Demo Reel 2012

Hey everyone, here's my current Demo Reel, the footage from Medium Rare is a little laggy thanks to Adobe Premiere :(, I hope to update this a lot with more models and animations next year in my final year.

let me know what you think:

Semester Ending Blog

So it has in fact been a while since I’ve been blogging here, but I do have some new content to update with. During the yearlong Game Development Workshop project, my group members and I have developed a game known as Medium Rare. I have been updating you all on this in both the team blog and this space as well. Since I am in fact a 4^th year student at this school, I am currently enrolled in a course named “Special Topics in Game Development & Entrepreneurship” yea, you’re probably wondering what it’s all about since it’s a pretty vague course title. In this class our main focus of study was Serious Games. This is in fact a topic I’ve explored in an earlier class with Dr. Kapralos. 

Here’s a bit of history, two years ago when I was enrolled in “Computer Graphics” now being taught by Dr. Hogue and called something else, I was in fact assigned to develop a serious game that would be able to teach and entertain individuals interested and currently diagnosed with Diabetes. We learned the various techniques to developing a serious game and eventually came up with a Maze style game. The game was called “Defeating Diabetes”. The player would go through the maze with a limited amount of spaces, representing their sugar level. On the maze, there were also objects that the player could pick up on their way through the maze that would increase their sugar level, such as juice, meat, fruits and other types of foods. Each item had its own value of health that it would give you, and the player would have to make it to the end while maintaining its balance.

Here's a little screenshot of it, keep in mind this is from 2 years ago where we were being taught completely different stuff. This is made entirely from OpenGL and C++....not even any Maya Models:

What’s my point? Well I’m basically going to talk about the design aspect of a serious game. Our current game that we are required to create for this class is a serious game that is audio oriented and mainly for the visually impaired…aka blind. The game is called sound maze…here’s a picture of the main menu:

You’re probably wondering why it looks all flashy and graphic. During our study of this special topics course, we learned that in order to develop a successful serious game, it is important for developers to both capture the player’s attention and educate them at the same time. Most critics would claim that serious games and simulations are not really considered games at all, but really just multimedia tools used for digital based learning. Is this necessarily true? By developing our game the Sound Maze, I have in fact learned many things about the visually impaired and about sound in general… first let me explain the game.

The game plays in first person as the player proceeds through a maze based on the sounds emitted from different objects. There are floor switches at certain points in the maze that the player must step on in order to open doors within the maze, and also a final goal sphere that emits a sound to guide the user to the finish. If anyone was in Dr. Kapralos’s class today you may have seen our demonstration. We used many different sound effects, one being the main background song that was playing. Some other sounds include Beeps and tones of various pitches that would inform the player of where a switch is and also once a switch was activated. There were collision sounds depicting whether or not the player was touching a wall or had collided into a wall also. This game should be played with headphones in order to experience the 3D sound. The game should also be played with your eyes closed, which we did in fact playtest with. 

Upon play testing, I got cocky thinking I could half ass the maze simply because I knew which directions to go since I made the level. Was NOT as easy as I thought, I ended up getting lost several times because I was just trying to rush through it. Most players will find the maze somewhat difficult, though we do have different mazes that cater to different age demographics. I soon discovered that in order to get through this maze I would in fact have to take my time. Once I restarted from the beginning, I found it difficult to focus on the beeping noises of the switch, though I did know which direction it was coming from… so I decided to hug the walls to the left and proceed. I would have to stop once I collided with a corner. I slowly moved up and heard the beeping noise get louder. Several minutes later I reached my first switch and heard the satisfying tone. Seconds later, I heard another beep noise and ventured over to find that one… this process repeated until eventually I heard the goal sphere, there was a significant difference in the sound that it emitted, but it seemed SO far away. I did eventually complete the level, properly, with my vision blocked.

