Making Jelly Chasers! (1/2)

To kick off our second year we were given a brief about sweets. I'm good at them, so naturally had this one down. The brief outlined that you have to market the popular 'Jelly Babies' sweets with a game that appeals to 8 - 12 y/o.

We assembled our team and came up with a studio name that would win the hearts of all serious business people:

Eat your heart out disney

Our tutors rightly suggested this was perhaps not an appropriate team name/logo.

'No Hesitation, No Surrender'

Once we had a bit of a giggle we were ready to stop playing silly buggers and do some work. This brief was focused more on the paperwork side of game design, so you had to make a prototype level from your game idea (barely playable) and then write a GDD, TDD, ADD and Personal Journal for it. Here's a few screenshots of our prototype:

Start Screen

From player's perspective

 Inspiration for our game's mechanics came from the masterpiece that is KATAMARI. In Katamari you roll around a pile of junk, making it bigger and bigger. In our game, you run around as a Jelly baby, picking up smaller ones to grow larger. As you grow bigger, you can access more of the level.

View from above

On that concept, we made a picnic table. To climb the cake and other puzzles you'd have to be a certain size. The level has a timer to put the player under pressure when absorbing the other jelly babies and there were lots of fun little interact able points. Jesse Schell says you have to make 20 games before you start to make progress. Thank god we're on bloody number 2. ONWARD..

Making Jelly Chasers! (2/2)

I get excited when we're told we've got to do these game design documents. I think it's because I like looking at 'themes' on word and making it look pretty. Look here is my journal.

 

 Pretty, eh? TELL ME I'M PRETTy ok this has to stop. I'm good at these things when I get into them though - I think it's because I have Scott Roger's 'LEVEL UP' book and when I read it it doesn't make my eyes bleed. His GDD examples are a bloody god send:

He makes a great point about using drawings to explain ideas to the rest of the team. He draws comics to liven the GDD up and translate what he means a lot more clearly. This is something I'm definitely going to do the next time I make a GDD. Compared to his our document front page looked a bit boring....

Working with Engines: Unity

I haven't posted much by ways of individual work yet, so here's bit I've done in Unity. The Brief: Make a little 2D puzzle game to demonstrate knowledge of Playmaker and Unity. When coming up with a quick puzzle idea, this came to mind:

A simple toy maze which you tilt to roll the ball about. I decided this would be the basis for my puzzle and quickly set up some props in Unity. I called the game 'Cheese Run', with the logic that the ball is a piece of cheese that you navigate through objects to a mouse hole.

After popping some colliders on each of the objects and tweaking their physics properties I created a few simple levels. I made the materials bouncy for added difficulty of controlling the ball. 

Setting up the tilting function of the board was straightforward. Here's how I configured them in PlayMaker:

Click to Enlarge! 

Last but not least, I added a nice surprise to the win condition rather than just a "Well Done." 

Ta-Da! A mouse appears on screen, soon to be with an added thank-you squeak sound effect.

Presenting a Concept

After our practice with the board and fairy tail games our next group project was to last us till the end of the year; our task was to create a 2D game from start to finish. Our team, dubbed 'Insomiacs', came up with a concept that took inspiration from Japanese wood block prints. Here are some examples of images we were looking at whilst coming up with some ideas:

We established quickly that we didn't want to make a side-scrolling plat former and so an idea was formed that you would jump INTO the picture. The player solves mini-games on each layer to unlock the next; battling against a time limit to move further into the lovely print style backgrounds. Put simply, you are a Frog aiming for the Palace pond in the distance. Here are some slides from our presentation to industry. (It was like a Dragon's Den scenario.)

Adding a texture to the layer the player is currently playing on allows for easy recognition of what they can jump on /attack etc. 

We invested in a Frog suit for Andy and made him our mascot and logo. +10 Try hard points awarded. Got a 1st, worth.

Stay classy.

Character Design Week

Another 2D technical art brief, we dipped in on character design and how to portray what kind of person someone is/what they do etc. I was given 'Abertoir worker'. You'll see my concept sketches below (6/10 I know) and you'll see me developing the kind of character I wanted to portray by the end of it. He's supposed to be a guy who despite killing animals, feels every cut. Deep.

Vectors

We have a module dedicated to teaching us a range of different software in preparation for conveying our game ideas. Since many 2D games are created using vectors to save space, we were shown the basics of Photoshop's vector tools. Here is a piece I made after being given the title "Blinkies Balloon Race"

I've used photoshop a lot before but never really dabbled with the vector tools, s'alright like.

(Project 2) Our Own Board

This time round we were given far more time to create a board game of our own. Instead of being given a video game with pre-existing rules to take from, we were given a fairy tale. Ours was Goldilocks.

Our game orientated around the story of Goldilocks, focusing on the chase for her. You play as one of the three bears, starting on the house board. You make your way around that house board, picking up cards corresponding to space colours that will aid your chase of Goldilocks. On the Garden board you race your friends (and a timer) to catch Goldilocks first!

Here are some examples of assets we created. 

 Cards

 Ruleset (Page 1)

 Garden board (Left half)

 Garden Board (Right Half)

House Board