19th january
In this week we disscussed as a group what product we will be selling at the tate, the person who will be buying it and what the story is behind the character.
our character name is jack from france, a 22 year old colledge student who also partakes in freeriding as well as having a knack for puzzles, boardgames and anything which involves strategy.
Also has a younger siter named nova aged 13 who also shows a love for not only puzzles but for museum art as well as collecting.
Jack wants to collect the small puzzles for his small sister to enjoy.
As a group we ran into some trouble with the story, most of my team mates couldnt take this serious enough so couldnt come to an agreement, i also felt there wasnt enough ideas put down for the game we are designing.
The taget audience for the small puzzles will be for people with a love for collecting and puzzles
I think maybe your group became sidetracked by the puzzle (which isn't really sophisticated enough for the kind of game we are looking for); rather than working from your target audience and ideal user to your product - you've started with a puzzle and then worked back towards a user.
ReplyDelete26/1/10
ReplyDeletethis week we disscussed the problems relating to our assignment last week, we disscussed how the character was to unbelievable and not well thought out so couldnt be taken seriously as well as the story not relating in anyway to the game we created.
which leads to the puzzle game we created, it seemed far to comlicated, boring and lacked any real challenges other than navigate through a small maze.
There several floors that are in the small cube and we modified the game to a maze with challenges, adding small holes into each floors so the player must avoid them inoreder to continue to the next floor, each flooor has more holes increasing the challenge and thrill.
The story has also been changed, to a young male uni student and his little 12 year old sister who have been invited by their granpa to visit the museum and witness his art piece.
they both get lost and so to pass the time as they walk play the maze game which has the same floors as the building itself so as they guide the pinball to the bottom they are also following its root and navigating themselves to the bottom.
The next game we thought of was a hand held game, the character is a famous painting theif, his job is to collect all the paintings within each room withought getting caught by the guards to proceed to the next level as there are more valuable painings but an increase in guards.
this week in ppd we disscussed about our second idea of our game in detail talking about the rules, procedures and objectives of the game.
ReplyDeleteThe objective of the game is playing as a famous theif collector and to steal each and every painitng while avoiding guards and and scoring as much points as possible within the time limit till reaching the last room.
There are also elements of strategy involved , the guards have a set pattern they walk in and its the players choice how to avoid them as well as take them out from behind.
By doing so it gives the player more freedom to explore withought worrying about the guard seeing you as they are unconcious.
the procedures are as follows
:play as one character throughout the game
:game is shown in birds eye view thus u see the whole room of the museum as well as above the characters head, guards e.c.t
:played on a hand held controller
Using the analoge buttons to move only left and right, up and down
:press B to collect painitngs while near them
:press A+B to knock out guards
The are a number of rules;
:there only ten rooms throught the game
:to advance to the next room you must collect all paintings in the room
:a set time limit in the room, all paintings must be collected befor it runs out or game over.
:the higher the level/rooms you go into there is an increase of guards and painitngs
:making contact with the guard forces you to start at the beggining of the level and lose all paintings.
:guards only move in a certain pattern
:hitting a guard from behind leaves them unconcious and will not move.
:small painting give small points and large paintings give bigger points.
:the game is finished once you collected the last painting in the last room in level/room ten
:points are then added up and the player shown their score.
this week we disscussed in my about the layout of our game, trying to come up with a prototype inorder to play our hand hold game.
ReplyDeletewe thought of using a birds eye view to capture the landscape of the museum rooms, thus all the painings, the player and guards will all be seen looking down on them.
we drew this example on paper, each room being a square and drawing rough copies of the painintings on the side of the walls.
Drawing pillars as well as using a pencil to outline where the guards walked around and their field of vision.
the idea went well and we quicly disscussed the pros and cons of our ideas, so far the layout of the idea a seems fine and we will stick with it and continue with it in the next session.
we finally began our paper prototype and i am confident to say everything went well, we modeled the rooms on paper as grids, which the player would move along like a chess piece.
