Thus begins yet another AGP learning journal, this time for Games Design. I do my learning journals in reverse chronological order, so toward the end of the class, you don't need to scroll to find the good stuff.
Final Reflection
Wasn't sure I was going to get this one done one time...talk about taking it down to the wire! I made a Spark Video about what I learned in the AGP Games Design 2017 course.
Week 05
I'm finally done-ish. There are things I would change if I had time (and will change before I use this in a class), but I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.
Here is the concept behind this game. I teach a non-transfer psychology class, designed for students who don't plan to continue at a 4-year college after completing their associate's degree at the community college. I have taught this course online for a few years after teaching it in the classroom for several. I want to redesign the course around a "Museum of the Mind," where each "room" in the museum is a different major topic in the course. In each room students would have a variety of activities from which they can choose to learn that content.
One of the rooms would be "Memory." Students could read about memory from their OER textbook, watch a YouTube video from Crash Course Psychology, complete my interactive lecture on the topic, or play a game. Whichever they choose (and they can choose more than one), they would need to complete an interactive worksheet about memory.
Here is a video of my game.
So what would I change? I want to figure out a way to draw attention to the text information about each memory piece. It looked bigger when I previewed it in Unity than it did when I played it after building it. I would also like to figure out a way to make it disappear after a bit. I have it attached to the pick-ups uwing Andrew's dialogue script, but I think I might try adding a box collider around the pick-up that turns the dialogue on and off...not sure if that would work, though.
I also need a better win screen, something like, "You found your memory...about memory!" Some directions would be good, too. I will probably add more bits of memory, including the different types of long term memory.
And instead of gold nuggett spheres, I thought about making the pick-ups rotating brains, but that was kind of gross...
Week 04
In reviewing the Building Background content for this week, I was stuck by the parallel between game design and learning design. When I saw the "Flow" diagram,
I immediately thought of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.
According to Vygotsky, learning takes place in that sweet spot where learners can achieve a skill with the help of a teacher or peer, but not on their own. If the task at hand is too hard, they cannot achieve it, and they become anxious. If the task is to easy, they can already achieve it on their own, and they become bored.
Then in the live class, flow was described with these characteristics:
- Clear goals
- Chance of completing task
- Immediate feedback
- Continuously challenging
- No distractions
Again, I was struck by the parallels to learning design. Well-designed learning activities have clear goals and objectives that are achievable by the learner with help (the zone of proximal development) and eventually on their own. Learners should receive immediate feedback on their achievement of those objectives, so they know what they need to do better. The learning tasks should be ordered in increasing difficulty, so they are hard enough to keep learning challenging but not so hard that the learners become too anxious about the learning experience. And finally, the learning needs to interesting enough to keep the learner's attention, drowning out the myriad distractions that can occur.
Piece of cake, right?
On Being Frustrated....
While I have enjoyed creating my island and my character, thinking about the parallels between learning and game-playing has really brought my underlying frustration to the forefront. When I design a learning experience, I start by defining the goals and objectives of the learning, and everything else always leads back to that.
My gut tells me game design should be the same way, but as of now, I have no idea what I can do in Unity as objectives of the game. Ideally, I would like to have tasks the players must complete that involve using content from courses I would use the game in. For example, I created the crate image with lighted buttons on it, with the idea that players would need to push the buttons in the right order. Unfortunately, I don't know if that sort of thing is possible. Without knowing what CAN be done, I can't figure out what SHOULD be done, so all this time spent creating an island and a character without an ultimate goal in mind is frustrating...
Character Update
I decided to work on customizing my character this week. I must admit, I kind of zoned out in the live class when Mark showed us how to do this, because A) it was in Photoshop
and 2) the class runs at the same time as my current favorite TV show...
Hey, don't knock it 'til you've watched it...
So I paid the price of my wandering attention by having to watch the recording. Once you get used to it, the synching between audio and video isn't too bad; you just have to listen for what you want to do, and then watch to see how it's actually done a few seconds later.
I started by changing her clothes. Once I had her on the island, the long jeans and long-sleeved shirt looked too hot, so I changed her into shorts and a t-shirt in Fuse, and then exported her to work in Photoshop.
Then I went a little crazy, and I made her blue eyes green. I copied the iris to a new Photoshop document, using the ellipse lasso tool with the alt-shift key combo to make it a perfect circle, drawn from the center out. In the new document, I adjusted the colors to make it green instead of blue, and then copied it back to the original document.
