Signing off.

On Wednesday we went to class and handed everything we had done for the project in. It was a good feeling. We worked really hard and I only hope our grades reflect that in a couple of weeks when we receive our feedback. I think ours was good enough to get us top marks but of course we are also marked individually. Our game didn't have super polished load up screens or main menu screens like we had planned, but the game itself was polished to a high standard and had six playable levels which wasn't bad considering we started building the levels with six weeks remaining.

We did it!

Personally, I feel I contributed enough to earn a high grade but we'll have to wait and see. I handled the vast majority of the design aspects of the game, including the documentation. I did enjoy having all that creative freedom but sometimes I would've liked someone to bounce ideas off, particularly with the level design.

I really enjoyed working with Lab Rat Games, and it's sad that Simon is leaving us. I learnt a lot about myself and how I fit into a development team. I hope a few of the guys want to stick together for next year's project, because we've formed a good working relationship and become good friends in the process. It's also a shame our tutor James Burton is leaving the course as well as Simon, although his feedback sometimes felt harsh, I learnt a lot about design with him as our tutor. It was also fun watching him play Dimension Hop and swear in Spanish whilst doing so. Who knows who we'll get as our design tutor for next year. We've had two great design tutors in Ben and James in the first and second years respectively that I just hope they can get me through my final year.

I'm excited/nervous about my grade but I'll push it to the back of my head for now as there's nothing left that can be done. For now, I'm going to stop worrying about everything and just enjoy my time off. I think for the next project, I want to work on a more serious story. Hopefully, there'll at least another designer in our group and I'll have more time to work on more areas of design. So this is me signing off until the end of September when I start my third and final year! I'll probably stick with this blog for my third year so I'll be back baby!

PEACE!

Judgement Day!

It's finally here. The final day of the project. It's giving me a mixture of emotions to be honest. In a way I'm relieved because this is the culmination of all of our hard work since the project started. It also means I can take a break and try and enjoy the rest of my summer in between working at my part-time job. I'm nervous because I'm not sure our game is ready. I know that if we had more time we could make it so much better but at the same time I know that we did the best with the time we had. I'm excited because I haven't seen a finished build of the game since Monday and I haven't seen it complete with the sound yet! I'm also a little sad because I've really enjoyed working on Dimension Hop and it marks the end for the team. One of our programmers is leaving the course once this is over. It'll be sad to see Simon go, especially because he was so important to our team. He constantly kept us organised throughout the whole project and who knows what would have happened to us if he hadn't done so! It's a shame I won't be able to work with him on next year's project but I wish him all the best for the future. Shame he won't be bringing us any more Cornettos either!

So, it's a big day for the team! We made substantial progress in the form of FINALLY getting the animations into the game. I was very impressed with Harry's work on them and of course Simon being able to get them to work seamlessly in the game. It's strange how just one thing can add so much polish to a project. It actually looks and feels like a real game now! I only have one small thing to do before 7 o'clock which shouldn't be an issue. I just hope we've done enough to get ourselves a decent grade. This will be my penultimate blog post for this year as I'll post again after we've handed everything in. I just hope everything goes to plan! Time to get ready and go and meet up with the guys! Wish me luck!

The looming deadline!

It's been a good while since my last blog post and there's a good reason why. We are quickly approaching our FINAL deadline. In just a few short days, we will be handing the latest build of Dimension Hop in for marking, whether it's ready or not. With plenty of work left to be done we have to make sure we make the game to the very highest standard that we can possibly achieve. It's been roughly five weeks since my last blog post and the presentation of our vertical slice. Our final sprint started straight after and I have to say, I think we've come a very long way.

Here is the Gannt chart that Simon made to show the tasks that needed to be completed during our final sprint (final 6 weeks) to get the game to an acceptable standard.

"Colour coded for your pleasure." - Simon Gilbert

So, as you can see, we have plenty to be getting on with. Building two levels a week whilst testing and making adjustments was very ambitious of us. However, we had already cut a lot of content out of the game and didn't want to cut any more. My job during this final six weeks has been to keep the level designs coming. I've also been in charge of bug testing the game, helping design the sound and completing the much-dreaded project handover report.

I'm on track to finish everything in time and I'm pretty happy with the level designs. After playing some of the completed levels whilst testing, I found them to be fun but not always in the way I meant them to be. It always feels so different when I play the builds to how I play it in my head or with movement markers in Photoshop. However, there are some things that I intended on going a certain way that also turned out pretty well, I'm happy with it. If we can polish the game to the standard we have envisioned then I think we'll have a pretty fun game.

The main problem I've had this past six weeks has been the testing. Our game is only compatible with an Xbox 360 controller as of yet and it's inconvenient when you want to get other people to play your game if they don't have one. I'm not sure that we'll get everything done but I'm certain that we'll have it completed to a respectable standard.

Here is the Gannt chart from three weeks into the final sprint. The green bars represent the percentage of the task that has been completed and the red is incomplete tasks.

