Transcript

Hi, I’m Evan. And I’m currently enrolled in the MA in Indie Game Development course at Falmouth University. In this video I’ll be breaking down some of the work I did during this module. As well as giving my work context within my short term goals, studying at falmouth and my long term asperations in the games industry. I chose to enroll in this course because of the diversity of it’s content. I want to take my existing knowledge of game devlopment and not only improve upon it but also reinforce it with other skills. This is where the first module comes in.

Although my practical skills in game development are already strong, an area I can safely say I lack both knowledge and experience in is that of development practices. So far in any team I’ve worked in, there’s been little to no structure, or at best it’s just a vague trello board with some ToDo notes on it. So I was very excited coming into this module to see what I could from this into the various side projects I work on, both with friends and on my own.

Although I learned something every week during the semester, the two sections I felt were of most benefit to me were the two rapid ideation sessions. These allowed me to apply the knowledge I had gained from previous weeks, and reflect on them more deeply from a practical point of view.

Rapid Ideation 1
For the first rapid ideation session I wanted to step outside my comfort zone and tackle a topic that was completely new to me, the topic I chose was networking. I set myself the goal of creating a short demo that could be played by two people remotely. The theme for the session was given in picture form, it showed a character fighting a dragon. So after mind-mapping and brainstorming several ideas, the concept I went forward with was that of a simple top-down dungeon crawler. Where the players would progress through several rooms before fighting a dragon boss.

The first week was mainly speant learning the basics of Photon, the networking SDK I used. It quickly became apparent that developing a game with networking would require a completely different approach comapared to offline games. Once I felt I had a strong enough foundation, I started piecing together the game. It quickly became apparent that my initial scope for the game was too big. Although the final game didn’t feature the dragon boss from the orginal concept, I’m still happy with the finished product and knowledge I had to gain in order to make it. Although I think my initial brainstorming was sound, were I to redo the session again. I would focus my tasks better during the actual development, in order to fit the theme better.

Rapid Ideation 2
For the second rapid ideation my chosen theme was “rework”. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to revisit a past work of mine, and see what I could do with it. As the basis of this session I took a small game I had created earlier in the year as apart of a game jam. This game centred around bouncing a laser between mirror to hit a target. And I wanted to see if I could convert this game from 2D to 3D. I’ve been brushing up on my vector math recently so I added an extra challenge. I wanted the laser to bounce realistically off the mirrors surface. I achieved this by taking the mathematical formula for a reflected vector and implementing it’s logic into a C# script. By the end of the two weeks I had a playable demo that demonstrated the main mechanic I had set out to achieve. If I had any points of critisism on this session, I would say that as in the first session, my time allocation still lacked focus. Though I had improved over the first session and actually managed to demonstrate everything I had set out to, I feel had I speant less time in certain areas such as visual fidelity I could have added more content.

Conclusion
During the last 12 weeks I’ve discovered several aspects of myself and my habits in my development practice that I have noted and will be addressing going forward, into both my future studies within Falmouth, as well as my other ventures. During the rapid ideation sessions I noticed a distinct lack of focus in my development. I had a tendency to map out the requirements clearly, but when it came time to excecute them I abandoned the plan and simply did what I felt like in th moment. Going forward into future modules, especially the ones containing team-based projects, it will be extremely important to put an emphasis on structure. Outside of college, for a little over a year now, I’ve been working on a side-project with some of my fellow students from my last college. A game which we’ve released a short demo for and have been documenting the development of to a small following. So far our main approach to organisation in this project has been a disorganised kanban board, which rarely gets updated. Going forward in this endevour I’m sure the knowledge gained in this module will be of great help in providing the sense of structure the project currently lacks.

Upon further reading I started learning about the existence of software used in the industry known as an ‘Applicant Tracking System (ATS)’. These systems are “used to help manage and automate hiring and recruitment practices for an organization by providing a centralized location to manage job postings, filter job applications, sort through resumes, and identify strong candidates for open positions.” (White 2021).

Due to the increase in applicants in certain sectors, companies have had to adapt in order to streamline their hiring process. An answer to this problem is the ATS. The ATS can automatically filter applicants based on the companies requirements for the role. Unfortunately for the applicants, this means your application can sometimes be dismissed before it ever reaches a human.

A way to avoid this is to tailor your resume in order to fit the standards an ATS expects. Upon researching the topic, I found Novorésumé (“Resume Builder For 2022 | Free Resume Builder | Novorésumé” 2021), an online resume builder which, among other selling points, claims to be “ATS-Friendly”. I found the experience of revisiting my past work and breaking it down into concise chunks extremely motivating. Looking back seeing how far I’ve come in my work so far has me excited looking forward as to what I’ll be able to add to this CV in the coming months.

