CAGD 370 Blog

Final Blog Post

    For this project I chose to be the modeler which in hindsight was a mistake. I should have been the programmer or the level designer as modeling is far from my strong suit. If I had done either of those I could have helped much more and our final prototype would likely have turned out better. But I chose to be the modeler. I always remembered that this project was all about prototyping so aesthetic elements were secondary. I was also the project lead so by taking the least important role I would have more time to help the group. 

    What went right in this project? A lot went quite well in this project. We generally managed to get most of the work we set for ourselves done each sprint and we usually were catching up on stuff in the following sprint. We ended with no incomplete cards aside from those in the backlog which was mostly things we never really felt we would end up doing. Despite having no real programmer, we managed some pretty decent code in parts such as my making of some decent user interface/menu elements. We were able to do a decent job at our mission statement of making a game that makes water movement fun and we were fairly creative with concept and gameplay elements. We had some cool collectibles I made and I even made a menu where the player could learn more about them. Our programmer worked tirelessly in spite of not being a programmer and made the game functional with minimal glitches and even made our movement mechanic fun in the end. In the end we did a lot of good work and mostly made the most of our circumstances. 

    A lot of things ended up going wrong with this project. First is an issue with Unity Teams we ran into from sprint 1. One of our group members didn't have access to unity teams and the two of us who did had issues with merging errors. We tried to unsuccessfully solve the issue for several weeks before just giving up on it and going with just having to send the project back and forth and making small individual updates that would gradually be merged into the larger project. This meant that several prototypes were undertested and had missing elements. This was mostly fine as we continued until sprint 5. Right near the end we were getting everything ready for the final prototype and I was working on making several user interface elements. I went to bed having done as much as I could from my end and all our programmer had to do was merge everything and prevent any major glitches. Unfortunately when I woke up on the day of the play test I learned that our prototype not only had none of my user interface and menu elements, it also had almost none of my art assets either as he could not figure out how to make either work. This was crushing. I had been feeling like things were going well and I was trying to do as much as I could and then it all just fell apart at the end. After play testing several other prototypes I put ours at 7th of 8 due to how disappointed I was in our final product. We should have finished it earlier so we could have more time to iron out the bugs and make a good final prototype. So while most of the project was going fine the end was a borderline disaster. At the very least our final prototype plays fine.

    

        I would have done a lot different as I have already said at the beginning of this post. I would have been the programmer or level designer so I could have a more hands on approach to the project. I would have made sure to find a better fix to our unity teams issue. I would have made sure our prototype was done at least 2-3 days before the final play test so we could fix any bugs in the code. I would have made the project in Unity 2D rather than in Unity 3D so we would not have the same digital modeling issues and it would have also helped with some of the coding. I would have added some sound effects or music if possible. If I could do it all over again I know we could do a lot better. I look forward to future projects like this one and overcoming those challenges with the help of the knowledge and mistakes I have made with this one.

Blog Post 4

    Our fourth sprint was somewhat odd. I got a fair amount of work done but also realized a lot of things we needed to get done. This sprint I primarily worked on making user interface elements for the game and found some helpful tutorials for how to do that. I also worked on making a neutral non-player-character for the game. We finally decided to just ignore the unity teams issue especially as Kevyn did not have access to unity teams. We did not finish all of our cards but I felt we most of what we set out to do. I believe we can have a strong finish by the final playtest and critique.

    The neutral non-player-character I was working on ended up being a largely aesthetic piece. I made a sea gull as they are too small to be a real enemy for the intrepid Walrus. I ended up using a simple back and forth movement script for it so it will fly around the level to add to the aesthetic. I would have liked some possible interaction but that would likely be too complex to implement for the value it would provide. I am reasonably satisfied with its current end state and do have some small possible ideas to implement. 

    For the latter part of the sprint I worked on user interface design and made a main menu and plan on making much more soon. I found a great tutorial that helped me make a main menu in really quick fashion and it also had some really simple code for progressing to the next level which I might use later. I had to cut a card idea from an earlier sprint which was a user interface idea to choose and re-play levels but I realized that would be fairly complex to implement with relatively little purpose. I may look into revisiting the idea but probably will not due to the idea causing scope creep. I have plans to make an in-game menu as well to allow the player to pause or quit while playing. Another thing I am working on is making some top of the screen user interface elements to track health and score in the game. I plan on making a major contribution to the game with the user interface elements for the final sprint. 

