Games Stories

Games Stories

This week's readings explore the idea of the importance behind a hero's journey in games, the importance of myths in game writing

The hero's journey is important to game writers and story tellers as it tells myths- which convey the values of society and teach us about ourselves and how we should behave. Myths guide our actions, for example people believe in the literal truth of the Bible, suicide bombers believe that they will go to paradise if they blow themselves up etc.

Myths give us a sense of personal identity, gives us a sense of communuty, lie way to moral values and helps us deal with the mystery of life and death. 

The reading which can be found here goes on to talk of how human tribes in the past would encourage their members to act for the good of the tribe and not for themselves through the telling of myths and stories- and ultimately these were the tribes that survived. Myths become models for how we should behave and influence the way we act.

This is important to games as they allow people to control their environment for a short period of time. As an example, a young boy got control over events and his own feelings thanks to the portrayal of myths in games, he grew less scared of others and his own feelings.

The hero's journey refers to a collection of common elements in thousands of myths that are categorised to create a narrative.

Important elements of the hero's journey include; establishing the world of the hero, the call to start the adventure, entering the mythological woods, trials, meeting the evil one, getting the hero's prize and returning that prize to the community.

The reading outlines steps on how to use the hero's journey to build a story:

1. Pick the premise of the story
2. Create the hero
3. Create the villain
4. Showcase the hero's normal world
5. Disrupt the hero's world
6. Enter the woods
7. Confront the villain
8. Acquire the prize
9. The hero returns

The second reading which can be found here states that common misconceptions of stories in game stories are that the story is just dialogue and doesn't matter in a game. 

Classical stories are important for game developers to know as they are simple and successful. There is a basic structure to creating a classic story, which is as follows:

• There is a protagonist/hero.
• There is an inciting incident that throws the world out of order.
• A gap in the life of the hero opens.
• The hero tries to close the gap through normal means but fails.
• The hero takes a risk to overcome their problems.
• Something new happens and the world is out of order again.
• The hero must take an even greater risk to overcome this,
• There is anothe reversal opening a third gap.
• The hero must take the greatest risk to close the final gap and get to the object of desire.

 A character is not dictated by what they do, but who they are and what they choose to do. Putting a character into a difficult or morally challenging situation pressures the character to bring out these choices which reflects and shapes the character. 

The rest of the character cast should be designed around the hero, and the world should be designed to oppose the hero at every turn.

 

Link from The Legend of Zelda series

Source: DeviantART 

Alpha

The Beginnings of an Alpha

This week, I continued to work on developing my game Eterna Hunt by adding more core mechanics into the game in order to develop an Alpha version.

I wouldn't call this a fully complete alpha as my terrain is lacking and I only have the basics set in place as of now, but it does show the basic elements of the game.

I will not be adding more to the terrain until all of my scripting is complete for now as it slows down my laptop considerably and would rather have the game elements work than have a pretty game that doesn't function.

This week I did quite a lot of scripting! 

I included a little spider enemy that looks at the player as they walk around the map, and walks towards the player and attacks when they get into a certain distance of the spider. When the player swings the axe at the spider it dies! When the spider attacks the player, it takes away some a heart from the health bar... or it should. I can't seem to get this feature to work at the moment but the scripting is there so it's only a matter of figuring out what went wrong.

Image of the spider enemy coming towards the player

Source: My Unity Project

I also added a health bar, along with hearts that can be collected from the map which increase the health by 1. This gives players a chance to recover health after an attack from the spider! The hearts are greyed out when the player loses them from damage, and when the player collects the heart it turns back to red. The hearts by default rotate, and when the player walks over them they make a sound and disappear.

Image of collectable heart

Source: My Unity

I also made a Game Over screen that activates when the player health reaches 0. As there is a bug with the code to get the health to reach 0, I can't actually test this feature at the moment until the code issue is resolved. The script to trigger the Game Over screen is there however, so in theory it should work once the spider is actually able to damage the player.

Game Over screen

Source: My Unity Project

Overall I'm happy with my development of my game so far and have been finding it easy to follow tutorials and use assets. However, my script seems to want to have a hiccup here and there, which has been difficult to try and resolve since I don't really know what I'm doing.

I am meeting my targets- I planned last week to add enemies and a health bar for this week which I did! I have a game with a main menu, collectable objects, health bar, enemies, weapons and a game over screen so I would consider it playable and in the stages of being an alpha.

Next up I'm going to look at implementing a hunger bar, fixing up my code errors, finding assets to use for my game and working on making several enemies and hearts and objects placed throughout the map.

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

Tech Tip: Blogger Template

As extra credit for this week, I decided I should update the theme and layout of my blog since I haven't updated or changed it at all since I first started running the blog and felt that it was getting a little boring.

