Final Round of Critiques on Paper Prototypes

Aquila: Rise of the Emperor

I was unaware that the Roman emperors had war planes, but maybe my knowledge of history is lacking here. It's also possible that I've misunderstood the game's setting, or maybe the planes could be a placeholder for something. Nonetheless, I was confused by them.

Regardless, it is impressive that the team had a digital prototype working at such an early stage of the project. Although apparently buggy, using temp art work (at least I hope so), and small in scope, their prototype seemed to cover the primary mechanics of the game. It appears their testers at least enjoyed it, which bodes well for the final game. Also, their testing seems to have uncovered plenty of bugs and missing functionality (such as stat feedback). All in all, this thing looks rather promising, even though it's being made in GameMaker.

Deep Field

Uhm, a strategy game within a spatial field? I guess it sounds impressive but I'm clueless as to what it means. Apparently it all comes down to blocking balls and throwing them at targets. Not sure where the strategy is to be found in that. I also didn't understand how the 'acting it out' testing really worked or what they discovered from it. The mechanics seem so dead simple that I can't imagine it taking more than a few hours to make a prototype in Flash or GameMaker, which seems more useful, unless 3-dimensionality is somehow absolutely critical.

Somehow I got the feeling that the following phrase was used sometime during development: "Okay guys, we can't seem to figure out what we wanna do, so let's just roll around in chairs and throw balls at things."

The Legend of Chopstick Chung

I rather liked the visuals in this presentation and the game looked surprisingly polished considering the early stage in the process. The idea was also communicated well and seemed well thought out. As a concept it's pretty simple, but it allows for a lot of creativity and opportunity for expansion. It is important though to focus on the presentation and polish of each minigame rather than churning out too many half-developed ideas. But it looks like this is exactly what the team is doing, so I wouldn't be too worried.

Dynasty

A bit confused by this one at first but reading the testing doc cleared things up a bit. I'm still not sure what role the MSN games played in the testing, but I was quite impressed by the look and feel of the paper prototype. I remember seeing this 'paper window' approach in 312 as well, and it really fits well with the RPG genre. It just makes sense not being able to see what's coming up. The history and puzzles add plenty of additonal points of interest, and at least make it sound different from a lot of other RPG concepts, even though the game's working details are still rather unclear. But keys and moster fighting are involved, which are always fun.

Weekly Assessment #6

Well, it looks like we're making a Flash game now. It's not entirely surprising, considering the issues we've had with Torque. Even judging on the limited basis of what I've seen of it, it's really not the most flexible or approachable working environment one could imagine.

Fortunately, however, we do still have plans to pursue the Torque version of the game after classes end. If we can pull it off, the extra initiative ought to make it look even more impressive on a portfolio. Also, making a Flash game is hardly a total sacrifice. Sure, 3D is cooler but we can cover most of what we set out to do in a 2D format. My little 3D ship still looks pretty good as an animated sprite. My poor buildings though are another matter; I just don't know how I'm gonna get them to work from a top-down perspective. My towers have been reduced to sad little circles now. Sigh.

On a positive note, at least the development of character stuff shouldn't be affected by this change in format. So, whatever we want to do with the cutscenes and in-game chatter should potentially be just as cool. Thus, I would like to invest a considerable fraction of my resources on the characters, and I've mostly been working on a model of Clyde this past week.

The game prototype also turned out rather nicely; Lawson clearly knows a little something about Flash. Today's (or technically yesterday's) testing session may have been a bit last minute, but I think we got some great feedback and highly positive first impressions. And now that we finally have something tangible to work with, I expect our team meetings may prove more productive.

Third Round of Critiques on Paper Prototypes

Stick Ninja

As far as I can figure, this game is a 2D platformer or side-scrolling action game. If this is the case, I don't quite understand why the paper prototype appeared specifically designed for a five on one confrontation. In a side scroller I would expect enemies to be rather sequential.
Then again, there were plenty of things that I didn't quite understand from the presentation.

Bigger text and less lines going through text would also have made the thing more readable.
Apparently there are multiple characters, but the only character property is a combat bonus, making higher bonus characters simply better. This seems like a strange use of character choice, but maybe things will be different in the final game. There also seemed to be a number of different weapons with different bonuses, and something tricky about calculating attack points that the testers had difficulty with.