    The play test for this sprint went okay this time. I made a new google forms feedback form which addressed some of my issues with the earlier version of the form. This time I got some demographics data. I should have probably also asked about player types in the demographic section but I often only come up with these good questions after the fact. I tried to implement the form into the drive but had to scrap that idea part way through as it did not work like I wanted. The play test itself went okay and players generally liked our game but it had some bugs that were frustrating for the players. The last level in the build also had an end of level exit that lead nowhere which confused and frustrated players. For my part play testing I could not play test all of the games during the play test time as they had all gotten much longer and I spent a fair amount of time with play testers of our game. I also noticed how a lot of the games had gotten much harder which I hope our game will not be. I aim for Sea and Snow to be a fun light experience. 

    Overall I am fairly satisfied with what we got done this sprint and believe with some hard work we can make something great for the final play test. 

Blog Post 3

    So far my third sprint has gone fine with some ups and downs. I have been a bit slow on work but have been making progress. I still am working on making assets but am also working on some other more complex tasks such as UI design and fixing an issue with the project in unity. My group has been making some progress but I am somewhat dissatisfied with everyone's card progress including my own. If we can work together cohesively we can get some good work done but a lot of that is getting everyone on the same page which is easier said than done. I also had to break a few cards once again and added the points system to the cards. 

    We are still hampered with an odd issue in Unity as when I try to open our shared unity project it has "merging conflicts" which I do not know how to resolve and googling has been of no avail. Based on my search the issue seems primarily related to git but I do not believe we had anything to do with git so trying to find relevant info has been an issue. Also our modeler doesn't even have unity teams and cannot even access our shared file in the first place. For the time being this issue can be sidestepped but it makes it much more of a hassle than it needs to be.

    After the end of our second sprint we had our kinesthetics prototype and I would say it went quite poorly. Our group had no coordination and the prototype we had was incomplete and buggy. It was a decent showcase of the design of our game but was ugly and boring in addition to the aforementioned issues. It primarily suffered from the broken unity project which did not allow us to coordinate in a single project at all. I also made our feedback form which was decent considering it was my first try but my group did not help me in coming up with the questions we needed to ask and the form was thus underutilized. I also ran into the issue of inserting into the google drive which I could not figure out as I could make a new form in the drive but could not determine how to put in a preexistent one. I hope our next prototype will be less of a borderline disaster.

    This sprint I assigned myself four full cards and 2 shared cards and have completed 2 cards so far. One of my incomplete cards will need some workaround as it involves working with multiple different people's work which is a hassle right now. I am also looking into how to make UI buttons for replaying levels in unity and such. One card I have assigned myself should be fast and simple and the last card I am working on is a shared card for making a tutorial level for our game which, being shared, is another one snarled in our bizarre mess with unity. I have completed cards on making art for some collectibles and enemies and I think they will look nice once I get them in unity.

    The last notable thing so far in sprint 3 is that we are looking into switching to Unity 2D instead of Unity 3D as our game is already 2D so working in 2D may make some things easier. The main thing with this idea is that none of us have worked in Unity 2D so far so we are unsure of how difficult switching to it may be. I am of the opinion that we are unlikely to switch as we already have decent programming work for our character and programming in a new context would probably be too much of a leap. Overall the sprint has so far been interesting but still has some issues to work out.

Blog Post 2

    My second sprint went ok, I did what I set out to do but need to do more in future and ran into scope issues with the larger work of our group. I made art for this sprint, I do know that we should not focus on art but as the modeler for a project that currently does not need much modeling it is a useful thing to do to make the game more enjoyable. But I do need to find something more useful to do in the next sprint so I can be a better team player. Perhaps I will take part of the job of programming or level design as both of those are quite hefty jobs and may need some help. I have been also working on reducing the scope on a few cards that were very broad in scope. 

    In order to make models without having to go through the extensive work of making 3D models I looked into how to make sprites early on in this sprint. I watched some videos and eventually realized this may not work with Unity 3D which we are using as our classes have not taught us about using Unity 2D so I decided to instead use photoshop to make images which can be put as textures for simple 3D models like cubes. This should get across the aesthetic we want in a simple and effective manner. 

    The first thing I worked on was making a character "model" by making a new piece of art for the Walrus that will be better than just a brown capsule or some other simple 3D object. This should work using the forced 2D perspective in Unity 3D. I also made some simple images for the first 3 sets of 3 collectibles each. This was largely just a re-hash of concept images I had made earlier. I then made a image which I hope to use a background for the levels. This will need testing to make an image that has the right aspect ratio for the background of the level. This should be helpful in making the level more fun to play.

