A game for a 35 year old canadian men.

For the group's prototype 2 assignment I decided to create a demolition game with a wrecking ball.

After some research I found that the average age of gamers are around the mid-thirties and the most common game genre is common games that are easy to pick up and play. It makes sense because there are several types of gamers; Casual gamers, Mid-core gamers, hardcore gamers, pro gamers, etc. Research shows that the older gamers (30ish+) tend to be the more of the casual gamers.

Our prototype is called “Building Smasher” and I made it very simple yet challenging. I tried to make it a casual, simple yet challenging and appealing to the average 35 year old Canadian guy. The player only uses the arrow keys to move the wrecking ball crane. It can take a while to master the maneuvering of the wrecking ball because of the rope/chain.

Destruction is proven to be a guy’s thing so that’s why I chose to do the wrecking ball.

The player wins and progresses to the next level when they demolish the building to a curtain height before the time runs out. What makes the further levels harder is the reduced time and increased building size. The player’s control over the wrecking ball is the key to success in this game.

Prototype 1 = Mechanics of Space Invaders in Unity!

I forgot to mention about my First prototype. Last week, We are supposed to create a fan remake of an classic Atari-2600-type game from the given list:

a. Defender, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_%28arcade_game%29

b. Crazy Climber, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Climber

c. Galaxian, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxian

d. Space Invaders, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders

e. Xenophobe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophobe_%28video_game%29

f. Slot Racers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_Racers

g. Fishing Derby, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_Derby

h. Wizard of Wor, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Wor

i. Centipede, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_%28video_game%29

I chose to do Space Invaders since I could quickly visualise a clear and organized way to code the game. The game would require all the features in the orginal, these features are:

-Player Shooting

-Enemy Shooting

-UFO

-Lives

-Score keeping and increment value based on enemy type.

-Player Movement

-Enemy Movement (moving down after a unit reaches the left or right boarder)

-Lost when no lives are left
-Lose when enemies reach a certain depth towards the player

-Destructible Barriers

-Enemy removal after being hit by bullet

-Removal of player lives when they are hit by an enemy bullet

Here’s a screenshot:

As for our group game, I’m the sole programmer since no one else in the group has strong programming skills and in the end I’ll just waste more time fixing people’s code then doing something else more productive on the game.

I‘ve set up all the code base for our game and they are mainly header file for game objects that will be used, such as enemy, player, ally, bullets, game managers etc.

Magic the Gathering - Assignment

For our assignment we were to create 3 simple magic cards and explain how we calculated the stats on the card.

Four Legged Spider Pack: +2 for colour, +2 for colourless, +1 for base. Total of 5 points.

 Fire Master: -1 for being a red card, +2 for colour, +4 for colourless, +1 for base, +1 for using more than 5 mana. Total of 7 points.

Mind Controller: +2 for colour, +3 for colourless, +1 for base. Total of 6 points.

Summon Night: swordcraft Story (GBA)

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story is a member of a famous Japanese RPG series, "Summon Night". This game plays on GBA platform.

Here's a graph of all the resources in the game that effect the game play and have some sort of equation to it. When I started linking all the elements together the graph got more complex. I found that Health is the central resource, everything evolves around it.

Ingenious!

We played the award-winning German board game called Ingenious. Here are my thoughts on this game:

Things I liked about this game:

-Simple

-Special game for single player

-Up to 4 players, good for family or group of friends

-Lots of freedom on placement which would involve more thinking/strategy from the players rather than luck such as rolling a dice in other games (though it does involve some luck when drawing pieces)

-6 pieces only, so they have just enough to use which would require thinking verses having too many which wouldn’t require much thinking if you have the piece for everything.

-Loser is the player with the lowest score for any colour (makes players value certain colours over others more)

-Can see other player’s score board, helps you develop a strategy

Things I disliked about this game:


 -Rule where youngest player must go first and then go clock-wise (unbalanced)

-Additional rules for single player (which can’t be helped but doesn’t have the same feel as multiplayer).