ReplyDeletewe constructed painting along the side of the walls using folded up paper as well as treasure chests made the same way.
im was happy with the presentation of the board as i had created the whole idea of the game as well as the lay out but had many difficullties with how to play the game by hand.
using a dice to control the player as well as direct the guards was complicated and very slow paced, and getting to the end of the first level was difficult withought getting caught easily.
either way the game was a succsses as it could be played and we could analyse and evaluate our progress.
through researching viral marketing and mmo games we had finally begun making our game which is designed around the advertisement of chocolate as a chocolate factory game.
ReplyDeletethe main aim of the game is to fulfill out the orders given to you and create the chocolate using the right ingredients for more points under a fast paced puzzle game.
we had just created our paper prototype which had worked out well at first, conveyor bets made from paper as well as the chocolate and ingredients given multicolor to tell apart the different ingredients and for more appeal.
we came across flaws such as how the player would suffer defeat and how, the idea for a chocolate factory game having lives was absurd, so we changed it to something more ideal, by the chocolate clogging up the oven if the player is not quick enough to place chocolates elsewhere.
similar to the Tetris game, when the chocolate fill up even one conveyor belt its game over.
the design and story boarding are easy to read and follow and i have learnt that we need to play the prototype amongst ourselves so we can create more challenges and work out more flaws.
continuing with our project we had come across challenges in showing how to visulialise our game, the ingredients for example would need to be coded with little pixelated pictures so the audience can understand what the ingredients are.
ReplyDeletei learned that it is important to understand how the audience will visuailise this and if it is easy to understand thus some of our work needed to be simplified and less frustrating for the audience,
this week the challenges had increased for me, the conveyor belts needed picture icons in order for the player to tell what ingredients they are, the problems i ran into were mine were either to big or to complicated to understand.
ReplyDeletethe player must know what ingredient it is at a glance so i tried creating diffrent images to give that result.
However there has been progress in the aesthetic look of the conveyor belt, its layout and the animation of the chocolates.
i need to increase the amount of icons i create while making them easy to understand to the audiences.
this week i continued with the ingredient icons for the conveyor belt, i had learned how to acuratley turn straight shapes into curved ones as we believed it was nessasary for a more aesthetic appeal.
ReplyDeleteit was a slow and long process but had created and changed several of my work inorder to make it easier for the player to recognise what ingredient meant what, also with some of our changed ideas i had drawn more design documents to explain our game.
we have gotten rid of the packaging machine, redesigned the ovens and started the coding and animations of the chocolates.
progress has been going steadily and well as our game reaches our final stages, although i hope to try and contribute more to the animation and coding of the game
the progress for my work hadnt increased as much, just continuing with my work on the icons which i had completed as well as continuing with the story boards.
ReplyDeletei feel that i have improved in designing storyboards that are eye appealing as well as easy to understand compared to how i was befor
we have finally gotten our game prototypes played by other classmates and have gotten some useful advice in return.
ReplyDeletethe game so far was far to simple and straight forward, relying on no challenge at all as the player could easily figure out the mechanics the ingredients to use and could easily tire of the game.
there needs to be an increase of chocolate bars as well as the increase in speed of the coveyor belts to keep the players attention shifting from one conveyor belt to the next keeping the constantly preoccupied.
we could also switch around the ingredients while the conveyor belts are moving to also confuse the player, to keep them on their toes as they never know when the ingredients will change and may end up placing the wrong ingreident in the wrong place.
we had finally finished creating our flash game "Chocolate factory" there are many pros and cons i have with the game as well as my own indiviugual work i had done in it.
ReplyDeletei believe that i had not participated enough in group disscussions enough compared to when i was working on the titans game, i left too much work on the coding to my other team mates thus i have little understanding of how the game even works.
i also beleive that the main title screen and ending screen which i had created wasnt detailed or aesthetic enough to absorb the player in the game, i know that i coudlve worked harder to create those designs.
thus apart of me feels that i didnt contribute as much to the game as i hoped but in the end we all helped and discussed our ideas withone another inorder to create this game.
if there was something i needed to change in this game it is to create a points system for this game so each indivigual cake has points and the player must guide the cakes into the correct ingredients or lose points if they make the wrong decision.
in conclusion im happy with how the game turned out but i need to contribute more to the team disscusions.