    I ran into issues this sprint due to issues in Unity when I tried to work with our shared unity project but when I tried to load it says there were "conflicts" which I am unsure of how to resolve in order to upload changes to the project. I tried making a new project or deleting possibly offending files before loading in but neither worked. I have tried to get in contact with my group about this but this is a busy week so they were probably busy and I will try to resolve it in the next couple days. For the meantime they can download my images from our Trello board or I could share them in our group's discord. 

    One issue I have been trying to resolve this sprint was issues around the Trello board as I made a few cards with goals that were too large for a single card. The offending cards revolved around making level layouts and making them in Unity. I have since made smaller sub cards for individual levels that should resolve the issue if my group members cooperate. My group has been running into cohesion issues as I have too little to do and some members have too much. Several of us also procrastinated at actually putting work on the Trello board. Hopefully during our next kickoff we can work more closely to make sure we put the right amount of work in the sprint for each member. We should also communicate more often in order to make sure we keep up pace.

Blog Post 1 

    My first sprint went pretty well. I did all that I set for myself and my group has been making good progress. My first two cards I did was adding some of the concept art I made after our first meetings about our game. Our game Sea and Snow is about a walrus traveling across the Arctic. So one of the concept art pieces I made was of the walrus himself. I also made a couple featuring sea ice and the aurora borealis. I made more cards for the rest of the group and myself as well as adding a backlog after the Tuesday lecture. I added three cards for each of us. I would make UI mockups, concept some sets of collectible items, and make the paper prototype and its rules. 

    First I made the paper prototype since I set an earlier due date for myself for that so I could run it by my group members. I first worked on a board grid layout as I felt a grid would be the simplest way to get the game idea across in a paper prototype. It took a few iterations before I made the board I would use for the paper prototype. I asked my group for their thoughts and they suggested I should make the board only 1 page in size. I did consider making a 4 page board but that would take much longer to play and make the printing part of print and play more of a hassle. One of the considerations I had to make when making the board was making sure the shades of the different tile types were reasonably distinguishable when printed in grayscale. To help with this I made a key to distinguish the tile types and other icons on the board. After making the board I added the starting points for the player (the walrus), the enemies, and the collectibles. I then made the rules themselves. I had originally started with an idea of having the movement be d6 (a single 6 sided die) for land movement and 2d6 (two six sided die) for water movement but this did not work for the smaller map. So I made land movement 1 and water movement d3 (a single d6 where the results are halved so 1-2 =1, 3-4=2, and 5-6=3) +1 so the average was 3. The reason the movement was like this was because the player is a walrus and they move faster underwater while being cumbersome on land. I then made rules for fighting and the enemies. I then printed it out for myself and play tested for myself. I made some edits to the rule sheet after this including a couple that made the game harder which would turn out to be a bit of a mistake during the play test. One of the rules I made that I thought turned out pretty fun was having the narwhal enemy fight the orca enemy which was otherwise too hard for the player to fight. The orca also chased the player and made the game feel like a chase which was one of the better parts of the print and play prototype.

The Key for the print and play

The initial board idea

The same first board idea cut into four parts

                                       

   The Final board design for the print and play featuring the icons for the player, enemies, and items.

        The second card I set for myself and did was the UI design mockups. I just took one of the concept arts as a base and used light blue to make some basic user interface type concepts for the game. These included a idea which may not end up making it into the final game, the journal which would include descriptions for all the collectibles the player had collected as well as additional information when they completed a set of related collectibles. I also made a simple mockup of the main menu featuring the game name, a play button, a levels button for the player to re-play levels in any order, and a button for settings. I also made one for the in game menu which included a main menu button, a level restart button, a controls button (should be settings), and a collection button which should probably have been in the main menu instead. I also made a mockup of the top of screen UI featuring the player portrait (which may be superfluous) and the player's health represented by hearts. This turned out pretty well and was completed on time but most of these will be drastically changed or even removed before they make it to the final design.

    Lastly I made some concept art for a few of the possible sets of collectibles that would be in the game. There will probably be one set for each level. The three sets I made concept art for were: Inuit artifacts, lost expedition artifacts, and bones of arctic fauna. I did some basic research on the Inuit artifacts and will do some more for the ones that may make it into the final game. The three Inuit artifacts are a bone comb (generic idea with no specific reference), a tiny carved ivory maskette, and a carved ivory sea otter. The latter two of these are based on actual items. The next set was the lost expedition artifacts which featured a lead can (before lead poisoning was well understood, a button from a coat, and a monocle. These were mostly just basic ideas. The last set was made up of animal bones including: a walrus tusk, a narwhal horn (its actually a tooth!), and a polar bear skull. These turned out well and will serve as a starting point for collectible item sets in the digital version the game, though this will likely be a later feature and may have to be cut for scope.