Activity 3 – Gameplay and Player Stories

The goal of the game is to escape the human prison and save as many of your fellow alien comrades on the way out. This goal can be accomplished by either avoiding/sneaking past the human guards, or by taking the fight to them by using their own weapons against them. There are many different types of human guards, all with their own movement patterns, damage outputs and health levels, the player will have to learn these elements of the game to progress through each level. The game takes place in a very distant future, where humans now have the technology for space travel.

1. As an alien, I will use my pistol to kill humans in order to save my alien friends.
2. As an alien, I will use firearms to kill humans to progress through levels.
3. As an alien, I will use a shotgun to kill enemies faster.
4. As an alien, I will use a grenade to kill multiple enemies at the same time.
5. As an alien, I will activate switches to open up doorways in order to progress through a level.
6. As an alien, I will use my movement to avoid humans and progress through a level stealthily.
7. As an alien, I will avoid saving my fellow alien friends in order to escape myself and progress through levels much faster.
8. As an alien, I will use a landmine to deal massive amounts of damage to enemies that walk on it.
9. As an alien, I will scavenge the game world for weapons to defend myself against the humans.
10. As an alien, I will try to use my weapons sparingly as some of them have limited amounts of ammunition.

Activity 2 – Game Look and Feel

Mood: Lonely, Fear

Style: Generic Pixel Art Platformer (Mario), dark colour pallete

Shape Structure: Square (maturity, stabilty, balance, stubborness)

Spatial Dimensions/Size/Boundary: Gameplay takes place in a human prison, the player is an alien trying to escape and save his friends along the way. Play is restricted to the jail. Dimensions are based on real life cells, with slight exaggeration in some areas due to the nature of a 2d platformer.

Setting: Far away future, where space travel has been invented. High-level tech is being used.

Representation: Humans are seen as the villains this time around. The aliens were taken against their will to be experimented upon.

Game 3 Reflection – Chi Yan Chau

Student name: Chi Yan Chau

Student number: N9316311

1. How you have approached learning new things and/or finding new information during the semester?

I have learned or found many new things during the semester, no matter from cycle one to cycle three. I am personally a game designer as I am studying game design as my major, many of the animations techniques and coding techniques are learnt through the tutorial provided by the units, but mostly I learned the techniques from online tutorial videos because many of the things covered in the tutorial videos are only basics so I will need to explore more in order to do more fancy effects in the prototype. Searching through official unity tutorial is indeed an essential for me to found more techniques that I have never ever learned. Overall, I learned new things through either provided tutorial videos or online resources from official unity and some coding forums which provides useful solutions to specific problems.

2. What additional, non-technical skills you’ve developed during the semester?

In addition, I have indeed develop technical skills during the semester. Throughout the semester, I have worked with two other groupmates in collaborating in three games, we need to have good communications in order to know who is responsible to work on specific work, as well as we might have concerns and questions about every activities we did in every cycle, asking each other advices are indeed another communication skills within group tasks. On the other hand, working individually is also an important skills I have developed, as a result time and schedule management is very important, especially for me, I had multiples of due dates of assignment around the submission date of this unit, I will need to distribute evenly of my working schedule, so that I will have enough time to work on IGB100 and other units as well.

3.  The most effective strategies you used for managing individual and team activities?

I found that the most effective strategies I used for managing individual and team activities are that we will have the compulsory “meeting” every Monday at the workshop session, it is important to let each other know what exactly we are doing in every individual task. As well as, having shared google drive and a facebook group chat is a lot convenience for sharing work with each other, sometimes should a group member contributes or share an idea, this method will be a more convenience method for sharing his thoughts.

4.  The ethical responsibilities associated with working in a team-based environment?

During every cycle, we have divided each group member in working within specific tasks. There are 5 activities throughout every cycle, in terms of fair work practices, we have also contributed with original contents to those activities, in those activities we have brainstormed ideas by ourself, so that I think we have pretty fair work practices. In terms of responsibility, we maintain every member doing 2 different tasks in every cycles, and it was going smooth and clean in every cycles, we do not really found problems in distributing equal workload. Thirdly, in terms of honesty, I believe that we have doing our works honesty, for myself, I believe I have correctly use free assets in the unity asset store and correctly cite those sources, I do not think there is deception throughout cycles. Last but not least, in terms of reasonableness, during the workshop, I believe I should have contributed much in terms of communicating, I am not a well-speaker, I often contribute my content through facebook chatting but rather than in workshop, I will need to improve my communication skills in the future.

Playtest report – Game 3

Student name: Chi Yan Chau

Student number: N9316311

Participant demographics

 

For the playtesting, I have invited 3 people, 2 from the studio and 1 who is tend to be our studio’s target audience (i.e. Bob). All testers have experiences of playing game with keyboard or with computer. This was done as to retrieve feedback from the studio as well as some feedbacks from what we intended the target audience to be. This playtest last for within 10 minutes, and that testers played the game without any remind from me. Before the test begins, I have asked each of the participants about their gaming preferences and background so to know more about background of participants. After the playtest, I also have interview few questions for them about their feelings and feedbacks for the prototype. I discovered that 2 of them enjoy MMORPG and 1 of them especially will play RPG style game.

