Game Design: Logic or feeling?

Hello guys, I hope all of you are doing well! Me? Just being me, the same old busy me.

This shall be the very first blog post where I am not showing off my work, the reason being that a particular discussion with some of the guys from my Game Jame 2012 team has got me thinking so I'd thought I should share my thoughts with others out there.

But first, congratulations to all of the Sydney and Wollongong Game Jam award winners! You guys deserve those awards :D

Anyway, the topic of said discussion was about game design in the perspective of an artist and a programmer. This conversation stemmed from @Gazza_N's tweet that I've brought up during our short discussion today on what we didn't do during the Game Jam. Gazza explained in further detail that while artists tend to base their game designs on themes and atmosphere, programmers base their game designs on logic and mechanics.

Being an artist myself, I can't help but agree with Gazza's statement about artist-game designers. In my rather recent career as a game designer I have been basing my game design decisions on how a game should feel rather than how a game should work. Flashback to Tuesday, where I was presenting to my boss the critical path for our game. Apparently I didn't actually do the stuff properly and I ended up suffering the wrath of boss on how I have missed the point of the critical path, especially on how I didn't consider the mechanics of player progression. In retrospect, this event has highlighted how an artist like me approached game design only by themes and atmosphere and how little we consider about mechanics and logic. Be as it may that my boss came from an architecture background, I was humbled to fact that I have plenty of things to learn in regards to game design and that what my boss had to say about game design was, much to my embarrassment, true.

Onto the other half of Gazza's statement about programmer-game designers, it is funny to note that another event at my workplace has underlined how programmers tend to design games based on logic and mechanics. Flashfoward a bit onto Wednesday; this event happened after the end of the emergency damage control meeting in regards to my blunder. This time around I was discussing with one of the programmers - who happen to be an avid gamer himself - about the pros and cons about a particular feature that I wanted to add into the game. Near the end of the discussion he mentioned that while my idea may be implementable, it may make further development harder due to restrictive mechanics. Again, goes to show how programmers approach game design from a development standpoint as opposed to artists.

Now back to the present. Gazza has philosophically pointed out that neither view points about game design from artists or programmers are right or wrong. He also added that, ideally, game design should have a good balance between art and programming; a balance between feeling and logic.

That last statement from Gazza reminded me of my closing statement from my discussion with the aforementioned programmer. After he gave me the warning about possible future complications in regards to my idea, I noted that I understand that while we must be wary about the mechanics and development processes, "If we put too much concern on the development process then the player experience will suffer, as it had been the case when we did our first public release." After saying what I had to say, I did not receive another reply from the programmer since then.

Whether I was right or the programmer just couldn't be bothered to argue with me, I will never know. However, that statement did point out one vital thing: however we try to balance logic and feeling into game design, in the end...

... We are all designing for the players' enjoyment.

- D.T.

Global Game Jam 2012: A short, straight-to-the-point, personal debrief

*Looks at the date of last post* *Looks at today's date* *What the FFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUU...!*

Anyhow welcome back to this rather neglected blog of mine. What happened to me since the last time I've posted? A lot of things really. Most importantly, I have actually diversified from pixel and vertex wrangling to game design! A~~nd, guess what! I've since been promoted and I now stand as Morf Dynamics lead designer! Yay~!

So you can guess since due to my current position PLUS fitting in gym workouts to my weekly schedules, it's no wonder I've been mostly absent during all that time.

Whelp, without further ado, what's new this time. Oh wait, did you read the title of this post? Yes! For the first time ever I've participated in 2012's Global Game Jam! And what an experience it was for all good, bad and worst.

Well since I don't have much time to spare at the moment, I'm going to make my account of the Game Jam as short as possible.

This year's Game Jam in Sydney is apparently so big that it was split up to take place at 2 venues, one at Rosehill Racecourse and the other at Woolongong. I chose Rosehill due to the closeness to my home, and I immediately regretted it during dinner on the first night. More details on this later.

