Platform Game: Construct2 Learning & Azure

What I learned in class.

We have had several tutorials dedicated to learning Construct2. We made a simple platform game with aliens, we made a simple AI based game, like a game of ping pong, we made a space invader type game and broke apart flappy bird.

To be totally honest I struggled to keep up in class. Coding, even simple l coding like in construct2 Doesn’t come easily to me, and it feels like I have to repeat something 50 times before I remember it.

However, something must have stuck in my head because after a freak out I realised that I could actually do it! I spent a solid week working on the mechanics and character design before sitting down and starting to have it out with Construct. It took me an entire day to figure out how to get my recycling bin working the way I wanted it to do.

I have to give credit to Hossein for getting me started and many of my fellow classmate for giving me advice and constructive criticism, my friends and family for test driving it and my husband who also helped me figure out some of the game logic and coding. And also my kids, for all their ideas and input.

Here are a few screenshots of my Construct in the making. I’ll post more about the creation in a later blog post.

Microsoft Visit

We were really fortunate that the team from Microsoft came in to talk to us and take us through how to create a simple Construct game and upload it to Azure. If we hadn’t had this time with them I am not sure I could have produced a game at all! They presented the information in an easy to understand way and were very patient with me when I asked them to clarify something or go over something again with me. Having them help me set up an Azure account was really helpful, plus reminding me that we could use our One Drive account as I hadn’t even thought about using that. In fact, I hadn’t used it at all. So thank so much to them for coming in and thank you to Britta for helping arrange that.

Huge thanks to Ovishesh Oberoi and the rest of the team, you can see what they taught us by following this link.

June 6, 2016

Game Review: The Scruffs Online

About this game: The scuffs online is a simple 2d platform type game where the aim of the game is to find objects hidden in a what seems to be the front yard of a hoarder. I don’t have a hugely massive attention span when it comes to playing games but I found myself easily drawn into the simple mechanics of just simply finding an object.

First impressions: I really enjoyed the graphics of this game and I found the characters oddly charming. The way the introduction was animated put me in the mind of Warner Brother’s Limited Animation technique, where the main bodies of the characters stayed still and only the mouths moved.

What I really liked. I liked the fact that this game is a based on a word search type activity, but having a timer and having the timer speed up if you get click happy adds a certain amount of risk. I liked the way you could get help from the dog, who would bark faster if you get closer to the object you have to find, but I soon ran out of dog treats to feed him. I’m not one of the world’s most observant people so I found even the initial levels quite challenging, which kept me more entertained than many people might find it.

What annoyed me. As I previously stated, I’m not very observant, and with the clock ticking down, and my random desperate clicking speeding the timer up I soon ran out of time and to start the level again. I am not a huge fan of having to go right back to the beginning in a game so I soon got despondent with it and gave up.

Game Play. The game leads you into the story quite well, with voice actors telling you the background and prepping you for game play. Game hints pop up on the screen when it’s evident you need them. The game only uses the mouse as the interactivity, so it’s reliant on you searching the screen to find the object you are looking for.

The nitty gritty. I found this game quite enjoyable and would most likely play it again. I am not sure what value at the paid version would add, this is something I’d only consider if I was totally immersed in the play, which at this point I don’t see happening.

You can try your hand at this game yourself on 2Dplay.com.

June 6, 2016

Brother Monkey World Warrior Game: Character Development and Mood Board

Brother Monkey – Love the world

That’s a working title, I’m not exactly sure what I am going to end calling my game, so if you have any great suggestions please do let me know.

As promised, here is a post about the development of my main character and hero of my game, Brother Monkey. Anyone who knows my family, know who Brother Monkey actually is, but for those who don’t, he is my daughter’s favourite toy, some might say, her one true love. She has said in the past “I’m not going to get married Mama, I’m going to live alone with Brother Monkey!” (We believe her!)

I did lots of googling on anime eyes and discovered a style called Chibi, I really liked the simplistic approach so I decided to try drawing that myself.

I started by doing a lot of different sketches of Brother Monkey, trying to get a feel for the direction the artwork for my game was going to take. I’ve included a few of my initial sketches. I had an idea that I wanted my characters to have anime style eyes to use as different expressions so I had a starting point of sorts.