 

Discussion findings

 

After the playtesting session, as different participants have different gaming styles. I have integrated their feedbacks about the prototype in the following table after a short discussion and interview with them, and asking them to give points to each question. This is also an evidence of data collection from the survey from them(1 is lowest while 5 is highest).

 

 

Questions	Player 1	Player 2	Player 3 (Target audience)	Average
Was the game fun to play?	2	2	2	2
Are the characters in game are enjoyable to look at?	3	4	4	3.67 (Highest)
Is the game world enjoyable to look at?	4	3	4	3.67 (Highest)
Would you be interested to play again if the game comes out as a final produce?	3	3	5	3.67 (Highest)
Was the enemy AI too difficult?	1	2	1	1.33 (Lowest)
The game sound effects were enjoyable to listen?	2	2	1	1.67

 

From the above table, it reflects few perspective of the gameplay experiences to player, including game balancing, character and scenery design, but most importantly the entertainment value of the prototype. The above table provides practical feedback for improving the prototype. According to the above table, the following were found for the need of improvement. The most important which is the lowest rating of each approach is that the enemy AI found too simple and mono to player, it only received a 1.33 average points, this reflect the enemy AI only do simple attack pattern and behaviours. Secondly, the game sound effects also were not enjoyable to listen as the second lowest average points of 1.67, the prototype does not include any soundtracks as well as only few types of sound effects were included in the game. These are the main issues engaged in the prototype.

 

Discussion findings and recommendations

 

 

Problem Encountered	Descriptions	Recommendations
Enemy AI	AI was too simple and only provides single pattern which player could easily detect their pattern and eliminate fastly so that the entertainment value drops	Creating multiple patterns of enemy pathing, some may perform a ranged attack after a melee attack and some advance enemy can chase player in a longer distances with more powerful damage.
Enemy outlook	Enemy has only one type of outlook which also make the playtesters not that entertained.	Creating multiple enemy types, in aggregate from the above issue, different types of enemies could provide different pattern of attacking and pathing. Some would be more harmful than others. On the other hand, creating a boss fight could also lead to a more diverse gameplay experience.
Sound effect	The game does not have attractive sound effect and most importantly the game does not have any soundtracks in it.	Creating more types of sound effect and create ambient sound effects is also important, player could feel more immersed in the game while the game includes more of the suitable sounds.
Game Objective	The game objective seems too simple and straight-forward to player	Providing more complex game objective or game world to the player, for instance create a game objective that the player must escape a particular area within a time limit in a maze, this can be challenging but also entertaining to player.

 

Reflection Cycle 3 – Jim Szymanski

During the semester, we were introduced to a new game engine called Unity. I was already familiar with Unreal Engine 4 so I already had some bases with game engines. I proceeded in the same way I did with UE4 to learn how to use it. I used resources available from blackboard as well as tutorial videos and by touching every button in the engine. I would say the last one is probably the most fun / interesting way to learn how to use an engine as you’re not limited by a tutorial explaining only 1 single thing.

I’m not too sure I’ve developed any non-technical skill this semester. It just reminded me how group work is always split unequally and often depends more on your teammate than in yourself. It may sound a bit cynical but in my case I believe an important skill in group work is too believe more in yourself and don’t leave things until the last minute, so you can be on time and eventually catch up with what people didn’t do / Force them to do what they must.

Despite that I believe we did some nice work anyway. We kept track of each other work through tutorials, Facebook, and the website. I believe it is important because even if for example activities are personal submissions, you often need previous knowledge (for example, my activity about objects and rules require the use of player stories, made by lance).

As for personal work management, I don’t think I’ve done well for cycle 3. For cycle 1 and 2 I was always on time / had some advance about my planning. But with the end of semester coming, the lack of motivation and a lot of assignments due (Plus a whole weekend spent at KG for a cross unit project in KMB216), I’ve been getting late on what I first planned. I probably should have been stricter on my schedule to be on time, even though I find it hard to do any good work when you’re not motivated.

Finally, I think I’ve already started to talk a bit about ethical responsibilities in the workspace. It is quite hard to force people to work or even tell them they need to do something. Because I our society where everyone feels offended about every tiny single thing and when they are not happy with what you ask them will just say that “it’s unfair”. I had this experience in a previous unit (INB280) and luckily my group was different this time. It is true we were probably not the most hardworking group and even sometime some work was not done, but if we reminded each other that we needed the other’s work to do our own, everyone would eventually do his own to not let down the group. I was very happy about this set of mind. No one was trying to lie or make the others do his work and everyone would agree on his tasks. When one would miss a class, he would always tell the others on Facebook the day before so we could plan what we would do the next day, send him information’s about what he had to do etc.

Overall I believe this unit was interesting and despite the fact I still don’t like group work at all, our group was nice and enjoyable to work with.

Our 3 games reunited