Homework 11: Game Design

Two great games I have played

1.     The Legend of Sword and Fairy

This game is also called Chinese Paladin, which was developed by a Taiwan company called Softstar. I love this game not only because this is the first RPG game I have ever played, but also I am still touched by the impressive story illustrated in the game. This game has a very memorable tragic ending, which has moved many players to tears.

2.     Grand Theft Auto V

The Grand Theft Auto V, aka GTA five, is also one of my favorite games. It is an open world action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North. One important reason I am into this game is the flexibility. “Impossible is nothing” fits this game perfectly. Players can do everything they want including driving an aircraft, committing serious crimes, business activities, etc. This game also talks about society values and ethical issues of criminals.

Two bad games I have played

1.     The binding of Isaac rebirth

I only played this game for 10 minutes or even less. The whole graphic design makes me feel uncomfortable. Players can see poops everywhere. The maps are called mom’s womb, guts, etc., and the bosses are also very gross like a drooling bug, or poops.

2.     Don’t Starve

Every time I play this game, I am extremely frustrated. I do not see any fun facts in this game. The goal of this game is very easy. All a player need to do is just to keep Wilson alive. But this is also very hard, because there are too many things to do and consider. I feel terrible and overwhelmed if I do not find enough wood in the day time, or the weather is terrible, because when the darkness come, all I can do is nothing but watching the torch goes weaker and weaker until died, and hearing the beasts howling around Wilson. Sometimes I even feel that I am Wilson, who is sitting in the darkness and praying. To me, this is a very depressive game.

Homework 10: Interfaces

1) list ten examples of interfaces between people and the real world.
1. Pan is the interface to cook
2. Cell phone is  the interface to call
3. Deck of card is the interface to card game
4. Cup is the interface to drinking
5. Knife is the interface to cut
6. Table is the interface to put something
7. Road is the interface to drive
8. Car is the interface to transfer
9. Towel is the interface to sweep something 
10. Micphone is the interface to expand voice

2) Give an example of a good interface between player and game. Explain why it is a good interface
One good example is Fallout 3's Pipboy - or, more specifically, the short animation of your character raising the Pipboy to eye level whenever you access it:The animation lasts for only half a second, so you might not put much thought into it. But watch how it challenges the patience of your players after sitting through it countless times over the course of an 80 hour game. Never conclude that your player will "get used to" doing something in a non-optimal way. They will only seethe and bad-mouth your lack of design sense.

3) Give an example of a poor interface between player and game. Explain why it is a poor interface
Oblivion's UI is a classic example of one platform's UI being incompatible with another. Even though Oblivion was ported from consoles to PC, it still retained its controller-focused UI. This is completely analogous to releasing a game on iOS or Android and making the player move an on-screen cursor around like they're using a laptop's trackpad instead of taking advantage of absolute touch positioning.
So what makes Oblivion's UI so bad? It's a combination of wasted space, improper scaling, and inappropriate controls.

Homework 9 Balance

Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance
Balance Type #1: Fairness
 Fairness is an important aspect of a game. So to make our game symmetrical，we need to give equal resourse and power to all players. In our game we will set some obstacles, and these obstacles may be some opponents that has equal power as our player. So that make game not too easy or too difficult.

Balance Type #2: Challenge vs. Success
To make game interesting, our game need to neither too difficult  or too easy. So to reach this goal, we can make different levels. First severeral levels should be very easy, it will make player to practise the operation of the game. With the level goes higher, the difficulty will get higher and higher. And before the game release, we can let different players test the game.

Balance Type #3: Meaningful Choices
There will be a variety of choises for the player in a game. In our game we can design different difficulty of opponents, and different opponents have different credit. If the play choose to fight easy opponent, they will get less credit, and if they choose fight difficult opponent, they will get more credit.

Balancing Type #4: Skill vs. Chance
Our game will need more skills than chances. The obstacles may still, the players may  improve their skill to overcome them.

Balancing Type #5: Head vs. Hands
The players should use both their head and hands in our game. Except for the operation by hand, they also should think about their optimal ways to achieve by their head.

Balance Type #6: Competition vs. Cooperation
Our game is a competition game with PC. And for the reason of balance  type#1 our game will be fair.

