Acid Rain

So I was messing around with the particle system and we are trying to decide.. Enter the Matrix or Acid Rain?

More Brandon stuff Week 7

This week I worked on finding background sounds/music for the game. I attempted to convert some songs into an 8-bit track but failed to do so since I am not familiar with the software I was working with. After attempting to get songs for the game I managed to find three songs. Now I am working on making a splash page for the game selection screen.

2D Art and Game-feel

Particles, floor arrows to lead player, playtesting, fence texture, design stuff like adjusting camera, bouncing, game feel stuff.

We've been in Alpha for awhile now, and we're getting lots of good playtest feedback.  We've been focusing on game feel, and as such I'm getting to do more design work lately.  We've adjusted the camera, tweaked the physics, and worked out some better ways to give player feedback.  In support of this, I've moved over to making some 2D art:

A particle. Animated gifs don't preserve transparency, apparently, but you can get the idea.

An arrow.  We'll put swaths of them on the floor to lead the player down different paths.

Going forward, asset generation is going to take a back seat to making sure everything looks good in-engine.  I'll be working with Sarah on in-engine art, and with Brandon on UI.

UVs on All the Things

The project for the last week and on going into this next week is to UV and texture all of our models. In response to the feedback regarding the disconnect between our solid and textured colors, we opted to move everything to textured colors. This ultimately means more work for me, but will definitely help our visual cohesion. We also tweaked the color pallet, adding a pastel green and a brighter blue to flesh out the colors within our game. Hopefully this will make somethings pop more and better direct the player's eye through the level. I'm looking forward to more feedback, and continuing to refine our visual aesthetic.

Brian week review

This week I learned a lot about level design and creative ways to enhance a mechanic to make it even more fun. I have been working on the flipper and bumper mechanics. They still need a bit of work. I have been visiting the tutoring lab for help and guidance. Brian Gobar has been a great help with learning good game design.

Alpha Build

For those of you that would like to play our Alpha Build.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27868787/Pinball%20Alpha/Pinball%20rush.html

Controls:
A to shake the ball right
L to shake the ball left
R to reset

Alpha Milestone Vid

Hey all, your friendly Producer/Level Designer here. Go check out our Alpha Milestone Vid and please be as critical as possible (it's the only way we can produce a top quality game).

https://vimeo.com/77513572

Prepping for Alpha

Oh man, we're halfway through the quarter already and I don't think I've really touched one game all quarter (okay, I lied, Pokemon X while riding the L) except for this one. All that means is that I've been putting all the more effort into making this game fun and exciting for not just other people to play, but more myself as well. I want to be able to play this game and get into it. So to do that, I've been working hard on the level design and basic coding for the game, setting up things like the GUI and the score sheet. Now, as we approach Alpha, our Game Mechanics are finally tightening up. Of course there are one or two bugs to work out but those will get solved in the next week or so. As we speed through Alpha these next few weeks, I'm going to be turning my attention to finalizing level structure and making the game FUN! To do this, I'm going to be performing Beta Tests at the beginning of each week, starting 10/28, with the only focus being on fun. I'm going to have level layouts and have testers mark what areas where fun, what areas weren't, and how they think the not fun areas could be made into fun areas. This is basically going to go on throughout ALL of Alpha, as far as my discipline is concerned.

As the Producer, my role is now going to become bigger as we need to start overall beta testing, and figuring out who is going to be fixing what. This is the part where many teams could begin to slack off because they think they are well off. As the Producer, I am going to be looking to keep my team motivated through to the end, and put out the best game possible.

Textures, Textures, Everywhere!

This has been the week of textures. We finalized our texture scheme to be a pseudo-realistic pass using our color scheme, and have been apply textures like mad as I crank them out. Wood textures, brick textures, concrete, metal... We even have three versions of a textured pinball. I also did three preliminary style passes before we settled on our current texture aesthetic, pictured below.

Colored Realism (final choice) 

Solid Color 

Realism 

Most of the textures featured have multiple color variations and we established our skybox as well, which you will see in our alpha pass. I'm relatively proud at how quickly our aesthetic has come together and I look forward to continuing to polish our art.

Brandon stuff week 6

This week I worked more on sounds and managed to get a total of 20 sounds that are related to pinball. The sounds are simple pings and flicks with different types of materials that are being in contact with the ball. As well as getting the sounds for the game I also made some textures for marble and the asphalt ground. Last I made some 3D models for trees that are around Chicago.