As I had arrived 2 hours too early at the venue, I get to meet other Jammers before the action unfolded. By the time the Jam started I've already attached myself to a team of 8 people comprising of 4 coders, 1 composer and 3 artists - I was one of the artists.

And now, this year's Global Game Jam theme is not a word, but a picture. Behold!:

For those who don't know what this picture is, this is a symbol of the Ouroboros. Once we got the briefing, our team quickly went straight to brainstorming.

Immediately after looking at the picture, pretty much all of the guys knew what the symbol is all about. What we got out of the theme were a couple of key words: infinity, cycle, death and rebirth. From those key words we then thought up a couple of ideas of what game we want to make. In the end we settled on the idea of making a Metroidvania-esque platformer with the goal of breaking out of the infinite cycle of life, death and rebirth while making use of powers based on the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

The first night was pretty much spent on making quick prototypes of the game and creating concepts of the art direction. It was during this time that we've decided to attempt at a 2.5D side scroller game. In terms of my contribution, I have presented this concept image to team:

It was a quickie but it was enough for the team to decide on what the protagonist should look like. As a result I was charged with modelling the main character:

Funnily enough, due to the apparent androgynous nature of the character design, the team affectionately called the protagonist, "She-He". She-He took up the majority of my time during the first night due to several reasons:

1. This was actually based off a base model given by one of the team members. The problem is that the model provided was of a particular standard that rendered me having to spend a lot of time fixing and modifying the model to the standard you see right now. I literally spent the whole first night working on the protagonist's model.
2. I was working on a human figure.
3. It was my first time doing 3D models since my promotion to lead designer at my workplace.
4. I was a pedantic 3D modeller.

Unfortunately, because my modelling skills was too good for the person in charge of animation to rig the character in time we had resorted to revert back to the base model (which has an existing rig and skin weights) and modify it slightly to resemble my design. tl;dr - my model didn't make the final cut.

The early hours of the 2nd day was spent on creating the model for one of the enemies to be featured in the game. I was chosen to design and create an enemy based on the season of summer. Me being the expert 3D modeller, I was forced to design-on-the-fly while creating the enemy model since I only had enough time to look up just one reference image of a Praying Mantis on the internet:

The basic idea in my mind while modelling this creature is to amplify the aggressive features of a Mantis and to distort the anatomy to make it look like it came from another world. During this time I had to use time-saving techniques to speed up the modelling process (mainly by reusing geometry to make other components) since I had to also create UV maps for the animator to texture the Mantis.

What happened after modelling the Mantis was a bit of a blur to me as at that point I was becoming too fatigued to even notice the flow of time. However, what I do remember is that I was given other tasks (mainly concepts and 2D images) to do for the remainder of the Jam.

This was one of the splash page concepts that I created for the game; it was at that time we've decided on the name for our game:

At a later point I was assigned to create a font system to be used in the game. I drew inspiration from Skyrim's dragon language system for the font design:

Then later I had to design cave painting murals:

... And I think that's pretty much what transpired on my account. There might be other things that I had done but right now my mind's a haze.

But without further ado, here's the result of our 48 hour struggle: http://globalgamejam.org/2012/equinox

In personal retrospective reflection, due to the sheer size of our team (8 people!) our ideas grew too ambitious which in the end caused us to underestimate our goals and expectations, so in effect having so many team members kind of worked against us. If we had split up further or toned down our vision then our game idea and development could've been more manageable. Moreover the amount of time invested into visuals somewhat also delayed certain developments of the game, although due to the quality required that problem was a bit hard to avoid.

All in all, the Game Jam had provided an experience I've never had before and moreover my efforts will be exposed to the rest of the game development community. The most exciting aspect of the whole 48 hours is that I get to meet other people who are also into game development like me and to also share my skills with them while also learning new tricks and learning more about myself as well.

Those were the good parts, however those 48 hours at the Jam felt like a week's worth of work crammed into a short period of time. Even at this time of writing I still feel fatigued from the weekend. It was busy, frantic and not to mention humid as well.

