26th of January 2017

Steadily moving forward!


Freezer Room

Cian had prototyped the sliding of the player on ice, for the ice sliding puzzle we intend to have.
I created a range of assets for the room and mashed them together in Unity. I also set up a temporary fog particle system to make it a little more cold looking.

That means: Ice tiles, tiled floor, hanging meat, frozen fruit, frozen bags, frozen fish, air conditioning

Hallways

I set up two hallways that the player can pass through without any harm.
In terms of assets, this operation came with: A painting, three statues, a flower pot, wallpaper-wall-tile

Abyss Room:

Today, I also put together the room before the last: The Abyss room, in which the reoccuring character will appear in danger of falling to his death if the player disregards him.
This room was meant to be quite dark and broken looking, so that the light at the end of the room seems all the more inviting.

I also finished anothe range of assets, including a very nice set of garden furniture and plants.

Garden furniture and plants, 
dark-shadow-shifting monster
Broken floor boards,
UI Elements
Statues and Painting
TextBox UI

The garden furniture and plants are for the final room, following right after the Abyss. Here, the reocurring character can be served tea, and the player can go on to leave the mansion. We plan to make a repeatable path-scene so that the player will move on and on without escaping, but can easily return to the mansion if only he turns back. This might be a fun and interesting way of allowing the player to restart the game with a better understanding of his role in the house.

Cian in the meantime has made great progress on the way we handle our Inventory system!

We can now switch between gun and duster for the spider room, and new items will be added to

our inventory as long as the player's hands are empty. I have prepped the UI elements for this, so we will soon be able to visualize it.

Cian has also started using parent classes, so that our scripts look a lot nicer. 

We have begun using Githubs to at least synch the scripts easier. We are well on track for the prototype due in week 16, and will probably start preparing our presentation soon. 

24th of January 2017

Polishing the Spider Room:

I have added some more furniture and cobwebs to the spider room. The spiders will now stop spawning when the cobwebs are interacted with, as the cobwebs will fade away over a few seconds.
The room is at this stage playable and almost fully styled, so we will be happy to present it in the prototype. Cian has worked on a script to make the spiders follow the player around and pause when vulnerable, so that they move much more naturally now as well. The room is in fact quite challenging, so some balancing of the shot speed or spawn speed will be needed.

The Dark Room:

I have also styled the next survival room, in which flickering lights will threaten the player. If the player is caught in the dark, he will be killed by monsters. A broken fusebox in the top right corner of the basement room can solve the problem and allow the player to succesfully pass on to the next door.

We have abandoned work on the spear trap room for now as it thematically did not fit with the story - there simply wans't an associated housekeeping task, and the room looked more like a dungeon than part of a house.

This room took some more experimentation with lights. We used spot lights instead of point lights, and soon learnt that lights can cancel each other out. This was quickly fixed by setting their render priority to important. Cian developed a script that has the lights flicker, and a bool currently reports when the player is in the dark.

The Start Bedroom:

This is the finished, styled starting bedroom. The diary on the table will later be interactable and provide the player with the basic controls for the game. E to interact, Space to use item, Q to switch through items in the inventory. I am especially proud of the addition of the bed, that I coded to actually be made when interacted with. Good housekeeper!

New Assets:

 Player death animation,
Reoccuring Character Design, Idle
Curtain Monster Design, Emerging

Various furniture
FuseBox
Books
TextBox
UI Elements

Room One and Two, Prototypes

22nd of January, 2017

Towards the end of last week, Cian finished prototyping a simple combat room, in which a spider-like creature shoots web balls towards the player. The player can pick up a gun and shoot the monsters when they are in a vulnerable state.

He also prototyped a trap room that shoots spears from the walls when a pressure plate is activated.

For the first room, we needed to find a way to make it more of an interesting puzzle. We decided that the player should remove cobwebs, that would then keep more monsters from spawning. Dusting off bookshelves seemed like a good task for our ghostly house keeper, and hence in theme with the game's background idea. Over the weekend, Cian did some more work towards this concept.

The trap room will easily be finished, but is currently not necessarily a good fit for the running theme of the story. I am not too confident about the dungeony look of the room at the moment, because it simply does not seem to fit into the mansion logically and looks qutie bare with its stone walls.