By being both the player and the developer, I learned first that being visually impaired does not prevent you from playing and enjoying video games. Just because a game is considered a serious game or an educational game it does not mean it can’t be fun or challenging. The gameplay that we created was in fact effective, because once I realized I did not know what I was doing, I eventually had to think and pretend I was actually blind in order to get to the escape. I think a blind person can in fact use these skills in their everyday lives. In our presentation today we did in fact compare our game to a real life scenario of a traffic light. Imagine a blind person waiting to cross an intersection, nowadays we actually do have those beeping countdowns that let the visually impaired hear when it is safe to go. In that scenario, the individual would hear background sounds of traffic and people talking, walking and doing whatever they please. The skills that have been taken from our came can be applied here since they would be focusing on the sound of the traffic stop… Yes I know it’s a very large comparison… what generally makes a serious game good, is the fact that there is balance between both effectiveness and fun. Making a game about a traffic intersection does in fact sound quite boring right? Generally we would have to make the game look amazing in order to really capture the player’s attention, this was really difficult because our players would have no sight. I think the whole fun factor differentiates this from being a serious game rather than a simulation.

The sound maze is actually pretty cool if anyone is actually interested in trying it. We do have to polish it up a little bit for the coming due date. Tweet/Facebook/E-mail me if any of you would want to try it out. I will upload pictures of the game very shortly… but it won’t really show much since you’re supposed to be blind. :P

I will also be uploading my Demo Reel on this blog so check it out, I definitely need to add more to it, any thoughts and feedback would be great.

This will probably be my last blog post for the year, if you’ve been following this at all thanks a lot, I assume we will be blogging again next year! Here’s to a good summer. See you again in September.

Week 10 - Storytelling

Though I do have a hard time hearing things and paying attention in the class, one thing we talked about in games these days is like the storytelling aspect in video games. For our game Medium Rare we actually do not really have much of a story… This game seems more like one of those kill time on your phone games that people would buy on their iPhone for like two bucks. As an individual I am quite disappointed with this due to the fact because I am actually one of those gamers who are really into the story aspect of games. Though I wouldn’t say it’s the primary selling point for me in a game, it is one part that I really consider when buying a game. 

Working at Best Buy part time in the gaming department leaves me with a lot of time to read up on different games and get opinions from other gamers as well as give my own. Some of my favorite story based games were from the PlayStation 1 and 2 era. These would include the Final Fantasy series from the very first installment to the twelfth. The majority of these Squaresoft RPGs in fact did a very good job with storytelling in my opinion. I think the storytelling originally is what gave me the interest in video games in the first place. Even back in the day when I would play SNES games like Donkey Kong Country, I would be fully interested in the stories. Even something like Mortal Kombat which was purely a brutal fighting game, they had a lot of different character backgrounds and developments.

My point right now is that I think most of the games that have been developed for this current technological age are lacking in the storytelling aspect. A lot of games like Call of Duty and almost any Fighting game such as the recent Soul Calibur V and Streetfighter X Tekken, have extremely poor stories and mainly focus on the gameplay mechanics and online systems. Soul Calibur V was actually one of the more disappointing ones for me because they had introduced many new characters and removed many fan favorites, and they had not even provided arcade mode endings for each character explaining their introduction and outro to the game like the previous games had. 

A game like Streetfighter X Tekken is selling very well and to many is recognized as the best fighting game of the era, when in reality it is lacking many things, the story being one of them. The story does not actually make much sense and is of course very poorly planned out. For a crossover series there is actually no relevance to the two game worlds colliding at all. Upon watching the initial trailers for the game, many expected huge rivalries between popular characters like Kazuya Mishima and Ryu. 

On another note, you have a game like Mortal Kombat 9 released last year, which has provided amazing graphics, a well thought out story that almost felt like a movie and welcomed players of the previous titles as well as new fans. It also gave a good intro and outro to each character even being in a biography section. Below I’ve attached the trailer for Streetfighter X Tekken so you can see what I’m talking about in terms of what people like me expected.

That's it for today... more after tomorrows lecture. Sorry about the delay on these.

Week 9 - Medium Rare - the Board Game

It has been quite a while since I’ve updated you all on this log. Through the past three weeks I have been very busy with assignments and stuff. But here we are! One of our requirements for our game Medium Rare this semester is to create a paper prototype model of our game. Though this would normally be in our Project Oz Team Developer Diaries, I’ve decided to talk a little bit about it here, providing a bit of my own thoughts on the task.

