More Camerawork and Spontaneous Networking

It's week 17 and it's three weeks into the big game project, there has been a lot of talk in the group as of late but mostly about level design. But since I'm not one of the level designers I'm not going to talk about that in my blog.

Camera

So the camera has been a top priority as of late, the last two weeks I've been trying out some different camera models. The first one i tired out was a free-rotating that the player had complete controll over, but I also made it snapp back to it's original position behind the player when it hadn't been moved in a while. I then restraint the camera so it couldn't go below the ground and not rotate above the player. Having That whould make the player upside-down or the camera would have to rotate it in the Y-axis make it face-up and I didn't think that would look good.

For the air camera I ended up making it look towards the spot the player would land, this was easy since Petter already calculate the ladningspot for the movement code. All I had to do was to calculate the vector between the camera and landingspot, normalize it and move the camera back x times that vector from the payer to get a nice overview.

HUD

Jonatan feelt that we needed some sort of "overview-button" that when pressed zoomed out the camera and gave the player a huge overview of the area. Robert then came up with the idea that we could display the some sort of HUD on that overview aswell. So i set out on creating this, when the left thubstick is pressed and hold the time slows down and the camera zooms out, the HUD then fades in and shows the player the only info it could want to know.

Networking

So last tuesday we spontaneously decided to add co-op into the game, since this was something that mostly needed programming. I don't have that much to do at the moment other than to create small scripts for the artists like when they want something to spin or a texture to pan and so on. So with that in mind and after countless requests from playtesters to add multiplayer I started to work on the multiplayer. Unity's networking is really grateful to work with and after one day I had a working build.

What I will be working on this week is to reduce the lag and adding some HUD that indicates where the other players are, since you can loose eachother quite easy as it stands.

These images are quick mockups of how that HUD might work.

Wether these HUD's will show at all time or when the player clicks the left thubstick is still under discussion, perhaps we'll make it an option.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Big game is starting.

Prologue

This week the course "Big Game Project" started, during the weeks leading up to this project we've been working on a concept that Jonatan Keil proposed with the working title "Open Circuit" and thus the group Freshly Squeezed was created. The game is to be created in the Unity engine.

(Click here to read the concept pitch,
The colour errors are due to Google Drive)

Last Week

My primary work last week has been with the boost that are suppose to drive the player forwards, I've also done some work on the checkpointsystem and the mechanics of the checkpoint boost. I've started to work on the camera effects to emphasize the feeling of speed.

The Boosts

(Programming art)

There are three types of boosts, the small boosts used for guidence and the weakest of the boosts. The activation boosts are less common but can be activated when the player chooses with a great bust of force. Lastly we have the checkpoint boosts, when the player enters the area of a checkpoint boost they can charge up a boost that will sling them in the direction of the vector between the player and the boost station.

The small boosts are very straight forward, when the player collide with them they instantly give the player a small amount of force in the players direction, since we're using Unity's rigidbodies all I have to do to accomplish this is too add force to the players rigidbody with the players forward vector.
The activation boost works in a similar fation, but instead of adding the force instantly it adds to a pool of boost power that the player can activate when he/she chooses, upon activation the force is added to the rigidbody.

The checkpoint boosts are the most complex of the boosts but still not that problematic. When the player enters the area of the boost, the time is slowed down, the player now start to charge a boost by holding down a button. The amount of charge is shown by the field of view increasing(as shown below), the output direction is shown by the yellow line on the ground(emphasised with red in the picture below), when the player releases the button he/she will be slingshot in this direction.

(I'm no artist, as you can see)

We had a various of ideas for the checkpoints that I concepted and tested, one idea was that when you entered the area of the checkpoint you lose control of the player and start to controll the output-direction arrow. But to make this feel good I had to add a diablo-esc camera perspective so you gott a better overview of the arrow, however we felt that this checkpoint model took you out of the gameplay and ruined the "flow" that is the key feature of this game hence we went with the other checkpoint version.

The Camera Effects

So I talked a bit about changing the FoV(Field of View) of the camera, and this is right now also our primary speed effect. Currently I change the FoV of the camera depending on the players Velocity, clamping it between 60-120 FoV. I also add some Bloom and motion blur to the camera, however all of these effects are subject to change.

The Checkpoints

Right now we are talking about how we want to handel the Checkpoints, we are currently leaning towards a model where you can toggle between all the checkpoints you've passed during your playthrough of the level. So if you want to go back more than one checkpoint that is entirely possible. When going back to a previous checkpoint the time is reset to the time you had when passing that checkpoint, however a penalty is added to your time, stopping you from just reseting form the checkpoint over and over again.

Fog of War

The last thing I've been working on is the FoW(Fog of War) for the game, in the game's level selection screen we are going to show a preview of the map with Fog of War where you haven't visited. I accomplish this by splitting the terain up in parts, then register when the player has visited one of these parts. This data is then converted into a texture with transparency where the player has been.