You can appreciate from this how far behind the team was at this point but we soldier on regardless. I'm feeling quite stressed in regards to the impending deadline and I'll be relieved when we cross the finish line. It's been a long project and I have enjoyed every second of it but I fear that these last few days might be the death of me! So, until Monday! PEACE!

The Vertical Slice and Crunch Time

Since my last post the team have been tested in some ways and have hit what I personally feel is our lowest standard of work to be done for a deadline. When it came to the Vertical Slice, everything seemed to be on track. However, we made some mistakes and certain circumstances prevented us from reaching the high standards we always strive for.

First of all, we were without one of our programmers for a large amount of time in the last couple of weeks which left Simon with a lot of coding to do on his own. This was a huge factor, but could not be helped and it did set us back a bit. I feel partly responsible however because I had only given the team a paper design for my level when I should have given them a version that was on a grid and completely to scale etc. We had other issues such as the animations not being done properly in one project and they became mismatched when put into the game. Also, some of the art assets weren't the right size so Simon had to spend time editing them.

Overall, it was a collection of errors across the team that ultimately meant that we didn't have much of a level to show. I was disappointed because we have yet to show of any actual gameplay in terms of a full level with game challenges and obstacles. Our previous demo had shown off how to play and how to use the mechanics but there still isn't any challenge there. We showed them what we had and we threw together a quick presentation to show them that we have actually improved on a lot of aspects of the game but we just haven't had time to get them into a build of the game just yet. However, we are currently working hard with the time we have left to get our levels finished to a high standard. Unfortunately, this means we have had to cut a lot of the game out. We originally wanted the game to have 10 levels including 5 chapters of narrative telling Hop's story to the player. We have had to cut it to 5 levels plus a tutorial so that we can get it all finished. This means that we can only fit one of our storyboard/cutscenes into the game and there won't be any time to tell the whole story. Any narrative other than the opening storyboard is going to be transmitted to the player via in-game dialogue. This was a huge blow for me after writing the story but I know it's very necessary and to finish all of the work we had planned just isn't feasible anymore.

This feels like a very negative post but we knew that this wasn't going to be easy and we knew things would change the further we got into this project. We're all still learning and we have made some mistakes but we have learned a hell of a lot from the past few weeks. We have already moved past this and are fully focused on making Dimension Hop the best we can for that final deadline. We know we have something special with this game and now we're gonna make sure we do it justice.

Benny the Socktopus and the Big Fat Distinction.

On Monday, we received feedback on our Game Design Document. I couldn't make the lecture as I had tickets for a gig, which really sucked because the GDD was my responsibility. I wrote the majority of it and formatted the whole thing and you'll know how stressful it was if you read this blog often. Our design tutor James is notoriously hard to please and is an expert at poking holes in your documents and this was my first time writing a GDD. I was nervous about the feedback as I didn't want to let the guys down. We had some negative comments about the Pitch Document and I wanted to improve on that this time around.

The feedback turned out to be great, a lot better than I had expected. In our tutor's own words it was a 'Big Fat Distinction'. I was proud of the document and I knew I had done the best I could and the work the other guys did for it was also to a high standard. I think the main reason that the document was a success was due to the extensive planning I did before we started. I researched GDD's thoroughly and planned our own accordingly. See my other blog post 'Plans. Important plans.' for more details. I was pleased that I could contribute to the team and that as a group we got some praise for this as we've all been working hard. I just hope that we can continue to produce a high standard of work and that we can achieve that elusive Big Fat Distinction for the whole project!

Since reading our GDD, James has really started to buy into Dimension Hop's story and it's characters. In particular he loved Benny the Socktopus. To thank Benny, I'm gonna post his character profile here. You're making waves buddy! Soak it all up.

Character Profiles

Benny the Socktopus



Name: Benny
Age: ???
Height: 4ft 2”
Race: Socktopus
Background: Benny is a creature lost to the very darkest depths of the Void. He is an octopus made of socks that has forgotten the feel of love and companionship. Even so he remains positive… I think. It’s hard to tell when he wears a vacant smile at all times. The immense loneliness he has felt for so long with only the voice in his head for company has made him rather absent minded. He may not be much help to Hop as his incoherent babble may be hard to understand but a friendly face is still welcoming.

Personality: Benny used to be a loving and funny Socktopus. However, not much of this remains other than his pleasant smile. He has very much become one with the Void and is a shrewd representative of the despair the Void can bring to a being and reminds Hop that he only has a limited amount of time to find his way back home before he ends up the same way.

Hour of Fun

Last week, in our production lecture, we were introduced to a development technique known as the 'hour of fun'. It is basically an hour (usually 4 o'clock on a Friday when creativity is at its minimum) where all the members of the studio will stop working and start play testing their game(s). Someone will usually observe the team playing and make notes on anything that works or doesn't work. They will then sit, as a group, and discuss the game and give any feedback or share any problems they had whilst playing the game. This technique has been adopted by development studios around the world. Studios such as Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions and, our Production and Design tutors, Ben Hill and James Burton's very own indie studio White Paper Games.

