Motion Sickness

The last week has been full on but I have gotten some stuff to work in both Stencyl and Photoshop. Firstly, my little green block teleports around the environment to the right location but that's only marginally interesting.

More importantly I got some sweet motion skeletons for Voodude running (the more I use that name the more I'm getting attached to it). I just need to flesh them out so they look like him and then things will be looking good on a basic level.

I also realised the to get the background looking good as it rotates I'll have to make it a circular file and rotate EVERYTHING in Stencyl by a certain amount of degrees each turn... We'll see how that goes.

How Not to Have a Date

So here are the storyboards for my Anxiety video. It may be me in these shots but I'll be calling on the wonderful Michael O'Hara to be my unfortunate up-stooder...

Also my setting will be in Michael's flat as there is far more space around their dining table and the room is much nicer. I may have to bring in extra lighting but I'll be able to check that out tomorrow when I do some filming.

Visual Metaphors and Other Suggestive Imagery

I wonder if anyone is picking "lust"... Anyway, I've completed three pages of draft sketches to get my ideas down for "anxiety".

As well as these shots I was thinking of having a hyper slow-mo shot of my character suspended in the air to suggest a sensation of falling. Another would be dark liquid swirling around in a whirlpool of some sort. A short sequence I envisioned was of the character staring off absent-mindedly then quietly cough/clear their throat but an audio overlay of the character screaming could be heard.
If I want to bring in the idea that anxiety can be a snare and keep you trapped in it I could collect footage of ropes and chains and maybe a shot through a keyhole at the character in a chain or alone on the floor, trapped in an empty room.
Going off the idea in the third sheet of the hand opening and closing in jarring, overlaid cuts, the same technique could be shown of the character's face. Their expression could be indifferent but the audience would catch glimpses of a transparent face shaking violently or screaming on top of this footage with muffled audio to follow it.
Now it's just a matter of getting all this down on a storyboard in a way that does it justice.

Bring the Funk!

Okay I just wanted to prove that I beat Hexagon.

And then kicked my record in the ass.

Yeah boy!

Post-Critique Reflection

Today we had our critiques for the games and some pretty cool projects are on their way. As far as my own work goes there were some good suggestions on where I could take it. First of all I had to play the on-line game Hexagon to see how a game that functions similarly to my concept works with a high difficulty. It is a highly addictive game for a number of reasons;

- The music is great for the epileptic-inducing game-play and can be used to get the player's timing (sort of). It also acts as an incentive to play in a continuous stream so you are able to hear more of the music without it being broken up by re-spawning.

- Almost instantaneous re-spawning means that if you make a mistake (which you will over and over and over...) you don't have to wait long until you're back in the psychedelic action.

- It has a clearly established goal and is simple enough that the player learns how to play relatively quickly.
From this I can take that the levels I put into my game could be rapid and short, but slowly increasing in length/difficulty and players can infinitely re-spawn from the start of each level. However, this would contradict a suggestion Kah made that the player could have three lives based off how close they were running to the furnace (front of the screen being 3 lives, just ahead of the fire being 1). Another thing I learned from Hexagon is having the set position on each path would be better than having an area in which the player can strafe. Too many times in Hexagon did I get caught by a glancing wall as I over/undershot a gap.
As far as aesthetics go the HUD of my paper prototype looks too awkward on a rectangle background around a circular focus. Kah suggested I incorporate the elements in a similarly round fashion. On this note the soul counter does not need to exist, it just needs to be clear that rescuing souls makes the fuel gauge degrade faster. It would also be redundant to have them count as some kind of score because there is nothing stopping a player from deliberately delaying their succession of the level to collect more souls, which defeats the character's narrative purpose.
I also made a realisation today when describing my idea to the class. My game pits the player against the environment as the try to save the environment. Ha.

Paper Prototype Printing Progress

Here is a snapshot of what makes up my paper prototype for tomorrow's presentation.

I had a bit of trouble with the printers in the Kelburn library yesterday so I had to run down to Te Aro to get a better quality print-out but things are looking pretty sweet on my desk in front of me right now. Now that everything is cut out I just need to wait for the glue to dry and I'll be pretty close to finishing.
I decided to keep the Voodude as the player avatar as I've grown fond of his design which means I will carry over the slightly abstracted spiritual aspect of the game. This will be apparent in the core of each level. Not all of them will be a furnace as the prototype suggests. I'm thinking that the earlier levels will be softer with more forest imagery (or at least suggestions of it) with only a minor deforestation aspect which will grow stronger as the levels proceed. Eventually the levels will become black and white as the player moves into a spirit realm. The player will be trying to collect the souls from the trees that fall into the furnace so it saps the energy from it, dropping the fuel bar on the right from green to red. Once the bar is fully red the machine burns out and the player proceeds to the next level. Missing souls will maintain the furnace and making it harder on the player who will be dodging obstacles as they run around.

Reset Buttons

Lots of games have them and apparently so does my project.Talking with Richard today completely flipped my project on its head, in the best of ways. Although I was enjoying the fluidity of the traversal mechanics in my original concept, I felt the game was lacking something that was allowing me to get truly motivated about it. We were originally talking about Audiosurf and Bit Trip Runner which led on to where I'm at now;

Pretty much I've changed my game to a reverse auto-runner type game where the player would be running towards the screen the whole time and can swap between six lanes to collect items and dodge hazards. The six lanes would be cycling around like a hexagon and the camera would slowly rotate, speeding up as the player increases their score. The controls would be simple; jump, skip to left-hand lane, skip to right-hand lane, skip to lane directly above you. The player would be running through this infinite tunnel away from various cores, such as a burning furnace, grinding engine or void. They could still play as a tree spirit and extract the souls from wood they pass through to keep the level of abstraction present, but the tiers of the world concept no longer applies. Instead there would be a fuel meter or something that keeps the level's core engine burning so the more items they collect from the lanes the less fuel is able to be replenished and the player would complete a level once the fuel meter reaches zero and the core burns out. For my presentation I am thinking of combining an interactive processing sketch to explain the rotating world and a Stencyl iteration of the treadmill runner style to show the pacing.

These are two examples of how the player could navigate the six lanes. The first strip shows the player (the red dot) moving right to the adjacent lane. This would be accomplished by a simple press of the "right" arrow key, likewise with the "left" arrow key and moving to the left adjacent lane. The second strip portrays the player leaping from their current lane to the lane directly opposite them. This would be performed by pressing the "space bar" key, as the "up" arrow key would be used for an on-lane jump.
Things to keep in mind as far as controls are concerned is the left and right buttons would be oriented relative to the character's starting position which would be the bottom of the screen. This means "left" more accurately moves the player clockwise, "right" anticlockwise.