Lastly, if the busy schedules were not enough, then there's the fact that all of the Jammers had to put up with the sub-par services provided at the Rosehill Racecourse. Food was practically inedible and insufficient (we had 3 cases of people throwing up after eating the "food"), and if we wanted to buy more food and drink we had to put up with the blatant daylight robbery from the venue. And lets not mention taking a shower over there - we had to be ESCORTED by security guards to the shower rooms due to the fact that they were located at some restricted area. I can honestly say that Jamming at Rosehill was like staying at some boot camp with all the minuscule rationing of meals and taking a shower there was comparable to being escorted to a decontamination chamber to say the least. [/rant]

But really, despite all the above negative things I could seriously say that if I were given the chance I would most definitely participate in another Game Jam. Of course - it was busy, it was stressful, but ultimately it was the most fun I ever had.

- D.T.

Eh - where was I? Oh yes...

Hello folks, D.T. back here after... how long? Don't know and in the famous words of a certain work colleage, "Don't care".


Anyhow to explain my long absence from updating this blog, I was actually involved with the creation of a teaser trailer of an online social game world created by the company I'm working in.

So without further ado, here's the trailer:



To explain my involvement in the trailer's creation; I was primarily in charge of the Meeble's (the humanoid beings featured in the trailer) character designs, models and textures, as well as having worked along with another work colleague on the trailer's post-production including sourcing sounds and music, the timing and sequencing of the scenes, and additional effects. In effect, this was my big chance to expose my capacity as a 3D artist.

Below is just a teaser featuring one of the Meebles, courtesy of Morf Dynamics:

To see more, check out the Mojikan Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/MojiKan

To see more information on what is Mojikan, click here. (Don't worry, it's a safe link.)

Anyhow~ now that I've explained what has been happening, time to explain what I "plan" (as in if I'm not too lazy) to do with my own 3D developments.

Because of recent events the swordsman character that was previously featured in this blog will be put on the backburner indefinitely. This time around, I'm working on a entirely new character concept - again, it will be a gaming character model designed for high end computer games, only except it won't feature much capes or another other flaps of clothing. Besides that, I had been working on a few pieces of digital art and will be featuring them in this blog in the foreseeable future.

Alrighty - See ya again sometime. Peace out!

- D.T.

Week 15: The beginning of Phase 2... BANG!

Ooh-Kay, D.T. back again with more pure Maya 3D awesomeness - almost as awesome as Bang Shishigami's explosive spirit of Passion! Love! Bravery! and Honor! (If you don't know what I'm talking about go Google "Blazblue")

...Alright, alright, so far the stuff in my blog has yet to reach the epic-ness of the manliness of the man himself, but I'm getting there!

But I digress; anyway here's another update to my personal project and this time the mannequin that I've finished last week is no longer naked.

All costume components have been colour coded for both of our viewing convenience; trust me you wouldn't want to see a model with grey all over. Anyhow, what you're seeing now is a 75% completed model of my gaming character; whilst the left arm armour and the helm are currently missing, some components of this dude's clothing needs to be further refined.

The above image is a closer detail shot of the swordsman's greaves (shin/leg armour). As you can most definitely see in the image, I have cheated a bit at the toes; I'll will probably fix that up, as long as it doesn't cost too much polygons. Besides the shins needs A LOT of working on; while making screenshots of the model I have discovered that I have forgotten about how the ankles are supposed to move and what parts of that area are going to be exposed when the ankles flex. One quick fix I can think of here is to raise up the part of the armour around the back of the heels; either way, needs more investigation.

This next image is a brief look at the clothing components around the torso area. The current models for the clothing are kinda rough as they're simply blocked out to give me a overall view of how the character's shape is going to look like. The shirt in purple and the green trousers most definitely needs more working on, otherwise I'm happy to leave the waist and thigh armours as they are. A new addition to the costume is a sash-like cloth that is hanging around the left leg; it's a feature that originates from my earlier designs that I did for this character but left it out at the final design due to time constraints and the lack of knowledge in using the nCloth simulator in Maya (I was still in my half-completed 3D animation course at that time); well since I have time to kill outside my working hours, I thought this would make a good experiment... Although I seriously need some help with this; the nCloth tutorials out there on the internet are either very vague or uses a flag as the only given example. *yawn*

Oh whelp, take it easy guys any I'll see you next time. Peace out!

