Dark Hack Progress

For the past week I have been working on a few things for the newly named game Dark Hack.

The first part of the week I spent my time creating and designing new levels that can be put into the game or split up and “chunked out” to other levels.

The first level players must catch a sticky bullet and break through a barrier that’s in their way. Next they must jump over a block and avoid turret fire before jumping on platforms to make it on top of the level. Finally after avoiding several homing bullets and deflector bullets, players must catch a sticky bullet from the final turret and break the block in the floor to access the end of the level. The second level players must first catch a sticky bullet mid air and aim it to destroy a breakable barrier. Next players jump up a series of platforms while avoiding a turrets fire. Next players must jump across and opening in the ground and finally avoid three turrets to escape towards the finish line. The final level players have several turrets firing at them at once. One is a sticky, two deflector and one homing bullet turret. Players can break the barrier several ways by either catching a sticky or deflecting a homing or deflector bullet. Once players pass this portion they must use the deflector bullet to allow two blocks fall that they can then use to access the end of the level. Final note here is that all art inside the levels to this point has been placeholder.

The remainder of the week has been spent on trying to get a menu system into the game. Here are the menus that I have been working on. Note menus will have a background image attached.

Work from the past week

My Group

For the past week for my group I have been working on some levels for our game. I have created a few different levels that embody either one or two different projectiles that the player must avoid.

Level 1: For the first level the player encounters a stick bullet cannon and shoot the first breakable block. Next the player encounters a gravity bullet cannon and direct the bullet over a wall and destroy the next breakable block.

Level 2: For the second level the player must use sticky bullets to break the first 2 blocks the player encounters. The next turret is a reflector turret that the player must direct the bullet off a wall and into the last breakable wall.

Level 3: The third level uses a divider turret that splits a bullet into 3 on contact with the shield. The player must deflect these bullets into 12 separate breakable squares to reach the end.

Level 4: The next level uses gravity bullets that the player must reflect over a wall and break 3 blocks before moving on toward the end.

Level 5: The last level is a maze that the player must move through. Along the way they encounter platforms to jump on, bullets to avoid and sticky bullets to break blocks to advance to the end. The end of the level is located on the top right.

Helping Another Group

For the other group I have been helping them out with some scripting issues that they have been having the past couple weeks. First I helped them by creating a movement script that allows players to move either up, down, left or right according to what button they pushed. This also decremented the current players number of turns. The next thing I helped them create was a turn script that cycled through 4 players during the game. Once the game was started a GUI would indicate which players turn it was and then how many moves that player had for that turn. Once a player would use up all their moves play would cycle to player 2, player 3, player 4 and eventually back to player 1. Only one player is allowed to move at one time. Finally I created a random number generator in this script that simulated a dice roll. This number would then determine how many moves the current player would have for that turn.

Digital Prototype Version 1

Digital Prototype:

Here is the latest version of our digital prototype for the second project:  Prototype

Contributions:

For our second group project I was put in charge of creating a paper prototype version. I started out first by creating the three mechanics functions which are Jump, Dash, and Shield on the paper version. For the first mechanic Jump I decided that the best way to use this was to create an arc motion for the player. The player’s maximum height on the board was 4 squares up while they could travel 7 spaces horizontally. When a player decides to jump on that turn their actions are moving up one space and moving to the right once. The same is for when a player is falling but instead of going up a space, the player would go down one space. The next mechanic is Dash and I decided that the player could use this to destroy enemies that are in the players path and to also increase their jumping ability. When a player decides to dash they would travel 3 spaces in one turn horizontally. If a player decided to jump immediately after dashing they could move up and over an extra space. Finally using the Dash mechanic took away one shield piece. The final mechanic was the Shield. Using the shield protected the player from enemy fire and could be used to reflect bullets back towards them. Every time a bullet interacted with the shield though the player would lose that shield piece.

Some additional contributions that I have made to the project are programming and level design. For programming I started to look at what code we had and tried fixing up somethings but had little to no success in that area so far. I plan I taking a deeper role into the programming end from here on out if there are any additional areas that need to be programmed. The next area that I have helped in is level design for using our mechanics.

Thoughts:

My thoughts now on the project are becoming more positive. I believe everyone is on board with what the vision of the project is going to become. I was having a hard time personally seeing what we all wanted as a group for the game, but after thinking about it on Tuesday I am now on board with the groups idea. The next thing that we are all going to have to get on board with are fun levels that correctly portray our games mechanics.

Paper Prototype of Humanity Void

Last week we created a paper prototype version of our second project currently called Humanity Void. We sat down and play tested the mechanics that we originally were set on as a team. These mechanics were jumping, using the shield, and dashing. Each of these mechanics were presented to the player during different times in the prototype but once they were allowed to use it once they could use it for the rest of the game. Overall I think that the prototype was a success but along the way there were some issues. The main issue that testers were having was keeping track of how many times an enemy shot and which foes were in range to shoot. This caused some people to go back and redo part of the game where they had missed on an enemy shooting a projectile. Our in class presentation of the game also showed similar results with the projectiles but everyone seemed to pretty much understand the mechanics we tried getting across. Afterwards though we were told and all agreed on just focusing on the one main mechanic which was the shield. I believe that we are now all on the same page as a group and can now focus on our project and make something really special.

Here are a few images from a play testing session that we did as a group:

Rule Book for Humanity Void

Here is the rule book for the board game version of Humanity Void that was presented during class. Inside you will find illustrations of the the mechanics that we included. We finalized the three mechanics as Jumping, Dashing, and using the Shield.

Humanity Void Rule Sheet

Game Document 2

Here is the second version of our game document for Humanity Void. Changes are going to be made to this version to reflect current work later in the week.

Humanity Void Concept Doc 2

Progress With Humanity Void

After our second go around with the presentation during class we all felt that things progressed but we were still stuck on something. We received additional feedback from other instructors and students that suggested that our theme and mechanics still didn’t connect. They saw the high concept of the game which at that point was a battle between man and machine but our mechanic of a energy shield was a symbol of the characters humanity. They understood the connection when it was presented to them but felt that players would never make that connection on their own while playing.

So after we received our feedback we went back to the drawing board and decided that the best thing would be to come up with three mechanics that we can base the game around.  This would offer the player some interesting combinations of things to do and make the game more fun. We separated for a few days and met up again back on Friday to present everyone’s mechanics that they thought of and the story boards associated with them. After discussing we all agreed on three: a shield, jumping and a dashing attack. These are at the present time being implemented into a Unity file for testing purposes.

Finally we divided up the task of creating a paper prototype version of the game that will illustrate these mechanics. Jon Paprocki and myself took on the responsibility to come up with an initial idea for the paper prototype and then on Monday when we all meet up we can get everyone’s input and change it accordingly. Finally these changes will be ready for Tuesday’s class along with a rulebook for testing purposes.

First Game Document for Humanity Void

This is the first version of our game document for Humanity Void.  Humanity Void is a 2D Side Scrolling Platformer that puts players into a virtual world where their character must hold onto their humanity and fight against Unity the virtual overlord.

Humanity Void Concept Document