I also noticed some glitches that would sometimes occur with the previous theme; the text would sometimes overlap and become unreadable so changing the theme would hopefully fix this.

Screenshot of my blog

Source: My blog

I picked this theme and layout as I liked the way the labels are laid out clearly on the right hand side so people can navigate the blog content easily. I also picked a different image for the background- I liked this image as it adds a pop of colour to the otherwise very monochrome look of the blog which I like.

Hopefully this change is for the better and you guys like it too!

Week 9 Progress

Review Progress

Looking Back

Looking back at my progress during the course of the entire semester I feel that I have learned a lot and progressed well with my blogs and tasks. I’m happy with my progress so far with my blogs and with my consistent commenting and with my Unity progress. I feel that my weekly routine works for completing my work; I do the majority over the weekend as I have the most time them and do bits throughout the week which has been working well for me. I have enjoyed doing the project assignments a lot as designing a game and making it come to life is very rewarding despite the hard work and I hope that my end game will be functional and similar to what I had planned. I haven’t really been doing the extra credits but I will look into doing some more over the last few weeks to get more marks to reach my desired grade.

Looking Forward 

For the second half of the semester I want to try and get ahead of my work as much as possible when I have the chance to so that if I ever need to skip some blog posts or tasks I wont lose out on points. I want to also start doing the extra credit options more often in the future to ensure I reach the points I want to get. I want to avoid leaving things until the very last minute to do and have them done ahead of time to ease my stress and give me some time to breathe. I also want to try and avoid the issues I’ve been having with Unity by taking extra time to do it in college (or when I get a new laptop my problems should be resolved). I'd love to try making my own models and assets in the future as I feel it gives me a lot of creative freedom and I can create things that are in my vision for my projects.

I found this picture while Googling motivational pictures of dogs and thought it would fit here. The ladder may symbolise something but the doggo inspires me moreso than the imagery of the ladder.

Dog looking at a ladder 

Source: US Marines site

Week 9 Reading and Writing

Reading and Writing

Looking Back

Looking back at all the readings I've done over the course, I feel that they've definitely helped expand my knowledge of topics I may have already been aware of or taught me something completely new. I feel that overall the readings have been going well however sometimes I feel like I can barely make a dent in some of the longer ones in the time allotted for reading content. The reading I felt that I enjoyed the most was this one I did about social psychology and Dunbar's number because it explores the psychology between bonds users make between each other in games through the use of Dunbar's number and also explored how game design can aid players in being social. I feel that the readings help me in my game creation and I definitely have discovered new reading strategies. I feel like I absorb more information when writing notes down as I'm doing the readings rather than reading all in one sitting and then writing afterwards.I'm relatively happy with my game project but I wish I had better resources to work on it such as a laptop that can actually run Unity smoothly and suitable assets for my game. I definitely consider my progress in creating my project to be the biggest achievement for me as I am completely inexperienced in making games and am proud of how far I've gotten with it so far.

Dunbar's Number visual

Source: Wikipedia

From my readings I like this image the most as it is a nice visual of the theory of Dunbar's number- this visual shows off the number of relationships that a person has in their life, the red 5 indicating intimate relationships, the 15 indicating best friends etc. 

Looking Forward

Looking forward I definitely want to improve in my reading as I feel that I tend to stop taking in information after a while, especially with the longer readings, and I tend to get overwhelmed with big blocks of text. I have been doing better with the readings ever since I started taking down notes as I read the content and hope that continuing to do this will improve the scope of the information I take in while reading. I also want to learn more from the readings that I could apply into my game design and help to improve it's gameplay and quality of life features based on the research from the readings. I'm looking forward to learning more about academic writing in the planned workshops in the near future as I feel that it'll help improve my writing overall and help me in my future modules when conducting research and writing.

Looking forward I want to keep improving my knowledge about the topic of games and game design as it will help me if I develop any more games in the future and it's also useful information to have when looking at games both critically and while I play them myself since I do tend to play games a lot in my spare time.

I am particularly looking forward to the following weeks as seeing my game develop is very exciting and rewarding and I'm very excited to see other people's games and get a chance to play them!

First Playable - The Struggles of Unity

First Playable

For this week's project development, our task was to create a playable version of our games with some of the core features included. 

I struggled a lot this week with my Unity- it's like it was trying to fight me! Even though I made my map 50% smaller and removed the trees, to say it was framey and unresponsive is an understatement. When playtesting my game, it took a few seconds for it to respond to and clicking or moving. Because of this I didn't get to implement as much as I would have liked to this week, but still made some progress despite the struggles.

 

Eterna Hunt main menu screen

Source: My Unity project 

In my Unity free tutorials this week I created a main menu for my game, which drops the player into the world when the "Play" button is clicked. I still need to implement the options button features which I will do in the near future. This took me a little while to implement and to get working but I'm really happy with how it looks and works!

