Interactive storytelling

Dear and beloved readers!

I am attending three courses right now and trying to deal with a lot of stuff regarding my own life and the future of it, that is the main reason why it was a long time since I posted anything here. And also because I have been writing some posts for Naarthegame.net instead and reporting the ongoing development over there. So there is a lot of planning in all directions. 😉

So something’s are changing right now, I am trying to learn how to write narratives, not being a book reader is something that doesn’t help me at all (I will need to start reading books of course).  So let’s get this thing started;

 

In the course named interactive storytelling we have an assignment to deliver. The thing is to write a branching story with dialogs where the user will experience different outcomes based on the choices made.

My first plan was to portray the life of a poor boy in the streets of Iraq, the goal for this kid was to gather money to feed his family, so the reader would have to figure out the best way to earn money by haggling. I realized that the scope was going be too big for this assignment so I had to figure out another way to execute this Idea. After a some thinking I had a better idea!

I realized that I could use the journey of current day refugees trying to get from turkey to a safer place, with this idea I would be able to shed light over the current situation and maybe induce some kind of compassion towards what the refugees would have to go through.

So this is the story of Hamodi, a young boy that tries to make his way through different countries to get to Sweden. The way there will vary, depending on which way you choose for him.

I have been using real life sources from people that made it to Sweden, BUT, none of their names are used here and the story is of course  not a true story but a collection of stories. Anyways,  try it out and if you have some time over please leave some feedback in the comment section below so that I may learn something. The story will maybe continue if enough people would like to see it finished but for now I hope you like this one.

 

Download the story here: The story of Hamodi 

OBS: The software used for this story is called Twine, Check it out! Its pretty easy to use.

 

The progress of Naar

We have been proceeding with our game Naar and reaching to new places, things are going a bit slow but if we nail the mechanics and have them done before Christmas, then we can start working on making a playable demo and hopefully with an interesting narrative.

I have been writing Devblogs for Naar so I had to prioritize that, you can read more about them at our website: NaarTheGame.net.

However, I have been doing a lot of work with my comrades, everything from creating spells, to designing levels.

My part is the being the Lead Designer, but as we are a small group of students that title seem to vary in work but at the same time a lot of fun. The negative thing about it is that I dont have the time to get stronger in one area, as I have to be everywhere at once, like for an instance, I worked together with our 3D modeller Marcus to establish rules for the magic casting and combining (We have a new design that should be fun and powerful to use) and then I jumped in and worked on animating a dash skill, and tried to create clothing physics for Mokhtar (Our character). Then I tried to create a new spell to learn how blueprints work in Unreal Engine 4, and to finally work some on adding stuff to the level.

http://imgur.com/G9vwKur

It is a lot of fun! But I need to get better at producing more stuff, we need to get going!

The publication of Naar is getting bigger, a lot of middle eastern people have showed interest in our Facebook page, but sadly we have had more downloads than feedback submits, and we are still trying to figure out how to resolve that problem.

At first we only had the feedback link on our website, but then we added it into the game to collect people who forget to leave feedback, the result was a bit better but we wanted more people to leave us feedback.

Now so far we have released a 0.4 build including a little bigger level and tutorial information, two magic spells, refined movement and an enemy that chases and attacks you. So get in, download, play and tell us what you think about the game so far.

http://imgur.com/iANHPMM

Week 2 on prototyping

We want to thank all the testers who left us feedback after trying out the first prototype! We have been looking at ways to improve on the game and are progressively working on the movement mechanic to make it feel as good as possible.

(We are also working on some very exciting changes to the magic system compared to the one in last year’s GGC-version and we’re hoping to have that implemented in a few weeks)  

Sadly for this week we won’t be releasing the second iteration, we have to work out details and also build a new level, environmental objects needs to be designed etc. So please be patient with us as we try to proceed to the next stage.

For the next iteration we will add:

The ability to shoot a basic fireball

Destroyable objects for you to fire at

New level design

Refined movement and jump

Better blending between some animations

A drop shadow for Mokhtar (Player Character)

The first version is still available for download and you may still leave feedback on it, you can also mail us if you have any further feedback or just write it in the “Other” tab in the feedback formula.

You can also subscribe and receive information of changes or updates from us!

We have big plans for this project, and soon we shall have a fighting system that you’ll hopefully like!