In the prototype the mechanics seem to boil down to selecting the right weapon for the right enemy type and picking the order in which to attack enemies. But it seemed to me that the enemy type was always known to the player and that weapons could be switched between attacks, so I'm unsure what exactly prevents you from always selecting the best weapon. Similarly, I didn't understand why it mattered what order the enemies were attacked in. Of course I may have misunderstood the game, but it didn't seem like there were any choices of significance for the player to make.


Zodiac War

This one appears to be just a 2D fighter, little different from Street Fighter or the dozens of others out there. The well defined nature of the genre undoubtedly makes things easier as there is abundant sources of reference for what mechanics are known to work, but it would also have been nice to see a few touches of originality.

The presentation for this prototype was very light on information, and even the testing doc does not really explain exactly what mechanic was being tested. It appears they translated the fighting game into cards, representing movement and attacks, but it remains unclear how these were used. Are attacks played simultaneously to simulate the timing and moments of vulnerability that are so critical in the genre? Do some attacks overcome others? Is there a longer delay with some attacks?

In addition, the results of their testing sound rather useless, as good pace, attack variety and clear controls are absolute common sense for any fighting game.


Crack Quest

Although the gameplay is far from original and the subject matter is questionable, this game was impressively far along in the production process. This alpha version of the game (or maybe pre-alpha?) certainly allowed for more accurate testing than a paper prototype would have. It seems their testing response was pretty positive, with the only issue being the length/unskippability of the cutscenes. Given the genre and ludicrous story, I certainly wouldn't be too interested in watching them unless they were artistically mindblowing or something. I'd say if the intro cutscene is longer than about five seconds then cut it back, put in a skip button, or integrate the story into the gameplay.

Weekly Assessment #5

Our prototype deadline is coming up and I'm hoping we can, at the very least, get some of my models into a pre-prototype tomorrow. At the minimum we should end up with some of my terrain pieces floating in the sky, with my flyer model flying around them. Naturally, for the prototype deadline in week 12 we need to have the bomb mechanic working. Perhaps not entirely polished, but at least functional.

For my part, there shouldn't be any problems getting some art into the prototype. I've dramatically changed our main player vehicle into a much improved, and probably final, form. I've also finished the mobile garage and four different buildings for the ruins. I've tested the main flyer and some of the ruins within Torque and everything has been pretty smooth sailing so far. I've only needed to go back for a little tweaking with scaling and multi-mesh grouping to get things to export properly.

As far as the characters go, I haven't managed to do anything further. At the moment, I'm thinking of doing just shoulder-plus-head models for all the character others than Clyde. I would, however, like to get Clyde fully into some cutscenes, and in any case we need a simplified clyde model to put in the flyer's open cockpit.

Our regular weekly meeting is on again for tomorrow at noon, and hopefully Lawson and Matt have gotten some cool stuff working. Fortunately, I don't have to mess around with that ugly code. All I've gotta do is extrude some cubes and paint them.

Things to do tomorrow:
- get my models into Lawson and Matt's pre-prototype
- texture the hippie vehicle
- get as many ruins done as possible

Weekly Assessment #4

I wish I'd gotten more done this week, but the 355 programming junk has really weighed me down, along with several other projects and BOL II. I have no new concept sketches this time, but in my opinion there's nothing else we really need. The characters are more or less set in stone, and the ruins are often easier to think up in Maya than on paper.

The terrain has moved forward a little bit, and at least I can say with fairly high confidence that the required workflow is clear now. It's only a question of spitting out building models and texture maps from here on out. Plus, the models for the mobile garage and hippie vehicle are complete, so it's only a matter of texturing those (although that will probably take quite a bit longer than modeling).

I am expecting a bit of a lull in other projects next week so I should be able to get more done, particularly next weekend. But to be honest, the other parts of the project were still in relatively early stages of development in the last meeting, so perhaps I shouldn't be too worried. Our regular four-hour meeting is on for tomorrow afternoon once again, so I guess I'm about to find out how the whole thing is shaping up and what kinds of targets I should be aiming for.

And now for some sleep...

