End of File

Well, here we are. The following post is a duplicate of my Individual Game Design Document with, of course, the addition of video footage. Enjoy:

Conceptualisation:
As far as End of File’s original concept is concerned I found the idea fascinating and wanted to change very little. This seemed to be the general consensus from the rest of the team so we did not waste time discussing the base idea; rather we devoted our early processes to conceptualising different puzzle that revolved around the use of perspective. We tossed around alternative mechanics and the one I pushed the most was that of extrudable shapes. As wonderful as the perspective puzzles were, I found the game needed some form on interactivity, no matter how basic. The extrusion satisfied this and I utilised it in the majority of my puzzle designs. I tried to combine it with perspective (as seen in puzzles like the "Catwalk" or the "Hole in the Floor") to keep the core element of the game alive in my designs, but I also tried puzzles that isolated the extrude mechanic. Some of these were more for platforming type puzzles to satisfy that classic urge to climb about and explore. One puzzle I am particularly proud of that uses extrusion but indirectly plays on perspective is the "Gravity Shift Staircase". This was one of my first designs and by far one of my strongest and I am grateful that the James was able to implement it early so we could refine it.

Catwalk

Hole in the Floor

Gravity Shift Staircase

An idea I was able to contribute to EOF that was separate from Adrian’s original vision was the characters of Jerry and Kathleen. I found EOF’s narrative lacked a human (or more broadly, natural) touch and had the potential to alienate players and make the game an emotionless experience. I created a series of notes that are visible to the player from certain places in the EOF world. They are written as if they are embedded in the world’s code. Finding these comments gradually unravels a somewhat passive-aggressive conversation between the dominating Kathleen and apathetic Jerry. The purpose of these notes is to expand the narrative of the EOF world as well as providing some comic relief from the constant puzzles. Other ways I wanted to make EOF more natural was through the geometric “flutterbys” and “cube clouds”. Having recognisable natural elements in the blocky environment would ideally invoke a sense of comfort in players, particularly in “Jerry’s Sanctuary”, and make the world seem less uncaring.

Production:

Producing animated assets was what I sunk most of my time into. All of the doors, clouds and moving doodads in the game were my work. While Chris Read was also doing asset work in Maya, his was more environmental focussed than mine. I wanted to produce objects for both show and or the player to interact with.  I constantly kept in mind that having such a minimal aesthetic meant we ran the risk of people seeing our game as bland opposed to minimalist. Of course our mechanic dictated our aesthetic but that is no excuse to make our world boring. For that reason I wanted to fill it with a range of moving objects that showed that this strange environment the player is exploring is alive, emphasised further by the natural elements I mentioned earlier. Many of the doodads serve no other purpose than to look cool and move on their own, but that is just fine. The colour coding used in EOF means players can tell what is important straight away, so I was free to make my assets as excessive-yet-pointless as I wanted.

Of the numerous puzzles and environments that feature in EOF, six puzzles and two intermission spaces were of my design. As the majority of them are stair-based extrusion with a defining feature or two, they are quite mathematical in the way they are made. I drew inspiration from the idea that these spaces would be produced by code. I tried to make the other spaces follow a pattern but utilise more interesting shapes for variety.

The soundtrack of EOF was produced by Chris and I. I only ended up making two of the eight or so music tracks we had. My attention was directed at all  the sound effects which I created using edits of audio from freesound.org and my personal collection of sound samples. Originally I had an array of ten perspective glitch samples and eight extrusion glitch samples but the extrusion sounds never made it to the final game. I also composed the high pitched glitch shriek for the falling intro sequence but produced this after I had already made my asset montage so it did not feature. This isn't necessarily a bad thing either as it is harsh on the ears.

Together with Reece I designed the GUI for the pause menu and produced the tutorial screen seen at the game’s beginning. The original idea was to have an animated PNG for each button which would glitch out but fix itself when the player moved their mouse over the button. I created the frames in Photoshop and rendered them out as a GIF from Premiere but unfortunately we ran out of time to get the code to accept them so we had to settle on having the buttons flick between two images; glitched and stable.

During the last few days before the submission I found myself playtesting our game every time Adrian and James made a change. Out of familiarity with our content I made both the trailer and walkthrough for EOF. As I worked on the trailer I tried pairing the footage we had with the different soundtracks Chris and I produced. Unfortunately the pacing was too constant for all of them so I reverted back to the original song Adrian had used in his teaser trailer in his initial pitch of EOF (”11” by InSpectr). I decided to leave the walkthrough silent considering all our puzzles are visual based and it is far easier to just show the solution than talk about it.

Where to from here:
I believe EOF has excellent potential for further development beyond what we managed in the time we had. Given an extra couple of months I believe we could develop a version of EOF to play on the oculus rift. We would also have time to bang out the bugs that we ran out of time to fix as well as produce more of the puzzles we had originally conceptualised. Adrian mentioned rebuilding the game from scratch in Unreal 4. Despite being able to hang onto our Maya assets I would use the opportunity to review and refine what we have. We could argue that EOF is designed for the oculus rift or at least would provide a unique experience for it so I would gladly put in the effort to create an adaptation.

