I did three rounds of playtesting and people’s feedback was useful, but I haven’t modified it all into the game yet.
I added targets to the game, and I kept the two shooting modes so that the player can use them flexibly. Also, I fixed several critical bugs, including the problem that the 3DUI did not show up after pressing ESC while simply closed the game.
Playthrough Video
If can’t play it, check:
Final Critical Reflection
I feel very sorry that I couldn’t finish the story mode and show it in the final product because of medical reasons. Through this project, I learned a lot about Unity 3D production. This will be very helpful for my future work. I think the current project has basically shown the mechanics of the innovative shooter I envisioned, and it would have been better if I had added a multiplayer matchmaking mode and different reactions of the characters to different bullets. I’ll take the time to continue refining it after I submit it, and I hope to be able to bring out my original grand vision.
Case Study
Death Loop
Its background mechanics design and level design are almost identical to my initial vision, and the game seems like a finished product of my vast vision. This includes the need for the player to find a clue in a limited amount of time so that the clue can be used earlier in the next turn. And by planning the resources needed to advance the game at each stage.
2 Characters between “Police” and “Criminal”Break the LoopWho am I?Find the code then come backSaved by myself
I learned Cinemachine and the smoothness of the camera animation was greatly improved by calling multiple virtual cameras to capture the character.
Build Scenes
Build scenes for training levels, update the translucency function when the view is blocked by walls.
3DUI Implementation
I wanted the game to be more immersive, so I tried the 3D UI. Because of time constraints, the project still had some of the 2D UI presents, and after that, I wanted to be able to fully integrate it with the game.
Add AI-bot.
I use different codes to control the movement of the target and the feedback and behavior when it is attacked in different ways.
The main mechanism of the project is to reverse time. And I talked to some game makers this week on Twitter, who have made relevant functions. This is really a little difficult. Someone realizes it by recording the physical system of unity in advance, into an animation clip. Then play the corresponding animation through the timeline. The advantage of this is that the animation effect is more realistic. However, it can only be carried out according to the pre-set animation track, and can not let players actively control the mechanism. Meanwhile, if the animation duration is too long or the number of fragments is too large, the animation clip file will be huge.
I also saw other people implement time reversal with UE4, which is very similar to the function I want. He records a position every certain time, and then interpolates between these positions to obtain a smooth motion curve. I’m trying to do something similar.
When in doubt, make debug spaghetti to see what's happening.
Finally got the mesh clustering optimization pass in with variable tick rates per rubble piece. Time to blow up some structures!
I tried to make demo levels with HDRP and URP respectively, but I found HDRP is more complicated and takes up more resources, and requires higher computer configuration, so I chose URP to make my project. I am using the URP renderer system to achieve good graphics, and I will keep going for it, then it will be updated next week.
Character Model and Animation
I looked for some character models, but they were hard to combine with other skeletal animations, so I chose to use Mixamo‘s free models.
Again, I used part of Mixamo’s skeletal animation, which will make my animation editing process much easier.
For the weapon, I found the model of the pistol on a free site online and animated it through unity.
Twelve Minutes is an adventure game developed by Luís António and published by Annapurna Interactive. The game takes place almost exclusively in a small apartment suite and requires the player to repeatedly play through events of a 10-minute cycle to try to solve a mystery.
The game’s repetitive reincarnation of the plot to gain new clues to advance the gameplay is consistent with my game setting. But the problem with Twelve Minutes is that with its excellent voice acting, the script is limited and the pace of the game is too slow. Players are forced to repeat the same plot over and over again that they’ve played many times before, but they can’t skip the parts they’ve already experienced and directly choose a new plot.
Players play as time agents to catch time criminal. A single game can only have 5/10 minutes. Players can only touch part of the area within a limited time, and after repeated rounds, keep unlocking the puzzles to find the time criminal.
Additional Settings:
Add time gates with time retracing function. Two-player cooperative mode, two people acting together in order to complete all the quests within the time limit. PVP mode, a group of players to track time criminals, another group of players set time traps in order to escape.
Main Mechanics:
Similar to Tenet. Bullets will reset after being shot (like 10 seconds), then 10 seconds later bullets will shoot back. Time criminal can set items such as mines, projectiles, timers, etc. that reset time, and the time police can use them by collecting these objects, while the police come with items that can limit the area to prohibit the use of reset items, or use items that advance/actively trigger time traps.
Items
Clock: show the rest of the time
Injection: extend the single-game time
Time bomb: reversing time after explode (does not affect characters)
Bullet: shot and can be reversed
Goals
As the time police use repeated entries into the same timeline to gain clues, advance the plot and catch the time criminal.