What's left to do is to add alpha-gradient to the borders of the visited areas.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Balancing Balancing and more Balancing.

Last day we had yet another balancing session, we were about half the group since the other half had other classes to attend. The goal of yesterdays sesion was to make the Wizard even stronger in the begining of the game and also try a new trap mechanic.

So inseed of doing an aditional 10+ saving throw for each trap and take two damage for each failed test, we tested and stuck with that you allways only take two damage no matter how many traps there are in a room.
The saving throw was lowered to 7+ and for each aditional trap in the room the you add 3 to the threshold, i.e. 1 trap 7+, 2 traps 10+, 3 traps 13+, and so on.
We decided to do this change since the traps were way to strong, especially during the endgame when the wizard could force the players to walk on the traps, so a 50/50 chance of taking 8 damage for about 6 mana was way to strong.

As for the wizard we tested to let him start at three mana and that helped alot more than we'd tought  But to reduce the heroes power at the start of the game, we removed alot of equipment and replaced them with consumable potions. This made the wizards spell "Demolish"(Destroy target equipment) alot more powerful since equipment was harder to come by.

Today we had a QA sesion with our primary teacher Adam, we only had half an hour with him and the game takes about 45 minutes to play. So needless to say he didn't get to finnish playing before the next group came along, but he did get sad when he had to stop playing which is a good sign. He liked the game and told us to just muck about with it this week, try and add classes, perhaps a town where you purches items and so on.

This is all for this week since I'm going to Gamex to show up a game I worked on last year called "Tribal Marathon"

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Thursday QA

So the goal of this week was to balance the game as much as possible which i described in the previous post. This post will focus on the QA session we had this Thursday.

This thursday I pulled together the entire class and everyone tested at least one other game in the class. Since our game takes 45min - 1h 30min to play depending on the players experience only one group had time to test our game. It took the testers 1h 15min to play a round of our game. And their impresion of the game was that the traps were too powerfull, as it stands right now you roll a 10+ saving throw for each trap in a room you've entered, each roll you fail you take 2 damage for.
I also have found them to be a bit overpowered so what we plan to do is to change the trap system to, the more traps there are in a room the higher you have to roll, but you can only take two damage maximum.

A second thing they said was that the wizard was to weak at the start of the game, we've tried to fix this problem earlier by adding more lowcost cards in the game and increasing the mana the wizard gains but it seems that we still need to work on it a bit.

They also told us that there were to few potions in the game but I'm doubtful since this might just be an effect of the huge damage of the traps. So we will first try to fix the traps, and then if the problem remains we will add more potions.

All and all they loved our system and only feelt that we need to balance yet some more, so next week will be a balancing-week aswell.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Revamp!

Time for a lot of text!

So today I was in school working with my group from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., we did QA(Quality Assurance) the entire day and improved the game. The main goal was to create ways for the wizard to split up players, since during the QA last friday we discovered that it was too easy for the heroes when they stick together.

So we decided to add these spells:

Switcheroo:

Choose a player and a token, switch their places.

Possess:

Choose a player, that player deals damage equal to the number of 

equipment he/she has to another player in the same room.

Whirlwind:

Choose a room, move each player in that room to a different adjecent room.
Place 2 level 5 tokens in the room they were previously stated in.

And my personal favorite

Evil Laugh:

Choose a room, each player in that room 

skips a turn for each player in that room

What this did was that the wizard could split the players up, or punish them when they are together and thereby making it more riskful to walk as a group. We also lowered the amount of swords a player could have (positive combat modifiers) from "one of each kind" to "two of any kind". Since there are three +3 swords, four +2 swords and five +1 swords. Before this change when you played three heroes all those heroes could have one +3,+2 and +1 card, giving them an +6 on their combat rolls. After this change, if you played three heroes only one person could have a total of +6 on their combat rolls, the other players could only have +5 and then +4 and so on.

We also wanted to try one new mechanic and add one new rule. The mechanic was "the rage of the wizard", when all three key's needed to get into the wizards tower is collected, the world starts to fall apart. The wizard must now, at the beginning of each turn, remove X number of tiles, where X is the number of people in the game. There are some constraints though, the wizard can't remove tiles so that a player can't get to the tower, of if a player dies and drops key's there must remain a path two that key. What this did was to create a narrower path to the wizards tower, forcing the heroes to walk through the wizards traps and monsters.

The rule we added was that when the wizard was enraged, he was allowed to place creatures inside of his tower aswell that the heroes had to fight before they win.

After some QA

The next thing we tried was that instead of the wizard gaining one "mana" each turn in addition to the modifiers from the tiles the players walk on, he only got the mana from the tiles. The reason we did this was because we felt that the wizard got to much "mana" too fast in the early game.