 

View of axe and gem

Source: My Unity project 

I added in a first person player camera, and decided to give the player an axe when starting the game. The axe includes C# code which allows it to swing and make a sound when the player left clicks, and it follows the player as they move. This is an important step for this playable as weapons play a big part in the survival aspect of my game.

I also added a collectable object to the game that makes a sound and disappears when the player walks over the object. The gem is just a placeholder for now until I find suitable assets to use in its place. I want to refine this more and add text to the object when hovered over, but my laptop was struggling so much that I had to leave it for now.

I used my knowledge from the Jimmy Vegas tutorials to implement these (I also had a look back as a refresher) as I find his tutorials are very easy to follow and he's also using the same version of Unity as me so it doesn't complicate things.

 

First person view 

Source: My Unity Project 

First person view of my game- I have to play around with adjusting the axe postion as I think it currently takes over the screen a little bit. I'm aware that the terrain is very barren at the minute, this is to preserve my laptop and be able to implement mechanics and features without as much lag a beefy terrain would bring.

While I do feel like I'm making decent progress I'm frustrated that I'm not really able to do more due to Unity being so slow. I have to try to find ways to combat this- perhaps I'll have to work from the college Macs instead of my laptop to get further into my development.

I'm most likely gonna have to cut out a ton of features I had originally planned to include for a more realistic project with the time I have to develop it, which is sad, but I'd rather have a functional game than one that's half broken. 

Next I'm going to hopefully implement some enemies and a health bar!

.

Unity Free Tutorials

Unity Free Tutorials

For this week's Unity tutorials, we were tasked with finding 2-4 of our own tutorials to follow. I really liked doing this- as it gave me a chance to develop something for my game project.

This week I looked at some tutorials by Jimmy Vegas for creating a main menu, along with functioning buttons including a play button that loads the player into a scene of choice.

I thought I would stick to Jimmy Vegas tutorials this week as he is using the same version of Unity as I am, and his tutorials are clear and easy to follow (at least to me).

These are the two tutorials I followed.

I started off with creating a new scene in my project for the main menu. Using the UI GameObject, I created text which reads the title of my game, "Eterna Hunt". I then added a side bar and bottom bar and anchored them to the menu, and made them semi-transparent so that you could see the scene behind it which I made later. Using the button option, I created three buttons, one with "Play", "Options" and "Quit Game". 

This is where the tutorial got a bit confusing- Jimmy went on a bit of a tangent about the importance of text and button colour as some colours make a glitch where the button functionality doesn't work- so I just followed his advice and din't make my button black. I made sure to change the colours for when the button is hovered over and clicked to help distinguish it. 

I then went on to create a mini scene reminiscent of my main world- I built a terrain behind the main menu and made some mountains and painted textures and trees, and also moved the main camera to look down on the scene so that you wouldn't see any clipping.

Main menu demonstrating button hovering change

Source: My Unity project

The next step of this tutorial was to add functionality to the buttons using C#. 

As I find C# very confusing to follow and understand, I downloaded the script from Jimmy Vegas' website and applied it to my buttons, tweaking the code to remove buttons I didn't feel were necessary to include in my game which Jimmy did in his game, and to change the linked scene number to ensure the right scene would be opened when the play button is pressed.

And.., it worked! For once. 

What happens after you press the play button

Source: My Unity Project

I removed the trees from my world to reduce lag- I'm going to make the map smaller when I work on developing my game further during the weekend before I add them back.

I was so happy and satisfied seeing my world pop up when the play button is pressed, since C# tends to want to fight me and not work. Pasting the code provided by the tutorial definitely helped me in this regard and it's safe to say I'll be doing it for every script I have to make from now on.

The options and quit game button aren't functional yet, but I'll tackle it when I develop my game more during the weekend.

I'm looking forward to developing my game more, as seeing things come together is really satisfying for me!

Tech Tip Cheezburger

Tech Tip Cheezeburger

Upon realising that memes were a part of of the tech tips, I decided to make one on Cheezburger since 1. I need to catch up with some points and 2. cats are the best.

I saw a beautiful image of a cat peeking around a wall and it reminded me of myself constantly lurking around the kitchen corners whenever I put on a pot of pasta, so I put a similar caption on to the picture.

I made this using Cheezburger!

Though a bit outdated of a meme format, I did enjoy looking at all the cat pictures on the site and it has a certain charm to it.

Game Fun

Game Fun

"Fun" in games is a very subjective term and it's dictionary definition isn't helpful in understanding what makes a game fun. Though, in recent years game developers have a much better idea of what fun in games is all about.

Looking back at our evolutionary history shows our basic drives for survival, reproduction, social interaction in family and communities. Looking back in time is also beneficial as technology now has made a particularly potent play experience that is both new and old in it's origins.