Another Week Review

For this week I got the Bumpers working the way we wanted to. Also fixed most of the tunneling issues in the level. Furthermore I got the barrels to move out of the way. I went to the tutoring lab to get help for some of these to work well and was very happy with the help I was given.I played with the game and altered the speed a bit to make it a bit more fun. The flippers are still having problems and I can't seem to get them working.

Playing With Our Weenies

An overwhelming majority of the feedback we've received from so far concerns goals and motivation in our game.  I've been helping by adding what Disney called Weenies.  Additionally, we've been playing around with design-side ways of motivating the player to move around our world: we're adding flashing lights (a staple of pinball) to places that we want to attract player's attention, we're more generous with our points, we've changed the way points are represented to the player, and we've made hitting flippers and bumpers reward the player with a big speed boost and some auto-aim.  We've settled on a style for texturing and coloring our world, and we're pretty happy with the way it will look.

We're squeezing in an extra work meeting before next week.  On tap, I'm going to finish working on at least one more Weenie, and then I'm going to take a look at updating some of our older models to fit our style better.

One of our Weenies, a statue DePaul students affectionate named "Hans von Babycrusher"

A few views of a Brownstone building, the most commonly seen home in Chicago.

A section of the Chicago L Track, shown here with skeleton, which lets us make arbitrary paths.

WIP construction model for The Flamingo.

Coming together

Would you believe there was a point in time I didn't think this game was going to start coming together? Ideas were never an issue for our team, in fact we usually had too many ideas and it was hard to come up with just one. Even after we selected our theme, genre, and game, the ideas kept spinning around the room and we'd think up new features to add in. However, the ideas are now settling into place and as far as level design/gameplay mechanics are concerned, the game is starting to feel good. There were some level design hiccups during the presentation today, but from what I was able to get from talking to other groups, they really liked the look and feel of the game. In this upcoming week, I am going to be hard at work designing the level for the Alpha build, making sure textures are attached properly, and getting final level design kinks out of the way. I am also going to help to implement some placeholder splash screens, and maybe work with NGUI a little bit.

Latest build

Here is out latest build.
Controls.
Press A to tilt the ball right
Press L to tilt the ball left

Run through flippers for a speed boost.


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27868787/PinballRush!/PinballRush!.html


Current known issues:
-Bumpers arent as reactive as we'd like, that will change.
-Bumpers are going to be put on the corners to keep the player from getting stuck
-Flipper Speed Boost needs to be ramped up.

Brandon Design #3

Made a Ferris-wheel in maya and got some ideas for sound files for the game. worked more on how the level will look in terms of how it will feel. Also I am going to start to create some quick draft models of filler buildings to add some more visual attention to the game.

Weekly Review

This week I went to the tutoring lab and Brian G helped me create a better way to have some game feel for our game. He play tested the game in a couple of different ways. He told me that there is better game feel when the player has to push the ball to make it go faster than if the player moves the ball only by holding the button down. I was very happy with the help I got from the tutoring lab. The ball now moves by repeatedly clicking the space button.

The Struggles of Simple Art

In an effort to step up the art from our previous prototype, we're pushing the model aesthetic to be more curvy and less mechanical, in addition to working towards a visual composition within the game as a whole. Using the colors of the Chicago flag, it's been a struggle to build something that looks visually engaging, like pinball, and not way over the top. Due to issues with Perforce access, this has proven more difficult than expected, cutting in on work time and making it difficult to learn the Unity system. Our goal is to stay true to our simple color pallet and push our aesthetic with the models, using red as a guiding color throughout - be it to highlight where to go, or what objects hold more value.

Pinball Rush! Prototype build

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2m7fxe8gO0seTUtbWFpU2h0M1k/edit?usp=sharing

controls..

Tap 'A' to move left
Tab 'D' to move right
Tap 'W' to stop going left or right
Tap 'Space' for flipper movement


CHALLENGE: Make it over the ramp.

Tissue Testing report

Pinball Rush! Tissue-test summary

          

  Team Accidentally Plaid has just finished up the first round of tissue testing and we are happy to report that we easily found five people. The build we showed them was a very early stage of our game that we thought covered a lot of the core mechanics in a very small space, so that they could quickly test them out without having to keep progressing through a long level.

            We set up the play testing so that two people would be play testing the game at a time while others waited, and then when the first two were done they could fill out reports while more people started playing. This seemed to work well because the testers were able to engage in conversation with each other and learn about the environment that we gave them. When everybody was done we were able to chat with them briefly, after they had filled out the reports, and really get to pick their brain on how they thought the end result would (and should) look. Overall from the informal chatting we were able to ascertain that almost all of them have been waiting for this type of a game, where a pinball gets to just move around and engage a world, with some risk.