As a class we then had our very own hour of fun. There wasn't many members of each team that attended this particular class but it was still very useful. I was the member of the team that was observing and making notes and it was really interesting seeing people attempting to play our short and breakable tech demo. I got a lot of great feedback in particular from my tutor Ben, who's experience in the hour of fun was evident as he tried his hardest to break the game in every way imaginable.

All in all we got some great feedback from the rest of the group and some things to work on but it wasn't anything we didn't already know about before. The tech demo level shows off the mechanics great but isn't exactly representative of what a final level design will look or play like in the finished version of the game. However, I did find it very interesting to see other people play the game for the first time. I feel that this technique will be extremely useful when we have a more playable level with real challenges which we should do in a few weeks when our Vertical Slice is ready. It will be very interesting next time round.

Bye bye!

A Whole New Level of Dimension Hopping

This level is the seventh out of the ten that we are aiming to create for Dimension Hop. We are also using this level for the Vertical Slice we are producing to show off a high quality version of the game that is representative of the final product. I chose level 7 due to the fact that at this point in the game the player has control of all four dimensions for the first time. I wanted to show off how combining the dimensions and your abilities in each one can make for interesting and challenging gameplay and therefore a later level was the obvious choice. It also gave me the opportunity to show how challenging the game can be. I aimed for around 10 – 15 minutes gameplay, this could be longer if the player aims to collect all of the collectibles.



Here is the rough paper design I drew up to present to the rest of the team. I believe the design is fairly simple yet is an effective way of demonstrating the unique style of platforming we want to offer to the player. The player will have to mould themselves and the environment around themselves as they move through obstacles. Changing their properties and abilities as they do so. The player will also have to be fast and combine their abilities effectively.

It works nicely on paper but it will be interesting to see how it works in unity. Hopefully it will work well!

That's it for now!

Trying to be Productive in Production

So, things have been slow since the end of pre-production. After we presented everything we had done to the group, we decided to take a well deserved break from Dimension Hop. It coincided nicely with a 2 week break from lectures and it was nice to distance myself from the stress I;d been suffering from documenting and planning every aspect of the game. It was actually the first time since the beginning of the project that I had actually stopped thinking about it. It was strange.

However, we're all back to work now and in full swing working towards our next deadlines. My initial task was to design a level for the Vertical Slice (A small playable section of the game that shows the progress of all areas and should represent something close to the finished version). The dimensions available to Hop are slowly introduced to the player over the 10 levels of the game. I decided to go for one of the later levels in the game as I wanted to use all four dimensions. With it being a later level I also had to make it difficult. I think I managed to achieve this with the design I showed the team on Wednesday. The feedback from Phil and Simon was positive and I can't wait to see them knock it up in 2D Toolkit. I'll upload a picture of the design in my next blog post.

My other task is to work on writing the narration with Phil, we've been procrastinating slightly with this but what we have written so far is pretty good. Making it wittier and slightly more mature is the key to making it work. I've never tried my hand at this style of writing before but I think we can make something enjoyable.

With the Vertical Slice design out of the way I'm gonna crack on with a few more of the levels for when the guys are ready to start building them. Hopefully I'll put myself and the rest of the team into a good position for the next milestone.

That's all for now!

The Second Milestone

We were well ahead of schedule and managed to get everything printed, bound and burnt on to disc on time for the lesson where we would present our progress to the rest of the class. I was happy with how the GDD turned out, I missed out on my target of 25 pages and only managed to get 24 done. However, I wasn't too worried about it, I feel that it contained everything that was required so should meet the standards needed to get a good grade.

We also handed in the TDD and the Art Bible. Harry had managed to get it all done and after some alterations from Simon we felt it was as good as we were going to get it. Due to it not being ready for the personal deadline we had set ourselves to review everything, we didn't have enough time to make it any better. Simon had the TDD well under control so no worries there.

The presentation went well, we let a member of one of the other groups play our demo and we talked them through the differences from the first prototype. It was in 2D Toolkit this time rather than the 3D version using the regular Unity package so it looked a lot different. Not to mention the tiles and backgrounds we had created for this deadline. Artistically it is fairly close to the final version of the game and this was noted by a number of our peers in the group crit session afterwards. I then talked the group through the design changes since the last milestone. The main focus was on the narrative of the game and we talked about our narrator and the way we'd be using a rhyming narration style along side still image/story board style cut scenes. Phil (as he will play the narrator) gave the group a preview by reading out an extract. In terms of gameplay there hadn't been many changes, the main change in this aspect was the new collectible/ game progression system we have implemented. The player will have to accrue a certain amount of collectibles from a certain number of levels to unlock the next set of levels. We wanted to avoid the whole 'complete a level, unlock a level' style of progression.

We spoke about the evolution of our art assets and about the future of our project as we hit the start of production. Feedback was generally positive and we answered plenty of questions. Our tutor's remarks were also positive and he said that we had given ourselves a good platform to build upon for the rest of the project. I was pleased with this because this is something that we had spoken about and something we had aimed for.

