Home Work #6

1. Four each of the four elements of the Tetrad, explain how it is addressed by your game. If one of the four elements is not used, please state this.
2.  Do the four (or less) elements work towards a current theme? 
3. In your own words, describe the meaning of a "theme", and how does it differ from an "experience" (see book for examples in Chapters 2 and 5. 
4. What is your game's theme? 
5. What are the elements in your game that are meant to reinforce this theme? 
6. What is it about your game that you feel makes it special and powerful?

1.  Artistically our game is in an interesting area.  It is not necessarily artistic or realistic, but it still stands out because it is unique and doesn't take itself too seriously.  There is a certain type of humor and obscurity that happens when "3d" stick figures get shot at, gush blood, and fall down like a rag doll when they are killed that helps to establish the art style.  The mechanics will be solid and important part of the game, especially on the typing challenges which are essentially half the game.  The mouse will function as a fluid way to control gunfire.  Story is not the most developed, however, the story doesn't have to be too deep in a game like this where you "infiltrate corrupt organizations and steal all their money and valuable information, and shoot anyone who stands in you way".  That is the story.  It could use a little more, but it doesn't need all that much I feel.  And finally technology will play an important part in the physics of the game.  Nothing in our game is all that outlandish or technologically difficult I feel, so realistic motion and movements within the game should be a theme.

2.  I believe the game's theme is still in development but is basically there.  The driving factors being the art style and mechanics, supported by an untold story of "spy and hacker" person sneaking into buildings, and supported by the physics.

3.  I believe the theme is a concrete concept that contains defining elements revolving around the triad.  This theme that is conveyed is subjective, and that marks the experience, how the player plays and feels about the game as a whole.  If any elements of the theme are too weak it will interfere with the experience on some level.  An example of this might be a game from the Halo series with solid mechanics, story, art, and technology to support game play.  But if you were to significantly reduce the graphical quality of the game it would change the experience of the game and depending on how much quality was reduced you may simply not want to play the game again.

4.  Our games theme revolves around a semi futuristic society in which many corrupt organizations have most of the money and power.  To combat this, our anti-hero protagonist, hacker, social engineer and gunman breaks into buildings by sneaking and blasting his way through in order to use money to benefit mankind.

5.  Elements that reinforce the theme have to do with hacking and the prominence of computer terminals in the game.  Aside from that, security, rebellion and successfully compromising the organizations security systems are main themes.

6.  Our game is special because it is relatively original.  With a non-realistic art style and typing mechanics operating from the first person shooter point of view, I know of no games that have come close to the style of our teams game.  There are not many quality and/or fun typing games that can be played to pass time.  At the very least, the game will be unique enough and have solid enough mechanics to hold up with any other game produced by a 3-4 man indie game design team.    

Home Work #5

For my demonstration of physics and game mechanics I decided to make a very simple scenario in which the character wields a spinning baton like weapon and uses it to knock over and potentially destroy objects.
     To do this I created a cylinder for the baton and added the keys r and e to move forward and backward respectively and used the f key to rotate the baton in a roughly cone-like motion.  I did this through the logic editor using the sensors (the keys), the controller, and the actuator under the motion option making sure for the time being to establish global directions.
     The other objects were just cylinders and rectangular boxes which had specified properties through the physics "modifier".  I changed them from static to be rigid body with varying levels of mass and "bounce".  The end result being a spinning baton going forward to knock over various setting objects in the game.
     In our team's actual game this will be very useful because given the action of the game during gun/fight sequences it would be nice for the office environment to be destructible to a certain extent.  When you fire a weapon and it hits a clock or a coffee cup on accident it would be very cool to see that object fall down, shatter or just have any type of motion at all.  So this will be implemented in our office type setting to destroy and make a mess of the surrounding environment for entertainment and to reinforce the "reality" of the game world.
     Below are some screen shots of the baton on a trajectory towards the "in game" objects, consequently knocking them over.

Home Work #4

So far, I personally believe our game project is going pretty well.  Everyone seems to be getting along and are pretty supportive of each others ideas.  Things that are making me not love the game project as much as I could is the relative unfamiliarity in blender which can be countered just by actively engaging in blender tasks and tutorials.  However, this is a temporary problem and learning curves are to be expected.  The game is still very rough in some areas right now but I feel that the team is on board with the game concept and have made clear their own personal opinions about the game concept we have thus far.  As far as communication goes we are pretty well prepared, we have all cell phone numbers, emails, facebooks, blogs, and video communication capabilities.  Our team does not have a regular meeting schedule, but we do have an "emergency" meeting day that we could meet on 7-9 ish on Wednesday night.  Other than that we keep up a continuous goal based dynamic team schedule where we decide what times would be best for group members to meet up.  I think the biggest thing that needs to be remembered when designing our game is to remember that although it is a first person shooter, it is a typing game that is displayed through the first person perspective and that most of the game play and action in the game will come from typing challenges, typing puzzles, and various other typing tasks in the realm of "pseudo hacking".  The game concept still needs to be fleshed out more, but I am very optimistic about the future of the game and believe that if we as a group make all the right moves to stay on schedule, that we as a group will have a playable and enjoyable game that will hold up with any other indie game. 

Home Work #3

Hey guys, home work three required that I make an object or two in Blender.  I decided to make a "irregularly shaped cube" to mess around with subdivisions and extrusions and feel very comfortable with that.  On the cube after extruding surfaces I also scaled down some of the face surfaces to add some diversity to the object.  For my other game object, I decided to make a clock and it turned out reasonably well, I had some trouble subdividing the faces of the cylinder so it was difficult to push the face of the object in to make the game object more believable.  In addition the "object" remains unjoined at its current state, however I will fix that when I find out how to join objects again.  I am going to be designing a lot of objects to develop the setting of our games building (office building) so objects like this although not the most exciting are very much a part of the game if you want to add any elements of realism to your game.  The objects created thus far are very rough, but I am going to get a lot more comfortable with Blender over the weekend and will be able utilize all main its capabilities very soon.  I will get some pictures up as soon as I can.