Games are specialised, and play is deep rooted into our history and we can see it in other species. Basic things animals do such as play fighting, tumbling etc. is a way for them to practice survival skills. Taking this into account, these games/play are all about reproduction and survival and social rules and behaviours.

Playing is common in childhood, and technology and video games have promoted interest in adulthood, and our culture also promotes us to keep learning in life. These observations give path to a theory to explain why people get pleasure from leisure activities that honed their ancestor's survival skills. 

You can read the article here!

Another reading discusses player types and measure of fun in a MUD.

When people examined and evaluated a MUD (Multi-user Dungeon) and what aspects of them players enjoyed the most, the four things the majority of people enjoy when playing are:

Achievement within the game context, exploration of the game, socialising with others and imposition upon others.

We can divide these categories into four player types; achievers, explorers, socialists and killers. Players tend to drift between these

play types depending on their moods, but most players tend to have a primary play style.

Interest graph

Source: mud.co.uk

The axes in this graph represent the interest of a player in a MUD. Certain player types fall into different places on the graph, for example explorers are interested in interacting with the world, so they fall on the top right of the graph.

Prototype

Eterna Hunt Prototype

This week, using the GDD I have designed, I have began to develop my game using the Unity engine.

I decided to start by laying out the basic terrain of the map since it's an open world game, and getting the general layout and placements right will help me develop the game more efficiently.

I started by sketching out the general map of my game- I did this using a mobile drawing app called IbisPaint X. Bordering the entire map are mountains so that the player has a set map to explore.

There are three main sections- The forest, the volcanic region and the tundra region, along with a lake subsection. All areas are coloured for visual representation of how big the areas will be.

Map design of "Eterna Hunt"

Source: Me

Screenshots of  my developing game
Source: My Unity project


I'm finding it easy to apply textures, grass, trees and building basic terrain! My main focus was building up some terrain this time around, so I have yet to add any scripting to my game, but that will come when adding objects and creatures to my game. I'm finding scripting a little difficult; I don't really understand it and it tends to not work all too well for me, but I will combat this by looking at plenty of tutorials and sample code!

Though I have textures, grass and trees down, they're too natural looking for my liking and I would like more fantasy-esque plants and colours in my game. There are some things available in the assets store but I'm not willing to spend money on anything since it's very unlikely I'll use them outside of assignment work, so I'll have to look into free options.

I find that when I add more trees, grass and terrain to my map, it slows down my laptop considerably... it's painful to work on it when it's that slow, and there's unfortunately not much I can do to fix this slowness. This is already a big issue in this early stage, so it will probably only worsen as development continues.

I may possibly have to make the map considerably smaller than I would have liked, and be sparing with my many trees to go in the terrain in order to make my laptop a bit faster and responsive when developing. The map I have currently is bigger than I actually thought, so cutting it down shouldn't have a huge impact. Plus, this gives me chance to build and detail the terrain more since the map would be smaller.

I feel that I am meeting my targets relatively well as I have been following the majority of the Jimmy Vegas tutorials and they have taught me the basics of Unity and provide helpful tutorials on things I can add to my game. Also, having done all the project work is very helpful as it's given me a solid idea of what I want my game to look like and the things I need to do to achieve that.

Next up, I'm going to work on making my map smaller, start adding interactive objects into my game, and start working on a cursor and UI.

Game Decisions

Game Decisions

In this week’s reading explores the problems with making an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) including looking at social psychology, friendship, design insights and the social motivation of players.

Looking into aspects of social psychology aids in the development of social design in games.

Friendship between players in a game built up in a variety of in game activities and spaces allows users to build bonds with one another. Important factors in order to determine if individuals are likely to become friends include being close together, being similar to one another, interact back and forth and also be able to confide in the other person. Designing features in the game that allows players to interact, engage and observe is beneficial. Dunbar’s layers explores in depth how people socialise with one another- almost like a network of connections a person may have. It states that people tend to have about 150 friendships in total, branching off into good friendships, casual friendships, best friendships and intimate friendships. Here you can read more about Dunbar’s layers.

This blog goes into extreme detail regarding the social psychology of people, including Dunbar’s Layers.

Dunbar's Number image

Source: Wikipedia

Design Insights

Exploring game design that keeps in mind the social nature and psychology of players will help build a game in which players can bond with others and maintain these bonds.

Designing public and private spaces for players to bond, promoting shared goals, promoting positivity in growth and support aid in players sharing goals and building bonds. It also helps socially motivate players.

Having several communication channels, such as personal/private, tiered, and broadcast channels is an important factor to look into when designing an MMO.

One piece of advice the readings give is to not build a big world first, but to rather define social activities, map out group size and to build social support systems.

Keeping in mind how players interact using social psychology and knowledge of game design allows for a game where player’s social needs are satisfied to be made and is important to learn from.