cell. The future of 2D games, compared to 3D games, will be more accessible to the public, more developers, and 2d games will not die. As a new game developer, I started with 2D games, and I believe I will focus on 2D game development for a long time to come.

Link to 2D Scroller game: https://simmer.io/@Haoquan/w2-2dscroller-demo

One sentence for game design idea:

Players experience three life stages of a boy in three separated episodes by moving, interacting with characters and environment according to the instructions provided and solving puzzles.