References

• “Careers Advice And Employability Information | Falmouth University.” 2021. Falmouth.ac.uk [online]. Available at: https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/employability [accessed 30 Dec 2021].
• WHITE, SARAH. 2021. “Applicant Tracking System: The Secret To Beating A Resume-Filtering ATS”. CIO [online]. Available at: https://www.cio.com/article/284414/applicant-tracking-system.html [accessed 29 Dec 2021].
• “Resume Builder For 2022 | Free Resume Builder | Novorésumé.” 2021. Novorésumé [online]. Available at: https://novoresume.com/?noRedirect=true [accessed 28 Dec 2021].

In order to define a community of practice, Wenger says it is neccessary to identify the following 3 characteristics:

• The Domain: The domain is the interest the members of the group share. “A shared competence that distinguishes members from other people.” (“Introduction To Communities Of Practice | Wenger-Trayner” 2022)
• The Community: The community is the relationship between the members of the community. In order for it to qualify as a community of practice, the members must interact with and learn from each other. “In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information.” (“Introduction To Communities Of Practice | Wenger-Trayner” 2022)
• The Practice: The practice within a community of practice represents the “knowledge base” formed through the community’s regular interactions. “They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice.” (“Introduction To Communities Of Practice | Wenger-Trayner” 2022)

Working from home during the covid-19 pandemic, establishing regular contact with peers and colleagues through tools such as Discord(“Discord | Your Place To Talk And Hang Out” 2022) became a high priority for me. While studying my Bachelor’s I stayed in touch with my fellow students, keeping up to date on each other’s progress and assignments. Without realising it at the time, I had entered into one of my first communities of practice.

• Domain: We all shared the same domain in the sense that we were all there together, working towards the completion of the same course.
• Community: This sense of community within my class was very strong, beyond seeing each other (virtually) in class every say, we would usually call each other afterwards to discuss the class and any work that had to be done around it.
• Practice: As each semester progressed, we would gradually develop our shared practice. If one person was falling down in a subject, they could easily reach out to the group and someone more proficient in it could share their knowledge.

Already in this course I can see the beginnings of another community of practice forming. Earlier on in the first semester I helped with the creation of our own Discord server for everyone on our courses. This has already seen a massive growth in popularity among my fellow students. It is a friendly environment in which we can discuss our work, gain feedback and help others feeling lost or looking for advice with their work.

References

• “Introduction To Communities Of Practice | Wenger-Trayner.” 2022. Wenger-trayner.com [online]. Available at: https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ [accessed 2 Jan 2022].
• “Discord | Your Place To Talk And Hang Out.” 2022. Discord [online]. Available at: https://discord.com [accessed 2 Jan 2022].

• S – 3D ‘Mirror Maze’
• M – The final artefact should mimic aspects of ‘Mirror Maze’s gameplay in a 3D environment.
• A – Using the Unity game engine and C# scripting.
• R – To fit the constraints of this sessions theme.
• T – The second week of the Rapid Ideation session.

The original game saw the player rotating the mirrors in order to bounce the light to hit a target. I created a simple character controller to allow the player to navigate the level, and a script to the mirrors to allow the player to interact with them.

Originally I attempted to implement a script that allowed the player to freely rotate the mirrors, fully showing off the laser effect. This proved too difficult to control however. Once more than two mirrors were introduced it became incredibly difficult to line up the mirrors in such a way that the laser would reach it’s target. It was because of this that I resorted to the original games method of snapping the mirrors to 90 degree increments.

After adding some free textures to the scene from a site called ‘3dtextures.me'(“3D TEXTURES” 2021), along with some on-screen prompts and effects to add some polish, the prototype was complete. While I don’t feel the work that went into the prototype is fully conveyed in what is shown, I am still happy with the end product.

References

• “3D TEXTURES.” 2021. 3D TEXTURES [online]. Available at: https://3dtextures.me [accessed 27 Nov 2021].

I decided to take this opportunity to revisit a game I had made earlier this year during a small game jam event. The game was called “Mirror Maze” and saw the player turning mirrors in order to bounce a laser through the level to hit a target. I wanted to see if I could take this concept and convert it from 2D, to 3D. Recently I have been brushing up on my vector math, so I wanted to take this into account in the session. I decided to add the additional challenge of realistically reflecting the laser off the mirrors surface.

As with the last session I decided to use SMART to evaluate my goals for this session

• S – Beam Reflection.
• M – The ray should realistically reflect off the mirrors surface.
• A – Using Vector math and Rays within Unity.
• R – I want to further my knowledge of Vector math and usefully apply it.
• T – The First Week of the Rapid Ideation Session.

• S – 3D ‘Mirror Maze’
• M – The final artefact should mimic aspects of ‘Mirror Maze’s gameplay in a 3D environment.
• A – Using the Unity game engine and C# scripting.
• R – To fit the constraints of this sessions theme.
• T – The second week of the Rapid Ideation session.

