Category: Uncategorized

Reading Response:

” There are many other games just like this that are making innovative composites that focus on gameplay rather than flashy presentation.”

I was really touched when I was reading the part about the history of indie games and it’s also interesting to think about the roles that both AAA game companies and indie games companies play in the long river of game history. The big game companies, or “commercial game companies” as the article indicated, are the ones who have brought games to a larger stage and more players: those games are well-designed to suit the interest of the public because the company needs to make sure that the game is profitable. However, the indie game companies are more innovative: they usually examine a concept and the indie games are more experimental and creative than commercial games. I can conclude it in this way: the characters or the storyline of the commercial games are designed based on the form of the game. Usually, the design team will search for the most popular types of games and then add other elements, thus the commercial games, nowadays, are very similar to one another and it’s losing originality. However, the indie games are more based on a story the designer wants to tell, or a concept the designer wants to experiment on, and the form of the game are just a method to achieve their goals.

Although it seems like indie game companies are the creator of new concepts, we can not just neglect the influence of those big game companies as well. One problem a lot of indie game companies are facing is profit, and designing a good game is expensive. if the games they create are not very popular or not well-known by the public, the company will probably lose the investment. On the contrast, the big game companies are better choices for investors because the profit is more stable(they have bigger popularity and more products). Therefore, it’s not hard to predict that a lot of indie game lovers were drawn to the game industry by big game companies. 

I’m not saying that exposure is a bad thing for indie game companies – I’d love that good games can have a larger market and have larger fan groups! However,  will indie game companies lose their initial resolution in front of the temptation of profits? Will they be acquired by those large game companies? These questions need more time for examination.

Playing Review:

I have played all of the three platforming games and therefore I’d like to write a long review to compare all of them together.

Celeste & Ori & Hollow Knight:

Difficulty Ranking: Celeste > Hollow Knight > Ori

These three games are all very famous platforming games. However, there are still some differences between them, besides the game difficulty. Celeste, in my point of view, is more about jumping and speed. I know you might think what I said is nonsense because Celeste is a platform game after all. However, what I mean is that the gameplay of Celeste is so strong that it almost makes me neglect the storyline of the game. Celeste also gives me a “super Mario” feeling, although the difficulty of these two games is not on the same level: my purpose when I started playing it is to pass games and defeat all levels, and the fun of this game is just to jump! Jump to the next platform, jump to the next map. However, Hollow Knight, also a quite difficult platforming game, gives me a completely different feeling. In my point of view, Hollow Knight is a soul-like(魂类) game in terms of the game rules and the background story, which means: when I was playing this game, jumping and beating the boss/monsters is just a method to read the stories and the get to know the world setting(世界观设定). I started to play this game last year, and I haven’t passed the game yet, not because I don’t have time or it’s too difficult, but because I don’t want the story to end. I have collected all items and defeated all of the bosses except the last one.  Why? because I feel so sad to see and so reluctant the end of that world. The story is too attractive and it feels so true.

Now, let’s talk about Ori.  I don’t want to compare Ori with the other two games, because I think Ori is a fairytale to me, which contains excitement, adventure, challenges, and tears. The music and the visual styles of Ori are a great help to help the player have that fairytale feeling, From my perspective, the magical thing about Ori is that, if you compare the gameplay or the storyline of Ori to other famous platforming games, they are definitely not the best, but the combination of them makes this game so unique to experience and it has an attraction to make the player feel like Ori is themselves, not just a character.  

I used four nights to pass the first four chapters, then turned on infinite dash and infinite life to pass the others. Even in this situation I still cannot find all the hearts and strawberries.

The game has excellent music. Yet what interests me most is the way it expresses a story and characters.

It seldom has direct story narritation, but all the formation of the character is merged in the environment and in the gameplay. This type of story telling and shaping characters is very novel for me. 

Usually to shape a character, the character faces some events from the outside environment, in handling such events the character expresses itself, and the character may grow up in some critical events.

