Alternalien Development Part 16: What I Learned is Gaming School Is...

I've learned a great deal over the course of this semester, and I like to think that I've also become a better person.  During the first few weeks of class, as my team can testify by, I was a real prick.  I was controlling, egotistical, and a perfectionist.  But I think I've learned to set aside my ego and my desire to be the best, and let someone else take the spotlight.  It's not easy getting over yourself, but you can be confident in your work without being arrogant.  I don't know everything, but at least I know I'm still learning.

Alternalien Development Part 15: The Intro Part 2

Continuing from yesterday, I worked on finishing the intro sequence.  Most of my time was used animating the crashing ship as it flies past the camera, but I also have it revealing the title on its final pass.  After around 3 hours of work, this is what I had to show:

While not the most visually stunning thing in the game, it's still perhaps some of my better work, and will probably be the last thing I add to the build.

Alternalien Development Part 14: Dave and Busters

Today was pretty unorthodox as Emil had us stop deving to "have a conversation".  We basically aired our dirty laundry and ended our beefs with each other.  As a team building exercise, we told each other what we thought we were doing well and what we thought they could improve on.  I was pleased to know that my team members think I've come a long way from where I was at midterms with my attitude.  After we bonded for a while, one of our very talented programmers, Mike, treated all to a lunch at Dave and Busters.  We played games and just had fun for a while.  I think our team is going to be alright.

Alternalien Development Part 13: The Clone

I worked on and completed all the animations for the Clone alien.  The Clone is an alien with the ability to change into another object within the game.  Originally, it was that he would transform into an enemy to bypass security on certain levels, but now that we've cut enemies, he changes into a box.

Concepting him was the hardest part, as the name "Clone" doesn't evoke a particular look.  I ended up with a "faceless" identity with a small guy wearing a paper bag over his head.  When he uses his power, his paper bag consumes him, and explodes into the new object.

Alternalien Development Part 12: Sandy

I focused on all of Sandy's animations, including his run, jump, and ability.  Originally called AlienX, Sandy was concepted to be an alien that controls time within a small bubble, being able to slow things down.  His hour glass form comes from a piece of concept art I did awhile back, where I imagines him as a literal hourglass person.

The animation for his power use is basically him flipping upside down like and hourglass.

Alternalien Development Part 11: Level Select

I worked on a few thumbnails for the level select GUI that would appear after the Main Menu.  They're both themed for vintage military hardware.  The first is modeled after a Topographic map with shapes representing hills and valleys.  The green squares represent levels within each biome.  

The second is a group of security monitors, the reason being that if the aliens are escaping a facility, then a camera would be on each floor.  If each floor is a level, then a camera would represent a level.  The second thumbnail was chosen.

Alternalien Development Part 10: The Main Menu

Over the course of the week, I made the final version of the Main Menu GUI.  The Product Owner chose the first concept I did for the final piece.  I added an indentation of our logo that was designed by Jose Flores.  This indentation was inspired by how early computer manufacturers indented thei logos into the corners of their products.

Alternalien Development Part 9: Freezing Fridge

This week, I got together with a fellow team member and designer: Garrett Poenitsch to discuss ideas for his arctic level.  He pitched me ideas with a fridge-like environment.  Something artificial and cold.  I did some drafts of what he wanted and this is what we came up with.

I think it's some of my best work.  All I had to do was recolor the base tileset and add some snow and icicles.  If we already have assets that would work for something else, then it's only practical to reuse it.

Alternalien Development Part 8: Peer Review

One of the most necessary parts of midterms are Peer Reviews.  A team member moves the front of the room where they are critiqued on attendance, body of work, and attitude. Each  person is rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being absolutely terrible and 5 being ready to work in industry.  If the score below the 3, then they're viable to get kicked out of the program or re-rolled.  In order to pass the freshmen courses, then you must have a 3 or above, to pass the sophomore course, you must be at a 5.

