MD2 Final GDD

Animated cow
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This week my group and I banded together to finalize and complete our game design document. We put a lot of work in by distributing jobs and continuing the production of our game. This week in the GDD I wrote about the games architecture and background design.

I spent this week designing structures, buildings, characters and game elements. I began researching kids games and examining their animations. I designed everything with a cartoon look and feel by creating the background for the main screen with rounded structures and buildings. Round characters and shapes have been shown to draw kids towards a game rather than sharply designed features as I've discovered in my research.

From here on the plan is to finish the animation and design aspects of the game and begin the actual game code. Im optimistic about our game as we've been putting a lot of work in since our recent meeting.

Alpha

For the duration of this week I've been trying hard to further develop my game with Unity and fix some problems that I had in the previous week. Firstly after a lot of trial and error I finally fixed the red scene. Last week my entire game magically turned itself red as I was applying a grass texture and I didn't know how to fix it so this week I focused on that and eventually solved it! My scene appears normal once more. 

I further developed my game this week by creating a variety of old style houses. As my game takes place in a town on an island I had to create a lot of these houses to compose a town type of setting. This took awhile as I've to make an entire town and add windows and doors to the houses. I also created a fog setting which I'm very happy about as I think it turned out very well and adds the creepy effect that I wanted my game to have. It took a while to perfect the fog and get it to the consistency that I wanted but I got there eventually and I'm happy with the outcome. I created more landscape too by adding shrubbery, bushes, creating a different variety of trees and another mountain range. My first person controller is now able to walk freely through the wisps of fog and collect gems. 

My plan now is to continue creating and finishing off my town with more houses and to try add in another sub-character or two. I'd also like to try and find how to create or add in streetlamps so I'll do my research on that this week and hopefully find an answer on how to do it. Below are screenshots of my progress, notice the red scene is fixed! 

My game

Unity free tutorials

This week for the Unity free tutorials I chose two tutorials that I thought would be great assets to my game. The first tutorial I watched was 'How to make a mini map' by Jimmy Vegas. I began by right clicking my player and creating a camera. I then dragged the camera upwards to create a downwards angle on the player. From here I created a render texture to create the mini map. I then went to game objects, UI and created a raw image where I also edited the height and width. Lastly for this tutorial I created a small circle that would indicate where the player is on the map.

The next tutorial I watched was another one by Jimmy Vegas called 'How to create a main menu'. I started in the main camera section where I created a button from the game object section. I then created a play button and a quit button which I scripted for using Javascript to link the buttons. These are the main menu buttons which have two functions. From there I dragged and dropped the script to the game object and applied the script. Finally I was able to create my animated main menu.

I found these tutorials to be very helpful as they really helped me to create important aspects that I'd like to include in my own game. I find that choosing my own tutorials is helping me to further develop my game and get it to a decent standard.

Game
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Game Stories

For this week's reading we were given two articles called "Into the woods: A practical guide to the Hero's Journey" and "What every game developer needs to know about Story". Both of these articles sparked my interest and both were very informative about the topic of the Hero's story. The article that I enjoyed the most was the first one which explored Joseph Campbell's work. 

In this article we explored and dissected the journey that the hero of the story has to go through in order to fulfill a myth. Firstly the question is what practical use is the hero's journey to us as storytellers and game writers? It's important because myths are important, they're how we teach each other how to behave and who we are. Myths are also used to guide actions, The Cry for Myth by Rollo May is used here as an example. This example shows that there's an adaptive advantage to myths. It also goes into the theory of "kin selection" which states that evolutionary fitness gives genes the ability to promote survival and copies of itself. 

Successful tribes were tribes that found ways to encourage everyone to act for the good of the tribe instead of themselves individually. In this article the author also explained what would happen if a myth was taken away from a man. The man would become depressed and mentally ill. Storytelling and literature are the main medias used to tell different myths. Literature proves that there is in fact order in the universe. 

Joseph Campbell also summarized a list of elements of a good myth which included establishing the hero's world, the call to adventure, gaining the hero's prize and finally returning it to the community. Next we learned how to use the hero's journey to build stories which was explained in a number of steps. The first step is to pick a theme and myth which leads to the next step of creating the hero which would be someone who can embody that premise. The third step shows us some characteristics on how to create a good villain. Some of these characteristics include traits similar to the hero, he maybe an outlaw, clever and resourceful, cruel and not forgiving. Step four tells us to show the hero's normal world, the player must see the hero's world that he's trying to save. The fifth step is to disrupt the hero's world, this can be done by taking him out of his normal world and forcing him into action. Next is to enter the mythological woods for the trail of trials. Each level should show the incremental growth. Step seven is to confront the evil one or fight the bad guy. The eight step is to acquire the prize which is the thing worth fighting to acquire. The final step is the hero's return in this part he will return the prize to the community. 

The next part of the article discusses the three act structure and the game designers journey. The designer must pick myths that people would believe and put those myths into the game. The myths that are created have the power to change lives. Finally, the designer must take the hero's journey themselves. 

Links:

Movie Outline

Dan Harmon

Piper

Hero's 

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