Log #13: Oct/20/2024

• Noisy Things
• A Start Screen
• Fixing Laggy Lighting
• Shrinking the Project

Hiya kids!

This entry covers a couple days of work, and is a little later than intended. After seeing a fellow game developer make a few music tracks for their game, I've been inspired. Over the last few days, I finally put something together and made a draft of some background music for our project.

It took me a while to find sounds that I liked, but after I Googled the chord progression of a song I was inspired by, I had a good place to start from. It was not until I started messing around in some music-making software that I found a melody I liked, and really put something together. I plan to get feedback from the rest of the team on what I wrote.

Above is the draft of background music.

During these few days, we added a start screen. Previously, our game started by dropping the player into our game's world with no context whatsoever. I think having a start screen helps prepare the player to start playing the game. I was suprirsed when one of our coders showed me the start screen, as it was much more elaborate than I had intended, and communicated a much darker vibe. Perhaps I should have been more clear, or maybe I should have drilled in that we just needed a placeholder start screen.

We also ran into another problem. The temporary lighting that a programmer had implemented during the first few days of development turns out to be super laggy. Apparently calculating shadows takes a lot of computer power. One of our artists spent a good deal of time learning about the lighting system in Unreal Engine, and fixing our game's lighting.

Additionally, to slight sadness from me, we reduced the overall goal of the project to be less ambitious. The original story I had written up was quite large, so shrinking the project into something smaller seems necessary if we want to have a game that's mostly finished by our deadline. I still think our new plan is ambitious and will be a lot of fun, though. Wish us luck!

MATH: Data

Welcome, all! This is another one of our famous MATH SEGMENTS! Today we're talking about data. Now that we have a playable DEMO of our project, we are recieving data from playtests, and so we can improve our game accordingly.

One thing that we learned is that the controls of the game are not intuitive. Even though we showed the game's controls on-screen, everyone who played our game was confused by how it worked.

During these times, our team is watching what people do. After our first outside playtest, I immediately made a note of what needed improvement. In one part of our DEMO, you have to fill out a piece of paper. The controls for this segment confused everyone who played it. So, it probably should be altered so that filling out a piece of paper feels less awkward.

Additionally, we told the player about a game mechanic before they needed to know that information, resulting in playtesters being confused. Everybody found it awkward that they were told to look into their inventory before they had any items. So, I think we should rework the instructions we give the player to only tell them about a mechanic when that information is relevant to them.

Seeing how things work to people who have never played our game is super informative, and very interesting! I think having people playtest our project has already contributed to a much better overall project.

MATH: Functions added Oct/24/2024

Couldn't get enough math? Well we've got more math for you! As mentioned above, I spent these last couple of days reworking our game's story to be less ambitious.

Considering the player options and how that affects the game is what really seems to drive a player's experience. I decided to limit our game to having two "main" story routes. However, thinking of the game as branching into just two possible routes still seems rigid.

To allow the game to feel rigid, I have been planning out some pieces of our game independantly from the main player actions.

In a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, for instance, the player picks out one set route for how the progress through the book. But because each route through the book is an entirely linear experience, if one scene of the story happens in multiple storylines, the scene either has to be vague enough to work for either, or it has to be duplicated so that it appears in both storylines.

As you can see, making a complex story with multiple ways of coming across the same in-game settings could easily lead to a massive mess of possiblities that creates something bigger than our team can build.

But there is a huge thing that separates our game from typical flowcharts and Choose Your Own Adventure books. In our game, we can make calculations, and change things in the world based on the player, rather than having to plan out each possible outcome.

I've described in ealier blog posts how certain things in our game act without dependance on anything else. But video games can take this further. Because we have the powers of computation on our side, we can calculate, in real time, how a scene should look based on a variety of inputs from earlier in the game.

For example, we could have a segment of our game that makes all of the other in-game characters loose their hair. Instead of needing to create a whole branch in our game plan based on all of the possible times that NPCs could loose their hair, we can simply use computer powers to change the in-game character's hair. Imagine that "hair" is on a separate flowchart from the game's storyline. When the game needs to know what someone's hair is, the game checks the logic for just the hair.

So, while it at first seems disappointing to limit our project to just two "storylines," this doesn't stop us from creating unique player experiences. Our players can influence the game in small pieces that combine like blocks to create the main experience. To put it in a metaphor: the number of possible doll houses is really large, but the number of possible doors, windows, and walls is a lot smaller.

My disappointment still lingers amongst the vast array of ideas in our heads, but the goal to create an immersive and unique player experience is still within reach.

That's all for that MATH SEGMENT. Have a good rest of your week. Thanks for giving this a read.

-Luke Knotts