The result isn't quite what I wanted; to get a real fringy look, I think I'd have to mess with the mesh, which I didn't take the time to try to figure out. Overall, though, I think she fits better on the island.
Here is Emma Redux, lost on an island. She still has a few weird things going on, like a ridiculously long neck and very narrow shoulders, so I still need to play around with her to get her right. I think it has to do with how I rigged it in Mixamo; trying to get the elbows in the right place was a bit challenging.
Week 03
Not much for this week. Creating a character in Fuse was pretty easy (amazing how many settings there are for boobs, and not a single one for hips...).
It was interesting how there was more variety for men than women - no female zombie? The clothing options for women were also rather limited. Only three skirts, and none of them suitable for any intense activity...a nice mid-calf flowy skirt would have been nice for a cruise passenger marooned on a desert island. It would also have been nice to be able to combine options - leggings under the mini-skirt, for example, or a tank top and jacket. The long hair also looks weird, so I might change that later.
I was also disappointed in how standardized the clothing options were. How would you create a space suit, for example?
Week 02
Designing game environments is as big a timesucker as playing games is.
As I've said before, I have little background in art, so when Mark said creating your island was like sculpting, I had a moment of panic. Working in 2-D is a big enough challenge for me, so working in 3-D...time to break out the single malt.
I fell back on science. I decided my island was a dormant volcano, where one side of the cone was worn away to form the bay. I built up the original volcano, then "wore down" one side. I played around with the various brushes to try to make the sides look more "lava-flowy."
For the base texture I used one of the tiles I created from images of the Martian surface. Unfortunately, you can see the tiling when you zoom in, so I went over it a bit with a slightly dark texture I made. I adjusted my original wavy texture to make it look more like lava, rotating it so the wave were vertical and making is dark. And it turned out my other textures actually made an interesting grassy color when laid on top of the sand, so...
This is what I came up with. I still make adjustments as I add the details, and I need to deal with the tiling of the sand, but it's pretty close to what I want.
My big problem was not realizing that changes you make in "play" mode don't save when you save a scene. I couldn't figure out why these beautiful changes I made didn't seem to stick. For me, it was easier to adjust moving parts in real-time to see how the changes affect things, as opposed to flipping from scene to game to scene to game. I built a beautiful waterfall and then lost it because I built it when the scene was playing...
So I built another one. But of course, I couldn't remember exactly how I had done the first one. There are elements of the first one I like better (the mist is better), but this one was pretty good, too. I followed Mark's USA live class 2 recording, which was a challenge. Trying to pause and rewind Connect recordings is not the easiest thing to do. But he shared his settings and textures in the Facebook group, so that helped immensely. I did make some changes to what he did. I didn't like the collision effect because it gave too hard of a line. Falling water doesn't really collide and bounce off a plane of other water. Instead it pushes through the planeand force water back up. So I turned the collision of the water fall off, left it on for the mist, and adjusted the waves to simulate someof the turbulence.
Here is my second (or third...or fourth...I lost track this week) attempt at a waterfall.
At this point, I sort of had to let go of science, as I tried to figure out a reason why there would be a water source that high up...I'm going with some sort of internal heating increasing the pressure underground, sort of like a permanent, mild Old Faithful geyser thing.
One I got the waterfall done, I started working on some scenery. I found a couple of nice free asset packs. I also found you need to be careful with what you import, because some can cause unexpected problems...causing you to have to start over again (but once I realized I could import the terrain I had already built into a new project, it wasn't that bad...but it did lead to waterfall number three).
This is where the real timesucking comes in. I spent hours placing plants and rocks and resizing and moving, adding and subtracting trees and grass. And then I would realize I did my whole "cave" in play mode, and, well, time for more scotch. Oh, and I wish there was a way (or I knew a way) to make a gentle slope. I used the set level tool multiple times with small changes in the level, and then used the smoothing tool to level things out. The results are OK, but not ideal.
It was time to add some foliage. Again, had to sort of suspend disbelief while trying to figure out where my island would get fresh water, but I thought there could be some nice foliage over by the waterfall. I made some adjustments to the waterfall, lowering the one side and changing the angle to increase the "overspray" in that corner to provide water for some tropical foliage.
I added another "oasis" on the other side of the island by adding a little pond. I used palm trees and grass over there. I wanted my palm trees to sway a bit like the grass, but the wind zone almost did me in. The Unity documentation isn't the best. It included few screen shots, so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where this "bend" option was. Then I spent more time adjusting and readjusting turbulence until I finally figured out this option called "main" had to be turned way down to get a gentle breeze rather than gale force winds. I added some more tropical plants there as well. I have to be careful adding those in because they don't sway in the breeze. It needs more work, but it is good enough for now...