I imported my images into Photoshop and then used my Wacom pen to styles the miniature Brother Monkeys I had created. The next step was vectorising my monkey so I skipped over to Illustrator to start work on that. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I wasn’t quite heading in the right direction.

Moodboard

After awhile I started to go around in circles, thankfully soon after this my husband sent me a link to some gif’s by Eran Mendel, an Animation director and designer and I immediately fell in love with his style.

With this style in mind, I went back to the drawing board and came up with an idea for my monkey. After playing around with this style in Illustrator and keeping in mind how small my character would be I decided to stick with the chibi style eyes rather than use the plain eyes in Eran’s Style.

After this, the process sped up some, but still took the time to work out proportions and create Brother Monkey’s backpack.

After three days of working on this, I have come up with the following character concept art.

Stayed tuned for the next step, I still have lots more work to do!

June 5, 2016

Game Review: Spider Monkey

Spider Monkey, round up. This game is a quick easy enjoyable came with super simple game controls. The graphics aren’t overly complicated but it all works well together. The objective is to rescue the tied up monkeys, get rid of the bad monkeys and earn points while you do it. To make the spider monkey jump you just use your left mouse button to click where you want him to go. At first, I thought that might be overly simplistic and easy, but I was soon found there was more complex than I first assumed.

What I really liked. I liked the easy interactivity between the mouse and the character, the way the little monkey swung around made me smile. I liked the way the screen shook when the monkey fell off the trees and ‘dies’. It’s a great visual reminder that your character has taken a fall. I like the gratification of points and the checkpoints. I liked the way the game introduced you to the story, using a comic book style images to explain the back story.

What annoyed me. I found the double swing quite hard to master, so fell and died quite a few times before I got the hang of it.

Game Play. The easy gameplay might make you think this game would be easy to clock, but my usual ineptness with games means that there is enough in the simple 2d game to keep me entertained for some a little while.

You can play this game for yourself for free in your browser at 2d Play.

June 2, 2016

Brother Monkey World Warrior Game: Story

The Brief: How can a game designer intentionally ‘break the mould’ when designing a game? – How can you integrate VALUE into a game design?

A REAL HERO’S JOURNEY!

That’s pretty daunting for me, I hadn’t really thought much about making games before, but I am always up for a new challenge!

we are designing a 2D game that we can embed value in. The actual brief asked if we could address a human theme and foster the integration of that value. So after casting my mind about I started forming a plan. A Brother Monkey plan.

The starting point: Well, I might not have played too many games in the past, but one thing I know about them is that they have a story. No matter how short the story, they always have one, and this is the first task of many as we work towards the end goal of making our own platform game in Construct2. After giving it some thought here is the story I have created for my game.

Game story: The hero of the story is Brother Monkey. He is loving, compassionate and lives in the jungle with his friend Kitty Cat Girl. They love their life in the Jungle, swinging and jumping from branch to branch, until one day something bad happens.

Men come with big diggers and start to knock their tree home down. The men are removing the jungle and replacing it with Palm Oil Trees where Brother Monkey and Kitty Cat Girl can’t live. They try to convince then men to spare their homes, but the men won’t listen. So Brother Monkey has to figure out a way to stop the diggers from destroying any more trees.

Once the diggers have been disabled Brother Monkey says goodbye to Kitty Cat Girls and go’s in search of the President to tell him to stop destroying their home. On the way, he teaches people about the importance of preserving our environment.

The goal: Save Brother Monkey’s jungle home and teach people about how they can protect the environment. Educate people about what kind of products could have palm oil in them.

Up next! My next post will have some character development!

June 2, 2016

Race to the End Board Game: Sheep Mania

The brief: To create a Race-to-the-end board game inspired by today’s newspaper. Tips: A game is fun, it’s a form of play, invite overall rules, goals, and formats. Capture the players interest with an attractive goal. Teach the rules in a seamless way, give feedback during play. What distinguishes this game from any other game or toy? Be creative – don’t limit yourself to games you have seen. It can be carried and expressive as songs, movies, or stories.

News Article: The first thing we did was check out the Stuff app to see what the new had to offer us in terms of inspiration. I was not disappointed when I viewed the following article, Stoned sheep ate cannabis and went on ‘psychotic rampage’ in Wales! Priceless!

