Art Updates

We’ve taken a new direction with the way the levels are set up, in order to achieve the feeling of a dream world.

 

All the worlds will have a broken up set up, whether the roof is only partially there or like the family room and kitchen, broken off into sections. The church is in a similar fashion with half of the roof and wall missing. Additionally they will be placed into a white washed world to further insinuate the world is not real but  a memory.

The family world in particular is supposed to evoke “displacement” as if something seems off or distant about being home.

06/18/2013 Meeting Notes

Today we discussed the visual styles presented in the previous two posts. Here are the things we like:

• delicate feminine color pallet
• warped hand drawn look on the planes in the memory world
• white outlines on memory world terrain — look into procedurally doing
• try adding hand drawn elements (bushes/trees) randomly populating memory world to tie thematically to memory bubble style
• paper texture overlays
• city outlines on the horizon

For Thursday (meeting @11am in Replay)

• real world examples that are consistent with the memory world designs
• consolidate the memory world designs
• character design

05/17/2013 Meeting Notes

Steve, Dhanesh and myself (Katelyn) met to work on the memory interactions.

The way they could play out broke down into 3 ideas, a fetch quest, direct interaction, and dialog combat. We decided to develop the later two further.

Direct Interaction

Very much what’s been thrown around since the beginning  The player walks in on a situation and depending on how the interact with the NPCs, determines who follows him back to the real world. For example:

1. Player walks into bubble
2. Drunkard and Mother are having an argument at the diner
3. YOUR ACTION (pick one)
   1. Hug Mother [ -> increases mother’s empathy, she comes with you]
   2. Aggression (punch) Drunkard [ -> increases mother’s courage, she comes with you]
   3. Reason with both (must do many times) [ -> both come with you]
   4. Hug Drunkard[ -> increases drunkard’s empathy, he comes with you]
   5. Aggression (punch) Mother [ -> increases drunkard’s courage, he comes with you]
4. Mother with high empathy follows you out of the diner and back to the real world

The player interprets the story based on the situation of the two people he or she sees in the randomized environment. With a limited amount of people we could also determine how many interactions there would be and have scripted augmentations of background dialog.

Non Randomized Dialog Combat

Based off of Deus Ex. The player would walk into a bubble and see two characters either interacting or just populating the environment (mix of both throughout the game). Choose to talk to one and then multipath through a conversation. Pre scripted conversations and you respond through friendly – inquisitive – aggressive conversations. Depending the outcome determines if the character will follow you out.

The way they respond to your dialog choices is determined by their stats which we determine based on the personality we predetermine. Since Laura is interested in storytelling and it’s her strong suit, she lends to the ability to accomplish this. Through sheer quantity we could make the game still replay-ability, but this does cut it down from the 100% randomization.

Reflection

We think that in order to have some sense of storytelling, complete randomization isn’t going to work. We’d like to explore the dialog multipathing, but do realize that is a great deal of mapping and work and will need to see if it holds any level of replayability.

05/21/13 Meeting Notes

Real World Interaction

Our conclusion to this meeting was that in the real world, the NPCs will have idle animations to create visual noise on such a static screen. They will also be doing an action that changes the visual look of the apartment. This could be cleaning, decorating, rearranging, etc. Still needs to be determined but will help clue in which floor is most populated and developed.

When you populate the apartment, the floor with the most NPCs is the dominate personality at the time, and is what will reflect in terrain and physics of the memory world. If you give the NPCs that are in the apartment resources from the memory world, they will in turn give you abilities or resources as well. There is a cap to how many resources they will accept. These abilities are not tied or limited by your dominate personality at the time.

You can bring back duplicates of characters, and they can be on the same floor together.

Narrative

Check out Laura’s ideas here.

We thought it was a good direction but needed to tie in more with the minute to minute gameplay and mechanics. We also asked her to think of some specific memory ideas.

Bubble Interaction

This is homework to think about and come in Thursday (at 4:30pm) with some ideas to discuss

==== TO DO ====

Mtg Thursday @ 4:30pm, replay lab.

All – Memory interactions. This will be the focus of our discussion next week. How will they play out, how will they be generated, what are we trying to convey?

