Session #1-2 Production Project 2023

SUMMARY

Role

Character Artist/Things That Move

Intention (SMART Goal)

By Oct. 12, as part of team 6 as Character Artist, I will have evidence of making a simple interaction system in Godot by following Idle and Physics Processing Documentation for Godot for Session 1.

PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY

Leader in the Field

Consumer Softproducts

Consumer SoftProducts, otherwise known as Ville Kallio, is a Finnish illustrator who developed and published Cruelty Squad.

Source 2

  1. Having good feeling games is a matter of lots of play testing
  2. Implement similar mechanics to the games that you enjoy
  3. Adding unnecessary side stuff can be good for a game’s mood

Training Source

Godot – Idle and Physics Processing

Godot – Groups

  1. Idle processing allows you to run code that updates a node every frame, as often as possible.
  2. Physics processing happens at a fixed rate, 60 times per second by default. This is independent of your game’s actual framerate, and keeps physics running smoothly. You should use it for anything that involves the physics engine, like moving a body that collides with the environment.
  3. The frequency at which the engine calls _process() depends on your application’s framerate, which varies over time and across devices.
  4. The function’s delta parameter is the time elapsed in seconds since the previous call to _process().
  5. _physics_process() runs at fixed time intervals as much as possible to keep the physics interactions stable.
  6. Groups in Godot work like tags in other software.
  7. You can also manage groups from scripts.
  8. To create a node from code, call its new() method like for any other class-based datatype
  9. To delete a node and free it from memory, you can call its queue_free() method.
  10. You can alternatively call free() to immediately destroy the node. You should do this with care as any reference to it will instantly become null.

Project Timeline

Proposed Budget

Evidence of Team Planning and Decisions

PRODUCTION – ACTION

The Game

The game

Skills Commentary

SlideShow

extra commentary that wasn’t in the slideshow;

  • I created the car asset from scratch based on simple concept art that I had made last year
  • I created a simple system to make the car look like it has a power band and an optimal shift point
  • I made the car’s engine noise increase in pitch in relation to speed to make it sound like it is revving higher

POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking (Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving)

Due to me changing what the project was midway through the work period I had to quickly make a game prototype that I could present. I had to decide on what elements would be useful to the game, and creative ways of working around my own skill limitations.

Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)

I asked for help from the Godot forums, and collaborated with strangers to figure out why my code wasn’t working.

Tools for Working (Info & Media Literacy)

I used the Godot Documentation to understand how their code works and how to organize a Godot project and game scenes.

Ways of Living in the World (Life & Career)

In this session I improved my skill at writing my own code without the help of guides, which is necessary to have a career in game development

Reactions to the Final Version

The car looks good –

The game is quite dark and hard to look at – Odin

Self-Evaluation of Final Version

The game worked well, the exhaust getting visibly red doesn’t look great, and the contrast is far lower than initially intended.

Grammar and Spelling

Grammarly

Editor

Giovanni

Sanitatem Production Session 5

SUMMARY

Role

Character Artist (Things That Move)

Intention

By May 10, as Character Artist, I will have evidence of making expressive and efficient animations for the characters by following The Animation of Phoenix Wright by New Frame Plus for Session 5.

PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY

Leaders in the Field

Aryo Jati Darmawan Founder of Voracious Games, (Development studio behind Potionomics) with a predominant focus on the artistic direction and game design.

Game Rant Interview

ShackNews Interview

Nothing should stay the same for long

Focus on appealing character design

Exaggerate the aspects to lighten the mood and tone down the animation for a darker tone.

Include depth along with the expressiveness for good animation

Training Source(s)

New Frame Plus

Bang for your buck

Choose where to use animations

Pose Design

Expressiveness Demonstrations

Limited animation

Visible Shifts

Animation set demonstration

Strong and Big moments

Transposing to 3D

Project Timeline

The session starts on march 19th, and ends on may 10th

Proposed Budget

$7700 upfront and $15 dollars per game contributor per month past the first 3 developers.

Evidence of Team Planning and Decisions

Trello Page

PRODUCTION – ACTION

Sanitatem

Itch Link

This is the game that I worked on, and there is credits in the game to say what I did.

POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking (Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving)

I was a problem solver by fixing issues that had come up from having multiple people with multiple styles of programming. For example we had an issue where the game couldn’t tell when to remove potions from the players inventory, I learned through troubleshooting that the problem was due to the inconsistent use of namespaces. The solution that I found was to create a separate script that had the ability to transfer functions and variables up the namespace chain so that they were accessible to the all scripts.

Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)

I worked with Connor to troubleshoot a script that was intended to play a random walking sound effect.

Tools for Working (Info & Media Literacy)

I used the Unity Documentation to find ways to make my programs work.

Ways of Living in the World (Life & Career)

In this session I learned to be able to work better with others on scripts.

Reactions to the Final Version

The most important reaction was that the game looked unfun because the gameplay loop was simplistic and didn’t give much feedback. other reactions were that the city looked bad, the UI was very bare-bones, and there was little feedback to if an action did anything.