Alternalien Development Part 7: Crash Course in Agile

All development stopped today as we relearned Agile methodology.  We went over the basics, and even a few new things that I didn't know.  Agile is supposed to have 5 meetings, and we were only doing one of them.  They are in order: Backlog Grooming, where the Product Owner cleans and adjust the backlog for features that are going into a sprint.  Sprint Planning, where a feature team decides what goes into the next sprint.  Daily Scrum, which we call Stand Ups, are when team members give a brief report on what they've been doing and any impediments.  These are done before and during a sprint.

After a sprint has concluded, we then go into the Sprint Review meeting, where we report what tasks were done during the sprint.  Once that has concluded, we move onto a retrospectives, and the difference between a retrospective and a sprint review is that a retrospective is used by a team to make sure the methodology is being applied, while the sprint review is only to report the tasks done.  We decided on a day and an order in which to have these meetings, and this should help us in the future. 

Alternalien Development Part 6: The Freezening

I've started to wrap up the cold Temper animations, with his jump and shoot animations.  The Temper alien functions in puzzle as some that can either melt, burn, or freeze certain objects.  To accomplish this, Temper shoots out an fire ball or and ice ball.  This is an example of a fireball I made to test this out in a script.

This is what the Temper looks like when shooting out a fireball or an iceball.

The reason why there aren't as many frames of animation is because the movement goes by so fast that the eye cannot detect it.

Alternalien Development Part 5: IcyHot

I am continuing with the animations for Temper's fire form.  The difficulty in this is getting the fire on his head to move right.  If you look closely at a lot of fire in games, the frames move either randomly or is mirrored.  An example of this would be the fire animation from The Legend of Zelda.

But while making the animations for the fire form, I've tried to implement a more sophisticated method in animating it, the flames on his head moves more in relation to where it was in a previous frame.

Alternalien Planning Part 4: Crusher Animations

I've started this week with creating the initial key frames of the Crusher alien.  The Crusher was initially concepted in being a pink bubblegum like creature who could transform his fists in wrecking balls.  However, it was changed to a simple punching motion.

Above is the Crusher's run animation.  The key frames were inspired by the Mario's run in Super Mario World.  The inbetweens were done by Taylor Passow.

Alternalien Development Part 3: Market Value

We did an exercise today where we came up with all the possible features that would go into this game.  It was everything from the high concept of platforming to a single floor tile.  We were then given Monopoly money to assign what each of us thought the value of that feature was.  The highest was the concept of movement as a basic need with a score of 3161.

After we returned from that, we immediately got into planning for the first sprint with three teams.  Two were designing two arctic levels, while my team was completely animating the Crusher.  Our first sprint begins next week.

Alternalien Development Part 2: The Cave continued

After sleeping on the problem of huge, detailed matte backgrounds.  I came up with a solution that I brought to the PO.  Instead of using painting for the backgrounds, I suggested we use tiled backgrounds.  This is one I made for the Base levels.

This is much better for a few reasons.  It allows for a lot more variety, instead of relying of the artists to take hours to make three or four backgrounds, the designers can make their own custom backgrounds.  Plus, it stylistically fits in with the art style; simple and minimilistic.  The PO liked this idea and has now tasked the art team with making tilesets for all four biomes.

Alternalien Development Part 1: Jump Free

We continued to plan for Sprint 1 by doing planning poker.  Planning poker is an agile technique that uses numbers in the Fibonacci sequence to give effort scores to various features.  Being the Art Lead, I put all the various sprite an backgrounds and we voted on their values.  Usually, floor tiles take the least amount of effort, while characters and backgrounds take significantly more.

These are some example character sprites that took around 30 min - 1 hour work.  They may not look like much, but most of the work went into tweaking them just right.