Second Round of Critiques on Prototype Presentations

Last class there were another four presentations and one of them was ours, leaving only three to crit this time. So, here we go:

3rd Cloud

It was interesting to see someone actually doing an electronic prototype. With the introductory description and abundant screenshots, it was also easy to get a feel for the type of game they were making. But being unfamiliar with RPGMaker, I was unsure how much of what I was seeing was original and what things were part of the engine. I'm assuming that all of the art is not original content (though I could be wrong about this), so I remain unsure about whether the team is planning to pursue original art or not, or how much planning/effort actually went into this stage of the game.

The presentation, however, was quite engaging and I got the feeling they really learned from their user testing. They seemed to realize the different styles of play that apply to RPGs, the issues of equipping items, and various associations/expectations (such as random monster encounters) arising from familiriaty with a host of similar games.

Drive-thru Tycoon

This presentation wasn't as entertaining as the previous one, but I did like the exceptionally thorough description of the prototype's mechanics, as well as the testing circumstances. I found quite a few grammatical errors in the document and on occasion found the text a bit too small.

Overall though, the prototype and testing process seemed well thought out and quite successful. This genre also seems to translate very well into paper form, and aside from the AI, it appears that all of their major game mechanics were representable.

Food Fight

As I understand it, this game is intended to be a realtime, Flash-type game about cafeteria food fights, but it was represented in paper form as a turn-based Battleship-look-alike. I could, however, be mistaken here.

As with many other presentations, I found this presentation a little short on information provided, but I really liked the look of the prototype setup and the game characters. In fact, judging just by looks, this was the most impressive paper prototype thus far. Looking at the setup image, this could almost be a fully fledged board/card game in its own right.

Since I know very little about the prototype's mechanics or what the final game mechanics are going to be, there's little I can say about what could have been done differently here. From the team's own observations though, it seems they had quite a lot of issues with the prototype, which is surprising considering the competent look of the setup.

Weekly Assessment #3

Here goes this weeks assessment of progress, planning and such. I haven't actually managed to do all that much for the project due to a load of work in other courses, but things are moving forwards. For one, I've discovered an easy way to do techy textures for our vehicles and ruins, which looks better than my previous approach and is much faster to do. I've retextured the main player vehicle with this method and it should be ready to go into the game.

I've also done a few concepts for the mobile garage and some of the minor characters, and I've started experimenting with character models in Maya. There's really no quick way to do those, but I think they're still perfectly feasible, since I don't have to do binding (except with the heads, I guess) and I can get away with projected textures, saving me the pain of UV wrapping. But of course, if we're going to use these in cutscenes, we'll need some environmental stuff too. But much of this can be very simple or done in photoshop. Plus, I don't think we'll end up having all that many cutscene frames. Then again, I may be dangerously underestimating the size of the workload.

I haven't seen that much of what everybody else is working on, but things seem headed in a promising direction. Lawson has found a flying starter kit, so he won't have to build the flying mechanics from scratch - a definite plus. I haven't heard any of Dan's sound work so far, but he looks like he knows what he's doing. Matt is working on level design and upgrade mechanics, though I'm not quite sure what exactly that involves at this point. And then of course, Cody is busy with our story development and whatever team coordinating has to be done.

I'm sure more pieces will start clicking together in tomorrow's meeting (again four hours long!) but somewhere I've gotta find some time to work on 355!

Sigh...

Critiques on the First Round of Paper Prototype Presentations

Alright, here's my verdict on the four paper prototype presentations seen so far. Hopefully we'll go through more than four tomorrow or these presentations will never get done. Anyway, here goes:

Antlion

I have to say I didn't particularly like this presentation, and got very little sense of what the game or prototype was about. The teams's initial research and revision slide seemed unnecessary and an overly elaborate way of saying 'making an RTS was too hard, so we're making something else.' Also, the presentation never made it clear what type of game the team was working on, and what aspects of it they were trying to test. It seems that either escaping from an antlion or trying to catch an ant is the object of the game, but it remains unclear what game mechanics are used to represent this, either in the final game or the prototype.

As a final point, the game also seems incredibly simple, and indeed rather underwhelming for a full-semester, four-person project. But it is difficult to suggest ways to expand the game when I have essentially no idea what the gameplay is like.

Fins of Fury

Once again I was a bit unsure about the nature of the game at first, but eventually realized it's an action-adventure game, possibly with rpg elements and done in 3D. Once I understood this context, the presentation made more sense. Not much was mentioned about the paper prototype but it did seem like a good representation of an adventure game/rpg, as many of the core mechanics (point collecting, fighting, avoiding enemies, leveling, etc.) were accounted for.