If you haven’t a clue about our game Medium Rare here’s a link to our team blog if you’re interested in reading about it --> http://gdwteamprojectoz.blogspot.ca/

For our game Medium Rare we’ve decided to take a bit of a Monopoly approach to it, where you can travel across the board and collect and bank cows… Weird… I know, but it’ll make more sense when we have actual visuals. We’ve designed the game to be more luck oriented game. The game also has a bit of Pokemon influence you could say, because we have the players playing as our protagonist hero alien and an evil alien, both trying to collect cows (gotta catch em all!) The good alien players will pretty much act like Ash Ketchum in Pokemon and….”befriend” the cow rather than battling it like the evil aliens will. Similar to our paper boy game in the past I guess. We’ve also added the mechanics of the chance cards which will have various effects on players. There will also be cow cards that players will get once they wish to collect a cow. We’ve added the basic board game movement mechanisms into the game such as the Dice Roll and on the tiled board. The tiles would have different squares with different effects. 

Overall it is going quite well, we have already come a long way designing both the front and backs of our chance and cow cards which I will upload in a future post.

Week 8 - Solitaire & Vegetables

Multiplayer Solitaire? 

Solitaire is a game that was originally designed to be a single player game. I'm not too familiar with the game actually. The only time I ever really attempted to play it was back on my old Windows 98 computer when the only two games were Solitaire and Minesweeper. Anyways, the basic concept of the game is to sort the cards in descending order by suite and number. The player has a deck that they can reshuffle to find cards and then sort them into side piles that they can organize their numbers. In order to turn solitaire into a multiplayer game, one possible method would be to have two people race against each other to see who can complete it the fastest. This multiplayer method would be played by two people. This was my initial idea that I thought would be remarkable. Unfortunately I discovered that this game already existed in the form of Solitaire Showdown.

So in order to build upon that idea, I decided that adding a point system may make the game a bit more competitive. Basically how this would work is that the two players would share the zones where the cards must be sorted, and a player would receive a point for each card that they place. Seems a bit too easy? But in addition to this, I’ve added a rule that if any player places more than one card in a row, they will receive a bonus point. This will allow some players to gain an advantage.

A Veggie lover's version of 'President'

The given task is to design a type of game that can inform players about season vegetables. I have chosen to design a card style game; I’ve decided to call it “Vegeta”. The game will basically consist of cards with many different vegetables. On the card there will also be a number representing the actual calorie value of that particular vegetable. Though this was not a requirement for this task, it is an added bonus to those who wish to learn about the different vegetables. Each card will be categorized under a different color. The blue faced cards will represent vegetables in season during the winter, the orange cards will represent vegetables in season during fall, the yellow cards will represent vegetables in season during summer, and finally the green cards will represent vegetables in season during the spring. There are also red faced cards that represent a vegetable that is in season all year long. The cards can be seen below:

In addition to these cards, there will also be cards that a player can play to change the season, these will have purple faces. These cards will be explained later and can also be seen below:

The game can be played by 2 – 6 players. There will be a total of 10 cards per vegetable as well as 10 season cards. The gameplay will play similar to the card game “President”, players will start in the winter season representing the beginning month of the year, January. Players can decide however they wish to determine who will go first. The entire deck of cards will be dealt face down to all players. Once done, the players will get to look at their cards, and the first player will have to play a vegetable card from the winter season. The next player will have to play a winter card also with a calorie count that is higher than the previous card if they can. If they cannot, one alternative they can choose is to play a season card. The season card will allow that player to change the season to one of the two seasons that are displayed on the card. At this point, they cannot play another vegetable card.  Another alternative would be to play wild card. These can be played during any season. Once a person cannot play on the previous card, the previous player will win the round and can begin the next round with any season and card of their choice. This cycle will repeat until all players have zero cards left.

Vegetable Calorie References: http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-vegetables-ic1100

Vegetable Season Chart: http://www.foodland.gov.on.ca/english/availability.html