Discussing the rules: I and my fellowTteam Kittikat had an in-depth conversation about what types of games we could create that involved stoned sheep. To be fair, we decided to leave the marijuana out of it and just go with herding your sheep to market. To add an interesting dimension to our game we added a fifth character to our four players, a Wolf, to chase our sheep.

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We gave our shepherds two die to play for their sheep and a third die for the wolf. A player would throw three dice, two matching dice are the moves for your sheep, the third die is moved for the wolf. The Player, or Shepherd as we call the player will move their sheep in any combination in an anti-clockwise direction until their moves run out, then they can move the wolf in any direction, if the wolf lands on a sheep the wolf takes it back to it’s ‘Wolf Cave’ and then that sheep is stuck there until the shepherd rolls a six on one of their dice. If a sheep lands on a blue active square the Shepherd will pick up a card. The Activity card will have an activity that the shepherd will have to perform. If they Shepherd performs the activity they will be rewarded, if they decide not to do the active they will have to do the forfeit.The main aim of the game is to get all four sheep to market, you can strategically prevent your opponents from also getting to market if you use the Wolf in a manner that puts their sheep in the wolf cave.

The Results: Stay tuned for those, because we haven’t yet tested our offical prototype out in class yet! Once we have done that at school, I’ll bring it home and test it out on the brat Pack!

June 1, 2016

Game Research: Battleship ahoy

Battleship, or as I have since learned the proper name, “Salvo” is the pen-and-pencil game also known as Battleships which the classic board game Battleship is based on.

The Rules. Quite honestly I have probably only played this game a handful of times, and it would have been on one of those ‘old school’ (because I really am that old) plastic board games with my cousin, because of the 50 odd games we had at home Battleship didn’t happen to be one of them. The one my cousin had wasn’t Starwars themed, but now I have seen this I really want one!

After doing a google I stumbled across a blog which listed how to play Salvo and where to download the paperboard from. So big thanks to Boardgames.about.com, in particular, Erik Arneson who posted the rules.

So to the best of my understanding, you need two players, a piece of paper with the board printed onto it (you can do that here) or some graph paper, or just be really good with a ruler and follow the image below.

The goal is super easy: sink your opponent’s ships before they sink all of yours. Easy right? Well, apparently not. Because you need to call out coordinates and hope that your ‘bomb’ will blast their ship, and depending on how big you draw you graph will depend on how long it will take.

Setting up the board, if you are not downloading the gameboard and printing it out you’ll need to both draw yourself two 10×10 grids on your paper and then label with letters across the top (A to J) and numbers down the side (1 to 10). One of these grids are yours and the other one represents your opponent.

Place you ships, you have four of them. A five-space battleship, a four-space cruiser, a three-space submarine and a two space destroyer. What you can’t do is place your battleships diagonally, they must all be horizontal or vertical.

How to play. You take turns calling out a coordinate on the grid, ie, A5, or C6 until you start to hit your opponents ships. If you hit your opponents ship they will say “Hit” and “miss” if it’s a miss, then you can mark off whether that square was a hit or a miss and eventually work out where all the ships are. Once a ship has had all its squares hit, it’s out of the game and you have to say “You sank my ship” or something along those lines.

The winner is the first person to person to sink all their opponents ships.

Our assignment

battleship2 We have been asked to change the rules of Battleship, play it out and see how it affects the gameplay. We decided to modify the game based on the short amount of time we had to play. So if you got a hit on a battleship, the next turn would give you a spreading bullet that would hit the coordinates in a diagonal line to the left and right.

the effects of this speed up the gameplay but also made it slightly more confusing as we had more crosses to plot at every turn.

I think we will stick to the traditional game rules for now, but this has been quite a good exercise in helping me think more like a game designer for the preparation of making my very first platform game with Contstruct2.

May 28, 2016

Undertale, a review.

Undertaleidiot

How to sum up Undertale, well I personally found it frustrating and annoying but at the same time oddly mesmerising. Undertale is a 2d Platformer that took me back to the games of my youth and had me reminiscing on our old Amiga 500. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t really classify myself a ‘gamer’ and if my ten-year-old son wasn’t standing behind me excitedly hoping from one foot to another (He’s played this one before) offering me helpful advice on how to progress in the game I would have given up before I ran out of HP (Health Points).

