SMART Goal – By May 29th, while working independently following the producer’s skill pathway and by using unity and visual studio, I will have completed development on a 2D beat ’em up style video game demo character that will reach different stages of completion over the next 3 weeks for my May 2020 Stretch Goal.
How – I plan to set aside time throughout the week in order to make progress on development.
When – I plan to work on the game once a day but if that is not possible I at least want to make progress every other day
Resources – The resources that I will use include Unity Visual Studio, The Spriters resource all on my computer, and a pixel painting application from my phone
Milestones – May 15 I want to have the menu and character menu basic functionality complete as well as mechanics for the at least one characters complete including movement and combat. May 22 I want to have all character’s mechanics fully working such as player health. May 29 I want to add polish to all mechanics and menus to keep the style consistent throughout the entire project.
Heroines / Heroes – The person that I look up to in this role is Cory Balrog who worked on the first, second, and most recent god of war games and was the director for the second and most recent game. although technically he is not the producer the description of his job and the producer role are almost identical so I felt that he was a good pick for someone to look up to.
more information about Cory Balrog can be found below
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Barlog
Documentation –
I wanted to have had both main menu and character menu functionality as well as having basic character movement and combat done as of May 15th. I was able to achieve my goal and did so by spending three days laser-focused on completing this task. I did not finish all the characters but I did not plan on doing that this week I wanted to have just one done so that next week I already have all the code needed and just need to create those characters in their scenes. Below is a video that explains and showcases my work in more detail. I decided not to use photos for this update because I felt that the video did a good job of showing what I wanted to.
I wanted to have the additional mechanics for the games player such as health complete. I was able to complete this task as of May 21st. However when I went onto my computer on May 22nd to gather the documentation for this blog post I discovered a number of my files had corrupted including the scene within unity that contained most of the work for my stretch goal. I plan to simply continue with the work I planned to do next week which was to add final polish to the work that I have done.
My original plan for this final update to my stretch goal was to simply work on the menu of the game giving in some polish since that was just about the only scene that had not been affected by the corruption of my files. However I was able to do that and then some since I was able to restore the scene that had been erased because the assets used to make them had survived the corruption. I added some polish to the background of the title scene so that it was more in line with the pixel theme found throughout the game. after restoring the scenes that had been corrupted I was able to add a heath mechanic to the player effectively finishing development of that part of the game.
SMART Goal – By April 30, while working independently I will have obtained certification from the Solo Learn C++ online class to be able to better understand and utilize the C++ coding language for my April 2020 stretch goal.
Why – I want to achieve this goal because by completing it I will be better prepared for the career that I am pursuing as a software engineer since C++ is one of the most commonly used languages in that field.
How – I will achieve this goal by setting aside times throughout the week to work in solo Learn.
When – I want to work on my stretch goal at least 3 times a week but may do it more if I feel it is necessary
Resources – The resources that I will use to achieve my goal is my chrome book and my phone since both can use solo learn
Milestones – By April 23rd I want to be halfway through the functions module of the C++ tutorial and I intend to have my certificate by April 30th.
Heroines / Heroes – I admire Jeff Dean since he is the lead software engineer in the AI department of Google and that would be my dream job. More information can be found about him at the site listed below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dean_(computer_scientist)
Documentation – I originally intended to be halfway done with my stretch goal by April 23rd. As of April 23rd, I am actually more than halfway through my goal since I was able to test out of the last parts of the first module for the C++ SoloLearn tutorial which placed me just slightly past the halfway point.
– I planned to be done with the C++ tutorial course by May 1st. As of May 1st, I have indeed completed the tutorial course as well as the challenges at the end of the course and due to that, I have also acquired my certificate showing that I successfully completed the course. Over the course of my stretch goal, I worked in SoloLearn at least once a day right before I went to sleep but also on occasion worked on it during the mid parts of the day in between working on assignments from other classes.
By March 18th as part of my production team, I will have completed a tutorial on Player health slider to be able to create a shell game meant to act as a game template for game design session six.
PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY
Leader(s) in the Field / Exemplary Work(s)
Primary source
Spiderman 2 the video game
Secondary Source
SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004) Game Designer Tries the PS4 Game for the First Time
My focus for this production cycle is that of the main programmer. Although my game will not feature the same type of mechanics featured in my sources I decided to look to Jamie Fristrom and his work on the Spider-Man two video game released on the PS2 and original Xbox consoles. What made this game stand out to me is the fact that this game is widely known as one that was very innovative and introduced new elements to the world of game design. The most widely renowned new element in the game was the web-swinging mechanics and that is where Jamie Fristrom comes in. Jamie Fristrom was the lead programmer that developed that mechanic. What stands out about Jamie’s work is the way that he decided to develop and implement the web-swinging mechanic. He figured that he couldn’t use the basic pendulum approach since it would be to difficult to control on a gamepad so he developed an AI that would make decisions on player movement based on the trajectory of the players in the game environment. Another item that stands out about the work done by Jamie is how the work that he put into the game went on to influence the feel of many more games if the future such as the spiderman ps4 game that was released last year.
Programmer/ Character artist/ things that move in the world. What was done during this project was the development of simple low graphic mechanics that tested the practicality of a concept that is meant to be fully implemented in a large scale game project in the 2020-2021 school year. No art was developed because the game was a simple prototype and did not require any
Intention (SMART Goal)
The specific skills that will be learned are how to draw rubber hose art, and to save variables between scenes. The reason that these are goals is that knowing how to do both are vital to making the game work properly and both are things that have not been worked on before this project. to measure my progress throughout the project we will simply assess how close we were to getting the look of my characters right and getting the saving mechanic fully functional. Then we will asses our progress at the end of the project by seeing if we were able to get the saving mechanic working and also if my art fits the style we were going for. we do have the skills to achieve the goals that we have set. I already have coding experience it is just a matter of finding out how I need to set up my mechanic, and I am already a talented artist I just have not drawn in this art style before. I am setting this goal now so that we can make our game fully functional by the deadline. The deadline is February 25th this is realistic because the necessary art that needs to be built will only take me at the most two weekends to make and the mechanics that I to build are quite simple and the only thing that would make it so that it would take all the way up until the 25th to build is if unity were to crash in some way.
PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY
Leader(s) in the Field / Exemplary Work(s)
Primary Resource: Cuphead the game
Secondary Source: A Critical Examination of Cuphead’s Art Style
My focus for this game cycle is on character and scene art and all of that art I have planned to be based on the game Cuphead. The art style of this game is commonly described as subtractive and minimalistic. The art is drawn by Chad Moldenhauer who was also one of the co-creators of Cuphead along with his brother. Chad who had had previously worked in graphic design, hand-drew the animations and painted the backgrounds using watercolors, colorizing them in Photoshop. The art style that he used is called rubber hose art but he is quoted as saying that his largest inspiration for the art of the game came from old Fleischer Studio cartoons. The process that is used starts with a hand sketch of all the backgrounds and character frames. After that, the backgrounds are colored by hand and then touched up in photoshop. The characters are all drawn by hand and then imported to the game. There is also something very clever done with the are that acts as a subtle visual signal to the player and that is that all intractable objects if that be an NPC or object are all given a darker outline. All game objects that you cant interact with are given a very thin outline.
Give ray cast gun the ability to rotate on button-down
Create the ray cast laser effects
Create the enemy object
Give the enemy the ability to take damage
Set enemy to die after health is depleted
Set up player Health system
Give the player the ability to take damage
Set the player to die when health is depleted
Build a game to a computer
Playtest the game
Fix any unforeseen errors in the game
Present in front of the advisory committee
Proposed Budget
N/A
PRODUCTION – ACTION
The (FILM, SOUND, or GAME Creation)
Skills Commentary
N/A
POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION
21st Century Skills
Ways of Thinking (Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving)
An example of creative problem solving was my decision to use raycast to make our laser weapon since we knew that it would react to the environment in the way we wanted. Also, an example of critical thinking is how our team’s decisions regarding the game were all thought out carefully to determining if choices made will affect other aspects of our game and how they would be affected
Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)
Our way of working involved having three people on collab so that we could build the game asynchronously, then we had the other two team members work on assets independently that we could then place into the game. We communicated by using a mixture of the comment feature on collab and communication through discord.