Balance Type #7: Short vs. Long
Our game will have several levels. Beause of the limitation of time, we may not make it too long. But we will make it more funny.

Balance Type #8: Rewards
In our game player will want to get higher score to show their intelligent. And they can get higher skills with higher level.

Balance Type #9: Punishment
Because of the short of game, the punishement for players who died in the game, they will restart their game from the beginning of the game. 

Balance Type #10: Freedom vs. Controlled Experience 

We can set some hidden scenes along with the main scene. It gives our player more freedom to discover it.

Balance Type #11: Simple vs. Complex
For the first several levels the game will be simple. But with the level goes higher, the game will be complex.

Balance Type #12: Detail vs. Imagination
Our game is a fairy game, so it is built on imagination. We can use different characters to increase imagination. And some imagianted backgrounds work as well.

Homework 8 from Blender to Unreal to Git

1) create one or more objects in Blender

Here are the objects I creat in blender

2) Import these into Unreal 

3) Describe how these objects are used in your game

The first yellow one is the coin, we can use the coin to get points. Our game is a fairy game, so the fairy will eat the coin then get a higher record.

The second heart is the health. In the game,  our fairy will fight the monsters and lose power. If she eat the health, she will fill up her power.

4) Once all the team members have uploaded their project, "pull" your project from git, and take a picture of all the objects within your scene. 
This is the all object that our team creat. I sync from the github and import to our team project.

Homework 5

GAME ASSET

I did the main menu of our team project. When you start the game, you will see the main manu on the screen.

This  is the blueprint of main menu HUD. Then we will creat the main menu widget.
We set the ThirdPersonGameMode has HUD class as MainMenuHUD.

In the main menu, we have start game, option and quit game. The option will set the voice ON/OFF. We will set three buttons of main menu. Then if we press option button, the main menu will disappear and will show the option menu.

The blue print as followed

When we click the option menu, main menu set hidden, option menu set visible.
Return to main menu button is reverse from option button.
Then we set start and quit button by using default function.

And turn on, turn off voice button set as followed

Unfortunately, I haven't found how to turn off the sound yet.
and the UI of main menu like this

PS:The background download from Internet.

Github Repository

Github Repository
Account num: zyqdango
Team Repository: https://github.com/nicksuttell/Team_Fairy

Forth Week

Unreal First Step


In my first unreal project, I created a small house that has several stuffs in it.

Here is what I have done in this project.

I put an atmospheric fog in the scenery, that makes the sky to be translucent. I also put a derectional light enable it to be bright.

The room has three walls and I changed the material of the wall. There are also table and chair in the room, and a lamp light the room. You can see a ball over the table. The ball has gravity, when you start the game.

Here is the link of my project
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B73laoznmpaVanJFeTk3S0N1VWc?usp=sharing

Third Week

New Team Meeting

This week I met one of the member in our final project team. We disccussed the responsibility of each other, and decide that I  will be responsble for programming and assembling all the stuff. Our team member Pabelo will be responsble for character and scene design. We all are interested in making a racing game. We are considering to make it have different level and it could be harder and harder.
The task of next week is that finding a tutorial of UNREAL and learning it by ourself.

My favorite two games

The Long Dark           

The Long Dark is one of my favorite games on Stream. The background of this game is that you are the only survival in an air crash, and land in north Canada in winter. You have to keep searching resources to survive. You are surrounded by hunger, thirst, beasts, and cold. The reason I love this game is that everything looks so real. You have to find dry wood to make a fire, so you can boil drinkable water. You can also eat snow, but that could make you sick, and then you have to find medicines. You must calculate everything like how long you can sleep, how long you should spend on searching food and fuel, how to make a shortest detour to avoid wolves’ and bears’ attack, etc.
http://hinterlandgames.com

Plants Vs. Zombies

Plants Vs. Zombies is also one of my favorite games. I feel all the plants and zombies are so cute. The plants have cadence with the rhythm of the background music, and the zombies are designed very creatively like there are MJ zombies, football zombies, snorkel zombies, etc. This is a fun game but also full of challenges. You should not only fight zombies in the day time, but also in night, in fog, and on the roof fighting Dr. Zomboss.
http://www.popcap.com/plants-vs-zombies