            Some feedback that was pretty common from most of our testers is that we need to create more things for the pinball to interact with (i.e. bumpers and flippers), as well as some collectibles  We also saw that as soon as they saw “the Bean” they immediately tried to get over to it and explore that area. We are going to include more of those architectural weenies in the game and create interesting spaces around them, perhaps adding points for discovering those places. Something else we found from the testing was unintentional, but there is an expressway ramp that is just sitting in the world, and a lot of the testers found enjoyment in trying to roll all the way over it. Something like this is small but could be huge in adding another fun factor. Something we need to review as a team is movement, because some players liked the current feeling of not having full control over the ball, while others wanted full control all the time.

            After the play testing and compiling the notes, Accidentally Plaid has come up with a list of things we need to change or add from this point. We need to have the ball move faster from the start of the game, such as having a launching point. This was something that every tester wanted and it was a feature we didn't have implemented. We need to change the way that the bumpers are interacting with the player, because right now they aren't really doing anything and the play testers all wanted to bounce off the bumper. The world also needs to be set up to look more like a city, with a level of randomness put into it. The flippers need to do more than just be a thing in the world, they need to affect the ball’s speed/direction and give the player a reason for wanting to interact with them. Another thing the testers seemed to want was a world with some aspect of vertical, such as being launched or guided up to an elevated zone, to add depth to the game. There also needs to be some form of a hazard that the players are attempting to avoid, to give the player purpose for avoiding things and progressing through the level. In addition to these things, we are also going to get the ball to increase speed dramatically, as a couple of testers seemed to want to feel almost out of control with the ball, so they could feel better about being able to control it. Finally, we are going to add a goal for players to accomplish, because our testers told us that there is no goal at the moment, so they had no reason to play it beyond testing and exploring the world. We have our work cut out for us, but we are excited to have this feedback.

Zoning in

We are getting pretty close to the alpha milestone at this point and are now shifting into high gear. I thought I would take the opportunity to add a second post for the week, and talk about the status of our team and how we are handling this unique project. After a slower start than I think we would have liked, I have to say I am very happy to see how we've managed to come together to start on the alpha build. Tomorrow will give us a huge chance to see how our work is paying off as Nathan and I will be tissue testing with five random testers. We will then write our report and see what we need to change before alpha in two weeks. I personally am excited for this testing because it gives us a chance to finally solidify or game mechanics and form a clear idea of how our level needs to be laid out.
We are also starting to move into some other aspects as well. Typically in alpha, sound is not included ore is an afterthought, however because pinball relies heavily on sounds, we have realized that a lot of our sounds should probably be included in the apartment presentation. Brandon, our sound designer, will be handling this and shifting a lot of his attention towards finding, mixing; and implementing the best sounds possible. Our artists have cranked or a large amount of objects and now our lead artist, Sarah, will be focusing a good amount of attention on texturing and creating the art style.  Brian is going to be working hard to implement all of the various features, while Nathan works on touching up models while I fill in at level designing.

Outsider suggestions and more models

Lots of solid progress this week.  I consulted with my good friend David Jackson, who is both an avid pinball fan and a former employee of Stern Pinball (THE pinball machine company.)  He had a lot of valid observations about the pinball experience, and we've incorporated his advice into our build.  Chief among them was the observation that success in pinball isn't just rewarded with points and flashing lights, but with gameplay - a multiball or a free play or such.  We're still working out the implementation, but we should be able to capture this part of the experience.  He also made the important observation that, in pinball, 'tilting' is not a gradual turn but a dramatic bump on the side of the machine.  We're going to play with the camera controls and turn rate so as to replicate this, which should help make our game distinct from similar games.

We've continued to produce models, including a large Buckingham Fountain setpiece that I'm particularly proud of.  In-engine it's made of three different pieces, but here's a mockup of the whole thing:

Level Design Re-Cap 2

For this week I did around 20 rough sketches related to level design and some concepts I had for the game itself. After talking to the team coder and the team artists I managed to cut down on some of the ideas to more manageable tasks for everyone to be able to handle. Next I did the blockout of the game to get the general concept for what the levels will look like before adding the official models. Then I used the rough models made by the artists and placed them into the scenes of Unity to make the levels look more like they will in their final form without the textures placed. Last I added some new types of pieces for the game such as a Three-way, Five-way, Six-way, and Ally way road to be used as pieces in the level editing to make it more simple when making a mock up of the game.