Celeste differs from the common routine in that, using the special setting of the mountain that “reflect the person” there is no events or obstacles from the outside environment. Madeline, the character is facing and chellenging herself, throughtout the whole game. Madeline is not only the character we control, it is also the challenge we face. All her feeling, thoughts, personalities and even growth are shown not only from the dialog and the character, but also the environment {which strictly speaking, is also the character herself}.

But there is one thing that I dislike about the game.

As the game, the fun of playing it mainly come from repeatitive works: dying and retrying at every chapter, and finally the players are satisfied from mastering a series of operation that can pass the chapter. I think this type of hard fun is not suitable for many people, at least me, because it requires, at least, one have enough time to spend on the game through the repeatitive work.

Many people hear the high ranking of the game. After work they download it and play, then found it is too hard to even pass the first chapter. They can only spend perhaps 1 hour on game every day so perhaps they can never pass chapter 3 (for me I spent 4 hours continuouly on it and I think if I play 1 hour everyday I will forget the feeling to pass the sections I learnt from the previous day). This type of fun is only for those with enough time and patience.

Inspiraton

In the game, the player has the ability to travel back to the start of the game when it dies, while the previous “itself” still remains in the game. When the player dies and restart the level, a tim shadow of the player will be generated. The shadow will move on its own according to the previous movement of the player, the player need to cooperate with “itself” that exist before the world restart to solve puzzles and defeat enemies.

Suggestion of the Professor

Professor recommanded a package to realize the idea, he alsp suggested that instead of let the “time shadow” to behave completely the same to the player’s past (including transform, shooting and other interactions with the environment), we could only save the transform in order to reduce some technology difficulties.

Professor also suggests to make the difficulty a bit easier, and make more levels using this mechanism in the future.

Tech

I use object recorder to record the operation of the user and put it on the time shadow. It causes the main problem now:

as the function is from UnityEditor but now UnityEngine, the game could only be played in unity edity, but not be able to build.

so I attached videos of the game, if you want to play it, you can have the src files from me and run it on unity editor

Link

The first video is too large to be uploaded here

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nEj7I9eIpqtaY-xFfEbfMsiHwPrESlti/view?usp=sharing

the one below is a complementary video, plz watch the first one before this 🙂

Variables:

1.

very simple, just create variable and Debug.Log them out:

2.

The tricky part is to insert the variables as string in the story text elegantly, without using too much + operator:

therefore I use the operator in the code:

IF statement:

I combined the 3 car speed control tasks together in one program

when pressing w the car accelarates, when pressing s it decelarates

when the speed is positive the state is moving

when the speed is negative the state is reverse

when the -0.001 < speed < 0.001 speed will become 0 and state = stop

speed limited to -100 ~ 100, reaching the boundary will cause the state to become overspeed

To enable keyboard input, I used the special function in unity GetAxis()

To have a reasonable update rate of data, I used Time.deltatime

Switch

1. color

Very simple, not much to say.

2.  change weapon

I feel like it is easier to implemnt it usinf IF, because I googled that it is not quite easy to detect arbitary keyboard input and tell what is the key in unity.

Array

1. change color

2. change color by tag

For loop

1.

I feel the most difficlut part is to put the camera at the right position so that it can see all the cubes

2.

function

I put the three tasks together：

press w to move

press space tgo change color

press s to measure distance

In the last two weeks, I have developed my red panda model further, adding some color/texture and smoothed out the behaviors in each scene in RC. I applied the code I received from Nien to make the app one continuous experience, rather than each individual scene. I ran into some problems with the RC file size, as each scene is rather large and takes a while to build. I had to reduce the scenes to 5 instead of 7. I will need to fix up the 5 physical scenes (on paper). 

Here is the link!

Next steps:

• smooth out previous scene transition by applying notification trigger in RC behaviors
• sometimes tapping functionality is off – figure out what is going on with that (for ex: sometimes when I tap the globe, it doesn’t spin)
• potentially add a voice over trigger for page readings
• add RC function so that pandas follow user camera
• would like to wire up a button on the last page (adopt) on the UI interface so that each time the user presses it, a panda will pop up