Week #4: alternative low-fidelity prototype

With the COVID-19 outbreak, the user testing of the low-fidelity prototype had to be unconvencional but the show must go on! I developed a parallel prototype.  

I made a chess-like prototype on powerpoint in order to be able to have players interacting via livestream. You can find two user testing rounds in the follow video:

THE ANSWERS

How does the initial position impact the game’s pace? Should the player be able to stand still in a safe spot? 

• 1st round - the player had safe tiles where no enemy could reach and started on one of those
• 2nd round - the player started on a tile on a guard’s path and had no safe tiles

One of the players said that on stealth games, he likes to stand still on the initial position until he understands the enemy’s routine. That player, on the 1st round, took longer on each movement, standing still on spots he knew he was safe. On the second round, his strategy was no longer about careful planning, but about risky movement. He was caught by enemies a lot more. 

Conclusion: we want ‘2036’ to give opportunity to both playstyles to succeed so it’s important to have safe spots and the initial position should allow the player to observe the scene before engaging. 

How does the number of enemies impact the player’s strategy? What does each type of enemy add to the game?

• Level 1 – three guards 
• Level 2 – one guard, two drones
• Level 3 – two guards, two cameras, one drone

Players had no problem getting through the three guards, as they found their paths more predictable and avoidable.  When adding two drones, the difficulty increased significantly, since the drone detects on every direction. The players took longer to get through the level and were caught more often. The third level turn out to be of extreme difficulty, as none of the players were able to get to the objective without being caught at least once. All players avoided the area patrolled by the two guards, had difficulty not being caught by them (that were very close to each other) and struggle to find an opening between the two cameras. 

Conclusion: 

• the more human guards a level has, the more cautious the players are, since their pacing is quicker than the drone's and not static like the cameras.
• the drone detection area is very punishing when close to other enemies. It would be important to either change the type of detection or to isolate the drones.
• the cameras are a good tool to make the strategy more urgent, as the timing is shorter. 

What does the cover mechanic add to the game?

At the end, it was introduced a variation of Level 3, where there were two boxes serving as cover.

All the players used the cover system and it significantly change the playstyle of the more fast-paced oriented players, as they took longer, hiding behind the covers, to decide their movements. The slow-paced strategy-oriented players made it to the objective quicker. 

Conclusion: 

1. The cover mechanic made all players take a more calculative rather than impulsive approach (even though they could make it to the objective with the impulsive approach). Since we want to give the player the freedom to choose how to get through the level, we should separate the players’ path with covers from the path where the player could rush through.
2. Since the boxes don’t serve as cover for the drones (and they have more erratic routines), the players were more focus on that type of enemy. A good idea would be to give the impulsive players a path filled with drones.

THE PROTOTYPE GAME RULES

LEVELS

Week #3: the dialogue mechanic (update)

Finally, I finished the dialogue mechanic. Now, our colaborator can use Yarn to write our dialogue tree and our mechanic will do the rest. 

The biggest challenge is, since our team decided we would not use mouse as an input control, making the selection of dialogue not break immersion. The 'w', 'a', 's', 'd' keys are used for movement and the 'up' and 'down' keys are used for dialogue selection. 

From feedback of people I've shown this mechanic, in a gameplay perspective, it fulfils its purpose but it's not very nice to look at. Besides, since the main character is always at the center of the screen, I will need to find a way to avoid puting the dialogue monopolizing half of the screen.

For the low-fidelifty prototype, we find ourselves limited by not having people around to do experimentations. So, during the weekend, I'm going to do some gameplay storyboards to add to the already finished paper prototype test. 

Usually, storyboards are used to prototype the visual concept but they can also be used to describe interaction in gameplay. From the paper prototype, some gameplay loops are not clear so my objective is to explore every gameplay loop and to make the most of a situation where I don't have access to players,

Week #3: all Over the Place

Hello gang,

This week has been a little intense; After finishing last weeks' tasks, my job was not very clear. I knew I had to build the scene in Unity, leveraging my colleagues' resources, but I did not know much else. When I started doing that task, I soon realized that we were using animated models instead of single models with animations. After conveying this to the group, Rafael agreed to fix that problem. Making our project more reusable, teaching us a new skill, and, most importantly, allowing us to use GitHub to its full potential. Using animated models was forcing us to pass .zip archives to one another like first graders. This also avoided accidental code loss and gave us off-the-shelf configuration whenever someone adds a new asset or element to the scene.