Tools for Working (Info & Media Literacy)
The tools that we used when developing this project were Unity and Visual Studio. The other tool we used was YouTube so that we could find out how to make certain mechanics in our game that we had not worked with before.
Ways of Living in the World (Life & Career)
My team and I tried to separate our school and home lives as best as we could. However, there were times when team members worked from home when we were gone so that we would not fall behind.
Reactions to the Final Version
Peer: Caydance Petrone
“The movement is to antigravity it’s hard to control how high the character moves up. laser mechanic worked really nicely, Like how the beam decreases in size based on the object it is firing at. The response of the player in its environment felt very nice. Recommend a jump feature because it will help reduce the limits of mobility.”
Advisor: Sam George
“Prototype no comment”
Advisor: Brian
said that I was a strong presenter and that I was good at helping teammates follow in my footsteps
Self-Evaluation of Final Version
I feel that our project achieved what it was meant to since we successfully made the mechanic and that mechanic performed as desired. one of the things that we did achieve on the success model was the simplicity part. This was achieved because there was not much to the game it was a simple prototype meant to test the practicality of a laser weapon mechanic. The game was also concrete due to the use of sensory language such as the visual line that enters the game as feedback from the laser. The game has the credibility to it when you think of the larger game and that this cycle was meant to let others test the feel and functionality of the game’s core mechanic. The game was unexpected because of the fact that we did not make a traditional game instead, we broke the accepted norm and developed a simple prototype so that we could slowly integrate the mechanic into a larger game.
What I Learned and Problems I Solved
The main thing that was learned during this project was how to use raycast to make a reactive line that changes in response to player movement and position in the environment. A problem that occurred was that not all of the team members could access unity so in order to solve this we had them build their mechanics outside of the large project then send the files over to us. How I grew as a creative person was that by doing this project I began to look for more solutions that were unexplored and new to myself.
Grammar and Spelling
The tool used to check my grammar and spelling is Grammarly
The way that Ethan can confidently approach any production or assignment is unreal. Ethan and I have worked together for little over a year now and throughout that time he has always been an expert with UI elements in our game design. Ethan has the ability to handle multiple tasks at once and still go above and beyond with any task that he has been assigned. No matter how big or overwhelming a project can get I always breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I have a competent person on my team. Any employer or project lead would be wise to add Ethan to their team.
The goal for this production cycle of our game was to finish the game but this did not happen. However, we did make progress on the project however it was very minimal. I added in some of the environmental objects such as a house and some shrubbery
21st-century skills
Ways of thinking
My way of thinking largely involves a lot of me being introverted in a way that allows me to be alone with my thoughts so that I can generate ideas more efficiently.
Ways of working
My ways of working are very similar to my ways of thinking I prefer to be left to myself where I can confidently think about what I am doing and what I need to do next but I also don’t mind helping others if needed and did it quite often this last production cycle. However, this sometimes makes it hard to work because I do get overwhelmed quite quickly with how much my team members need me to help them.
Tools for Working
The tools that I work with are of course unity and visual studios but I also work with some drawing software at home. The program I use most often is Procreate but I sometimes use Adobe sketchbook.
Skills Evidence
idle and moving states
The (game creation)
Reactions to The Final Version
The advisory committee did like the amount of progress made from the last version of the game.
“Great game, you meet the requirements but include that in your presentation please.
Evaluation of The Final Version Storytelling Evidence From Made to Stick SUCCESS
Although the game progress is not a complete failure I feel that it does not fully succeed. This is because the game is lacking in its ability to be emotional. This does not mean that the game was a complete failure though. It has concrete game elements in its use of a controller since I mapped it using the standard for controller mapping based on my own research. Also, the game succeeds in being simple since it does not have any steep learning curve and learning how to play the game should be easy assuming that you have played any sort of video game before.
What I Learned and Problems I Solved
The largest problem that I had during this production cycle was I didn’t always have enough time to finish some of the tasks I needed to complete. How I solved this is I decided to set some time after school and during the weekends in order to keep up with the needs of the production cycle.
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