Reference
Loki
After stealing the Tesseract during the events of Avengers: Endgame (2019), an alternate version of Loki is brought to the mysterious Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic organization that exists outside of time and space and monitors the timeline. They give Loki a choice: face being erased from existence due to being a “time variant”, or help fix the timeline and stop a greater threat. Loki ends up trapped in his own crime thriller, traveling through time.
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Tenet
The film’s plot revolves around reversing the entropy of things and people, resulting in time reversibility. Tenet makes reference to physics concepts including annihilation, the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell’s demon, the grandfather paradox, and Feynman and Wheeler’s Absorber Theory. It has a kind of bullets with “inverted” entropy, meaning they move backward through time.
Case study
Minit
The game’s premise is that each of the player’s lives only lasts for one minute, resulting in “a peculiar little adventure played sixty seconds at a time”.
This is very similar to the background setting of my project, where players also need to explore repeatedly within a time limit in order to keep advancing the game. In Minit, the game gives players different residences as archive points to ensure that players can have a different range of exploration within the 60-second time limit each round, which avoids too much repetitive content caused by too small a map.
This week, I have been working further on the game cases. I looked at a range of cases and selected four exemplars as material for my discussion.
Among them, Minecraft is a new case.
Minecraft-Blockdown Simulator
In this game, players will learn how to combat a pandemic, one block at a time:
Witness an Outbreak – See first hand how a single zombie can infect an entire village, if left unchecked.
Social Distancing – Toggle different social distancing measures, varying from free-for-all to a lock-down.
Run a Zombie Hospital – Discover the impact your decisions have on a zombie hospital’s capacity.
Blockdown Simulator allows younger audiences to understand the effects of social distancing.
Visualisation is the key behaviour of our time. As the Covid-19 crisis continues to disrupt lives and communities around the world, there have been many simulations demonstrating how social distancing can mitigate a pandemic.
However, these models can be difficult to grasp. In such a crisis, clear, relevant information is key to encouraging behavioural change. Minecraft is one of the world’s most popular games, with over 145 million active players each month. In Minecraft, villagers can be ‘infected’ by zombie villagers, who can then be ‘cured’ with the right potions and apples.
By switching between scenarios, players can see how quickly villagers turn into zombies, and how quickly hospitals become overwhelmed. The result is Blockdown Simulator: a simple, playable model that demonstrates how various social measures can mitigate a pandemic and its impact on healthcare services.
The Blockdown Simulator is by no means an accurate model of the Covid-19 pandemic. The crisis we face today has more complexity and factors than Minecraft could ever imagine. In building this map and sharing it freely, their aim was to initiate a discussion among players about social distance and encourage responsible behaviour.
Research
This week, I’ve done more research on games that encourage player motivation.
Jane McGonigal wrote in Reality is Broken, that we need four elements in the process of rewarding someone, and through it, motivate the individual. These include:
satisfying work
perspective of success
socialising
significance
Therefore, how to please players and satisfy their needs is what drives them to play the game. In turn, the absorption of the content expressed by the game and the workforce generated while playing the game are the fundamental elements that allow players to learn further and do public welfare.
Conclusion
This week, I have summarised the existing research, come up with a few directions to motivate players to engage in learning and public welfare. And summarized a design step.
Putting players in their place. During gameplay, players receive different feedback depending on the interactivity of the game. This feedback can deepen the player’s perception of certain things and thus lead the player to behave accordingly.
Involving players in the design and creation of the game. Engage players in public welfare by satisfying their desire for expression and showing off rights.
To use visualisation to allow the player to observe the impact of different actions on the progress of the game in a simple and intuitive way, thus lowering the threshold of learning.
To place the player in the research itself, as a sample or as a tool, using the large base of players and their subjective initiative to greatly increase the efficiency of the research.
A way of generic steps:
One point is that the style and elements of the game need to fit the theme. To give the player an idea of what they are doing.
Another point is to make the most of the game mechanics. Make the mechanics fit the qualities of learning or public welfare in order to play a substantial role.
Ultimately, players actively practice learning and public service by understanding the gameplay and accepting the game setting.
Bug Fixes In the final phase, we worked on fixing various bugs in the game, such as monsters spawning in the initial room and falling to the floor, and objects spawning in dark places on the map. We have addressed each of these issues by adjusting the level labels or the properties of the items.
Refining the Animations This week I spent a lot of time with the 3D Anim guys tweaking the game’s animations.
We worked on dozens of versions to make the character walk animations fit the game better. I also learned a lot about animation design.
What we aspectedWhat actually come out
However, we were not satisfied with the final result. (Note the position of the cane in the picture above!) The characters kept making awkward body turns or holding the staff in a discordant way. So we decided to abandon these animations for now, and I went for a mix of animations to ensure that it generally looked okay.