I still have a lot of work to do, but I can do a little bit each day now that I know the process. Oh, and I had a moment of panic today as Unity crashed, but a reinstall with fingers crossed (and more scotch) and all is well.
UPDATE:
Sjaani's comment about lava flows gotme thinking. You can't have lava flows without an active volcano first, so.... I based this on the concept of Mark's waterfall. The flames and smoke have no gravity; fire is really just a lot electromagnetic radiation and superheated gas, while smoke is microscopic particles, so neither would be affected by gravity much. The sparks have a high initial velocity with moderate gravity on the sparks, since they are actual largish solid material that burns and would be more affected by gravity than flames
By the way, I realized after a bit it is a good idea to organize the objects into folders (gameobjects) in your hierarchy view to keep track of what is where. I ended up with a long list containing multiple versions of rock1, rock2, rock3, with no idea if the rock was in the cave or by the waterfall.
Update 2
I finally figured out how to make lava! I created my own texture by finding a stock photo of lava and then masked it to a circle in Photoshop. I used the same process as I did creating the waterfall, but used two starting color gradiants to get the dark red and black glowing lava effect. Took me a while to figure out how to get the lava to ooze instead of run, but the key was slowing the whole thing done with the simulation speed setting! I need to go back and experiment with that on my waterfall.
Final(ish) Update
I modified the lava flow by changing various settings, making the collisions to the world, and adding trails to the lava particles. That allowed me to have the lava flow over mulitple paths down the side of the volcano. It looks good form a distance, so I have to make sure you can't get too close to it...
Week 01
I'm getting better with Photoshop, but it is still not my go to app of choice.
My problem is that while I can follow Mark's video without problem, my result isn't always the same as his, and I don't know what to do to fix it. For example, when I would use the spot healing brush to get rid of the line at the joint, it looked great when he did it...but I would still see a line on mine. I finally got rid of it by using the clone stamp tool (which I remember from the digital imaging skill builder course).
I started with images from Mars, since we have some great texture images there. The first image is the original. The following images have four copies tiled into a 2048x2048 image in the background with the 512x512 tile in the foreground.
I finally figured out that the spot healing brush worked better for me if I merged the duplicated layers first before using it. I futzed around with different blending modes and came up with three different looks from the same image.
I decided to go a little futuristic for my crate. Not sure how well the rounded corners will work while building my "world," but it will be easy enough to square them up in Illustrator if I need to.
I decided to draw this from scratch in Illustrator instead of using Photoshop because I needed a palate cleanser after Photoshop... I started with a 512x512 artboard, and based everything of of multiples of 16. The squares in the background are 16x16 with a grey gradiant and a horizontal grain texture. I used the shape builder tool to create the overlay, doing a square in square to get the square outline, then added on two thin rectangle to form the X. That also has the gray gradient applied, but slightly darker, and an inner glow to give in the subtle 3D effect. For the glowy button panel (because you always need glowy buttons on a futuristic crate), I applied a 3D effect to the black background and to each button, then added an outer glow to the yellow button. Again, I can easily change which button glows.
Just an extra one 'cause I thought it looked cool.
Course Orientation
I like mind games.
Not THOSE kind of mind games, although they have their appeal.
I like puzzle games, word games, trivia games, that sort of thing. I'm not a big shoot-em-up type game player, and the click and collect type of games don't hold my interest long. But give me Scrabble, Words with Friends, Trivial Pursuit, or even a good jigsaw puzzle, and I can play for hours.
Now, back in the day, I was the queen of Tetris. More than once when I was in grad school, I would go to a friend's house and blow their high score off the board.. Something about how my brain works made fitting all those pieces together, well, child's play.
Reading someone else's journal made me remember my love of pinball and early arcade games. Back in college, I spent many an hour and more than a few rols of quarters at Playland in State College. I can still hear the bells and see the flashing lights and feel the buttons under my fingers as I try to put a little "English" on the ball without tilting the machine.
Credits:
Created with images by Hans-Peter Gauster - "Puzzle" • mil8 - "choose your own adventure" • Zak Greant - "scrabble!" • jacobms - "DSC01904" • @joefoodie - "Tetris" • Chicken Head Lives! - "Pinball!" • Ryan Somma - "Toru Iwatani: Pac-Man"