After trying this concept one time we realized that we had to re-balance the modifiers on the tiles in order for it to work. Since as they were now, the wizard was simply not getting enough "mana" because the negative "mana-modifiers"(the digit in the left icon) were too height and too many. So we made most of the -2 and -3 mana tiles into +1 or -1 mana tiles instead.

This helped some but the wizard still felt too underpowered in the beginning of the game, and was basiclly just sitting and rolling his thumbs until he got the mana he needed to cast creatures and spells. So we decided to add more lower costing spells, creatures and traps.

While lowering the cost of some cards we also added some new spells, such as:

Demolish:

Destroy any 1 equipment in play.

We added this card since the players got a lot of equipment that they didn't have any use for. Say that a player had one +3 and one +2 sword  equipped, and they get another +2 while looting a room, they would just hold on or throw away that card . Now that the wizard can destroy equipment a player needs to keep reserves of weapons so they still have some value.

Teacher QA

We then had a QA session with one of our teachers, Marcus. He played two rounds of the game, first as a hero and then as the wizard, both games took 1h 45min. The first time we played Jonas played the wizard and the three heroes won. The next turn Marcus played the Wizard and it looked like the heroes was going to win again, but slowly but surely Marcus got back on his feet. And Marcus then hammered the last nail in the coffin when he used the "switcheroo" spell to switch place of the hero with two of the three key's with a monster at the edge of the board while the world was falling apart around them. Marcus then overwhelmed the heroes, filling the board with traps and monsters until the last man fell.

All and all Marcus liked the game and didn't have any criticism, he did however suggest that we try to change something in the exploration system. As it looks right now, when a hero steps onto a tile, that hero flips all the tokens(monster, traps and illusions) on that tile and then resolve combat, loot and such. He suggested that we try and play that you aren't allowed to flip the tile until you've killed all the monster-tokens on it, he thought that would perhaps create even more mindgames. So that's something we shall at least try and see how it affects the dynamic of the game.

A thing that we decided ourselves that we wanted to try was to remove some equipment cards and replace them with consumables that give similar bonuses, i.e. replace some +1 swords with some +1 dmg potions.

Tomorrow I've arranged a big QA meeting with most of the group in the course, there we will play the same version of the game that Marcus tried to get more opinions from various different people.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

The process

The process of creating this board game wasn't hard but it wasn't a stroll in the park either. This tuesday we sat and created our core mechanic for this game, the wizards deck and mana-wheel. Whe then cut out som paper to have something to place tokens on and walk on as the Heroes and the we started to test the wizard.
It worked well and was interesting so we decided to develope the concept further.
The next day I could not be in school and work with the group since I have another course aswell, and so did Jonas. We told the group to create some loot cards for the Heroes and real monsters and traps and spells for the wizard. Jonas made some templates that the rest of the group could work with, like "Sword of Awesome +3 dmg in combat."

During the day I was still avalible on skype and asked the group how it was going, and I got the response that they where re-developing the entire movement-system since they didn't think the tiles mattered enought the day before when we only tested the wizard. They added different floors and tiles that could only be entered from specific directions.
A bit confused I told them to focus on creating the cards an said that we would talk about the movement-system the day after (Tuesday).

Tueseday came along and we met in the F-house of the school and started to talk, I explained that it wasn't that odd that they didn't find the movement-system interesting last time since we only had the focus on the wizard with his cards and mana. So we began to create the tiles and came up with the idea that the tiles should affect the wizards mana and hand. This made the tiles more meaningful and thus made everyone happy. We then spend the day balancing the tiles making it feel like the Heroes could stal the wizard from geting too powerful but never stop it. We also created new spells and monsters for the wizard and to make the vary more but still be fair, and loot cards to reward the players for moving around.

In the begining the mana-wheel had numbers from 1 to 16 on it, but after playtesting later in the week we realised that 16 is way to much mana for the wizard to have, so we decided to make it from 1-10 instead but still with 16 steps (making it go 1 2 3 4 5 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10). The other choice we had was to increase the cost of his cards but both would work just as fine, and re-writing the spin was less tedious.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

The results

So this week we've been developing an alpha prototype of our game.

You play as an evil wizard in his tower, or as heroes who tries to kill him. The wizard has a deck of cards that allows him to summon minions or traps or cast spells. 

They all cost "mana" and the wizards mana is decided by a mana-wheel which is placed in the center of the board, this wheel also represent the wizards tower.

The heroes move around on tiles that are flipped upside down and when a player moves onto a tile they flip that tile upwards.

All the tiles have different stats on them, the first icon is how the tile modifies the wizards mana-wheel and the second one is how the tile modifies the cards on the wizard's hand.