Playtesting We did a small-scale playtest. Most of all, of course, it was the two of us who did the testing. The game is on the hard side overall, which is in line with the hardcore positioning. Hanyu was responsible for the final tweaks.
Ultimately, the presentation of the game performs well. However, the overly high difficulty may require the player to go through many attempts to successfully encounter the boss and defeat her for victory.
Procedurally Generated Levels For the creation of the levels I used a combination of procedural generation and manual retouching. I watched some sharing as well as instructional videos and there were many videos that mentioned Houdini, which I did a brief study of. But I didn’t have enough time to use it in UE4. I still use UE4’s blueprint function to do it all.
Initially the generated maps had a lot of bugs, such as objects being too big or overlapping, so I fixed them manually.
I also rebuilt levels that were too confusing.
Before
After
After fixing and adding a few details, the levels came to life.
The placement of objects in the level also makes sense.
Sound Production During this time, I contacted a fellow Sound Art student and worked with her on all the sound design for the game.
Staff SFX
The sound effects sounded good and a dedicated partner was able to handle things better compared to the ready-made material in freesound.org.
Today, I’m going to talk about — How games enhance players’ initiative in terms of learning and public welfare through their interactivity?
First, let’s clarify a few definitions.
What is the interactivity of the game?
In computers, interactivity is the dialog that occurs between a human being and a computer program.
In the game, the game system will continuously respond to the player’s actions. This is the interactivity of the game.
What is players’ initiative?
Initiative means the ability to use your judgment to make decisions and do things without needing to be told what to do.
During gameplay, players receive different feedback depending on the interactivity of the game. This feedback can deepen the player’s perception of certain things and thus lead the player to behave accordingly.
What type of learning and public welfare can the game provide?
Due to the wide range of game genres, any discipline and public welfare can potentially be incorporated into the game. For example: environmental protection, scientific exploration, medical assistance, charitable donations, etc.
So, what’s the point?
In Reality is Broken, Jane said — Together, we can tackle what may be the most worthwhile, most epic obstacle of all: a whole-planetary mission, to use games to raise global quality of life, to prepare ourselves for the future, and to sustain our earth for the next millennium and beyond.
The United Nations has established 17 sustainable development goals, all of which can be used for the target of public welfare of the game.
And in 2019, the campaign “Playing for the Planet” was launched to promote environmental protection through playing games.
Game Cases & Aspects
Let’s take a look at the success cases that are already released.
The first example is a DLC for The Sims 4 – Eco Lifestyle. In this DLC, players need to improve the environment in which their characters live by acting environmentally friendly. This life-simulating gameplay will give players the idea to do so in real life.
The second example is Lords Mobile, which supports the anti-war movement by working with war child. It then partnered with Make-A-Wish International to help seriously ill children achieve their wishes. It organised a Charity Castle Design competition, where players sketched out castle skins and donated the proceeds.
A third example is EVE Online’s Project Discovery, which has so far successfully contributed to a number of important scientific research areas such as human cell classification, exoplanet discovery, Covid-19 analysis, and the study of human society.
Conclusion
So，How games enhance players’ initiative in terms of learning and public welfare through their interactivity?
One point is that the style and elements of the game need to fit the theme. To give the player an idea of what they are doing.
Another point is to make the most of the game mechanics. Make the mechanics fit the qualities of learning or public welfare in order to play a substantial role.
Ultimately, players actively practice learning and public service by understanding the gameplay and accepting the game setting.
Video
What’s Nest?
The current topic is solid and specific, next I will further flesh out the game case study and the results extracted from it, and study some literature research as a supplement and aid to make the essay look complete.
During these two weeks we have completed the design and modelling of the staffs. We distinguished them by their different attribute characteristics. Any staff is made up of 3 parts and can be broken up and reorganised. We have 30 basic staff styles, the following are examples.
Rendering in Maya always has problems with materials and colours, but they work well in UE4.
Monster Logic Design(AI) While I was designing the staff, Hanyu was writing the AI for the monsters. we added behaviours such as patrol, attack, escape, paralysis and even added a hate queue to cater for the diverse reactions of the monsters.
Hanyu also recorded a video of the basic 2-stage attack logic of the boss.
Numerical Balance
After finishing work on the staff, I had to shift my focus to designing the numerical balance. Because the staffs are procedurally generated, they are highly random. We divided the staffs into qualities, and as players got further in the dungeon, they would receive more advanced staffs. I designed dozens of basic staffs and added a degree of randomness to their values to ensure that players get a different staff each time. The staffs all work well, but the game as a whole is very difficult, and the multiplayer improves this significantly. There are some issues with the character’s attack rhythm and mana recovery, which we still need to test further.