After making a basic scene, I realized we did not have the camera implemented yet, so I went ahead and made two versions of the camera, one using Lerp and another using SmoothDamp; Both suffered from the same issue. Rafael and I traced the problem back to the fact that our player's movement was based on the camera point of view, which is not what we wanted. Eventually, Rafael decided to make a movement that was independent of the camera, resulting in better, more flexible, and more readable. With Rafael's new motion and my camera follow algorithms, we now have a silky smooth character following using a top down-view, just like we wanted.

I decided to go back to the scene and add some mood to it. This involved doing more exciting lighting and give the demo some textures. As otherwise, NPCs and the Player would look like black umbrae, and the walls would be completely grey. Because last week's improved blender-made map was a single object, I had trouble applying textures and proper lighting. So I reopened Andreia's .blend file and sliced her artwork into several pieces that I then reimported to Unity. This allowed me to give different materials and textures to the wall and to the ground. I then decided to paint the shallow lake in the middle of the map with a different texture, as in real life, water does not look like ground. I also added the tanks, so the player as more places to hide and to give some extra mood to the scene. I also added an additional NPC with a quest mark on top, so that Andreia can use it demo the dialogue part of our game; I fixed drones', cameras' and guards' patrol lights in terms of intensity and angle, to provide a smoother experience and defined the guards' patrol routes for the player to be somewhat challenged by our prototype;

Last but not least, and this happened at the beginning of the week, I discussed with Rafael what our paper prototype would look like and implemented it, in parallel with the tech feasibility prototype, then carried on to record it's play-testing with five different persons, before passing all the videos to him for editing;

Oh yeah, and I also added colliders to all scene's objects, otherwise our player could hack is way through everything!

To summarize. My primary role in this week's development was mainly identifying missing game features and project level optimizations. Creating new issues on GitHub, which will lead to future improvements in our game. Some of these have already been implemented. I also fixing minor problems. Building and improving the scene. It is way better than the earlier version, and making it playable and, I hope, fun.

Week #2: the dialogue mechanic

After much consideration I decided that I didn't want to use a library for the dialogue mechanic since most libraries either have a lack of intuitive writing interface or has deprecated methods. 

Since one of our collaborators, someone who isn't familiar with programming, is going to write most of the dialogue, it's fundamental that they don't have to open code to give input. 

The motivation at this moment is to use Yarn's dialogue tree composer (used for Night in The Woods) and export as a JSON file and parse it to a dialogue tree class in which each dialogue line will correspond to a node of a directed graph.

We're still not set on the dialogue display since it will depend on our collaborator responsible for the art style. 

Some of our options

The Walking Dead (Telltale)

The Night in The Woods (Infinite Fall)

Oxenfree (Night School Studio)

Three Fourths Home (Bracket Games)

I'll update you next week about how the dialogue tree was finalized.

Week #2: designing the map

Hello team, welcome back to my weekly blog post;

Today, I don't have much to tell you. For the first time ever, as its starting to become a tradition in this project for me, I've downloaded software that I never used; That software is called Blender™ version 2.8. This is a powerful, open-source, 3D modeling and renderization program that in our case allowed us to design the map for the technical feasibility prototype using a reference view downloaded from Google Maps™; It took me a while to get the hang of things, but after watching a few tutorials on the web I managed to create an elementary map; With a ground-floor, which is not visible in the image below, as it is hidden by the reference view, some walls and other world objects that more or less depict the real Forte do Bom Sucesso in Belém, Portugal;

I wanted to go further and create the roads and the bridges that you can see on the reference view. Still, I was struggling a lot with bezier curves and gave up on doing that for now since it is not an important objective at this stage.

