Josh Lee

I have finally begun to dabble within Unity in a more hands on sense as our track’s have been placed out by the engineers based on my map designs. Since many of Unity’s controls are similar to Maya, it’s easy to manipulate level objects as needed and place obstacles and collectibles. Playtesting is essential and something that we need more of as we go along. The level works when being controlled via the keyboard controls but when it comes to actually using the Kinect the game gets pretty hard. We need more space between obstacles and collectibles so that players can efficiently dodge obstacles whether that’s through jumping or lateral movement. Soon enough we’ll have it submitted to IGF. Can’t wait to hit this milestone!

Below are some sneak peek photos. Actually, not really. I just wanted to highlight some of the tools and way that Unity works similarly to Maya. You’ll see that I’ve got a coin collectible highlighted, and it is currently in the movement tool. What I like about Unity and Maya is that they have similar controls. The movement tools allow you to manipulate the objects position on the map, the scale tool allows you to make them large or small, and the rotation tool, drum roll… allows you to rotate them. These are all very simple observations, but here is the point: The use of these tools give me more skills with which to produce and design games.

What’s great is that I’m getting to the point where I can create assets for ingame use, place them within the engine, and see how they look. Texturing is still a large challenge for me, but eventually I’ll get to the point where I can get these assets in game. It’s great to see how certain programs build upon each other. Maya allows me to create the art assets, but it seems to have set a standard so that I can create and manipulate environments easily in Unity. The next challenge is learning to program, but honestly, I think my efforts should be spent more on thinking about design and polishing my art skills in Maya.

Another fun thing that I’ve been using within Unity are pre-fabs. These are tools where you cancreate a set of assets that you can populate easily throughout the level. This eliminates tedious copying and pasting of placing every single coin on the track. However, this does come with its drawbacks as well- these prefabs can be inflexible. However, they save me from the work of copying and pasting every coin. What I’ve been doing is placing a prefab down and then editing by adding or subtracting coins. We also have a zig zag coins prefabricated as well and it plays nicely through keyboard controls. However, when playing with Kinect, these are placed too close together when physically moving from side to side. I can stretch out their spacing by adjusting the prefab, but it’s not always optimal. Many a time I have had to go in and still tweak each asset one by one. So hypothetically, the prefabs make for less work, but I find that I still need to retouch most of them when placed so that the experience is better for the player.

Another thing I can help with recently is by doing quality assurance for the art. Kevin has had me take all of the assets that have been submitted into Unity and make sure that there aren’t duplicate faces, useless faces (ie, faces that we’ll never see in the game – like the bottom of the tree trunks -so they can be deleted to save on polys), and also that there is a standard nomenclature for the assets that we’re using. This helps the artists so that they can work on other assets and also helps me practice the skills I’ve been learning in Maya.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! What happened to that coin?

We have continued to iterate on the game. Rather than having multiple track types (ground and water), we are going to only have a ground track and cut the idea of the animals running/swimming through water as that set of animations would be too time consuming right now. I have also advocated for a forking path that will give players the opportunity to play the level differently. It also givers us the ability to create an “ideal path” where players can achieve a higher score via a faster run through the level. There are newish poses for the game’s new animals. The goat’s pose is still similar to the bull, the rabbit’s pose is your arms wide over your head still, and the tiger’s pose has players holding up their hands like a cat getting ready to pounce.

Finally, our modular levels are proving useful; we can quickly lay out a track for the game so that we can test to make sure the tracks are working efficiently. Since Unity has a terrain builder within it, we can also create a landscape of sorts around the track to give the level life and make it something more than just flat landscapes. We’ll be adding lots of art assets to it hopefully in the form of trees, caves, buildings and maybe other animals so that our Zodiac becomes alive.

Below is a picture of us in action with the poses that I’ve finalized.

Ashley is in the goat pose. The pose itself is grounded and actually very similar to the bull’s pose in the first build of the game. However, Jorge and I are tweaking it in Kinect so that it is more forgiving. That allows players to place their first wider (ie, outside of their hips) or more narrow (to the midline of their body). This creates a more enjoyable experience for the player so that they can focus on the game at hand rather than fighting with the pose.

