CS4455 Fall 2014

I create two avatars in two different environments in this game.
You can use 1 and 2 to switch between two avatars. 1 for the first avatar and 2 for the second. You can press g for non-game-feel polish.

The first avatar is aggressive and strong:
You can use either mouse or keyboard to control it. By default, it is controlled by keyboard. And to switch these two control mode, press m.
In the keyboard mode, when the avatar hits a box, the box would get fired and burned at last. There is also a fire above the avatar’s head, which also represents its aggression. To see the strength of avatar, you can either press space to see the camera shaking or switch to the mouse mode. In the mouse mode, when the avatar hits a box, the box would thrown far away.
To make the environment aggressive and strong as well, I set the main light to red which matches the color of flame and also use the thunder sound as background audio.

The second avatar is scared and dizzy(only keyboard mode provided):
I slow the move speed, rotation speed and jump speed for this avatar(compare to the first one). To make the avatar dizzy, I both shake and rotate the camera a little bit . In addition, the avatar has not enough strength to throw the box it hits very far away. Instead, the avatar would jump back a little bit and make some crying noise to represent its scary.
To make the atmosphere terrifying and dizzy, I add fog in the scene and also use horror music as background. Besides, I adjust the main light color to blue.
Continue reading goillinois-Game Feel P1 →

I have gone with the following combination from the list. 1. Strong and aggressive and 2. Dizzy and scared. I have used 2 different scenes to implement the game feel for the two separate behavior combination. For the first scenario the avatar is bigger than normal with a color shading of red to signify aggressiveness. The design is such that trees near the avatar bend away to signify his strength and aggressiveness as well. The running animation has a dust effect and the jump animation has a different dust effect to signify his strength. The game has an objective where the avatar has to stomp three bushes by pressing B. On stomping each bush the avatar laughs out loud. For the second scenario I have used the same settings but with a differently designed avatar. The avatar is a robot who has a mechanical hangover. So he is dizzy and keeps swinging in loops while moving. When trying to jump his parts come apart with smoke and he groans from his hangover. The game has an objective to collect three spheres. On collecting the spheres the avatar becomes scared of what it has seen and so it screams and shakes.

Continue reading virtuahost’s GameFeel P1 | CS 6457 Fall 2014 →

It is at this point where I most came to realize the truth of every game I could think of making being too big. There were several features that weren’t entirely required that I didn’t get a chance to add (though I plan to discuss them), and some required ones that didn’t quite work in time for submission.

For this demo, I went for ‘strong and aggressive’ and ‘weak and exhausted’. Yes, I know ‘exhausted’ isn’t one of the states from list one, but I felt this worked better with the general idea conveyed by the single avatar. On the general level, the avatar is a somewhat bulky figure with a battering ram, and the action performed by space is charging forward. Understandably, this makes turning much harder, and only allows forward movement. If you play around with this one issue in implementation becomes obvious: decay animation curves can start before attacks have fully finished ending, which, due to the decay starting at a value that matches the end of the attack curve, results in an awkward lurch forward. The intent is simply for the avatar to take some time to build up momentum to show its bulkiness. If a walking animation  (another thing I didn’t have time to figure out to comfortable levels) with the legs had been implemented, the avatar would run forward in a manner akin to a quarterback.

The avatar yells (despite my attempts finding a better yell for charging, this is all I got) and causes dust behind him as he begins to charge. If he hits a wall, he stops, but the screen shakes to show the power of the impact. If he hits a block, the screen also shakes, and despite the block’s size it’s pushed back by the force. It also takes a considerable time to stop charging, which would have been skidding to a stop to display momentum. The blocks glow red while in the aggressive state to show that they’re a viable target. Even holding the spacebar down without moving causes the avatar to prepare to charge, bending forward and pushing the ram forward.

The other state is weak and exhausted. The blocks still glow, but do so less, and the avatar doesn’t hold the ram or his own body up. He doesn’t take as long to build up, but this is partly because he never gets that fast, and pants heavily with movement. Space attempts to charge in this state, but needless to say, it doesn’t really work: the avatar is too tired and just stumbles forward in the attempt. The intended feel here was something akin to a stamina bar connected to the more aggressive state – if you run out of power from charging and ramming things, you end up like this until you rest temporarily. I never had any intention of actually implementing this into the demo, admittedly, but that was the initial idea that spurred making it this way.

There is an admitted lack of polish (only the blocks glowing display this). This is largely due to the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to use the music I was planning to in good conscience. The initial plan was to use two parts of the same song; one a more bassy and powerful part, and the other quieter. This plan was utterly ruined when I realized what Unity’s compression does to songs (in other words, it sounded too terrible for me to put in). While the code is present for swapping tracks or turning it off, I didn’t put the song in. For those curious, it’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8SFNeuY8K0 , with the loops being from 1:48 to around 3:03 for the aggressive state, and 5:44 to the end for the tired state. Anyone familiar with audio compression can probably easily tell what went wrong when trying to use this with Unity.

In short, the main missing features were the leg movements, keeping Decay curves from starting before Attack curves are done, and the background track. There are no textures either, but I couldn’t think of any real way to implement them that provided what could possibly be called an improvement in this blocky of an environment.

Continue reading Thisisaname – P1 →

Game Feel Project 1

1: Joyful & Nimble
Pressing ‘1’ starts a joyful and nimble mood to the game. I added a bright sky and rotating candy platforms to add liveliness to the game. The character moves fast and jumps high to show the nimbleness. The bright and exciting background music adds the joyful mood, and the collision sound is a very bright “boing” as well. The jellybeans are lightly weighted to match such joyful, jumpy, and nimble characteristics.

2: Dreamy & Dizzy
Pressing ‘2’ starts a dreamy and dizzy movement. The background becomes an ocean, so the character’s dreamy and dizzy movements would seem accurate. The background music is changed to a very slow and fantasy type of music. The movement correspondingly becomes slower and jumps are allowed infinitely as if you are swimming up; there is also a splashing sound when you jump. The character’s head rotates to show its dizziness and the movement becomes very slow to show the dizzy and dreamy state. The jellybeans are heavier than in state 1, since it is under water and character doesn’t have as much energy as in the previous state. The platforms keep on rotating but this time it gives a hint of dizziness of the character.

g: No Game Feel
Pressing ‘g’ removes all the game feels. It get rids of the background musics, sound effects, losing a sense of liveliness. Getting rid of the background makes the game loose the sense of reality. Also, the platforms stop moving so the game looses a lot of movement.

Continue reading Game Feel Project 1 →