There are also three "key-tiles" that are placed by the wizard, the goal of the heroes are to gather those three keys to be able to enter the wizards tower.

If the heroes enter a tile with monsters on it, all of the heroes on that tile roll a d20, they then pick the highest roll and add all their equipment modifiers(I'll come back to this). The wizard rolls a dice and adds the level of all the monsters in that room. If the wizards combined roll is the highest the monsters win and the heroes return to their previous tile and lose one of their ten life points. If the heroes combined roll is the highest they kill the monsters and get to draw one loot card for the group of monster, no matter how many monsters there where.

Whenever a player enters an unexplored tile he also gets one loot card. If the tile is occupied by monsters he only get the loot from the room when the monster are defeated, i.e. if monsters are defeated on an unexplored tile you get two loot cards(one for the monsters and one for the tile). This is not per player, the players all split the loot from a room.

In the next post I will focus about the process of creating this game.

-David Forssell

Boardgame Aesthetics

So this Wednesday I had a sit-down with my group where we were to come up with aesthetics for the Boardgame we are to make. Things went surprisingly smooth and within two hours we had a lot of ideas to work with.

The aesthetics we came up with was:
Exploring: We want the players to explore different "areas" and to force them to move around we added our second aesthetic.
Stress: To force the player to move around we will introduce stress in the form of time and objectives, the player will have to do a certain amount of things before the time runs out. The time doesn't have to be time as in seconds and minutes, preferably it will be "in game time"(turns in the game).
Challenge: We want the game to be challenging, not only in the way that the two aesthetics above create, but also in the sense that you have to conquer different enemies.
Fellowship: It's really usual that games sets the players against one another, we wanted the players to work with one another and create a co-operative experience.

We started to think about settings in which these Aesthetics would prospore and the first setting that came to mind was Caverns. It's perfect for Exploring since it can contain hidden tresures or fierce monsters; the monsters add Challenge and the players have to work together to survive the treacherous cavern and thereby creating Fellowship. But to increase the Fellowshipin the game we wanted to add an overmind, something that works against them and controls the cave. This could be an "AI" but that doesn't make the players unite as much as if it's another human being working against them and constantly stands in the way, so we added another player.
This players goal is to hinder the other players from completing their goals by placing enemies, setting traps, tirggering events and so on. This also helped to create Stress, since we could make the "overmind" stronger each turn eventually making it overpower the other players.
But this player will also feel Stress and Challange since that player have to stop the other players before they conqure the dungeon.

To add replayability we want to make the "cave-rooms" randomly generated. This could be achieved by the players picking tiles from a stack and then place them where they want to explore, or that the "overmind" creates a cavern beforehand; or perhaps that all the tiles are placed upside down in a random order(like in settlers of catan's preparation) and are then flipped when the players enter that room.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading. 

-David Forssell

A piece of my mind

I can't sleep so might as well scribble

Tomorrow I will meet my group and discuss an assignment in which we're to create a board game.
This week we are to come up with the aesthetics we want for the game we're making; I don't know what aesthetics I want in our game, I just know that I don't want to make a copy of any game we played in the previous assignment.
Our previous assignment was to play two board games and one roleplaying game, then analyze them and define and describe their core mechanic.
The board games we played was:

Gloom

The first game we chose was Gloom(here is a video of it worth watching). It's a card game where each player has five family members and your goal is to make your own family as unhappy as possible and then kill them. You do this by playing death, event and modifier-cards.
Each card has a title which promotes for storytelling, this is the greatest strength of the game since it's what makes the game more than just numbers on a character, you bond with the characters and their misfortune. Since you want to hear the stories you tend to not plan ahead for your next turn and therefore this game contains a lot of waiting for players.

Pro's: Easy to learn, creative, humorous.
Con's: Promotes not planing ahead, creating 'down time'.

Kingdoms

The second game was Kingdoms an accual "board" game since it contained a grid board; it also contained a number of tiles, some castles in various colors and a lot of coins. You place the tiles upside down and spread them out, each player then picks one tile which they are allowed to look at, 50 coins, a color and the corresponding castles.
The tiles contains a positive or negative number, this is the points all castles in a horizontal or vertical alignment with the tile gain or lose. The castles also have a number of dots on them, this is a multiplier that is used to multiply the score of any horizontal or vertical line the castle is placed on. The tiles also contains dragons which negates all the positive values the of the tiles in horizontal or vertical alignment with it, a gold mine which double the positive values aligned with it and mountains which blocks the effects of all tiles beyond them. Each turn a player may place a random tile, the tile they picked at the start of the game or place a castle and when the board is filled the players count their scores. The players then get their castles with one dot on them back and loses the rest and then plays the game two more times.

Pro's: Easy to learn, short game time, replayability.
Con's: Tedious to count score.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.
-David Forssell