With regard to the project in general, this game does sound incredibly ambitious and I hope they can pull it off. With full 3D, animated characters, story, levels and a character that apparently grows up through the course of the game, they've got their work cut out for them.

Mizu

As I understand it, Mizu is intended to be a side-scrolling platformer like Mario or Sonic where the player plays as a water-creature, fighting the other three elements. It was rather unclear how the paper prototype presented these mechanics, as all I remember hearing is that it was inadequate in many respects. This is understandable, considering that much of the fun in a playformer comes from the immediacy of jumping around and hitting enemies.

Untitled Game (previously known as School'd)

First off, I think this game needs a name, at least a working one. But with that said, the paper prototype seemed quite successful, even though the presentation was a bit crude. The game appears to be a medieval adventure/rpg with different character types, attacks and probably items. The testing approach for this game did seem quite interesting and very flexible, as new elements can be roughed in on this grid sheet on the fly.

Weekly Assessment #2

Yeah, I know this is coming in awfully late but I'm gonna do it anyway. To start, a lot of things have changed since the last posting. Our schedule is no longer as insanely rushed, and I've actually been able to think about other things these past few days. Even so, there is a lot of work to be done. While virtually all the conceptual work has been ironed out by now and I've gotten a start on the 3D modeling, there is still a mighty iceberg to be chipped away here.

Since our four-hour meeting last Tuesday, it's become pretty clear what assets we need. For in-game models we're looking at three vehicles and - according to Matt's count - 37 terrain pieces. I think some of those terrain pieces can be identical, or at least have only minor variations within a particular type. Such subtle differences are easy to do with multi-mesh objects.

In addition to that we need some bombs (which are very easy), effects (explosions, engine flare, etc), and of course front-end stuff (radio-chatter portraits, cutscene images, item images for upgrades, general UI stuff, and probably something I haven't thought of). At the very least I would like to get 3D character heads for the radio chatter, with at least some simple mouth-flapping animation. Ideally I would like to do full models for the four main characters, and do our cutscenes in 3D. But don't worry; these wouldn't be animated cutscenes, I'm not quite that crazy. Stills with voice narration is what we discussed last meeting, although I believe Cody is still planning to pursue 2D for these. But I happen to like my character modeling and think I could make them look quite a bit better in 3D. As an added bonus, I think 3D would even be easier, considering the amount of cutscenes and chatter we might want to have.

Guess I better get some modeling done....

Weekly Blog Entry

Alright, this is my official blog entry for the week. Up to this point I haven't been doing much besides turning out conceptual drawings for our characters, terrain and vehicles. I've taken only the briefest of glances at the Torque Game Engine, and just last night tested out the exporting of Torque's dts format files out of Maya. That turned out to be a bit easier than I feared. Although the process is still somewhat technical and finicky, so I'm sure there are a number of things that can and probably will go horribly wrong at some point.

But of course this is nothing compared to the technical mastery that our game mechanics will require. The Torque editing environment itself is pretty sparse in terms of functions, so much of the work will have to be done outside of it in the console and in text files.

Fortunately, I won't have to understand all of it. Most of my time from here on should go into models, textures, GUI and possible cinematics & radio chatter animations. It is quite a lot of content though, and I'm not entirely sure if we should model my character designs or just make very basic 2D animations (or even static pics). Actually, for all I know at this point the whole radio chatter & story cinematics may prove too much on our constrained schedule, making it all a moot point.

I'm sure I'll have a much better idea of where this is all headed by the end of the day, and I may continue on this official posting later in the evening.

Busy as a Beaver and a Bee Combined

Well, I've managed to stop kicking myself over my rather underwhelming game idea presentation last week. The idea I had really wasn't that bad, but I procrastinated a bit too much with it and by the time I had the idea fleshed out, I had barely any time to figure out how to communicate it. Poor planning on my part. But it may all be for the best, as I've now landed in Cody's team and his idea is infinitely more ambitious than mine. Great promise lies ahead there but also mountains of work and the possibility of dismal failure. I have high hopes, but it's hard to tell at this point how well any of the available engines will support our game mechanics. Time will tell.

IAT 410 Blog Is Up

First post in my IAT 410 blog; looking forward to making some games!