Some of the things I would change would be to have more coherency in the colours selected for different level e.g. for each level stemming from Hub level 2 would have a background that is a pastel shade of purple with violet highlights on doodads. I would like to try something similar with the shapes that we use. Imagine a series of extrusion based puzzles where the environment is mathematically precise squares followed by a series of perspective bridge and ramp puzzles where the environments are incredibly angular. I would like to improve the quality of the music I produced as well as creating new tracks for different atmospheres. For the sound effects I would like to create more original sound effects to gradually replace the open source ones.

Conclusion:
End of File has been an excellent experience. The team was easy to work with and we were highly productive as a unit. I can appreciate the importance of playtesting now as it was our go to method for debugging and polishing. End of File is a game I can honestly say I am proud to have helped develop. 

Make Like Flanders and Doodily-Daddily

With the addition of the intermission spaces I wanted to create some doodads to bring them to life. These animated geometries serve no purpose beyond aesthetic but do indicate that there is more to our world than cubes.

I also built and animated these but that happened post video so you'll just have to pretend that they look totally awesome in motion. It has yet to be tested whether I actually managed to fix the animation, but the Flutterbys may yet make an appearance too.

Adrian and I have been discussing the intro menu quite a lot recently and what we have in mind is a room that the player spawns in that has the menu controls as interactive buttons around the room. The player will spawn in front of a wall that has the player controls on it described as unnecessarily complicated/computerised versions of what they actually are ie. move (vector translation), run (velocity amplifier), look around with mouse (visual tracking).

Kickin' Ass and Bakin' Frames

The one thing I both love and hate about implementation is you find everything wrong with what you've created. Unity doesn't seem to agree with Maya's graph editor post- and pre- infinity functions so I had to go through the clouds I'd made and bake the loop into them so James could put them into the cloud generator he's been working on.

I've also managed to create some pretty cool looking intermission spaces for the player to roam in between puzzles. I found some stray faces in the first intermission stage which I cleaned up as well as adding a message for players to find.

The second space is more active with animated pieces. It makes use of the power conduit I made ages ago as a little something to add more life to the world.

Awesomesauce.

Post Beta Reflection

I felt our Beta presentation went really well. Adrian was thorough and efficient in explaining the aspects of our game whilst keeping it interesting. I think you could tell that as a team we were proud of what we had produced at this stage in the project. I was piloting the demo while Adrian spoke, showing off the elements as he mentioned them.
Something I noticed that Kah and Stuart mentioned afterwards was how much time was spend in corridors. I think what we need is some more diversity in what they look like, as well as some open traversal in which players are able to explore a bit more to satisfy their platforming urges. Although our aesthetic may be simple there is an element of beauty that comes with the minimalist design.
I have collected several people to playtest our game over this week and most of them tried running around the levels to explore before they addressed the puzzles. If we were to give them more space to play around in it would give players room to breathe, and they can tackle the puzzle when they are ready to progress. EOF is an experience, so there is no reason why we should rush it.
Other feedback was as follows:
-More difficult puzzles (well yeah fair enough)
-Bounce section (three of the four discovered the extrude launch and loved it. They want a puzzle designed around it)-Indication to jump off edges (if stuck its okay to fall off an edge to respawn)-Side-stepping (people still fidget when trying to line up perspectives)-Static indicators (only works when not moving and within an expanded proximity but part of the screen fuzzes in the direction of the solution. This would only work if the player stands still for 3 seconds or more, kind of a "I'm desperate for a clue" moment)-Make players aware of sprint function (self explanatory)-Payoff for random exploration (more hidden messages)-Hideous blue (Thomas didn't like it)
As far as indicating falling is okay I think it would be as simple as placing the cloud assets I made beneath the levels as well as above them. If players see an object beneath them then that gives some indication that there is space below them, not just an infinite white drop. Some of the more reckless players may try to jump on the clouds in which case they will be teleported safely back to the level and the lesson will have been learnt.
To avoid people fidgeting when trying to line up perspective I think we need some kind of "Patience is a virtue" message that appears if they try to line up a solution but give up because they keep shifting out of the solution zone.
The static indicators may be a bit harder to accomplish and the team has yet to discuss whether we think it is necessary or not.
I have produced another glitch title for the menu as well.

The tamer of the two is what the option looks like when the player's mouse is over it. Otherwise it glitches out as the second image shows.

Beta Polishing

For a beta shine. I figured I should put a post up to show I'm still alive. I didn't forget about you internet, I swear. Anyway, I realised I never put up proper images of the tower level I whipped up ages ago.

This is more of a luxury level and won't feature in our initial beta. I is pretty much an obstacle course for extrusion and perspective which should satisfy the player's inner platformer. Whether it makes it to the final game, I don't know. I'd like it to be in because it looks fun to run around in but I've learned not to get my hopes up with these kind of things with due dates looming so near.
I don't have any shiny new images to show you guys either. The past week has been dedicated to herding stray normals and touching up things we want in the beta. Polish, polish, polish. I want to see my face in those levels...