We Dared to Do!

So yeah we decided to play with the idea and it become much more than what I thought it would. We ended up make a team for Dare to be Digital now '9-bit Idol', comprised of five (4 Designers/Artists and 1 Programmer) to create a game idea from my mechanic.

This became 'A Broken Time'.

We came up with the idea of the player playing a German spy who has passed after the end of WW1 and is now in limbo faced with the task of setting souls of the people, who's deaths he was responsible for, to rest and reliving their memories. You can see our pitch here:

So for this I was tasked with the creation of the prototype for the mechanic of placing the object as well as the creation of the Environment Art. With the prototype I played with ways of guiding the player to help the player notice where the object might need to be placed, this included things like dirty marks where an object had been and missing parts of trim on the the walls as well as more intricate wall surface patterning to show where objects and such can't be placed this seemed to work well as a visual marker when testing. I would like to see if I could make it a little more vague however, to make it little more natural but this could make it too hard to notice. Below is a short video of the placing prototype where you can see the markings on the wall. It also shows the 'Hud' I have been working on, this is where the images will be stored and then can be scrolled through to find the image that the player wants to use.

Like I said I've also been in charge of creating the environments for the pitch. I have been working on the style of the environments with the help of Becky Michalak the Concept artist on our team from the BA Course. We went with a quirky stylised sepia toned world working with abnormal shapes and distortion. She has then gone and created some BADASS concepts for some of the environments as you can see.

Art work by Becky Michalak

Art work by Becky Michalak

From these amazing concept I have been creating the graveyard area which will be the Hub for all the players tasks and story. The player will frequently be coming back here and finding more out about the story and the people who's lives you are reliving moments of. With the environments look and texturing I want to play with the old worn sepia photograph look that you often see from photographs from the early 1900's. However I want a little dash of colour to give the environment a unique twist. Below is a video and some imagery of the environment to date. I want to play with the area a little more and add some more features.

  That's all then. So now we will be continuing with creating this idea into something bigger throughout the next semester to build on what we have. Hopefully we will have the help of all the team as well.

It's been a LOONNNGGG TIMMEEE!!!

So its been a long time since I last posted about my research. We need a catch up for sure. Last time I posted I was doing some tests looking at ways of using the environment in a game as mechanics as well as looking at ways to guide players using them.

• The last Test I posted on here failed because of the issue of feedback as well as issues with the Kismet and triggers which weren't activating for some reason; I figured it was the LOS triggers I was using which were being temperamental. I have since edited the Kismet to use triggers in the line of sight of the numbers to give allow the player to activate a number if the think its right and that they're in right place to do so. I have also added a sound to the activation of a number correctly and one for wrong sequences to give more feedback to the player as I have noticed that often the player wasn't realising when they had done something right. 

From this I re-tested it and the outcome was much better. Confusion only came from the players own shortsightedness and not looking at their surround. All the Kismet ran smoothly as well, and most players (except one) found the process of entering the sequence was easy to understand. I think the "rule of 3" (making a player do a process 3 times to subliminally teach them) method help here with the gradual increase in difficulty.

So after the success of with this test I was having ideas of other things I could do with the environment. One of these I got really drawn into. This came from a compilation of things that I have looked into in my previous research on here; and watching TV. So I have might have been watching Channel 4 a little too much at the time and some of the adverts caught my attention because it used the environment to create something that wasn't there. I mean the Channel 4 'Idents'. If you are unaware of what these are, they are basically a use of objects with perspective to create a '4' in the environment. You can take a look below to get a better idea of what these are:

So they idea was based on using images in a game to use a way to place things in the environment but using perspective so that the player had to stand in a specific spot (similar to the Sequence puzzle) to line up where it should go. For instance my first example of this was this:

You need to get over a river. A very large one but there is no bridge 

as it has been knocked down by someone or something and there is only small

reminisce of where it used to be. In a near by shack there is an image of the area before 

the bridge had broken. You take it and see if you can find the stop it was taken from.

You stand there and hold the image up to get the spot just right. You look at the image and then the 

spot it used to be and .... the bridge is there again. Just like new.

Even though this seemed like a great idea, after some discussion with Josh and some of the guys on the MA, I figure it was just too big and would become a mundane image gathering quest game thing. So it then became much small to a comparable size to The Room. Moving from area to area adjusting the world to allow the player to reach places that the usually shouldn't be able to. The image mechanic also turned into a camera which the player could take images of the objects in the world and store them to use in the world. This would allow the player to take an image of a door on a wall somewhere and move it to another allowing them access to the room on the other side of the wall they moved it to.

From this I started to do prototypes and plans of Kismet and looking into ways that I would be able to create this mechanic without the need of a programmer. I realised that it could be done in a similar way to that of the Sequence Test using LOS triggers and a much more complicated Kismet sequence.

Small section of Kismet for Prototype

Before I even got round to creating this idea properly myself and a couple of the guys off the MA decided that we where going to enter the Dare to be Digital game competition, and I pitch my idea and they liked it and we have been working on this idea since then and then we entered.