Earthquake Rebuild

Ok, so these are my first impressions (I'm a hardcore gamer) and what I did and happened while I was playing the build 5/23/14.

When you enter the game there is no explanation about what is going on, I saw a lot of information on the HUD but couldn't tell what they represent.

Getting closer to the first "ovals" which I guess will be people, my first intuition was to press the left-mouse button but nothing happened, them I tried again with different buttons ('E', right-mouse, space, enter) and noticed that the numbers changed on the HUD: +10 points at the Happy face on the left and some numbers on the right.

I clicked with left-mouse pointing to the container and it got smaller until disappear in the middle of air, so I kept doing it with everything that I saw: more containers, piles of earth, tress (they have no action) and more "ovals/people".

My guess so far was that I had to collect everything that was on the way and click on the "ovals/people" because the HUD always changed and the points for the happy face were growing. At this point I couldn't access one of the people because (my guess) is that the collider for the tress are really big (probably taking the area for the leaves too?).

Just finished walking around the whole map, apparently I collected everything and nothing happened. I pressed ESC and discovered an interface with some more information. It explained a little bit more about my goal, the tasks are still not implemented and I could see that the containers that I collected are on my inventory. On the Help menu I found some interesting information about Building Mode, I tried and nothing happened, another box with some icons appeared on the HUD and no explanation on how to use it. Tried to do something, couldn't. I'm not sure if there is something implemented for Building Mode or not.

What can I say is that it's super hard understanding what you are supposed to do, the icons and numbers on the right of the HUD makes no sense at all, at least for me. I know that it is not even an alpha version of the game but I would at least show a GUI Text or something right before the game starts explaining very shortly the commands, what to do, how to access everything and after the player hit any key on the keyboard he can play the game regularly. That can help us to test the game and know what is going on, what was already implemented, the kind of things that matters so we can explore and help giving a better feedback.

Also I asked my girlfriend (she's a casual player and programmer) to try the game and write about her experience (shown below)

"The purpose of the HUD device in the bottom right corner is unclear.  It was confusing and I was unable to figure out what it was for.  Additionally, finding the menu that contained the information about the game (what is going on, what you're supposed to do, etc) took a while so I spent a lot of time initially just wandering around being confused about what I should be doing.  Build mode was frustrating because you couldn't do anything, but this is likely because that part of the game has not yet been implemented.  Also the HUD in the bottom left was confusing to figure out.  It was not obvious what the information was about.  It took a lot of experimentation to discover that the top line had something to do with finding the people/blobs and the second line was related to finding the crates.  The third line with the clock did not seem to do anything, again I assume it just has not yet been implemented.

More information about the stage of development and plans for the future would be helpful.  It is unclear what the final vision for the game is which makes it difficult to work with.  It would be helpful to know what all has already been implemented and what is going to be implemented soon, etc."

Learning from mistakes

I am seeking my knowledge from the amazing book The Art of Game Design: A Book of lenses by Jesse Schell, and right when I was stuck in my ideas and my lack of skills I read something that cleared my mind and helped me to get over it:

1. Prototyping Tip #2: Forger Quality - this is something that I have been always doing, I already want to make everything perfectly since the first line of code. To look very appealing right away so I spent hours and hours learning how to work with materials, textures, modeling, how to use some modifiers. Every time that I put something on my mind I tried to make it work - the problem is that more than half of them were only important to a final product and I was not focusing on my prototype, on the game itself. That consumed me a lot of time and after one week I realized that I still had nothing to work with.
2. Prototyping Tip #3: Don't Get Attached - That is very complicated when you have to develop a project and at the same time learn the technology that you are using, I wanted to make a lot of different things but I kept finding barriers and barriers to climb, seeking tutorials, watching videos and reading forums. That took me a lot of time that I could have been productive in another way, instead of trying to make all the ideas from my first brainstorm with friend become reality. I definitely believe that not getting attached to your ideas is a hard work, sometimes you truly believe that they are the best and that is going to work perfectly, they are a total success, but that is not how it works and I learned it on the hard way, hitting the same thing over and over again for the past few days without going anywhere.

Without giving any signal to Prof. Dr. Gordon Erlebacher, I had to give up all the utopian ideas (I will not be able to do them by myself on time) and focus on what matters, doing step by step and not rushing to build an amazing skyscraper without learning the basics to build an ordinary house. So this week I decided to give fully attention on my Directed Individual Study and I could come up with what I think it is a nice prototype and it allows me to design a new track (scene) in no more than 2 hours.

Tutorial: Training the players

The reason to have a Tutorial Area is to train players that have never played the game before so they can understand the input buttons, how to control the ball and the goal of the game.

This map is intended to be very intuitive and simple, a message will be shown before the user starts to control the ball explaining how to do it and what is his goal at that point.

The Tutorial Area's map -

1. Straight line;
2. Curve to the left;
3. Curve to the right;
4. Curve to the left and then right: 'S';
5. Ramp on straight line;
6. Curve after a ramp on straight line;
7. Curved ramp to the left;
8. Curved ramp to the right;
9. A whole map including everything above.

Before the final version, the testers will try two different versions of the area, one with walls to help the ball not falling down, another one without it.

Brainstorming

While talking with friends and receiving their feedback I decided to brainstorm on top of that -

• Different types of pins based on an animals;

• To make the game more interesting the player will have the freedom to choose between areas on a menu (map) and each area is represented by an animal, so if the player is tired to deal with "monkey-pins" he can go back to the menu and keep playing with a different animal that offers another environment and behaves.
• Environment is where that animal lives: how the background image and the track looks like. For "monkey-pins" will probably be a forest making an analogy with their natural habitat, for fishes maybe a track that remember a lake or underwater.
• Behaves - Each pin has it unique characteristic imitating the animal that it represents, for example: the "monkey-pin" may jump from left to right and they will only stop when you hit them, for fishes they can "swim" so when the ball tries to cross a river or lake it is slowed by the water making it more difficult to hit the "fish-pin".

• This map/world will be represented by an island for easy navigation of the player.

• Each area of this map has their own tracks, beginning with easier tracks but becoming more challenging as you accomplish them.

• After you complete a track you will receive an amount of stars:
• Fail: 0 star;
• Finished but with a bad timing (took too long): 1 star;
• Finished in an acceptable timing: 2 stars;
• Good timing: 3 stars.

• The player can go back an try it again until he gets all stars.

• During the track course you may find some heart shaped items, they will work as a second chance to the player, so if he fails (falls from the track) he will have the option to choose between trying again and do not waste one of his hearts or try again from the place where he lost.

• Global score showing how many stars the player collected so far.

• Background music changes for each area.

• Two special areas on the map besides the regular areas (with the "animal-pin"): 
• Tutorial: this is where new player can receive their training and learn how the game work. With very easy tracks and a lot of explanations the player will receive training before going out and play the "real" game tracks.
• Challenges: face more complex tracks with different types of "animal-pins", environment variations, traps, etc.

• Set up different types of input (the standard W,A,S,D did not work very well for everybody).

Now is time to start working on top of these ideas. What is coming as next step will be the development of the Tutorial area and the "Monkey-pin" area. After that I will probably work on the menus and interfaces, make it look nicer, seek for nice background tracks, better sound effects and work on physics and balance of the game.

Starting with a prototype

At first my only intention was to understand better how the tool that I am using works and to learn more about Game Design. As my professor said, Blender is very addictive I really have to agree with that! Maybe it is not the most powerful software available at the market now but I think it is an amazing entry-level software for people who wants to learn more about 3D modeling, game development and animations, it's free and open-source which already makes it great! You are more than welcome to explore http://www.blender.org/.

Back to what matters - I really wanted to model something funny and at the same time start working with the logic tool, play with the physics engine and test what I could do using only the point-and-click side of Blender (yes, so far no python scripts, shame on me). I came up with the idea of a bowling game, that would be simple: a ball, hit the pins and that's it. But what about the funny side? First I thought that would be cool using the monkey-face that it is native on Blender so I modeled a Monkey-face-pin: 

Monkey-face pin

Ok, it looks very stupid, I know...but it was a prototype so, let's move on! What more would make the game more interesting and not only just another ordinary bowling game? Why not add ramps and link them by a few flat boards instead of only a flat board? Could be nice! Also change the goal of the game, instead of hit the pins to knock all of them you must: hit the pins and make them fall off the board! So you can control the ball using the keyboard and with that you have to hit the pins and keep hitting it until it falls to the infinity background.

Basics concepts of the game

With that I already started working on the logic, physics and all I could come up with such as background music, sound effects for the collisions. I also wanted to add a score that counts how many hits (collisions) between the ball and the pins already happened. With that I created another rule for my game: the less hits, the better.

First version

What is working for now:

• If the ball falls off from the board, the game restart;
• If a pin falls off there is an inside counter that keeps tracking the amount of pins that already fell, if all 9 fall off the board the game freezes for a second and restart.
• For each hit (collision) the score increases by one.
• You can play using W,A,S,D.
• There are sounds: background music, when the ball is rolling and when the ball hits a pin.
• The Monkey-face pins rotates before getting hit by the ball!

With that done I sent the prototype to a couple of friends, skilled gamers (yeah, hardcore players) and unskilled ones (sorry to say the truth that you are unskilled). The results were pretty nice and I got a few feedbacks:

• All of them told me that they enjoyed the game, maybe they were just being polite but they do tried a couple of times to see if they could finish it with less hits.
• Those who are already used to games could finish it.
• Some of them asked to change the size of the ball, the force applied to the ball when pressing the keyboard to control it(too sensitive) and it felt as if the ball was not effective when colliding with the pin, it would not go away easily.

I decided to change a couple of things based on the feedbacks: make the ball bigger, the pins lighter, apply less force on the ball and this is the result:

Rendered image from the game

Game play of the game -