Friday, April 26, 2013

Testing 3d GUI and interactivity solutions


Played with some GUI and holo-screen interaction ideas using Ragespline and PlayMaker. I think I'll be doing a lot with these two in the game.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Early perceptions on general design

Up until now I think I (and a lot of gamers) take simple things for granted. For instance while I'm sitting here making the Brevis player able to pick up and move objects around I'm realizing that Valve probably put a heck of a lot of thought and consideration into how far the cube is from the character when you're carrying it in Portal. Surprisingly it makes a big difference. My application is a little different but the problems are still the same and its mostly just when you are walking around this cube is banging anything it can find and getting hung up on every single corner to get even remotely close to, like its some kind of sick joke it wants to play on you... Primarily because of the distance but after bringing it in closer it starts taking up too much of the view and throwing it around with physics is harder to do because it doesn't create as much velocity when you spin.

This has always been noticeable between the lines, it was once said to me that 'if you make it look effortless then you did it right'... It is however... pretty easy to get hung up on these details when you're designing things. Ironing out the proper logic to make things work only to find that it doesn't really work like you expected or doesn't feel right and you aren't comfortable proceeding with it as is so you start making changes and figure out that hey, moving the carry point closer is going to affect several different things and I may need to rethink my approach to a certain puzzle mechanic I'm working on. I may even need to add in some faux accents to this to make this feel right - but then I'll have to polish those too.

I'm sure nearly everyone has run into this already at some point and to some extent but it has become more obvious to me now that I'm working on a First Person Puzzler with a huge reliance on Physics and overall 'feel' of things, and especially because I hit it so early - the first thing to design was the physics based object handling from the player directly to the environment plus up until now I've done mostly experiments and a top down space shooter and the mechanics were quite straightforward and felt pretty good out of the box so this hasn't been an issue so early.

Another thing I started noticing is that one of the tools, the Osmium Magnet you can move around, is going to be pretty hard to polish out and make it work well and it will require some pretty hefty changes to my original ideas for that mechanic which will have a big impact on the puzzle ideas I had planned and it just starts snowballing from there... all due to the amount of force required to pull objects in. I have to decide how to overcome that - polish it to work dynamically or heavily control how and when the component is used.

Lessons learned:

  • Test: At a high level often and early
  • Mix up: Cross test game components and mechanics to see how they play to avoid weak links you can't accept, you don't want to scrap something you spent a very long time on and make other things that depend on that idea that you now have to scrap
  • Prepare to change: And make huge changes to your Design Document because hardly anything is going to work as you expect it to, especially between other components
  • Keep an open mind: Scrapping work means you have to fill that gap. It can be discouraging but it can also be an opportunity for new ideas that you hadn't though of yet. I've got a lot of ideas through trial and error that I think have improved my original concept for the game.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Well this is nifty. Never tried blogging before..

This blog is to basically here to document the development of Brevis. It's my hobby game project being made in Unity3D and almost entirely constructed with PlayMaker.

The plan is for a physics based first person puzzler game. I'm a big fan of the Portal games and really enjoyed others like Braid, QUBE, and the likes of those. I also really like (who doesnt) the old Monkey Island series and such so I hope to be able to build a story in that can entertain you along the way - something I felt QUBE was lacking and I wanted to avoid making just a strict puzzler without significant gameplay and story meat for the player.

So far the barebone basics are working fine. I got the principle stuff jiving together, sorted out some magnetic component ideas, built the FSM controllers for one of the buttons, tinkered with physics weights on interactive objects and fused the first person controller into playmaker a little bit. In the coming weeks we'll see how things move along but I hope to have a working demo with several interesting mechanics up in a few weeks if I don't run into any major walls.

The progress thread is over on the playmaker forums:
http://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=3693.0