~ Brandon

Art Style Pass #1

The goal of this past week was completing a pass at artistic design for the game world. I constructed a pseudo level to capture the visual aesthetic we're aiming for. Our visual guidlines are as follows:

1. Clean - no 90 degree corners, curved, though unnaturally well cut (as though by a machine). In this, our goal is to capture the clean-cut feel of a pinball machine.

2. Chicago - Our goal is to capture the feel of the city.

3. Pinball - the thematics, the lights, the bright colors: we're going to create a Chicago-themed pinball world.

4. Low Poly - low poly count and block colors for simplicity of design.

Below is my first art style past, to envision what the game may look like:

My color pallet was red, blue, black, and white (and the various tones and shades in between). Using this color pallet, I colored and lighted the spaces above.

Week Review

This week we got together and talked about a bunch of different design components we could have and then cut the list to a few that we could do fast and will find out if they are fun. I got the code for the ball and camera working . The flipper and bumper needs more work.

Moving Right Along (Feel free to play the Muppets song)

No, seriously, feel free to. I love that song and that movie, but I digress. So this week our team has been working heavily to step up our game to show that we are taking our game seriously and that we as a team can create a fun one minute game. On my end, I have been playing a dual role of design and programming, while working on the production aspect of the game. Managing all of those roles has been difficult, but I'm finally starting to find the balance.

So this week I spent a majority of my time outside of the code and inside Unity itself, working with level designer to design filler areas, which is what we are calling the sections of track that are not going to be too crazy and are more meant to develop the setting of Chicago and let the Player feel like they are going through a city as a pinball. Currently, as the schedule has dictated, the level design is still in greybox but I am hoping to get some buildings soon and implemented them, so I can get rid of the ugly pink developers material.

As you can see from the track, these are a few segments from different scenes that I have put together, just to see how they would fit together. They are clearly different segments and will be used in different segments. 

 In the above picture, the ball is rolling underneath the track and the tilt feature (how the player will be able to move the pinball left and right) is working. The only problem right now is that the tilt function is a bit too strong and as the ball progresses through the segment, it begins to get launched into the area and gravity maxes everything feel real jerky. Unfortunately, I can't see what the error is and will probably head to the tutoring center to get another pair of eyes to look at it.

 

Here is the pinball rolling into the third level transition segment, where two choices have been given. Either choice would be fine, but we want to make this a game of decisions, so that the Player has to ask, "What if I took the different path?" This then creates the replayability that we are implementing into the game.


On the Production aspect, our team is scheduled to make some major leaps and bounds next week. At the next blog post, the plan is that some pictures of a textured world will be shown, as well as an early video of some gameplay. I will be working on implementing a GUI, as well as a rough main menu, that will have full features.

The Next Week

During this week we have created an asset list and have created models from that list. We also got gravity to work correctly on the ball. We will be getting movement and flipper function working this coming weekend. During our meetings we made drawings to depict events that we would seem fun and cool to have in the game. We chose the ones we all agreed on.

Trucking along

This week has seen substantial progress for team Accidentally Plaid. As far as programming is concerned, Brian and I are operating on schedule, making sure to get the major things coded first. The flippers and world tilt, as well as ball speed, have been chief things to focus on and they are on track to be done by saturday. I specifically focused on the world tilt, and getting the world to tilt smoothly, instead of jerkily. The end result was great, as the tilt now seems natural and should roll the ball from side to side. With a GUI just about done and ready to get put in place (at least, a first pass of one till I figure out NGUI), I'm turning to more of a design aspect to help Brandon get the blockout done.

Moving Forward

We finally have an asset list created! We may add more to it as we move forward, but the essentials are documented and up on trello. Nathan and I have been plugging away at the models this week, trying to get as much done as possible. It'll be interesting to see how the workload changes, once we move on to texturing, since I'm the only texture artist in the group. It should be simple, since we are aiming for a low-poly, caricatured version of Chicago. It'll mean a lot of block colors and simple lights, but I have high hopes if we refine and polish everything in the last few weeks.

Modeling!

I've started really cranking out models this last week.  We've decided on a beveled, machined, hard-edged look for our models to accentuate the sleek, clean atmosphere we're trying to create.  Texturing comes later, and I'm going to retool the older models somewhat to fit our aesthetic.  Without further ado: