The Hyperion mission! Having to manage one unit with a continuous stream of battling non playable characters takes away the added task of micro management and lets me enjoy a feeling of ‘distinctiveness’
How ‘cutscenes’ meld into gameplay e.g when saving Raynor, Kerrigan’s Leviathan arms smash into the prison ship which then transitions into the game level
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Evolution missions really helps players understand how an evolution works and how to use it
Dislike
After Kerrigan’s battle with Narud, I felt she recovered too quickly. It drew from the gravity of the fight. She should have been in an injured state for the Leviathan section where characters could comment on her fight. Then by the next mission having recovered, there would be a contextual piece of dialog about it
Introduction: As part of Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center we created a 3-4 minute video with a given main character and conflict. We created For Rent, choosing a mysterious stranger and don’t touch anything.
Time: 48 hours | Roles: Director – Writer – Producer| Team Size: 5
Introduction: The Chain was our final music video coursework assignment for Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Our film won a Bronze Telly Award in the student category.
Our final video was a highly streamlined effort. We first conceptualized an idea based on Ingrid Michaelson’s song The Chain. Our artist then created storyboards, and using those boards we created a rough ‘film storyboard’ with music.
Next we faced location scouting, in this regard the issue we encountered was not having a pure white background as per our storyboard. We adapted to this by finding a suitable ‘black out room’ to provide an all black background. Meanwhile we made a shot list from the rough storyboard that we had created.
With a shotlist, and locations to shoot we purchased necessary props, and went about filming on thanks giving.
As usual on set we changed the storyboard in various ways such as:
Thematic use of red
Inclusion of shots such as limited space, panning techniques
Use of props such as the teddy bear
Lighting e.g. using a sparkly dress to attract attention
After fifteen hours of filming, several hours of editing, the film was complete. It was well received by our peers and professors.
Finally we submitted The Chain to the student category of the Telly Awards.
Introduction: Missed Connection is our virtual reality team coursework assignment for Visual Story at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.
A special thanks to the folks over at Carnegie Library for letting us film there + being awesome!
Time: 1 Week | Team Size: 5 | Role: Producer – Director
My Contributions: I was involved in various aspects of the project, primarily:
Location scouting.
Arranging equipment, props, and conducting team meetings.
Building our second Lego storyboard.
Directing our final film.
Development
Learning from our last assignment we went into this project prepared to plan properly. We began with an idea of a love story in the library. Following this we created a Lego storyboard, and script.
Pocket legends is a multi-platform mobile massively multiplayer online game where players play with a variety of classes which have unique abilities. For this exercise I will be analyzing the ability system in Pocket Legends with a focus on the player vs environment (PvE) tank system for the warrior class.
Classes
In Pocket Legends each class has a role they perform, one such class is the warrior which suits the role of ‘protector’. During gameplay the warrior attracts the attention of enemies, and takes the majority of incoming damage. This role is referred to as being a ‘tank’.
To enact the role of tank, the warrior has an ability system. A tank that is unable to hold the attention of enemies will most likely result in the death of the party. This causes dissatisfaction with the game, which leads to lower player retention. It is therefore important that this system functions well.
Abilities
The fundamental building blocks of the ability system are the abilities. Warriors have unique abilities they can perform such as Vengeful Slash which has usage requirements, and effects when used. These usage requirements are mana, cooldown, and player level which are the primary variables that control this system.
When an ability is enabled it can be cast, and when cast goes into a ‘cooling’ time period. When cooling the ability cannot be used until the cooling period is over. Once the ability has cooled down, the player is able to cast it again. This process repeats as long as the player is able to cast the ability. Disabled abilities cannot be used at all due not meeting usage requirements such as lack of mana, character being dead etc.
We can represent this loop with the following diagram.
Introduction: Developed on the Oculus Rift with PS Move, DinoRancher had guests play atop a Triceratops armed with an electric lasso. The goal of the guest was to shepherd a herd of Stegosaurus to safety, protecting them from danger.
Story: You are a DinoRancher armed with your electro lasso and trusty trike. Travel across the desolate wasteland, and protect your herd from those nasty predators!
Design Challenges:
Herd behavior
Enemy types
Environment design
Integration of the PS move into Virtual Reality
Trike movement system
Design Goal: To create an experience that made the guest feel like a cowboy travelling through the desert protecting a herd of dinosaur from predators.
My Contributions: As producer I arranged meetings, delegated pending tasks, and contributed creatively. In addition as a programmer I was responsible for setting up the games environment which included, asset preparation, level design and developing agent behavior.
Introduction: Developed on the CAVE with Makey Makey, NoseDive had guests play in the CAVE environment using airplane controls we constructed using Makey Makey.
Platform:CAVE, and Makey Makey in Unity 3D | Time: 2 weeks | Roles: Programmer – Game Designer – Producer | Team Size: 5
Story: Our game had our guests take the role of make shift pilots thrust into having to fly a plane to safety through a terrible storm when the captain has become incapacitated.
Design Challenges:
Adapting to the CAVE environment.
Creating an authentic flight simulator experience with an easily understand story.
Design Goal: To create an authentic story of saving the day through the game we created.
My Contributions: For NoseDive I was producer, designer and programmer. Being producer involved scheduling and coordination of our teams artist, programmer and sound designer. In addition I assisted my fellow programmer with environment and Unity prop setup.
Introduction: A Playroom was a developed on the HTC Vive. A virtual reality device that allows a guest to walk around a calibrated virtual reality space with hand held controls.
Platform:HTC Vive in Unity 3D | Time: 2 weeks | Roles: Designer – Producer | Team Size: 5
Story: The setting of the game is in a play room where the guest encounters a ghost boy who needs help in-order to ‘move on’.
Design Challenge: To design a game for naive guests, conduct play tests, and make three predictions of what the guest will do all whilst having the guest ‘feel free’.
Design Goal: Round 2 of Building Virtual Worlds was indirect control round. This required we build an experience that felt free, and was intuitive enough for a guest to play from start to finish without any instruction or guidelines.
My Contributions: I analyzed, and designed the guests interactions as well as wrote our main non playable characters dialogue. In addition I conducted play tests which gave us invaluable feedback which we used to further develop the experience.
Development
Interaction Design
I focused on interaction development by first analyzing what we currently had. From that I wrote a draft story design which was a rough version of what we would aim for. Our current gameplay was clearly a linear story experience, and I believed we could achieve a greater sense of freedom by allowing a player a choice of what game to play.
From this notion I created two different interaction models.
I then met with the team, presented my two plans. We choose plan 2 which I further developed into a more detailed version.
Audio would play a vital aspect in driving this interaction model therefore I worked with our sound designer on a script for the game which we iterated over based on feedback (script documents).
Playtesting
Once the various audio cues, and interaction model was implemented we went about play testing the game. I conducted play tests with over fifteen naive guests which included an audience of fellow students, professors and non-students. This feedback was then used to polish elements of our experience.
In conclusion we correctly predicted each of the three interactions, and the guest understood our story, all with no guidelines or instruction from us.
Full Story
We began our project with brain storming, and research into the platform on which we were developing. We came up with several ideas including:
Darkness– Use light to guide the guest through a street.
Space Exploration– Explore the universe, and pick a planet to colonize.
Dreaming – Flying a plane, flying elephants, flowers turn to buildings (freedom from constraints).
Empty Room – Furniture place (guide them to a correct place).
Having difficulty grappling with the concept of ‘freedom’ we spoke to a member of The Entertainment Technology Faculty Jesse Schell. After meeting with Jesse Schell we honed in on an idea of a ghost boy which we would help in some manner through objects around him.
Next we thought about location, which was first a storage room due to it making sense to have many object, we then changed to a play room as it offer the potential for a ‘warmer’ environment for guests to feel comfortable.
After creating a basic room with a simple number of interactions which included:
Playing catch.
Place a train on the train track.
Hide & Seek.
Give a hug.
We had a prototype ready for interim.
Interim
After interim our two main points of feedback were
Make the boy and game generally less ‘creepy’.
To develop our interactions.
Less ‘Creepy’
Point 1 was a significant design challenge which we tackled by investing time into solving by:
Making our main game character look more human like.
Soothing music.
A warm game atmosphere.
A friendly, light and clear character voice.
Interaction Design
I decided to tackle point 2 by first analyzing what we currently had, then writing a draft story design which was a rough version of what we would aim for. Our current game play was clearly a linear story experience, and I believed we could greater the sense of freedom by allowing a player a choice of what game to play.
From this notion I created two different interaction models.
After meeting with the team, presenting the two plans and convincing them of the need to carefully design the experience, we choose plan 2 which I then further developed into a more detailed version.
Implementation
Audio played a vital aspect in our experience so I worked with our sound designer on a script for the game which we iterated over three times based on feedback (script documents). In addition to audio we used a number of other techniques including:
Lighting – To direct the players focus.
Color – Brightly contrasting objects such as with the yellow train on a blue chair, and a red book on a beige floor caught the players attention.
Uniformity – A suggestive picture fragment was placed in the frame, and other similar looking puzzle pieces were placed around the level.
After implementing these features with a new interaction model we went about play testing the game. We conducted play tests with over fifteen naive guests which included an audience of fellow students, professors and non-students.
Based on the feedback we received we continued to polish elements of the game. The end result of our work was that not only did we accurately predict each of the three interactions, but the guest completely understood the story behind our world all with no guidelines or instruction from us.
Introduction: Multi is a game built on Game Maker for Windows using Game Makers scripting language. Players control a character who traverses a series of levels in a platformer style game play.
Platform: Windows | Time: 3 weeks | Roles: Programmer – Game Designer – Artist – Sound Designer | Team Size: 1
Design Goal: The primary ‘design goal’ with this project was to further my design skills whilst practicing level and mechanic design.
Design Challenges:
Creating levels that were interesting to play with the mechanics I created.
Difficulty design.
Teaching players how to play.
Audio which included, character, and environment sound design.
Made the majority of art assets (character art and animation taken from a game maker tutorial)
Collected audio that suited the game play from free sources (credits bundled with Multi).
Conducted play testing with younger audiences which I believed would be interested in the game.
Download:
Follow the link below to download a .zip file containing the game. When the download is complete, unzip the file then have a look the read-me and, then run the .exe file to play the game.
Story: Jam-O-Draw was inspired by the classic etch-a-sketch game.
Design Goal: We wanted to create a multiplayer artistic experience with a fascinating reveal.
Design Challenges:
Adapting to an unfamiliar platform.
Creating an aesthetically pleasing experience using visuals and audio
Having the user interface during the experience be responsive and informative.
My contributions: My primary role on this project was as producer which involved making creative contributions, arranging meetings, coordinating our artists, programmers and sound designer to create the game in a timely manner. My programming responsibilities included assisting my fellow programmer with development, and preparing the game environment and assets.
Introduction: Seize the Sky was built during Building Virtual Worlds at Carnegie Mellons Entertainment Technology Center. The world was constructed using Oculus Rift, and Leap Motion. Using these technologies we put our guest into a virtual reality space with an ability to use a natural interface in our world.
Story: A mighty giant heads towards a town with murderous intent. A country side boy notices, and cries to Zeus for help to defeat the giant to save the city. You are Zeus, save them all!
Platform: Oculus Rift + Leap Motion in Unity 3D | Time: 2 weeks | Roles: Programmer – Game Designer
Design Goal: Our design goal with Seize The Sky was help character A (the boy) who is afraid of character B (the giant).
Design Challenges:
Incorporating a satisfactory use of Leap motion.
Achieving our a sense of character A is afraid of character B.
Level design.
Game-play design.
My Contributions: As the lead programmer on Seize The Sky I made large contributions to the code base for this project. I also took an active part in the design process with working with the team to develop various aspects including game play, and level design.
Development
Iteration 1
The development process started with being assigned teams. In our first team meeting we made clear our skills, started brainstorming ideas, and kept good development processes in mind.
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During brainstorming we tried using several appropriate methods, such as gesture centered brainstorming (due to our use of Leap Motion). Finally we had five initial ideas:
Help mend relationship between characters.
Play piano to make baby sleep.
Use light to guide a character home.
Keep animal safe growing to adulthood.
Hold characters hand to guide them.
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With our initial ideas we further boiled them down to three concepts with the following reasoning:
Concept one was hard to conceptualize compared to our other ideas which seemed simpler and more clear.
Concept five could be incorporated into concept three.
Creating sketches of each concept we then sought out the advice of our professor Jesse Schell.
With Jesse Schells feedback we went with concept C, because we wanted to explore squeezing in Leap Motion.
We then began further conceptualizing the idea with sketches, and research into the capabilities of Leap motion and Oculus.
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With this in mind we began assigning tasks to complete, considering game play, and used a scrum board to assist us in tracking tasks.
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On the technical side we used a NavMesh, and simple A.I. to run the behavior of the Hunter and Deer. The behaviors of the two agents were essentially:
The deer always moved to nearest tree that has an apple.
The Hunter patrolled around fixed points, and if it came close enough to the deer it began chasing it.
The result of our hard work was the following.
We then received feedback at interim, which sadly wasn’t good…
As part of our Visual Story course at Carnegie Mellon’sEntertainment Technology Center we were split into a number of semester long teams. Our first task was to come up with a name for our studio, and then to create a short animated studio logo.
Development
In considering our studio name we brainstormed a number of ideas:
Funk films.
Pumpkin Productions.
Sleepless Studios.
Overdrive Productions.
Overclocked Studios.
Overworked Studios.
We settled on Pumpkin Productions for two reasons:
It was the easiest concept to visualize.
As Halloween was approaching our team liked the idea of an evil pumpkin.
At this point our team started on concept designs. With our first concept we had two considerations. Firstly was that of color, which given the subject matter was a pumpkin, we felt orange would be appropriate. Secondly was that of shape, which we based off how a pumpkin looks like.
Our task entailed selecting footage from a number of videos, namely:
TN Parkour: First experience with editing & storytelling.
Stranger at the Door: Easy but more storytelling elements.
Anesthesia: More story(scary) with effects.
Unleashed: More challenging with Green Screen, VFX.
I chose to edit TN Parkour. With this video I attempted to create a music video of with cuts at beats, and attempted to tell a story of friends meeting up to do Parkour and ultimately feeling some sense of accomplishment at the end.
The rules to create these portraits was simple. Each person was given a different colored pen, and was allowed to make single strokes one after another. Any hesitation resulted in having to stop drawing, and choose a name. The name was created by taking turns writing a single letter.
The following is what Charlie and I created.
Improvised Portraits
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We very much enjoyed making these memorable characters! Try out this exercise yourself sometime, its loads of fun!
Building Virtual Worlds at Carnegie Mellon University starts with each student being assigned a role in Round 0. Since I have a Computer Science background, my role was that of programmer; this entailed I build a world that employed a number of basic features in Unity, such as:
Loads models and textures.
Play animations.
Use intervals, lighting, collisions, and multiple scenes.
When considering the world, what I noticed was the amazing talent of the artists and musicians around me. It occurred to me what a shame it would be for their work not to be seen. I decided then that my virtual world would be a gallery of other peoples work. My first task was then to coordinate of assets with artists, and sound designers.
Creation
Artists were initially required to create animated lunchboxes, then dragons, and sound designers were required to create music for a clip of game play from a previously made world. I decided to meld the two by attaching audio sources to several of the artists assets that would constantly play music made by our sound designers.
As part of Building Virtual Worlds we were tasked to complete the marshmallow challenge.
The marshmallow challenge has teams build a tower out of a number of materials:
20 sticks of spaghetti.
One yard of tape.
One yard of string.
One marshmallow.
We completed the challenge with a height of 29 inches, and though our tower may not have been the tallest when measured. At the end of the day it certainly was the tallest left standing.