Troy is in the bunny pose – it’s silly and elevated pose and hopefully elicits a connotation of surprise and excitement. Rabbits are hyperactive creatures, so in my mind this pose reflects the excited mind of a rabbit. It’s a higher pose than the others and creates a different feeling in the body (a stretch through the upper torso), and such activity is stimulating for the body to add to the game’s level of activity.

I am in the tiger pose. Gameplay tip: You don’t actually have to lift your leg, but you can if you want because the Kinect is actually looking for how your elbows and hands are in relation to your shoulders. That being said, hypothetically, players could do different things with their bodies as long as they’re doing the poses’ distinctive features (torso grounded and low for the goat, hands high, separated and spread apart for rabbit, and hands and elbows in their appropriate position in relation to the shoulders). This is another strong pose, it’s aggressive, and when I do it, I like to tense my body. This gives the sense of a tiger’s strength. Granted, players don’t need to tense their body when they strike the tiger pose, but it was a guiding idea in the design of the tiger.

Some of the emerging gameplay that can come out of these poses is for players to hit these poses while playing the game. Can they turn into the goat will scampering side to side to dodge the rocks and collect the coins? Can they jump and turn into the rabbit at the same time while avoiding logs? And can the player rapidly change from the tiger into the rabbit to maximize their speed in grass areas but also jump over logs quickly? It’s fun to see how fast you can switch between poses and what that makes for gameplay as you travel through the level.

Fall semester has begun. Our team has reunited and we’ve got a new set of goals for the game.

The game will become less linear. We will be creating tracks to give the illusion of turning and tracks that split as well to give players the option to take alternate paths. We’re also changing our animals. We now have a goat, rabbit and tiger. The game will still be on rails and the goal will be to reach the end as fast as possible. We discussed the merits of other ideas and drew upon games such as Agent Dash and Temple Run as inspiration and found ways to meld some of those games ideas together. When players come to the forks in the road, the game will automatically put them in the left turn if they’re on the left side of the track and vice versa. These little things should hopefully prove simple, but I’m sure the engineers will have their work cut out for them. There is a lot more on my shoulders in terms of design, but I believe using modular level design will help us whip out levels quickly and offer fun and frantic paths for players to use. We also need to tighten up the poses and offer variances for them.

It’s gonna be a busy semester, but man, it’s gonna be good.

Further insight on to some of the upcoming design changes:

Linear Design to Branching Design: We have a wonderful assortment of track pieces for the final level. Last semester we only had a linear level. This was due in part to the fact that the engineers had not been able to implement our level editor. This level editor will require a lot of engineering from their side – the animals must be able to stay on the track and not fly off. Eventually, we will apply this to elevated track pieces. By utilizing a level design that is branching, we give the players more options and reasons to replay the level. Since it is a student game, we will probably only get one level out of this project, so if we can shoot for a well-polished level with multiple branching paths, the game will have more life rather than just single play through.

Changing of the animals and their poses: We opted for these three animals – Goat, Rabbit, Tiger – because we feel that they will be more visually dynamic than the original cat, rat, and bull. We chose the goat because it still maintains the ramming aspect that the bull did within the first build, but also because we think it’ll be more interesting to look at than the bull. It’s more cute and I think the character’s polygonal build will read more goat than the bull ever did. The rabbit is our small character – larger than the rat – and I think the connotations with its abilities make more sense to players – rabbits jump high, run fast, and are comfortable in dark tunnel environments (like our caves). I think the choice of the tiger gives players a strong character to play as in this game and is in stark contrast to the choice of goat and rabbit. Where the goat is dopey but stalwart, the rabbit cute yet frantic, the tiger is strong and noble. It will be a solid choice for players in terms of speed and jump height. Its pose is an aggressive one, distinguishing it from the goats pose (a grounded silly flexing pose), and the rabbit’s upbeat, excited pose (hands high up in the air). These poses retain their dynamics from the previous semester (high, medium, low), but will have subtle changes that give more context to the transformation.

Oh, and next week? I’m gonna be in Burning Man! Time for some inspiration!