Steve – testing new meshes for the terrain and turning it into an actual map — create a test scene, quick mock up of glow intensities on characters representing their stats

Dhanesh – player states updated based on NPC stats, solid point and click system in the apartment

Katelyn – concept art, fix memory bubble, adjust memory scene, gdd

05/02/2013 Meeting Notes

Terrain:
Houdini will give us different terrain shapes btwn scenes, unity can morph between any of them.

• Is it better to keep the real world and memory world in separate scenes or in the same unity scene?
• Possibly a sphere or what happens when you hit an edge?

Memory Bubbles:
Translucent. Can see inside, but what they’re doing doesn’t show the outcome.

•  Is the animating worth it?
• It can be abstract & 2d

**Think about how the memory bubble says about the human act of remembering

Core Mechanics/Combat

• once you develop more irl, there is more complex enemies in mem world
• enemies drop resources that you need to take back to real world to keep NPCs happy*. would this only be from enemies or are there other things that you can collect resources from — maybe test this?
• combining spells/weapons from the same level might give you another spell or powerful combination

*NPCS in Real World
– demanding of resources, if neglected -> leave/dissapear
– limit: time allowed in the memory world

Enemies:

• could have reverse, revive things -> resources
• throught level boss fights & smaller enemies, depends on how developed your home is
• connected to the environment? courage developled -> fear type enemies
• abilities/attacks dependent on environment

TRIAD
Intellect
Enviro – geometric, stepped
nav: higher jumping

Empathy:
Enviro – smooth
nav: glide over the smooth hills

Primal Urges:
Enviro – jagged
nav: move faster, can launch self off ramps

NEXT WEEK

– have 2 worlds going back and forth, have simple character AI to know if you bring cubes back from mem world, and put in real world -> builds stats

– no meeting, maybe skype meeting on Thursday

04/23/12 Meeting Notes

It’s time to get moving on production!

Meeting Notes

NPCs in the Apartment

• How will NPC’s act while in the apartment space?
  • Can they wander about or wherever you place them in the room is where they permanently stay?
  • Leads to being able to create new resources from strategically placing specific NPCs next to eachother
• What floor you place NPC on determines what type of resource they produce for you
• Need to keep in mind to not overcrowd apartment space with NPCs

NPC Memory Interaction

• still a bit fuzzy on how you select which NPCs to take with you back to the real world 
• scratched positive/negitive connotations and 2 button hit/talk interaction
• stats (rational, primal, emotional) when you pick them up + where you place them in the apartment determine their output

Travel To & From the Memory World

• to get to memory world, character sits and meditates, whatever they’re sitting on (chair, couch, rug) also transports/materializes in the memory world
• to get back, player can transport back from a memory world, or go back to the object that they initially sat on
• there was also talk of making this the only way to get back, meaning you have to brave your way with the NPCs/resources back to the initial transport device

Visual Look

• rubberhose animation type
• memory world= mountainous terrain using facing ratios shader, stitched together with flat bubble sections
• start of fairly monotone per floor and as you become more developed, the real world also becomes more varied and vibrant
• memory world mountain levels and colors relate to the character’s rational-primal-emotional state
• geometric shape basis of chracters

Goals/To Do

[art]

• basic apartment model
• send some temp assets to Daneesh
• basic character model & texture
• 2 NPC character models

[programming]

• movement around the apartment
• basic systems

[management]

• revise term 1 schedule
• outline weekly goals

Paper Prototype

Here are the rules from an early paper prototype of the game mechanics. You can also check out a more formatted version here.

Game Design Summary 04/21/1013

[Research Goal]:
1. Explore first-person internal perspective
2. Explore agency-play

[Game Design/Production Goal]:
1. Make a complete game that has novel gameplay, strong narrative, and appealing visual style

[Current Game Design]:

• Overall: The gameplay is split between two worlds, one real world and the other memory/imaginary world. The PC retrieves characters and objects from the memory world and populates the real world with them. The resources and emotions developed in the real world help the PC to defeat enemies (or solve puzzles?) in the memory world.
• Goal: Defeat the final boss in the memory world.
• Narrative: The PC was hired by a real-estate company to clean & restore an semi-abandoned 3-story building. At first, he/she found it impossible to complete the task to the satisfaction of his/her demanding boss. Until one day, she [using she tentatively from now on] discovered an attic/basement that transports her to a memory world.In the memory world, she needs to defeat roaming enemies before she can find memory bubbles. From each memory, she brings back a character or object to the real world where she populates the building with her imaginary friends & objects. They help her clean and restore the building. By combining different characters and objects on the different floors, the PC can also develop different tools/equipments/food; they help her in her combat in the increasingly exaggerated memory world.Finally, the PC retrieves enough memories and developed enough equipments that allow her to defeat the final boss in the memory world. [Tentative ending] It is then revealed that the 3-floor building is the psyche of the PC, who is ‘rebuilding’ herself through reliving her memories. The state of the building at the end represents the ‘new’ PC.
• Mechanics:

1. [real world]: The three floors of the building in the real world (refer to as ‘the building’ onwards) are, from bottom to top, kitchen, bedroom, and study room. Each representing stomach (primal desire), heart (feelings), and brain (rationality). Bringing and combining imaginary characters & objects at different floors produce different effects. E.g., “mother” and “carrots” at the kitchen may yield energy. Each character and object has a negative/positive alignment based on the memory from which they are retrieved.Depending on how much the player develops each floor by populating it with ‘imaginary characters & objects’ and the alignment of each floor (i.e., neutral, positive, or negative), it changes the ability of the PC in the imaginary world. For example, a fully-developed negatively-aligned study + moderately-developed negatively-aligned bedroom + moderately-developed negative kitchen may yield a cold-blooded criminal mastermind that has a distinctive set of skills/abilities. In the Agency play mood, each personality type has automated behaviors. A psychopathy will kill everyone around.
2. [memory world]
   The PC combats with different enemies while searching for memory bubbles. Once inside a bubble, the memory will be played out and slowly faded/be blown away. Before it disappears completely, the PC can grab at most one character or object. That will be the character/object to bring back.The memory world morphs based on the development/alignment of real world in two ways. First, the environment changes accordingly. For instance, it turns rugged when the main world is overall negative. Second, the memories also change. They will be altered to different degrees to reflect the building’s state. A fully-developed overwhelmingly negative building will very likely turn the memories negative, too. More important, the character/object brought back from an altered memory may turn out to be different from what they appear to be. A luxury sports car in a positively-altered memory may be restored to be a second-hand bicycle.In the beginning, as the PC is a blank slate, the memory world starts neutral. The further into the game, the most the player needs to account for altered memories.
3. [Transition between the real & memory world]: time-based? at will?

[Visual style]:

• [real world]: isometric view with blocky characters.
  Inspirational imagines:
  http://www.duvet-dayz.com/assets/post_img/w20080623/CubeCrafts_small.JPG
  http://technabob.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/papercraft_mario_cubes.jpg
• [memory world]: 2D popup book-looking (without the need to be physically plausible) – see my South Park characters in Concept art.
  inspirational visual:
  http://www.glamfull.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/christmas-pixel-pop-up-cards-2.jpg
  (terrain structure): http://www.minieco.co.uk/valentines-day-pixely-popup-card/
  (popup art looking game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8jpgtduncCY
• Concept art.
• 

04/18/2013 Meeting Notes

My notes accidentally ended up in Steve’s notebook — will update when I get them back. Sorry!

04/11/2013 Meeting Notes

Members in attendance:

• Jichen
• Katelyn
• Steve
• Dhanesh

Goal: Discuss the 3 ideas from yesterday, and plan what to do in the upcoming week.

Meeting Notes:

• RPG idea reminds us of Don Quixote with the perceived monsters — this is a good thing as it will make it easier to explain our game to others
• Guillermo del Toro (of Pan’s Labrynth) talked about how in the past mosters represented the environment such as earthquakes and floods,as that was the unknown, but now modern lit and storytelling uses inner personal emotions. Perceived monsters would fit in with our goals.
• we could take SIM elements and apply them to the NPC team of the RPG idea
• RPG lacks agency play element and may be out of scope for the next 3 terms, but has room for expansion
• platformer seems most reasonable to accomplish, but lacks interest currently

Goals for next week:

• Look into IGF winning games, and see if we can build this game to fit specifications and possible go for awards. Also look into the different categories
• keep the 3 ideas on the table from yesterday, but improve on them or look for new ideas
• keep in mind the research goals: showing character depth & agency play/adaptive mechanics

Next full meetings: Tuesday at 6pm, and Thursday at 11am