Ray Reflection

I started off by creating some mirror objects in Unity. I did this by applying a texture to a surface, that would display the feed of a camera placed slightly behind the mirrors surface. I then mimicked a mirror effect by simply facing the camera at the player, then flipping it’s rotation on the y-axis.

Once I was happy with the mirror effect I moved on to the lasers. I started off by creating a script which cast a ray, visualised by a line renderer, this was to act as my “laser”. I then made it so whenever the ray collided with a mirror object, it would “bounce” itself in the direction of the collisions normal, repeating the process were it to encounter another mirror.

After the foundation of the laser script was completed I began researching the math I’d need to create my final desired effect. I quickly came across Stackoverflow entries and other blog posts that simply dropped the code in front of me that would get the job done, but I wanted to look deeper and get a proper understanding of the formulae I was working with. The most useful source I found was a video demonstration by Jorge Rodriguez titled ‘Math for Game Developers – Vector Reflections’ (Rodriguez 2021).

Once I felt I had a strong enough understanding of the underlying math, I moved back into Unity and started adapting my laser script to properly reflect the incoming ray, as I had originally planned. It took some time but I eventually got the effect working to a level I was happy with.

At this point I had completed the my first task and was feeling pleased and motivated heading into the second week.

References

• McConnell, Evan. 2021. “Mirror Maze By Oscail”. itch.io [online]. Available at: https://oscail.itch.io/mirror-maze [accessed 4 Nov 2021].
• RODRIGUEZ, JORGE. 2021. Youtu.be [online]. Available at: https://youtu.be/naaeH1qbjdQ [accessed 15 Nov 2021].

SMART Goals

The topic from this week that stood out to me the most was that of SMART goals. SMART is “a set of criteria to evaluate goals”(“Week 5: SMART Goals” 2022).

• S – Specific
• M – Measurable
• A – Achievable
• R – Relevant
• T – Time-Bound

I decided to break down my goals this week using this acronym so that I could reflect back on them at the end of the week and evaluate my progress.

• S – Multiplayer demo
• M – Two players remotely interacting with a single game instance.
• A – Using Photons Network SDK
• R – I want to gain an understanding of game management across a network.
• T – 1 week.

• S – Dungeon crawler game.
• M – Multiple rooms for the players to traverse with a boss at the end.
• A – Using the Unity engine’s toolkit.
• R – I want to showcase the capabilities of my artefacts networking,
• T – 1 week.

Clearly laying out my goals gave me a new sense of focus and motivation moving into the session. I knew exactly what it was that I wanted to achieve and I had a clear sense of how to achieve it.

Rapid Ideation – Week 2

With the foundations of the networking laid out I moved onto the gameplay. I started making quick progress, adding in a playable character for each player that joined the room that they could independently control was simple enough with use of the Photon SDK. It was when I moved past this that things started to quickly get more challenging.

I took a break from programming and decided to add some sprites to the game to add a quick and easy bit of polish. I downloaded a free tile set from itch.io (0x72, 2021) and created a tile map for it in the Unity editor. In hindsight, while this did give a boost to both my motivation and the overall quality of the games aesthetic, by the end I’ll have wished I used this time more productively.

When creating offline games in Unity, keeping track of objects in the scene can be trivial since the scene is a contained space. The more I tried to build upon this game the more I realised I had underestimated about doing the same across a network. While the Photon SDK does remove a lot of the technicalities, hiding it behind simple functions, I quickly became aware that this style of game design required a completely different mindset. Something as seemingly simple as moving the players from one room to the next, something that I could easily do in a normal project, proved to be utterly head-wrecking.

I had intended to emulate the a screen transition similar to that of early games in the genre such as the original Legend of Zelda. Should one player move onto the next room, the screen would scroll up and both players would be teleported forward. This however proved far more challenging than anticipated. Since you are dealing with two separate instances of the game, the messages you send across the network are limited in what they can contain. They can only carry simple information, Ints, strings, they can’t carry object references. This threw me at first as it called for me to approach familiar problems from a completely new perspective.

Although I achieved the desired effect in the end, I spent so long relearning my old methods that I fell behind and left myself unable to fully meet my expectations for the artefact. I ended up adding some basic enemies for the players to “fight” in the form of bats, the bats would simply be destroyed when the player collided with them, unlocking the next room.

Although I didn’t reach the goals I set myself at the start of the session I am still pleased the experience gained from it. I now have new appreciation for games that incorporate networking in them, and look forward to working with this technology more in the future.

References

• “Week 5: SMART Goals.” 2021. Learn.falmouth.ac.uk [online]. Available at: https://learn.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/240/pages/week-5-smart-goals?module_item_id=9167 [accessed 22 Oct 2021].
• “16X16 Dungeon Tileset By 0X72”. itch.io [online]. Available at: https://0x72.itch.io/16×16-dungeon-tileset [accessed 25 Oct 2021].

The card that was selected showed a character approaching a dragon with a drawn sword. It was with this theme in mind that I was tasked with creating an artefact over the next two weeks. As with my previous prototype, I decided this should be in the form of a short demo created in Unity.

Knowing that I already possessed the ability to create small games in Unity I wanted to add something extra to give myself a challenge. I decided the game should feature networking as this is an aspect of game development I had yet to interact with. I was already aware of the Photon’s networking SDK for Unity(“Photon Unity 3D Networking Framework SDKs And Game Backend | Photon Engine” 2021), and after some consideration I decided to use it as the foundation for this project.

I knew the concept I came up with would need to accommodate multiple characters and after brainstorming multiple possible game ideas I settled on the idea of two characters exploring a dungeon before confronting a dragon boss.

Seeing as this was my first time using Photon, I knew I had to start by learning the fundamentals of this new tool. I started by watching several basic tutorials and intro guides to the system, the one I found to be of most help was by the YouTube channel ‘Blackthornprod'(“9 EASY Steps To Create A Multiplayer Game With Unity & Photon – Tutorial” 2021). These guides helped me to put together a simple lobby system.

As well as video demonstrations, I also spent a considerable amount of time reading the documentation provided by photon(“Introduction | Photon Engine” 2021). This allowed me to get a sense of what was possible with the technology before progressing further.

References

• “Photon Unity 3D Networking Framework SDKs And Game Backend | Photon Engine.” 2021. Photonengine.com [online]. Available at: https://www.photonengine.com/pun [accessed 15 Oct 2021].
• “9 EASY Steps To Create A Multiplayer Game With Unity & Photon – Tutorial.” 2021. YouTube [online]. Available at: https://youtu.be/93SkbMpWCGo [accessed 15 Oct 2021].
• “Introduction | Photon Engine.” 2021. Doc.photonengine.com [online]. Available at: https://doc.photonengine.com/zh-cn/pun/current/getting-started/pun-intro [accessed 15 Oct 2021].

Challenge Activity

The challenge activity this week was by far my favourite so far. We were tasked with taking a single artefact from a larger game or interactive product, and example given was “an inventory system UI for a game” (“Topic: Week 3: Challenge Activity” 2021). I chose to recreate the time mechanic from the game ‘SuperHot’.(o.o. 2021) This game centres around a character who has the ability to control the speed at which time passes. Time only moves when the character does, should the player stand still, time too would slow to a stop.

Given my experience with it, I chose to create my prototype in the game engine ‘Unity’. First thing first I needed a player, for the sake of this prototype I kept things simple, sticking to primitive shapes to convey my idea. Coincidentally I happen to be working on separate 3D side project at the moment, so I reworked the script I made for that game and stripped it down to the bare necessities I needed for this.

With the player in place I could now move on to the main event, the time mechanic. Unity’s time works off of a publicly accessible value called ‘timeScale’, mapping this to the velocity of the ‘RigidBody’ component attached to the player immediately gave something close to the desired effect. It took some tinkering, clamping it so it couldn’t make time go any faster than normal, and not stopping time entirely as this affected the player acceleration, but eventually I got something close what can be seen in the actual game. After adding a simple script to the gun object to fire sphere’s with red trails it was starting to come together.

In the game, the objective of each level is to defeat all the enemies on each level. With some time left to spare I decided to add in some basic enemies for the player to shoot. In ‘SuperHot’ whenever the player hits an enemy they shatter into pieces, while this was far too hard to do within the scope of this activity I decided to try mimic it in a simpler form.

I duplicated the main character and coloured it red, to match the enemies in game. I added a simple AI script to make it follow the player and if hit with a bullet fired by the player, the enemy gets destroyed, replaced my a mass of tiny red balls that spill on the ground before shrinking and disappearing. Although not as iconic of a look as the shattering enemies in the game I was still please with this approximation.

After adding a small environment for the player to walk around in and adding multiple enemies, the prototype was complete.

References

• “Topic: Week 3: Challenge Activity.” 2021. Learn.falmouth.ac.uk [online]. Available at: https://learn.falmouth.ac.uk/courses/240/discussion_topics/2993?module_item_id=9150 [accessed 12 Oct 2021].
• O.O., SUPERHOT. 2021. “SUPERHOT – The FPS Where Time Moves Only When You Move”. SUPERHOT – The FPS where time moves only when you move [online]. Available at: https://superhotgame.com [accessed 12 Oct 2021].
• TECHNOLOGIES, UNITY. 2021. “Unity – Scripting API: Time.timeScale”. Docs.unity3d.com [online]. Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Time-timeScale.html [accessed 12 Oct 2022].