I soon discovered I could get some free assets online and decided to add some mood to the scene by incorporating some tanks and trees; I realize the trees are not monochromatic like the rest of the scene, but I did not know how to paint the remaining meshes; Here is my final result:

Prototype map for the first level of the game; Version 0.1;

Thankfully the team is not composed only of Blender noobs, and our team-lead Andreia showed up to save my pancetta. As of the writing of this post, she is video-streaming the modifications she is doing over the map, so that I can learn something. She already did the pool, a platform above that pool. She also managed to make a ground-plane that is actually attached to the remaining elements of the scene! Check it out right here:

Prototype map for the first level of the game; Version 0.2;

Stay tuned for more news!

Week #1: core experience and visual references

Welcome back to my weekly blog post friends and foes,

Today I am going to talk about the activities I carried out through out the past week. My job was to define the core experience of the game, based on the initial high concept and the ideas discussed by the group, refine the initial high concept document and provide visualization for what we wanted our game to look like.

Defining the core experience of game is one of the most important aspects of game development. Having a well-defined core experience allows teams to focus on only on features and mechanics that enhances the game with respect to what it is supposed to be; It should not however, hinder creativity of the team and should focus on the sentiments we want the player to feel. Some companies, also define or expand the idea of core experience with the term fantasy. This means that whenever the player enters in contact with the game through any media for the first time, .e.g., watches a trailer or reads the name on the game's box front cover, he should be able create expectations for that game and image what it is all about, with at least partial accuracy. The group focused on five sentiments for the core experience, some of them are directly related to one another and some may yet be removed, as having too many objectives may be counter productive: freedom of choice, familiarity, fear, outrage and exhilaration.

Following these footsteps and to better define what the game should look like, I argued about the importance of the art style, lightning of the scene and sound effects. Explained how these would be approached and why we would not set any goal for sounds effects due to time constraints. As a whole the group decided that we wanted to create a cartoonized yet moody environment, where the player is allowed to feel some of the previously mentioned core experiences. Some sources of inspiration are Life is Strange, Thief of Thieves and Invisible, Inc.; You can see some of the image references I posted on the deliverable document below:

Thief of Thieves, Art Style

Life is Strange - GUI

I do not want to bore you with all the details, I'll be back next week with more exciting news; Hopefully I'll bring you some custom-made blender assets that we will use for our technological feasability prototype!
See you then,
Francisco Barros

Week #1: the setting

The dev team knew from the start that the physical setting in which our game would play out was one of the most important parts, since it's expected from the player to feel familiarity about know landscapes.

In a first sketch, we planned to use Lisbon's downtown for its intricate street network and tourist-trapping ambience. Terreiro do Paço would play a big role on the level design. 

Downtown Lisbon (2017)

Soon we realized that discrepancy between the very tight streets leading to Terreiro do Paço and the very openess of Terreiro do Paço itself would create difficulties on keeping consistency on the level design. Since main event would be a party in a military area, that idea was scrapped.

Belém came as an obvious second option since it has the familiarity of downtown Lisbon but adds  military importance in the country history. The Bom Sucesso fort was deemed an ideal option not only for being a landmark for the portuguese army but it's arquitecture is very fitting for a linear physical path. 

Sketch of the game path.

Introducing... Francisco Barros!

Hello World,

I'm Francisco, my job in this team of amazing developers is to randomly talk about food and beverages, in particular, sweet cakes and coffees. This, of course, is just an introductory joke to break the ice. Welcome to my first blog post ever. I'm the oldest of the bunch, recently scoring twenty-nine years of age. I enjoy playing all types of games in my free time, ranging from sports to tabletop games and video-games. I'm a computer engineer, with specialties in distributed systems and cybersecurity. Still, here I am, ready to craft this masterpiece of a video game, we codenamed with 2036. Without entering into many details, I would describe this game as an alternative approach to stealth games.  I tell you this because you may be discovered not only through traditional means, e.g., you were spotted by your enemies, but also through the interactions with them. In 2036, the player is encouraged to interact with both friendly and hostile NPCs through dialogue. The interaction is useful to: overcome hard obstacles with more ease, learn characters backstories and motivations, and sometimes is needed to be able to progress through the game. This means that you need to be careful not only with what you do but also with what you say. Do not worry, we won't forget to include stressful events that will put you on edge nor take away your freedom to strategically navigate through the level!

