Global Game Jam 2014 - Face/Off and lessons learned

Over the weekend  I participated in Global Game Jam at the Edinburgh jam site. The goal was to make a game in 48 hours, starting at 5pm on the Friday with a deadline of 5pm on Sunday. The secret theme this year was a quote from Anais Nin, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are". After the theme was revealed we had some time to band together with everyone else at the event and come up with some pretty interesting and wacky ideas. Some people decided to make platformers where everything in the world was not as it seemed, others worked on an Oculus Rift horror game and several awesome ideas were thought up and discarded quite early on. 

One of the ideas I pitched was a game where you play in a standard FPS view against other players and the goal is to eliminate the other players. The main feature though was that at the start of the game the views of all the cameras are switched so that you would then be looking at another players view but you would still be in control of your own body. Through this 2nd person view point you then had to kill the person who had your eyes to retrieve them. Although this idea sounded quite interesting at the time it proved to be very complicated to play initially for many of the play testers. The gameplay itself when it worked was very good, mainly when two players who were trying to eliminate each other were looking at themselves and trying to take out their own view port. Sadly more often than not players would end up wedged in walls and completely stuck.

In the image below, Player 1 would be looking at the top left quadrant which is the camera view of another player. Their objective is to then work out which of the other bodies they are controlling and finally eliminate the player whose eyes they are looking out of.

Figure 1 - Original Game Idea

On the final night however we decided to add some alternative experimental game modes as we managed to get the initial game completed quite early. The first of these was a crowd hunting game, you play as a robot, mingling hiding in a crowd of other robots and your job is to find the other human player in the game who is also a robot and is also attempting to hunt you! This idea came about from one of the original ideas we had for the game which was that of crowds of NPC robots making it more difficult to spot yourself. After implementing them however we realised that it was actually more fun trying to spot others at all when people were trying to hide and blend in with the robots who were in the crowd.

Figure 2 - In-game Screenshot

Overall many lessons were learned over the course of the jam. The main one was that humans cannot survive  (and functional optimally) for 48 hours on purely chocolate and water. The other was that, it doesn't matter if your idea changes from what it was initially and new ideas that you come up with along the way shouldn't necessarily be restricted.

Anyways, although what my team and I made was not the most polished looking game it was a pretty interesting concept that we managed to make up in a relatively short period of time. Check out the video below to see a game in action.

Credits:
Mark Melville Miller (7thsanctum)
Sam Serrels (dooglz)
David Strachan (Halcyon)
Kenneth Benzie (infektor)

Our game jam page can be found here : http://globalgamejam.org/2014/games/face

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live: Dr Death MK 2
Steam: 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum
Origin: 7thsanctum
Youtube: 7thsanctum
Github: 7thsanctum

SIE App Jam Day (2013) - Super Santa Brawl

Apologies for the delayed post but I've had a bunch of project work that needed to be finished which will be discussed later. 

Anyways, two weeks ago on November 30th the Scottish Institute for Enterprise hosted an app jam at Heriot-watt university organised by one of my fellow game dev students who is also acting as the Napier representative for SIE. The main purpose of the app jam is to make some kind of application that might have some form of business potential and other elements that are awarded are things like completeness, originality and how interesting your idea actually is. Naturally, as a game student, I used this chance to instead spend time making a game. If you remember back to one of my previous posts I attempted to also make a game at the same app jam but didn't manage to fully complete it and as such didn't do very well in the scope of the competition. Luckily this time I managed to make a bit of a better and more complete game and won one of the top prizes which were £40 amazon vouchers and a Raspberry Pi with case.

The jam itself lasts around 10 hours over the course of a day. Unity was used to develop the game, as well as this Unity had recently released some new features to support 2D game development and as such I used this as an opportunity to learn how to use them. The theme for the jam was "Christmas" and to keep inline with this theme I investigated some Christmas themed sprite sheets. I found one that had a fairly nice santa sprite taken from the game Daze before Christmas for the NES. The first several hours were spent wrestling with and understanding Unitys new sprite animation system but after a while I managed to get things working, a lot of my understanding of how collisions work with the character as well were learned from the Unity2D tutorial on 2D platforming which showed how to use the new 2D physics system as well.

Figure 1 - The final game

The game itself was based on the likes of Super Smash Bros and involves two players running and jumping around the arena throwing snowballs at each other. To allow multiplayer I set up and used two Xbox 360 controllers. This was the first time I had used controllers for a game as well and Unity itself does not currently support rumble for gamepads so to get this feature I used XInput. Using the right stick the player can aim the direction of the fire balls, fire with the right trigger, jump using A and move with the left stick. If a player is hit with a ball directly they will lose a health point, 4 hits results in a death and the player respawning whilst the other player gains a point. The rumble intensity is modified based on the distance of an explosion to the player so the further away the player is from an exploding ball the lower the intensity versus a direct hit which will cause significant rumble.

Overall I was quite pleased with what I had learned over the 10 hours making this game as it had been a while since I actually made one. More work is needed before this is fully finished and I will need to change many of the art assets but I will do this when I next get a chance.

I took some videos using fraps but I'm currently having problems getting it to actually work. As such the video linked below is an older prototype version and was only what was made within the first few hours of the jam. I will update this once I actually fix my movie maker problems.

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Email: markmmiller@hotmail.co.uk
Xbox Live: Dr Death MK 2
Steam: 7thsanctum
Follow @7thsanctum
Origin: 7thsanctum
Youtube: 7thsanctum
Github: 7thsanctum

Java - Game Submission

For my Software Development module this year we were tasked with producing a game in Java. The primary purpose of this was to demonstrate our knowledge of patterns as well as other techniques learned in the module such as multi-threading. From this I created a space game with trading elements, inspired by the likes of Elite and FTL.

Figure 1. Main Screen

The players ship is at the bottom of the screen, the player can move by clicking in any of the squares surrounding the ship. If they try and click on a space too far it won't let them. When the player successfully moves the rest of the ships will take their turns and subsequent conflicts will all get resolved.

Figure 2. The results of fighting a single enemy ship

The main things that can happen when the player is on another square as something is Fighting and Trading. The player can battle space pirates, the current system just compares the health value of the player to the cumulative health value of the enemy and whoever has the highest wins! If the player is on a planet when they are attacked, the planet will send reinforcements to assist. In future I intend to upgrade this system to be more detailed, to include things like weapons and shielding and health bars that are affected by each combat, allowing the players and enemies to run away.

Figure 3. The result after a player is attacked in orbit around a planet.

Trading is the other part that plays a key role in my game, when the player lands on the same spot as a civilian ship or a planet with no enemies on it they may trade with them.

Figure 4. The options to trade with either planet or civilian ships.

 If the player decides  to trade with either they will be shown the trading screen and their trade partners inventory. They can trade any item for any other item and the value will automatically be calculated and deducted. I intend to upgrade this system so it could include more resources and so that resources have some form of function for your ship, such as fuel and armour etc. I also plan to have a central economic manager, much like a universe trade centre in which buying and selling of goods affects their worth in different planets and sectors of space. This way you could visit a planet, buy the goods that are bountiful there and sell them at a profit on the other side of the universe.

Figure 5. The trade screen

Overall I feel my game was a good start in my foray into the world of Java and Eclipse. It took me a while of battle with the IDE but eventually I managed to get something functional out of it. It requires much more work and a few of the systems still require a lot of polish but hopefully with a bit of time I will be able to get that done.