- D.T.

Week 14: *Deep breath...*

*Shouts out profanities at the top of his lungs* Phew, that feels better.

For too long I have been refining this dude, but at last I can finally say that this dummy is now ready to play dress up as I can progress to the next phase of my project.

As you can probably see in the image above, I have substantially increased the poly-count on the model to accommodate the updated edge loops as well as a new direction for this project. As a result, the dummy alone sports a whopping 2390 polygons.

Above are detail shots of the updated arm mesh; proper edge loops now make up the muscle groups on the arm as well as experimental edge loops that constitutes the arm joint on the inside of the arm. The reason why I said "experimental" is because I have no idea whether it is going to deform well during animation. Retrospectively, for a gaming character that arm joint has way too many polygons; I might have to modify it or replace it altogether if things don't go well there.

Up next is the abdomen; and man, can I say that this gave me a run for my money. If I have to rank the amount of time spent on on this area, I'd say it'll rank 2nd behind the time spent on the legs (shown later in this post), the reason being that due to the new direction I'm taking (which is to develop a gaming character for at least higher-end computers) I can no longer afford to skimp off the edge loops. Due to how the abdomen was previously modeled, it took me quite a while to figure out how to modify it so that I can properly edge-loop it and yet make it still resemble my original concept. There was also another issue of blending different edge-loop groups together; that issue along with other issues regarding this particular area was solved through insanely lengthy trial-and-error.

Finally we come down to the legs. In my eagerness to somehow accurately reflect the muscle groups on a human leg, I literally had to strip off the previous version of the leg down to its basic mesh structure and remake the edge-loops all over again, hence why it took the longest to do the legs in comparison to the other parts of the body. I also tried to do the experimental edge-loops for the back of the knee, but determined that there were more than enough polygons on the model already and that due to model typology it was basically unfeasible to do so. Of interesting note, the cause of the dramatic increase of polygons also stemmed from making the newer version of the legs; since further vertical polygon divisions were done to the leg, it eventually affected the rest of the body in that it was necessary to do so to maintain edge-flow.

And so there you have it, a completed dress-up dummy for me to play with in my current project as well as future ones too.

----------

Just to give you an idea what I have been through to get this far, here's an extra picture detailing the number of iterations made up until the final one (V2 which is highlighted).

Peace out!

- D.T.

It's been... Damn I've lost track of time.

Sorry for the lack of progress update guys, there has been too many things on my plate as of late, including a family emergency and me undertaking a secret side project.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten this project but for the time being it's been put on hold to make way for other matters.

It's Alive...!

... Alright - maybe not, but hey at least now I have a template of a male human body I can work off:

 

Picking up from where I left off last week, I started modeling the hip and the legs. Unlike my modeling odyssey when I was working on the arm, the hip and legs proved to be less troublesome than the arms thanks to the lessons learnt from the time spent modeling the arms.

After the hip and legs came the hands and feet. Figuring that the feet need less detail, I spent most of the time modeling the hand.

 

I was a bit confused when modeling the hand since... wait a minute, I've just noticed a 5-sided polygon on one of the above pictures. Hold on, be right back...

There, fixed. Anyhow, modeling the hand took quite a bit of time since, let's face it, it is quite complex (and God help me when I rig the resulting character...). With a bit of help from modeling and anatomy references, I finally managed to complete the hand. The only problem I face now is the fact that the hand alone has around 200+ polys - much more than I bargained for.

Overall, the whole body contains 1496 polygons - somewhat below my expectations, but at least it should give me some room should the time comes when I have to add polygons.

Anyway, that's it for this week - peace.

- D.T.

P.S. - Shoot, them legs look a little bit too long...