Self-Evaluation of Final Version

In my opinion we did the best we could with a bad idea. The game idea was written down on paper and it seemed fun then but in practice it was far to slow and the decisions were not interesting. Another issue was that we were aiming far out of our weight class in terms of complexity and so while we got the game done it was incredibly difficult to make the systems work.

Grammar and Spelling

Grammarly

Editor

Connor the sound guy

Production Project #4

Ron Frazier, Gumby Rocks, Creative Commons

SUMMARY

Role

Character Artist/Things That Move

Intention (SMART Goal)

By March 1, as Character Artist, I will have evidence of adding non combat interaction methods for the player by following a tutorial by Alexander Zotov for Session 4.

PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY

Leader in the Field

David Helsby

David Helsby was on the animation team for Destiny 2, and has worked on many other projects past then.

A GDC talk by David Helsby

The start of the talk

what makes a Bungie game feel like a Bungie game

Supporting Design

Design Pillars of First Person Animation

Making First Person Content That “Feels Good”

Pointing a weapon at a target

Posing in First Person

The Important Space on Screen

Training Source

Alexander Zotov

Environment setup

Collider Info

Text Mesh Creation

Code for picking up and UI

Project Timeline

by the end of February 6th I will have completed all animations for this session and I will start implementing them into the game

By February 20th I will finish the implementation of the animations and they will work in the game.

By March 1st I will have ensured that there are little to no bugs that are noticeable to the user. I would define noticeable bugs as something that is unintentionally on screen, or something that prevents the player from completing the task that they are trying to complete.

due March 1st

Proposed Budget

$7700 upfront and $15 dollars per game contributor per month.

Evidence of Team Planning and Decisions

We used Trello to manage the tasks that we needed to get done.

PRODUCTION – ACTION

The Game

Shroombies

Skills Commentary

Slideshow

In this session I made the interaction system and added an example interaction of grabbing a healing item. During this session I also made the level, helped working on the technical side of the particle effects, tuned the fog to fit the scene feel that we wanted, and I lit the scene to emphasize the healing item.

POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking (Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving)

While making the healing system I ran into the issue of the healing effect looping for far longer than it should have been, the healing effect doubled for one usage of the heal, and the debug log was showing that the heal was triggering multiple times. I solved this by learning more about different update methods and restriction methods. I solved the issue by making the healing effect turn off through an if statement that blocked all healing input for a unspecified duration. This solved the problem by preventing the method from triggering multiple times.

Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)

Multiple times throughout this session I needed to reference my other teammates scripts to learn how they did certain things and implement those methods into my own code. I learned how to understand the different styles of programming that each team member had.

Tools for Working (Info & Media Literacy)

I used unity’s documentation to build programs and optimize the scripts.

Ways of Living in the World (Life & Career)

In this session I learned how to read the code of other people, understand what the code does, and how to implement the functions in the code to my scripts.

Reactions to the Final Version

Hunter, a DigiPen student and advisory member, said that while the game has fun gameplay and looks like it can function, there is not a win or lose state in the game and as such this game cannot be called complete. Other notes that Hunter gave was that the UI was not fleshed out, and the enemy was not giving any sign that they were taking damage.

Self-Evaluation of Final Version

The final version of the game was a step up visually and mechanically from the previous version. the in game music sounded fantastic, the healing system is useful, and particle effects are significantly better. The

Grammar and Spelling

I used Grammarly for spell check.

Editor

My editor was the producer Spencer

Production Session 3

SUMMARY

Role

Graphics Programming/ Things that are seen

Intention (SMART Goal)

By Jan. 13, as CharBy Jan. 13, as Graphics Programmer, I will have evidence of making the RenderPipeline following a tutorial by “CatLikeCoding” for session 3.

PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY

Leader in the Field

Stayd Interview

The Process

Give a quick pass first

Use concept art and reference

Have intention behind decisions

Fast lighting by way of sins

Extracting texture variants

Wrapped Lighting

Training Source(s)

CatLikeCoding Render Pipelines

Notes:

Basic Generation of a Render Pipeline

draw calls

Directional Lights

Directional Shadows

Making point and spot lights

Making point and spotlight shadows

Adding fancy post processing

Project Timeline

due on, January 13th.

Proposed Budget

$7700 upfront and $15 dollars per game contributor.

PRODUCTION – ACTION

Shroombies

The Game that was made

Skills Commentary

Slides

I programmed the shader that is applied to the player model.

Connor made the music and sound effects.

Spencer made the enemy AI.

Jason made the game menus and UI.

Amanda made enemy animations.

Jaycie made the environment.

POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking

I was a problem solver because while I was making the graphics system there was a major issue with the rendering code was that caused the game to not display information. I solved this by adapting my shader code to work with the basic game without the broken code.

Ways of Working

I helped the team with the issues that came up. I used my knowledge of the Unity engine to help the people on my team to achieve what they wanted to do.

Tools for Working

The tutorial that I used in this session was made in an earlier time, so I had to learn how to update the systems in the shader to modern uses.