With these words, I end my first blog post ever, in case you missed that earlier on. Thanks for reading. Good luck and have fun.

Introducing... Andreia Valente!

I started to play games back when my parent bought our first computer in 1999. The first game I remember playing was Richard Carr's Treasure Island. During my early years up until highschool, I played dozens of games on all playstation editions, having special affinity to action-adventure games like Tomb Raider and the Uncharted franchise.

Richard Carr's Treasure Island (1997).

It wasn't until I played The Walking Dead (the first season) by Telltale (rest in peace) did I start to consume videogames the way I consume movies and tv shows: choosing not to spend my time just to be entertained but to spend it on narrative-based games with meaningful stories. Since then, games like Heavy Rain, LA Noire, The Last of Us, Mass Effect, Life is Strange, Night in the Woods, Last Day of June, Her Story, Emily is Away and Yakuza have created in me a newfound appreciation for the videogame art form as I find it now to be the superior storytelling tool.

The Walking Dead: the Tellale series (2012)

I'm not on the videogame specialization on my course but with the 2036 game I want to challenge myself to use my programming experience to create a unique setting and story. 

Introducing... 2036 game!

Meet the team [HERE]

SETTING

Portugal in modern days - a fascist is elected present and a regime of high surveillance is instituted, free speech is destroyed, and the streets of Lisbon are filled with military. A group of revolutionaries plans to tear down the president’s defenses by shutting down the servers responsible for the nationwide surveillance system and face recognition AI in order to let the  allies through a checkpoint in the Portugal-Spain border. You are responsible for infiltrating a party held on a military base in Belém (on 25th April 2036) and find the hidden server room  without being discovered.

FEATURES

• Run, crouch, vault, through the military-field at Belém’s garden. 

• Hide inside objects (lockers, portable toilet, closets). 

• Interact with objects spread across the environment in order to create distractions and go 

though the guards (radios, lamps). 

• Once inside the building, choose a disguise. If you choose to dress like the catering team,  you won’t have to avoid certain officials but won’t have access to the VIP area (upper levels).  If you choose to infiltrate as military personnel, you can free roam both floors, but you’ll have to avoid higher rankings officials that might find you suspicious by not recognizing you. 

• Interact with the party goers. Some people know where the server room is located, but you’ll  need a strategy to get that information out of them. 

GENRE

Stealth + RPG elements.



PLAYER MOTIVATIONS

1. Get to the military base (Belém castle) by avoiding and distracting the guards guarding the  Belém gardens surrounding the Belém castle. 
2. Choose between two disguises (servant or military) – each disguises affects the gameplay. 
3. Enter the party and use your disguise to find the location of the servers and how to access their room (through dialogue – careful! One wrong answer can end your plan). 
4. Find who has an access key card to the server room and find a way to get to it before time runs out. Once you reach it you might discover there are other ways of getting it besides pickpocketing. 

TARGET CUSTOMERS

• Fans of Stealth games. 

• Fans of dialogue-based narrative games. 

• Players curious about playing a game set in Lisbon.

TARGET HARDWARE

Personal Computers running Windows 10.

COMPETITION

Hitman, Dishonored, Thief.

UNIQUE SELLING POINTS

• Stealth games seldom explore social engineering while infiltrating a social event. Stealth will  be required: not physically hiding knocked-out enemies but avoiding wrong answers that could get your cover blown. 

• The physical space is not only an existent place, but also a landmark of the Portuguese capital.  Exploring the Belém Palace surroundings through a dystopian lens has never been done before.

DESIGN GOALS

Exhilaration -constant surrounding of enemies and a timer constantly ticking. 

Familiarity - created for everyone who knows Belém well. 

Freedom of Choice  - there isn’t a right path, wrong path. Every path to the end goal is valid, but present different challenges.