CSG 115 Final

Another semester ends with a peer review.  While I think most of my team did relatively well for their skill set, I don't think I was a very good product owner.  If I hadn't taken so long to complete the donut game, I could have allocated my time to the other games.  I was too nervous during the pitch and stayed quiet when questioned about the why we used the donuts.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 12: The Pitch

We pitched Cops 4 Kidz today to an audience to an audience made up of the capstone class.  We had barely anything to show off, but we did have one mini-game, the Tower of Hanoi Donut Rescue game.  One of the animation ranted about why we chose donuts in order to rescue the cat, there was a story behind the donuts, in that we thought it was a safer alternative to stacking different sized police officers.

At any rate, we did do more than the other team in terms of content, but neither did accomplished much.  I think our team suffered a lot from the fact that much of our team left throughout the semester.  And of those who stayed, weren't skilled enough to add all the things I wanted to add.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 11: Clever Title 2: The Sequel

We've implemented the Cat Rescue game as best we could, working with the previous team's scripts.  We don't actually have a win screen that gives the player a card, but we do have a back button if they want to exit the game.
The programmer of the team working on the First Aid kit game hasn't showed up for the past few weeks, so I've started to work towards getting a semblance of that mini-game done for next week.  I did manage to get a scene together to drag and drop, but none of the models I was using had any textures or materials, so we'll have to wait a little while before I can get the new models into the scene.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 10: Clever Title

We've begun to implement the cat rescue game into the main build.  I put a tree with the cat sprite on the main street.  Luckily, it wasn't difficult to to implement the code to start the game from the main title screen.  However, it is difficult getting the win screen to pop up once you actually win the game.  The other team didn't really comment on any of their codes, so it's difficult to figure out their thought process.  Putting yourself in the mind of the previous team is not an easy task.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 9: Armed and Fabulous

The Tower of Hanoi Donut Cat Rescue mini-game is virtually complete.  I never thought I'd get this far, but I have achieved the dream.  I have squashed the turnip.  Bit the curb, salted the Italian.  In other words, I am finally done with this frustration.  I'll work with the Build master next week with actually implementing it into the build.

A member of the other team suggested that I use a programming technique called recursion in order to do.  Little does he know that that process doesn't really work for an actual game of tower of Hanoi where you have to manipulate the disks.  It works for when you're simulating a game, trying to figure out the least number of moves and where to place the disks, but it just doesn't work here.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 8: Bigger and Badder

I have decided to completely rework my initial structure of scripts.  Instead of having one huge control script, it's going to be 3 separate scripts, each applying to one of the 3 donuts.  I figured it would be easier to determine where each of the donuts are placed.  So far, it's working a lot better than the single control script.  Sometimes, streamlining the process doesn't always work.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 7: This time, It's Personal

I have decided to take a different approach to checking the which donut is on which platform.  Instead of implementing a raycast to shoot out from each donut and check whats below or above, I tried to make it so that the control script checks which platform the donut has locked onto.  Hopefully, this new direction will be easier to achieve.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 6: The Squeakual

The frustration continued for the first part of class.  I attempted to implement a ray cast hit, but that didn't work.  So eventually I finally caved and made 3 separate scripts to hold the properties of the 3 donuts.  Originally I wanted to do it one script, but eventually realized that that would be impossible.  I also finally managed to call the variables that need being compared, so my task for next week to finally get that system working.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 5: The Frustration

I continued on my quest to try and program an algorithm that would the donuts compare sizes and which platform they were on.  There's not a whole lot more to say other than how frustrating it is to come up with an advanced algorithm for a language I just started learning.  Even some of the basic syntax for C# vexes me, as it seems to want me to jump through hoop after hoop.  In a previous language i used to write scripts for, you could alter and object's properties by just naming the object then putting the property you wanted to edit next to it.  For example: "objectName.x" or objectName.speed", it was fairly simple.  But with Unity, you have set up the object as a GameObject, then use GetComponent to actually call the script you need, then use the script to finally access the variable.  It's just been and incredibly frustrating few weeks.