First impressions. It didn’t take long for me to understand the tone of this game and the path it would follow as evidenced by the above picture. But I stuck with it so I could at least say I gave it a good shot. I felt like this game was designed by a teenage boy who would delight in the fact that I was finding this game so annoying.

What I really liked. I have to give credit where it’s due, so on the pro list would be the interface. Right at the beginning you’re given the control options and reminded again during gameplay. I actually wrote the instructions down because I have a terrible memory but it’s a nice feature. The level structure is good, where you are led through the first obstacles before you are set out on your own.

What annoyed me. It might just be the fact that I wasn’t in the mood to play games but being stopped every few minutes to fight something, or having to randomly walk into an invisible wall over and over really detracted from the gameplay.

Game Play. I liked the game controls although I kept trying to use the mouse. I suppose I am very conditioned to be using my mouse to play games. There were few problems when ‘fighting’ characters were I wasn’t sure how to back out and ‘take mercy’ on the opponent. My inability to figure this out early on the game was probably what led to my downfall. I enjoyed the cute pixelated characters and environment which I found very kitsch. The music also put me in a mind of old school games like The Secret of Monkey Island and the Lemmings.

The nitty gritty. So, this game annoyed me. What mechanics are responsible? I’d have to say the repetitive seemingly pointless tasks, like falling into hole after hole, then being forced to have a pointless conversation with another character that is supposed to be helping you. I’m not going to lie, I was hopeless at this game. To start off I thought I was doing OK, but about five minutes after my son went to play with the neighbour I managed to loose all my HP and the game was over. However, the good news is I only have to go back and redo from the last save point.

“The best part of this game is watching someone else play it, because you get so annoyed and thats funny!” Ethan – 10 years old.

I can understand the appeal of this game, so for the low cost of $11.99nzd on Steam you have yourself quite the legitimate bargain if you enjoy this type of platform game. Am I going to play this game again? If I am to be totally honest, probably not, but my son probably will so consider that a win Undertale! I’m giving Undertale a solid 6 out of 10, because even though it’s not my cup of tea it entertained my kids while I played it.

Purchase your own copy of Undertale either on their website or on Steam!

May 22, 2016

Changes

freak-out-1 Well, as you can probably tell this website has been a bit neglected. Neglected, not forgotten. I’ve been busy behind the scenes doing the odd design job but my primary focus these days, other than raising my gorgeous kids, is University. I started a Bachelors’ Degree in Digital Design, majoring in Animation and Special Effects at the beginning of this year so instead of ignore my blog I will post how I am going and what I am doing. There are people who tell me they are interested in my journey to Maya Autodesk mastering so here you go!

So now I have stated my intention I guess I should give a short update.

I’ve completed four assignments so far. 3D animated bouncing balls, A Filmiute, A presentation on a still frame of Ratatouille, and a Short Movie utilising chase scenes. I’ve done well in the first three, still waiting on the marks for the forth.

Next up, a character walk assignment, a ‘test’ on animation theory, a Critical Analysis Essay and Game Design. The last three I AM freaking out about.

The above photo is a stock image representation of me freaking out about the upcoming assignments!

March 23, 2011

Tales for Canterbury – Now available for pre-order

Okay, so firstly I know its been a few weeks since I last updated my blog. And before you stat shaking your heads I am not going to apologize, because I have been busy 🙂 Which means I have lots of things to show you.
But I am going to start with this, as I am SO excited about it!

Tales for Canterbury are now ready for pre-order. And I suggest you do do that now as I they will sell like hot cakes. ALL the profit from these books will be sent directly to the Red Cross Earthquake appeal they have $512 and I am pretty pleased to say that I helped that amount because not only did I design the cover art work but I have already pre-ordered my very own copy! (In paper back of course as I just love the tactile feeling of holding a book in my hands and having them all stacked up on my book cases – I have a few books heh)

You can order your very own copy from randomstatic.net. The print copy is only $24.95 (including postage within NZ) and the digital version is a tiny $12.00! That is a complete steal (Oh and since I already ordered my copy I can tell you that you can get the print copy gift wrapped at no extra cost. Since this is like a little present to myself I asked for my copy to wrapped up!)