I learned a lot during this milestone and put in a lot of effort to make sure my contributions to the game were good enough. We've learned a lot about ourselves as a team too which has been massively important and could be detrimental if we want our game to be a success.

Review, Re-do

Once we had ironed out the issues we were having as a team, the work just sort of fell into place. Me and James spent some time at Futureworks just working through what needed to be done with the GDD and most importantly talking story. It went well, James wrote up his pages, I read through them, edited them and added them to the document. It was easy going as James was in the mood to get things done. Since the whole background drama, James had come into his own and was fully focused until his work was complete. This was great, I got the whole GDD pretty much finished on the day of our personal deadline. I was just waiting for a little bit of work from Phil and I had to finish writing up the story but we still had plenty of time until the official hand-in. We had a meeting on the day of our personal deadline to review all of the work, even our sound designer Darren (who isn't on our course) attended. The only person that didn't show up was Harry and he was the only person who's work we were yet to see.

It's safe to say that the first thing everyone wanted to do was to play the game. Simon brought a new build with him, where he had added the backgrounds and the tiles so it was as 'arted up' as could be at this point. I was the first to play through and I was blown away at how good it all looked in-game. I was extremely proud of the team because even though we don't have much artistic ability between us, it actually looked really well presented.

Next, we sat down and discussed any changes we had to make to any of the documents or anything else that needed doing. There wasn't too much that needed changing but there were a few small things. There wasn't anything in particular that I needed to do, just to finish the GDD.

After a few high five moments and some bro hugs, we went to the closest bar and had a quick pint to celebrate the progress we had made over the last couple of months. Simon and Phil did a great job getting all of the game into 2D toolkit and doing some art assets. me and James did a good job with the art assets that we had to do, especially James with his beautiful backgrounds. We were proud of the game and proud to be part of Lab Rat Games.

My next post will be the last for this milestone and will be all about deadline day and the presentation.

The Lab Rat Jigsaw

It was a weird time to be a member of Lab Rat Games. We had but a few days until our personal deadline and everyone was getting irritable. However, when I stopped to think and remembered that the real deadline was over a week away, we were actually well ahead of schedule. This didn't stop people from bickering however. Harry was nowhere to be seen and hadn't uploaded any of the animations he had been working on for the best part of two months. He also wasn't answering any of us on the Facebook page when we were asking for a progress report. This was just the first sign of the problems we were about to have. James had started his work late and was really feeling the pressure of completing the game backgrounds on time and to a high standard. After all, the backgrounds required a lot of technical skill to make look as good as he got them to in the end, and he has no intentions of becoming an artist. I don't want to go into too much detail here out of respect for my team, but words were exchanged between members of the group, including myself. It was heated and certain people's frustrations were clear to see. It is safe to say that our team is like a jigsaw with some important pieces missing and we have had to fill the gaps with pieces that don't quite fit. Although they have done the job so far, they don't particularly feel comfortable there. We all felt like this in one way or another.

It felt bizarre to me that even though we were ahead of schedule and pretty much ready to start reviewing our work that we had such a substantial break down in communication. After many discussions on how to tackle the backgrounds and just generally chilling the hell out, James got the backgrounds for the game finished. They were also above any sort of standard we were expecting. In just a few days he really mastered Photoshop and we have these backgrounds to show for it.


The mechanical Dimension


The Void


The Doodle/Sketch Dimension


The Biscuit/Candy Dimension

These were great and this left James with just some pages to do for the GDD. Remember, that I took full responsibility for the GDD, so if James didn't do the pages then It'd be me that took the blame. I knew he'd get them done though so I wasn't worried, even if my balls were on the line.
In terms of the issues we were having with Harry, at this point they were still unresolved. However, our tutor Ben told us that animations weren't that important for this deadline and that we should really get started on the Art Bible. This is all well and good but we wanted to see what Harry had to show for the time we had been nagging him about the animations. It became clear that Harry was struggling with them and wasn't finished so we told him to get started with the Art Bible. At least from this point onward he started communicating with the team again. I appreciated the work Harry did for the Art Bible, he got it all finished and we were able to hand it in.

This was a crucial time in development for Lab Rat Games. We had really been tested as a team and really pushed to the point where we were at each other's throats. We were over the worst of it now though and things were well on track for the next deadline. I think the team now have a better idea of where they fit into the Lab Rat jigsaw and how important it is that we play to our strengths.

Rhyming Design

Whilst creating the Game Design Document there were certain design choices that had to be made. The game play aspects of the game were set and we weren't planning on changing them very much. Due to the GDD being more detailed and containing everything needed for development of the game; we had to finalise story, in-game menus and music and audio. This was good because it got us thinking more about the actual development of the game and we could start working towards that now. This mind set helped us to put ourselves in a good position at the end of this milestone and give us something solid to build upon.

So, one of the first things we started thinking about was the narrative of the game. The game's story takes a back seat to the game-play but it is still important to give the player a goal to work towards. I wanted the story to compliment the game in a way that it enhanced the enjoyment of the player but didn't steal focus from the game-play. The first question we asked ourselves is, how can we deliver the narrative to the player? We had already decided that most of the dialogue between characters would be delivered as on-screen text, accompanied by recorded chatter for each character so the player knows who's talking. This was fine and we agreed that this was the most economical way of doing things so that we didn't have tonnes of voice recording to do. We also decided to use still frame cut scenes rather than animated ones due to our lack of artistic talent. However, it was Phil that made the breakthrough when he suggested that we have a narrator who tells the story by using rhymes like a children's book. This fitted the themes and feel of the game perfectly but we knew that we needed to make the story more suitable for an older audience. This is when we decided to add a darker and more mature twist to the plot. Here is Phil's opening cut scene that he wrote to show me his idea. I made a couple of changes for the GDD but his original idea is mostly untouched and will be used for the final game.

Not too long ago, in a bedroom filled with joy,
There unfolds a story, of Edward and his favourite toy.

T’was his bunny named Hop, whom he’d swing and he’d spoon,
He brought jealousy to the other toys that lived in Ed’s room.

Especially wizard Walden, who devised a cunning ploy,
To get rid of little Hop, so that he’d be the favourite toy.

He cast an evil spell, meant to banish Hop forever,
Walden thought to himself, “Hahaha, I’m so clever!”

But when Ed came to notice, that his little Hop wasn’t there,
His other toys were no comfort, he really didn’t care.

So Ed searched and he searched, for days and then weeks,
All the while Walden’s rage, was about to reach its peak.

Meanwhile little Hop fell a very, very long way,
He felt he’d been falling, for an entire day!

Then he crashed into the void, where no-one laughs nor sings.
Hop now finds himself, in the realm of all lost things.

He awoke from his slumber all broken and sore
and frantically scooped his insides up from the floor

As he rises from the ground, without a whimper or a cry,
Hop then speaks his first words: “Where the bloody Hell am I?!”

That's all for now, I'll cover more design choices and wrapping up the GDD in the next post.

Tiles.. so many tiles.

So, after all the planning and research I started work on my tiles. We had set an Art deadline for the 8th of April in which all the Art assets had to be completed. The reason for this was to make Simon and Phil's job easier by giving them more time to get the assets into the game.

Here is the brilliant Gantt Chart that Simon created to show each of the mini deadlines we had set ourselves for the course of the second milestone.



My job was to create floors and walls for each of the four dimensions. The aesthetic look of the dimensions had been discussed at length and finalised so it wasn't too difficult to imagine what the tiles should look like. However, I didn't have a build of the game and the backgrounds hadn't been done so they couldn't be tested as I made them. It was a case of sticking to the colour pallets that we had decided on and hoping that they looked good in-game.

Here are a few examples of the tiles I created for the game.


The pencil acts as a wall in the Sketch/Doodle dimension. This is a wall is created from five tiles.

These tiles act as a platform in the Mechanical dimension. It is a combination of three tiles.

Each wall/floor is comprised of a combination of tiles that are 64 x 64 pixels in size. I had to create three tiles for each wall or floor. A top section, middle section and bottom section for the walls. A left, middle and right section for the floors/platforms.

It took a few weeks but I got my tiles completed before the deadline and I could spend the next few weeks working on my Design work. I was worried about getting it all done in time as I was working full time for three weeks at work due to it being half term. This left me with a lot less time to get everything finished. However, I just made sure to make lots of notes whilst commuting and got most of the text finished before I even started putting the document together. With the tiles completed though, I had a load off my mind and was confident that I would be done before deadline day.

Until next time!

Plans. Important plans.

So, I've been ominously quiet on here since we handed in our work for the first deadline but plenty has happened since then. We got our feedback for our other work and things were positive but not amazing and I feel like we deserved more for the effort we put in. This is what motivated me personally to really put my all into the work for this milestone.

Okay, so it didn't start great. Art. After a small but much appreciated break for a couple of days from anything game related, we all sat down to share out the art work between the team. I offered to make floor and wall tiles for all of the dimensions. I thought that this would best suit my art ability as I'm no good at drawing backgrounds.

We also decided that someone should take full responsibility of each of the three documents that had to be ready for hand-in. As the main designer in the team I took responsibility of the Game Design Document. Simon was left in charge of the Technical Design Document and we left Harry in charge of the Art Bible. We said that if one of the documents wasn't finished by the deadline date then the blame would fall on whoever was in charge of the document. This meant we would have to make sure that any work people were contributing to the document was done on time.

I was fine with all of this but chose to get my art work out of the way early on so that I could focus solely on the GDD. However, I had never written a GDD before so I had to do my research first. The document was required to be 25 pages long, so I drew up a list of possible sections for the document and constructed a list of anything and everything in those sections that we hadn't discussed at enough length. At our next lecture I told the team that we had to have a meeting about it so that everything that had to be in the document would be finalised. I went through my list and we discussed some things that we hadn't even thought about taking on yet. It went really well. We had a lot of loose ends about certain parts of the game, and how they would be developed, but we managed to tie them all up. This gave me everything I needed for the creation of the document which then allowed me create a 25 page plan and start assigning pages to people. I took on the bulk of the document but drafted in Simon, James and Phil to create some pages for it.

However, I knew it'd be best to do my art work first. So I also drew up a list of tiles and sprites I had to create. With all research and planning out of the way I could finally get to work on actually creating the assets and documentation that were assigned to me. I knew communication would be even more crucial for this milestone, but I had no idea how crucial!

More on that to come!

The First Milestone

On Monday night we had to present everything we had done so far to Ben(our tutor and producer for the project). This included the Concept Document, pitch document, 5 pieces of concept art, project plan and finally the tech prototype. As a team we were well on top of everything although there were some nervy moments in the run up to the deadline. There were worries about who was going to finish all of the concept art so me and Simon had to lighten Harry's load a little bit and do a piece each. My main task was to write up the pitch document. Originally Phil and Simon wanted to do a page of the document as they want to contribute to the overall design of the game. However, I ended up taking on the full document as they had plenty of programming to keep them busy until the deadline rolled around. I didn't mind this as I felt they already were contributing enough but it was nice to see their hunger to get involved with other areas of the game and help out with more work than they probably had time to actually do. The pitch document went well! I was a little worried about having enough time to get it all finished due to the amount I had to work during the last 3 weeks before the deadline. I settled at my desk with some snacks and a constant stream of tea to make sure I got it all done. It started out quite rough because I had no original art to use in the document. This came from a lack of a dedicated artist to contribute to the document but I quickly got over it. I thought I'd use the one piece of concept art that I had to do as something useful to stick in the document. This ended up being a picture of Hop in The Void dimension (Which you can see in my previous post) which ended up becoming the front cover for the document and used in the character profile I wrote up for him. I also drew some little sketches of each unique dimensional mechanics in action.

The front cover of the pitch document.

The Mechanics page of the pitch document.

So the document ended up getting finished on time along with the concept art. It took a couple of proof readings from Simon to get everything perfected in terms of the text. I seemed unable to proof read the damn thing myself due to staring at it for days on end whilst writing it. So, it was lucky Simon was there to tell me where I'd gone wrong. I was extremely proud of the document when it was finished, it seemed like there wasn't too many pages to it but each page was full of information so I didn't feel too bad about it. I managed to get everything I wanted to say and show the reader in there and that's all that mattered to me by the end of it. I just hope my faith in the document isn't misplaced!

When it came to the day of the actual presentation we were all a bit nervous but I got out nice and early, got it printed out and took it into class. The other teams seemed to be in a mad rush getting everything finished. We had some minor things to take care of and we still had to get things printed off but we must've been more organised than I thought we were. As, when 7 o'clock rolled around we were in the classroom ready to present everything. However, we didn't realise it had to be handed in digitally too so we had to sit and sort through that. Everything was really tense in the final weeks but I guess I didn't think about the other teams and how they were feeling too. I assumed it was just us because we weren't the most organised and I guess you could say the least balanced team in term of covering all the development disciplines. Although, I spose we have Simon's regimented use of ClockingIT to thank for at least being organised enough to get us through this milestone.

The presentation itself went fairly well. We planned out what we would say and how we would present our work. With Simon doing an introduction and a recap to start things off. I talked everyone through the Tech Demo as Phil played it and discussed the gameplay. Harry then took over by talking about the concept art and we passed around a couple of things. James finished off with our vision for this project and how we plan to move forward and make it a reality. Meanwhile the whole team pitched in and was answering questions throughout the whole thing. I was proud of the guys afterwards as we tackled the presentation as a team just as we had done with the work that had to be handed in.

With all of that out the way, we decided to review the first milestone and self evaluate our performance and how we may be able to work more efficiently as a team from now on. The daunting task of the remaining art work in the project was our main topic of conversation. We decided that, as nobody wanted to do it, we would all do it. So from now on we are going to divide up all art work and just keep it simple. It's the only way to handle the rest of the art without forcing someone to do it all. We all have varied but limited skills in art so keeping it very basic is the key to making this work.
We also discussed the fact that we crammed a lot of work into the last week when it could've been done over a period of 3 weeks. We would now try to break work up into more manageable chunks by giving ourselves a lot more short term deadlines. I also suggested giving ourselves a personal deadline about a week before the actual deadline for the next milestone so that we can review what we've done and make any necessary adjustments. Some pieces of work such as the project plan went without proof reading by other members of the team as there just wasn't enough time. This would also give ourselves the chance to print and prepare everything a day before hand in so that when it comes to hand in day we can just relax and go in as normal without rushing around trying to finish or fix things.

Overall, I'm really pleased with how the first milestone went. I think we did well as a team to have everything ready and to what I feel is a high standard. We've shown as a team that we can pull together and get things done and even though we definitely have some noticeable weaknesses as a team, we've shown that we also have some strengths. We've learnt our lessons from the first milestone and can hopefully go on to do this project justice!

That's all for now!

Meet Hop

Carrying on from my last post, we were due to meet up and discuss the narrative and setting of our game and try to find a new and interesting idea. Before the lesson we discussed possible characters and themes for the different dimensions. An idea that was thrown around quite a bit was the idea of heaven and hell themed dimensions. However, this didn't really fit the original vision we had for the game and I felt we could come up with something that hadn't already been done to death. So clearly, discussing things over Facebook wasn't getting us very far at all. We really needed that early meeting to get this finalised so we could start working on our different areas for the first milestone.

When we got to class we spent a good long while discussing everything. Me, Phil, Simon and Harry were all there but we decided to go ahead and fill James in when he got there as he was running late. We were just bouncing around different ideas but nothing was really sticking until Simon mentioned that the main character could be an odd sock looking for his other half to become a pair again. This idea led us to make 'The Void' dimension (A pre-existing dimension we had already decided on) a place for lost and forgotten items such as odd socks, keys, TV remotes among other things commonly lost. From here the rest of the ideas came thick and fast. We then decided that our main character would be something that was lost and ended up in this dimension. We instantly thought of a teddy bear. However, we wanted to do something a little bit different so we eventually decided on a stuffed rabbit. The new story was that his owner had lost him and he had to make his way back home to his own dimension and his owner. The four dimensions we decided that he could visit are as follows.

1) The Void - As I've already said, a place for lost and forgotten items.
2) Robot Dimension - A reality where he is a mechanical Rabbit and the environment becomes metallic and puffing smoke.
3) Biscuit Dimension - A reality where he is a gingerbread rabbit and the whole environment is made of biscuits.
4) Office Dimension - A reality where he is an office drone with a briefcase shield and the environment is made of stationary and general office scenery.

We also decided that with each different dimension he would have unique abilities such as an arm grapple to reach certain points of the level whilst in the Robot Dimension. He would also change aesthetically with the dimension and the environment would also have different properties making each one worth visiting.

This was as far as we got with this meeting but everyone was happy with the direction that the game was now taking. We had all had input into this new idea and we were feeling pretty good about starting work on it.

It took a couple more sessions of feedback until we started to make more changes. We replaced the Office dimension with the Doodle dimension where the character would become nothing more than a doodle on a page and the whole environment would be made up of children's doodles. This was then later changed to the Paper dimension. This is a reality where our hero is an origami rabbit and everything is made of paper. This was our finalised version of the four dimensions. We just had to finalise the unique abilities that could be used in each one.

1) The Void - 'Blink' - Our hero can teleport through certain surfaces.
2) Robot Dimension - 'Arm Grapple' - Our hero can grab on to and pull himself towards certain points in the level.
3) Biscuit Dimension - 'Crumble' - Our hero can crumble his body to fall through small gaps and reform on the other side.
4) Paper Dimension - 'Float' - Our origami hero can unfold himself into a single sheet of paper and float from large heights and ride air currents.

After this was done all that was left was to give our hero a name. This came from another idea of Simon's. He suggested 'Dimension Hop' for the name of the game and I thought it would be a good idea if we used Hop as the name of the character too as it had a nice ring to it and that's the kind of name a child would give to a stuffed rabbit. So here he is, meet Hop!


'Hop' in The Void. Drawn by me for use in the Pitch Document.

Presenting concepts and the inter-dimensional Gecko

The first thing that sprung to mind when we were given our multiple realities stimulus was having the ability to travel between parallel dimensions and the potential for interesting and fun gameplay that could come from this idea. The group spent a whole lesson talking about ideas for the game and we decided that we would present all our concepts to each other in the form of a concept document and we would decide which idea we'd like to take forward. We would decide based on how fun the concept sounded and whether it would help with our time restrictions and lack of artist.

My final concept was a fast and furious 2D platformer where the player could navigate portals which led to different dimensions. In each dimension the player's abilities and attributes would be different and also the properties of the level would change. Everything would also change aesthetically. In my head, I saw the player using the portals to change dimension in order to complete puzzles, get past certain obstacles and advance to the end of the level. I saw the narrative taking a back seat to the gameplay in this concept and came up with a simple story about a Gecko called Marty, who lives in a jungle that is under threat from an evil inter-dimensional being that was using his dark magic to transform the jungle into a dark and horrible place. Marty stumbles upon these portals and uses them to aid his escape from the jungle and to find a new home.

Happy with my idea, I presented it to the class and we decided to go with it. The other guys in the group had some great ideas too but we felt my straight forward idea allowed us to adopt a minimalist approach to the art for the game. We also felt that it allowed some exciting ideas in terms of gameplay. I also did a quick sketch of Marty the Gecko, it's kinda hard to make out due to me not going over it before scanning but there it is.

However, it wasn't long before our tutors got their hands on our concept and gave us some really good constructive criticism. Martin told us to give the player the ability to toggle dimensions rather than make use of portals to allow the player to have more control over how they finish the level and to make it a little easier for us to design.

Next up was Ben, our producer for the project and production tutor. He wanted to hear how our concept was coming along. He told us that the gameplay side of our project was coming along nicely and that he really liked our main mechanic. However, he also said that we should keep thinking about our narrative as he thought we could do something a little more interesting than we had. We quickly mourned for Marty the Gecko and decided to take his advice and discuss a new direction for the game's narrative and setting.

We scheduled an early meeting before class to renew our concept and in my next post I'll be describing what happened!

That's all for now!

So here it goes..

So starts a new term and a new challenge is ahead of me. A few weeks ago, on our first lesson back, we were set our new task that will take us up to the end of the academic year. Our task is to develop a game to a beta standard. Exciting? You bet. This is what I've been waiting for since I first started this course.

Straight away we were split into three development teams and given the brief for the project. It didn't sink in straight away that we were suddenly a game studio working on our very first game! We were also given a stimulus to give us a starting point for our game. Ours was 'Multiple Realities', which I was extremely happy with as it's a broad concept with plenty of potential for a good and original idea. I was also happy with my team, we are all honest and hard working guys who are willing to give our all for this project and our excitement was evident. The only problem was that we are the only team without an actual artist. Due to there being just two artists in our class, this was to be expected. However, we are all willing to pull together and work it out. The good news is that, we have a few dedicated programmers so I'm not worried about that aspect of the project which lets me focus a lot on the design which is what I really want to do, and I can also spend some time working on my art too.

Our first stumbling block came straight away as our first task was to think of a studio name and come up with a logo. We spent the rest of that lesson just coming up with ideas and this is the list that we came up with:

eclipse
perpetual
blue whale
m-theory
underdog
fallback
black hole
parallel
zebra
flux
lumen
obtuse turtle

However, none of us could really agree on any of these for our actual name. I could tell some of the guys weren't too into some of the names and the breakthrough came on our facebook group when people started chipping in with some new ideas. Here are a few of them:

NinjaSoft Games,
Spotlight Studios,
Groundhog Games &
Lab Rat Games.

Everyone seemed to decide straight away on Lab Rat Games, which was also my favourite and then Phil started mocking up a logo which turned out to be really cool. This was the first one he posted on the group.

I loved this logo but we felt it was a little complex.. So Phil quickly simplified his design and we ended up with this logo..

I really loved this logo, and straight away we all seemed to agree on Lab Rat Games and this sweet logo. It was the first step in what will be a difficult project for us all and we were glad to get it out of the way so we could start thinking about the game itself.

Personally, I couldn't stop thinking about the game, I already had a solid idea in my head and we had planned to discuss ideas in the next lesson so I began thinking about it more in depth. I was losing sleep thinking of all the possibilities that we could explore thanks to our multiple realities concept.

My next update will contain details as to what happened when we got together to discuss concepts and what we went with and how that has evolved.

Peace out for now!

UDK - The Colosseum - Evaluation

So, we spent a whole lesson playing everyone's levels and evaluating them. I was happy with my level. It did exactly what I wanted it to in the sense that it was a fun and easy level to play on and didn't hinder the gameplay in any way. If I had more time I would've tried something maybe more complex but in the end I was pleased with how things went.

I found UDK a very frustrating piece of software to work with but as the creation of my level went on it got easier. The one thing that impressed me about UDK is how easy it was to add pickups, lighting and player spawn points. I do think UDK is a very good program to make levels in, and after the initial teething problems I had, it was a fun and rewarding assignment.

I don't think my level was the most remarkable of the class but it definitely helped that it was simple by design, which was my original plan. So, all in all no complaints!

The end of this assignment brought an end to the term and now that we're back after the Christmas break, we are getting stuck into some very exciting stuff that I'm gonna be talking about here. As always, if you're interested then keep an eye on this page!

UDK - The Colosseum - Update 3

All that's left to do is add some pick ups and player spawn points to my level. This is the fastest and easiest part of the task. We know that Unreal players and more importantly my class mates love their Rocket Launchers so I made sure so shove a bunch of those around. Here are just a few screenshots.

That's it. I'm gonna do one final blog post about this assignment just to self evaluate my first effort in UDK!

UDK - The Colosseum - Update 2

As you can clearly see from the current state of my blog that my mind completely switched off over the Christmas holidays and I've neglected to update this thing with everything that happened just before we broke up for the holidays.

I will now unashamedly update this bad boy like no tomorrow until we are all up to date.

Where was I? Ahh yes. I was designing a multiplayer deathmatch map for Unreal Tournament in UDK based on a Colosseum. So, I showed you a screenshot of the basic layout of my map with only a few walls and the basic circular shape. I then proceeded to add a two tiered structure to one side of the stadium.

Building this level was a hard task, considering the program itself ran like a dog in concrete on my laptop. I had to persevere to get it to a finished standard. I wanted to make it simple and fun. My favourite multiplayer maps of all time have been simple and symmetrical so I wanted to build something along the same lines.

The second screen shot shows the finished level with all structures completed. See you soon for the next update!