I styled both rooms, and prepared the assets to continue with a light-flickering puzzle for next week. This needed mostly a broken fusebox for the player to repair or reset, as well as lightbulbs which were already prepared. I also finished some more furniture assets to improve the existing rooms and prepare us for the start-room, the servants quarters.

Player walk and idle animations are now finished and imported into the game, and for now, placeholder-music from bensound.com has been added to one of the rooms.

First combat room with
revolver on the table, and a spider
shooting webs at the player.

A potential trap room, pressure plates activate spears that fly from the walls. The blood indicates that there might be danger.

After speaking to some of our lecturers, we are still happy to continue on with this idea. One major concern is a unique selling point, however. We find the idea of a shifting mansion with randomly allocated rooms quite interesting, but this is currently a stretch goal and does not provide the innovation we should perhaps be looking for.

Ideally, we would come up with an interesting mechanic that feeds into most of the puzzles and thematically ties the rooms together better, or alternatively make the shifting of the house into a mechanic on its own. This still needs some consideration. Following Jim's advise, we won't be slowed down in our progress right now by overthinking our USP - for now we must be able to present a working prototype with a few playable rooms for our first presentation in 2-3 weeks. 

For this, we hope to present the starting room, a combat room, a puzzle room, a mystery and a survival room in linear progression. We are so far well on track to achievethis goal. 

Planning Stage and First Progress

So here is some basic information on the projct to be explored:

WIP title: House of Orpheus
Project Length: 12 weeks
Programming: Cian Hamer
Art and Writing: Nathalie Kranich
Art Style: Pixel Art
UI: Minimal
Engine: Unity 2D

Other Software: Photoshop, PiskelApp.

Notes on Software: 
Unity: We are using Unity for this project because it is the engine we both have most experience with, and we do not want to be slowed down by the learning curve of a new system. Unity suits our purposes fine and is free to use. The system is however not very accommodating towards pixel art, as the camera would have to be very zoomed in towards the small sized sprites, and sprites will almost always appear stretched and unclear. This is usually difficult to work around, so this is where Piskel App comes in.

PiskelApp: Piskelapp is an online app to create pixel sprites. It is lacking some tools for the drawing process. There are no layers or even stable ways to copy and paste, or enlarge a small part of an image. It is however especially geared towards pixel art, open source, and provides a few services that are essential to us:

- Piskel App allows you to resize your sprites without losing their crispness. We will be able to use images with 300x300 resolution that will still look exactly like 32x32 pixel art, hence tricking Unity into accepting the style.
- Piskel App saves all sprites to an online gallery linked to my g-mail account, and will hence be greatly useful in keeping our work stored and accessible from everywhere.
- The app provides frames and onion skin to animate sprites, and allows you to export your work into a sprite sheet, meaning it can be directly imported and used in Unity.

________________________________________________________________________________

After Cian and I brainstormed some room ideas on Monday afternoon, tuesday morning was spent writing out a neater version of said plans, a vague project summary, and a list of assets that would have to be completed in the near future.

This list, for me, included the following categories: Wall and Floor Tiles, Animations, Characters, Monsters, Furniture, Speech Bubbles, Items.

Cian spent the day working on a prototype combat room and a prototype survival trap room. In the first, the player would have to dodge some bullet-like attacks and pick up a gun to shoot the monsters whilst they are vulnerable. The survival room would simply be a case of being aware of spear traps and dodging them, as well as deactivating them, to get to the exit.

He managed to finish rough prototypes for both of these rooms by the end of the day, using placeholder assets from our previous projects. We had worked on a twin-stick shooter before that would also utilize pixel art, and hence had some assets to work with and scripts to recycle, especially for the shooting and movement. I will probably be able to salvage animation controllers as well.

I made some good progress on assets in the meantime, and finally settled on an idea for the player character's look. Below are a few samples of my work throughout yesterday and today.

 Assets so far completed:

Tiles: Wooden floor, wooden wall, concrete wall, concrete floor, carpet floor
Furniture: Wardobe, Dresser, Round Table, Table, Chair, Desk, Bookshelf, Vase, 4 Plants, Cuttlery, Teapot, Plate, Glass, Wine Glass,  Lightbulb on and off, window
Characters: Player, idle-down animation, idle-up animation, walk down animation, walk-up animation. 
Items: Gun, Knife.
Monsters: Curl-up-Monster






I have also begun arranging the first combat room. We are using a default sprite diffuse material on all sprites in order to let them be affected by the light. This way we can create moody and dark atmospheres and have     areas in complete dark.