Cops for Kidz Part 4: This Time it's Personal

We continued to work on our respective games.  I built the scene in which the game takes place, the most difficult part about that was zooming in because of the slow mouse scroll speed.  The rest of the assets where put in with greater ease.

This is currently what the game will look like.  I did a bit of programming, so now the player is able to drag around the donuts.  I still need to come up with an algorithm to actually place the donuts.

Copz for Kidz Part 2:No Country for Old Dogs

We re-convened to discuss our ideas for possible mini-games.  We stuck with the Tower of Hanoi/Cat Rescue game in addition to a First Aid game and an Ice Rescue game.  In the First Aid game, you have to click and drag bandages, antibiotics, etc, in the right order onto a small wound.  The goal is to teach kids how to apply first aid correctly.  In this wintry time of year, walking on  the ice of a river or lake is incredibly dangerous, so we came up with a game about rescuing small animals who fell through the ice.  We split into small teams to each deal with one of the games.

I created the animation for the cat sprite and figured out how to actually animate in unity while my partner modeled the donut.  We got a surprising amount of tasks done, and all that's left to do now is actually develop the game in unity.

Cops 4 Kidz Part 1

We divided into our groups for CSG110 to work on our new project.  I was elected as the project's new Product Owner, to which my first act as such was to pitch an idea for one of the mini-games.  There was a game that I used to play quite frequently back in my pre-adolescent days about three monkeys of varying sizes stacking up on each other in order to get an apple.  It was a fun puzzle games that I later discovered was a version of a classic game called Tower of Hanoi.  I re-imagined it as stacking donuts in order to rescue a cat from a tree.  I had the rest of my team brainstorm ideas for other mini-games next week.

Lerpz 2: First Blood Part 2

It was another day of not doing much, I used class time to work on another project from another class, to which I had trouble with.  Mike also teaches that class, so after a literal hour of scouring the internet for a solution to an error I had, I finally asked him for help.  I ended up getting rid of the feature because it wasn't really needed and even Mike's code couldn't solve it.
Apparently next week we have to get into groups and actually work on the simulation for that classes in the past have worked on.  I'm not sure what new features I want in the game, so I guess I'll start thinking about that.

Lerpz 2: Electric Boogaloo

I finished Lerpz early so I pretty much worked on stuff from other classes.  I'm sort of glad that I already knew how to do Lerpz, because it really cut down on time and allowed me to help others who are new to the Lerpz experience.

In general reflection, I don't think Lerpz was that good of an introduction to the Unity interface.  It doesn't really ease you into Unity development so much as it pushes you into the deep end.  It may seem like I want to dumb this down, but I think they should at least point out where everything on the interface is before you dive is head first. The tutorial itself was way too long and it doesn't expressly teach you how to code, seeming to favor that you just copy and paste the code. 
Lerpz was just a long, tedious, confusing grind and I wouldn't recommend it to first time Unity developers.

Lerpz 2: Fistful of Lerpz

I have come to the end of my journey with Lerpz, and what an adventure it was.  The programming challenges, the missing particle effects, all served my understanding of the ways of Unity.  Though I'm still not sure if this tutorial was used to get familiar with the interface of Unity, or if it was to get us ready for making a 3D game.

Perhaps I'll never truly understand the way pf Lerpz completely, I'm just glad it's finally over.

Lerpz 2: The Lerpening

Last week I started learning how to make Lerpz again.  It has certainly become easier the second time around, but still no less tedious.  Though, I have started likening it to the Hero's Journey (the classic plot line that illustrates commonalities and tropes from epic literature across the globe).  At the beginning  of last semester, I was but the humble apprentice, slowly learning to overcome the mountain of trials that was Lerpz.  Having conquered the villain, I have become the master.  I now pass my knowledge to the next generation of Production students, teaching them in the ways of Unity; little do I expect for them to teach me.

"And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."
- Friedrich Niezsche on Lerpz