Game 3 design process (Part 1)

Game 3 is our group game for the semester. For this game I'll be working with Tahlia and Mitch.

We decided for this game, since we really didn't have a lot of time, to keep it fairly simple. Each of us liked the move Labyrinth and none of us wanted to do a shooter, so after a bit of discussion, we determined that we'd do a maze game. After throwing some ideas around, we settled on a child-like spooky theme, a cartoony horror style. We were inspired by the MediEvil games, having played them ages ago, and themes of kids' monsters and the like. Then we realised that Halloween was approaching so it was thematically appropriate (even though I despise the Americanised version of the holiday, especially given we are in Spring in this hemisphere, not Autumn... but we won't go into that!)

So we started looking for some reference images to start off with.

 

 



After that we came up with a few more child-like reference points, such as "Where the Wild Things Are", and settled on an overall theme for the game: namely a kid's nightmare. So a little kid is sleeping and finds themselves in the spooky maze. They then need to find their way out of the maze otherwise monsters would get them or something equally horrific. Since it's at night time, there would be a moon. Ideally we wanted to have the moon act as the timer, however we decided to put that as a "maybe" option.

So the game would include child-related objects such as toys and a kid's bed, in a spooky maze setting. We decided that we'd have a timed maze without any damage dealing mechanics, to make it a bit more kid-friendly. We'd include some kids' toys as decorations, and then we decided to actually make the kids' toys friendly pickup objects. The time gameplay mechanic then came back into discussion and we decided to make so that the toys added time to the game.

        

Because I had used mazes in a first semester game I remembered the site I had generated it from (http://mazegenerator.net/) and went there to generate a bunch of random mazes. This site is amazing as it can randomly generate mazes based on four different basic shapes, a huge range of sizes, and different starting point options; and it generates the maze solution for you as well! So much easier than creating a maze from scratch.

We decided on a delta style maze (triangular based) with a small size and a bottom starting point:

Because it's kid-themed and we needed some additional gameplay elements, we then decided to add some monsters to it dynamically instead of just being the vague threat at the end. Originally we thought that we could have the monsters chase the player, forcing them to lose their way in the maze, however it was later decided that we'd actually have the monsters remove some of the player's time to complete the maze.

 

 

So at this point we knew that we wanted the game to be cartoony horror, outdoors, at night, kid themed, with toys and monsters, and a nighmare-y kind of feel.

This is when we put our asset list together - the preliminary version, at least.

Game Object Asset List
High priority	Mid priority	Low priority
Modular wall prefabs	Moon (moving timer)	Any animations
Toys x 5 (time pickup items)	Skybox	Decorations (plants, sculptures, etc)
Monsters x 2 (chase enemies)
End point (bed)

After that I started working on making a modular wall in 3DS Max. I started off by following this tutorial: http://vimeo.com/35545046. I found an interesting stone wall texture and used it as the base. The tutorial basically goes by using lines to outline the stone shapes, then converting the lines into polys and quadding them up, then extruding and shaping them. The tutorial actually uses Zbrush to do the sculpting, however since we don't have that I would have just done it in Max.

Right away I discovered that this method was exceedingly time consuming. I think I spent about a full day all together just on getting the lines drawn and the stone shapes quadded out. At this point I realised that the stone all would be enormously poly heavy, which would not be good in the game at all. This was confirmed in design class. So I decided to go back to the original texture I used, change and cartoonify it in Photoshop, and use that as a base with a bump map.

I'll still keep the complicated wall, and probably finish it to see how it looks, I just won't use it in a game. Maybe as a still scene asset.

I used this texture to make a very basic modular wall - essentially just a box, since the texture is tileable on the x-coordinates. I also made end pieces (3 sided cylinder shapes) and cut the end sections of the texture to make materials for those, so they'd line up seamlessly.

I also doodled some quick monsters just to see if I could come up with anything halfway decent:

After that I started working on seeing how the maze would look with the stone walls in place.

Just starting with a basic plane, I added the maze as a base texture for guidelines, imported the wall and end pieces, and started added them to the scene. After a while I added a first person character controller and ran it around to see how it looked.

The walls seemed to work quite well, the placement was a little time consuming but it wasn't too bad. It looked okay from a first person perspective too. The fully detailed walls would have looked nicer, but these ones weren't too bad.

Just to see the how it looked, I added some effects to the scene - changed the ambient light to a purplish-grey colour, added a blue render fog, and the Unity night time skybox. It turned out looking pretty good, as a starting point at least:

So from here we need to add some code to actually make things work (pickups, enemies, timer, etc), make models for the toys, monsters and end object, add some artwork and an interface.