Introduction

18th of January 2017

Spring term has started and it is time we get working on final year project. I am working on this project with Cian. We decided to make a game early on, whereby I would be in charge of all artwork and design whilst Cian would take care of the development and coding.

Last year when we planned the project, we intended to make 'King's Odyssey'. The idea was to make a friendly and beautiful looking 2D RPG in which violence would not be necessary. We had a story line planned out that roughly went like this:

A child is dragged under its bed by the shadow that lives there. It awakes in a vibrant and colourful world and is greeted by a jester puppet named Vesper, who offers the child assistance in navigating back home. On the way, the child has to avoid falling into the hands of the King's men. The land is ruled by the shadow who assumed control one day when the old King went missing. Whilst the player explores his own identity through his choices and actions in the game, the theme of identity is heavily reflected within the shadow himself, who assumes roles and identities without any awareness of his true, actual self.

We had planned out several areas of the world and settled on the complete story line, but it soon became apparent that we would have to drastically shorten the game in order to get the work done within the twelve weeks we have now. Ever since last summer I have been preparing assets, and since we decided to shorten the game down to two areas or episodes, half the scenery was already finished before this term started.

When this idea was in early development, we focused entirely on the story line. It would be a story which relied heavily on character development and early decisions influencing outcomes later on. Reducing the story to two chapters meant that many of these ideas were lost, and our favourite parts had no part in the project anymore. Focusing on the story first also meant that we had to find a mechanic to let the gameplay assist the narrative. We struggled all throughout the first term with the fact that our bullet hell combat was not engaging, and would only represent a very small amount of gameplay, whilst the player would otherwise walk and talk. We perceived this to be unenjoyable and boring, but could not find a way to solve the problem. Any drastic change would mean scrapping a lot of work, or losing the initial theme of the narrative, which closely related to the art style.

So on the very first day back from our christmas holiday, Cian sat down and mutually expressed our lack of passion and hope for this project. We felt as though we had been stuck for months without making any real progress, although we had spend a lot of time working on this project. It did not feel fun or rewarding, because an RPG only feels complete and rewarding when it is infact complete.

We decided to brainstorm potential new ideas. This time, we wanted a game that would focus on gameplay first and story later, but still give us a lot of potential for creative expression. We also aimed for something that would be more self contained and hence a more wholesome experience.
Here is what we came up with:

The player awakes in the servant quarters of an old mansion. Immediately after leaving the room, he is transported into a challenge that takes the form of survival, combat, mystery or a puzzle. Upon completing the challenge, the way forward opens, and the player may continue on his path to find the exit. The layout of the house functions as a four by four grid, and is rearranged everytime the player dies, meaning the maze is shifted and orientation is lost. With a pool of potentially sixteen challenge rooms, this also means there can be variation in which rooms are accessible to the player each playthrough.

After an interval of challenges, the player often meets a reoccuring character at crossroads within the house. This character always offers support and a kind word to the player, and appears to be lost in the maze of rooms himself, with little recollection of how he got there.

In the very last room, this reoccuring character will be hanging off a cliffside, asking for help. This is a challenge in itself, as assisting the stranger will mean being dragged down into the abyss by him. Stepping on his hands or walking past him, however, will allow the player to complete the first playthrough. Hints towards the player character's and enemy's background will be scattered around the house for the player to discover.

The game would be a hybrid between a puzzle game and a rogue-like thanks to the random allocation of rooms. We are hoping to finish 16 rooms, but if we run out of time, any number below that could suffice as a proof of concept and still provide the player with the complete experience of a game: Start, content, and end. It also means that we can test our game design in each individual room and explore various game play ideas. Each finished room will be new playable content for the game, and as they are each developed independently, no other content relies on them to work. This provides us with a very safe way of creating rewarding content for the game.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to see our supervisor yet as he is out of the country currently. We wanted to discuss this on the very first day back so we could make a decsion regarding what game to work on, but until next monday we may be on our own.
Our last project could be seen through to completion, but we feel as though it would take as much work to make that game presentable as it would to make something new, fresh and perhaps more engaging from scratch.

As we both feel better for having a new project to work on, I will for now assume that this idea is the new focus and will go on to report on our progress.

"House of Orpheus" is my current work in progress title for the game. (Because I imagine the reocurring character to play the lute, and it sounds nice. Also , "Perpetuum" was already taken.)