Ways of Living in the World

The skills that I refined here such as problem solving and communications will be helpful in the future where I will have less support from more experienced people and I will need to be able to work with a team and support a team.

Reactions to the Final Version

Nellie really liked the sliders and the accessibility options. Jessica liked the menu music. They both complimented the player model and gun.

Self-Evaluation of Final Version

The work that was put into the project was very well done and I am quite proud of what there is, but due to time constraints the level is not interesting to explore and fight in because of a lack of enemies. Another issue is that the shaders that I wrote were not very complex and they did not improve the product in any notable way. Finally the player did not feel satisfying to play, and there are still many bugs with the player movement. In the next session I hope that we (the team) can work to make the game even better.

Grammar and Spelling

I used Grammarly as a spelling check for this session.

Editor

Connor

Production Project Session 1

DEC GT40 terminal with FOCAL program By Morn, licensed under CC 1.0 Universal Public Domain

SUMMARY

Role:

Character Artist / Things That Move in the World

Intention (SMART Goal)

By October 14th, as part of team 6 as Character Artist I will have evidence of adding to the GDD art sections in Dundoc by following Le Duc’s Tutorial for session1.

PRE-PRODUCTION – INQUIRY

Leader in the Field / Exemplary Work

Kazuko Shibuya

Primary Source

Shibuya did all of the pixel art for the first final fantasy games. She managed to have expressive character animation without having much data to work with.

Training Source

Creating Templates

What to Do

Game Introduction

Game Art Location and Requirements

Publishing GDD

Project Timeline

The project starts on September 26th and ends on October 14th.

Project Budget

N/A

PRODUCTION – ACTION

Shroombies

The Game that was made

Skills Commentary

Slideshow

In this session I added sections to the game design document.

POST-PRODUCTION – REFLECTION

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking (Creativity, Innovation, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving)

In this session I had to take the code from a tutorial and rework it so that it will run in the game that was made by the team. when I followed the tutorial for making a first person gun, it was not transferring the damage onto the enemy asset, so I had to learn how to make the system work without the help of a tutorial.

Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)

In this session I had to be able to help my teammates, and ask for help from my teammates. I had an issue where I couldn’t get the AI to work in the game so I asked for help from the producer. The UI developer Jason needed help with having his code communicate with his game object.

Tools for Working (Info & Media Literacy)

In this session I used Stack Overflow for help with programming, Unity forums for help with the game engine, YouTube for help with implementing complex programs, and the official Unity Documentation for help with implementing unity specific code.

Ways of Living in the World (Life & Career)

The skills and tools learned in this session will be useful for a career in the future because problem solving will always be a useful skill, and my new knowledge of programming will help me in my future attempts to get a career in game development.

Reactions to the Final Version

Hunter’s reaction to the final version was that we should fix the compile errors, and create a backup of the game before making changes.

Self-Evaluation of Final Version

We should have used better version control so that we did not get stuck bug fixing issues that would not have come up if we had done proper version control.

Grammar and Spelling

Grammarly was used for as a spell check.

Editor

Spencer

Session 5 Production Project

Summary

Role: Character Artist/ Things That Move In The World

SMART Goal

By May 10th, as a member of team 7, I will make a complete system to allow the player to interact with my game. to do this I will use the tutorial series by Dave / GameDevelopment particularly the movement tutorials from them.

Leader in The Field

The leader in the field will be John Carmack. John Carmack was the lead programmer for the original Doom, Quake 1, and Quake 2. He also made the first “3d” game.

Training Source

My Training source for Making character movement was Dave / GameDevelopment‘s Movement tutorials.

For the basics of movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f473C43s8nE

For Jumping and sprinting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCxSjgYTw9c

Skills Commentary

Slideshow

In This session, I focused on making the basic movement of my game. I added WASD input, a jump key, gravity, and a climbing system.

Reflection

21st Century Skills

Ways of Thinking

This session stretched my skillset particularly hard, because not only my first time programming a game using C# instead of block-based programming, but I was also using an operating system for my computer that I was not familiar with. This led to many issues where Unity’s input handler would break in many ways and often would make the controls unusable. I fixed this by separating the movement systems from the camera controls so that they could both run in separate scripts.

I also had to fix an issue where Unity sometimes would loop the previous input if there were more than one other key being pressed and it would not release inputs if other keys were being used at that time. I fixed this by adding a state handler to my movement script that would add extra restrictions such as putting a cap on how many inputs the movement controller would take. This fixed the issue for the majority of the actions, but there are still some lingering bugs with it that I plan to sort out.

Ways of Working (Communication & Collaboration)

I worked alone for the most part, but I used the other people in my team as a resource for figuring out how to fix issues in my code and I would act as a resource if they had any issues with what they were working on.

Ways of Living in the World

I developed my ability to program. Before I started session 5 I was not able to understand most programs and how they worked and after this session, I was able to effectively use my new skills to create functions without using a tutorial.

What I Learned

During This session, I learned how to better take what I learned from a tutorial and transpose the lessons learned onto my projects. I also learned how to make a workflow and through the session I improved my workflow.

Grammar Checker

Grammarly

Blog Post Editor

Melissa