-Swapping Tiles rule if they hold no tile for the lowest score they can swap out their hand for a new hand at the end of the turn.

-Rule where the board games bigger as the number of player’s increase. I prefer to just let the player’s choose their game size freely.

-Average game time for two players is too short for me

Things I Would of Changed:

-Rule where the youngest player must go first. If the players were to play more than one round it would make the game imbalanced since the that player (the youngest) would always go first. Instead randomized the first player (ex. using a dice, assuming cost isn’t a factor)

-Allow the players to choose game size. I might want the game to last longer so might want to choose the bigger size board. Leave the choice to the player and have recommendations for the board sizes based on the rules they have now.

  
What do you guys thing about the changes?
Do you guys agree that it would make the game better?

3 Day Programming & Plan for Next Semester

Before you start reading, I completely accept the fact I screwed up lol. This talks about my point of view on our group's screw up for our game.

3 Day Programming

So I've been programming our game requirements the three days before the presentation and used the base code that we've worked on in the Engine Design Lab which already had the camera and physics and many other features an engine would have. I know the requirements are pretty easy except the Skeletal animation to get done. I only received code from our business guy in the group for the shaders & Xbox 360 Controller in our game (I forgot to mention that in the presentation when I said I did all the programming in 3 days lol). This affected me significantly because what I thought was done from the other programmers wasn't done, they came to me during the 3 day programming period and said "they don't know how to do it" and they didn't bother to learn how so I had to code their parts. Thus my three day coding period wasn't enough to do both my part and their parts so we didn't 100% of the requirements done.

Personal and Valid Reasons I Was Unable to Program Earlier

- Didn't get the level scene graph to work with until the last few days (I was still getting art from them the day of the presentation) and our game-code is based heavily on the level design and how you encounter with it, I would be happy with place-holder models to work with. It's not like a top-down shooter where I can start programming the AI and way points and etc. without the need for graphics. I later realized the lead artist wasn't doing the work either since he was waiting on the other artists to give him their parts (which he didn't get until very very late, He also got models on the day of the presentation) and he was responsible for the scene graph.
- Wasn't interested in our game, I had a different vision for the game than the designers. No motivation to do it, would only do it for the requirements since that's what's being marked.
- Programmers except me and the business guy didn't know how to do it and aren't willing to learn which annoyed the hell out of me.
-The votes for this type of game outweighed the others and the sadly the majority of the voters that voted for this are the freeloaders.

Everyone in our group was at fault.


Plan for Next Semester

- Since everyone else said they don't mind what the next game type is I'm going to pick something I enjoy programming (just for this group, programmers don't usually pick what they want to make) which is AI, we are going to do a Top-Down shooter next semester.
- Kick out all the freeloaders
- I'm going to do all the programming and I'm going to start early because I love coding Top-Down Shooters. once we kick out all the freeloaders our group wouldn't have any other coders except the business guy but I want him to focus on his parts.
- We are going to keep the group up-to-date with everyone's part, so the graphics people will know how the programmer (me) is doing and vice versa. We will comunicate about our division needs so we become more synchronized.
- Weekly group meetings
- Early place holder models even though this isn't going to be like our last game where it matters significantly.

Conclusion

So everyone in our group (except the deadweights/freeloaders) had the ablility to do it and make a good game but our team coordination was really poor so we paid the hefty price, having a crappy game.

Cram Week Begins! Quick update post

So there's one week left and we don't have much complete. There's a lot of models in our group Dropbox folder but there's a lot that aren't complete. There's not enough for us to code for the game and they aren't placed in the scene yet for our game from our graphics and designer people. I alerted all the programmers to just stop waiting for the graphics and just code all the requirements even though it may be not related to our game. A handful of the requirements are similar if not the same to the previous year's requirements so I have a lot of my previous code for our previous game that I can use. The only requirement that got me thinking, and sounds troublesome is the Animated Characters requirement where we have to perform skeletal animation in the game. I will look into that once I have everything complete.