(We have big plans for this project, and hope you will be able to try out the new fighting system for spellcasting soon.)
Once again we thank you for playing our game and hope for you to stay with us through this journey and hopefully you will learn as much as we do!

Visit the website at: Naarthegame.net
And the Facebook page: Facebook.com/NaarTheGame

Lets do this! Come and play!

Attention attention!

We are finally starting! You can now download the first prototype of the redevelopment of “Naar”. This first prototype will be testing the movement to see if we can bring out a smooth character control, the game can be played with either a gamepad or a keyboard & mouse so feel free to try them both.

The stage will be an obstacle course where your goals is to reach the top of the pillar and touch the shiny sphere, so you have to make your way to the top by jumping from platform to platform, it sounds easy enough but may seem difficult for some players. But try to be patient with us and give us feedback by answering the survey we have created for this.

To prepare you of what awaits, check these screenshots below of our current prototype:

Lets go basics! Climb that thing!

A little balancing of course!

Thats what we do! We reach for the sun!

And for further information visit our website: NaarTheGame.net, and our Facebook page: Facebook.com/NaarTheGame!

We appreciate all the feedback we can get and we hope you will stay with us to see how it goes!

Naar, Lets do it again!

Starting this year’s blog a lot later than I had planned, so let’s jump right into it without further delay.

 

After GGC we decided to spend our summer vacation far away from school activities, working and saving up money for our last year of Game design at campus gotland (Uppsala university). During the summer we attended at Intel buzz Workshop and presented our game there, mingled with a lot of new people and some which will be of use to us during this year and maybe even the future.

We decided that we would want to start over with Naar, and begin from scratch, starting off with character movements and working our way to casting spells and defeating enemies. We made a lot of research on similar games and looked at how they used their combat controls and camera movements, and we are going to try different methods to cast magic.

 

The previous demo will be available at our website but only playable with an Xbox-controller (or a similar gamepad). But a new version will also be available to test, and we will appreciate anyone who can help us by testing it and give us feedback on it. We will implement a keyboard layout so that it becomes more available for the majority to test. The new version will first start off with basic movements, so there won’t be any “action” but rather trying it out the character movement through an “obstacle course”.

Each time we iterate the prototype we will add it as new version of the game, and you will receive information about what has been added and adjusted, you can still comment on how you feel about different mechanics even though we moved on to the next step in the iteration.

The Naarative

In the GGC version of the game, we didn’t have the time to implement our narrative and that was a great loss according to us, we did not manage to deliver the right feeling to the game and often I had to explain the story, and if you as a developer need to explain a story, then you haven’t succeeded in delivering it from the start.

While we are testing out the mechanics for this version, we are working on how to implement a narrative for this game, the narrative is mostly written down but we are working on making cutscenes in the game to give the player a feeling of progression in the story.

Some new characters are also being worked on and we will start to animate for them as well. On our page you will be able to take a look at some concept art, and background information. We also have a developer blog that we are setting up and a webpage where each new version will be uploaded, Ill add a link to them as soon as we get it up and running.

Be sure to follow us and help us in the iterations, and hopefully this will become a fun experience for both parts. To keep track on where we are right now check out the facebook page: NaarTheGame.

Big Game Project; Final Week

Everything started out nicely until two days before the exhibition. All was in order and we started to build the lights a last time and going for the final build. But as we started doing that, our server crashed end the only working recovery point was three days old..

We wanted to get to the root of the problem, as no one knew what the reason for the crash was. We did not have the time to solve that problem so we went on to rebuild most of the things we lost and tried to make it look good enough.

It ended up with a version full of bugs, but it was still kind of playable, none of the sounds implemented before was there either.

Our AI programmer stayed behind trying to solve most of the bugs, then every time he wanted to create a build it failed, something about the third-person character blueprint. However, we set up the game and played it through the editor and it worked as a temporary solution.

We received a lot of good feedback regarding the game, and a lot of people liked it as it was different in style. We also made the “Hela Gotland News” (Its written in Swedish), where they asked us about the game and other questions like if it is difficult to get into the industry.

At the award ceremony, we where nominated but we never received a reward. We were pretty sure that we wouldn’t win anything, not because our game crashed, but because our game lacked a good gameplay.

Insights

Regarding the game concept overall, I took the blame for the concept not working. I failed to deliver my vision to my teammates and therefore we failed to deliver the vision to the people. The scope was to big, I did consider that the programmers did not possess any knowledge regarding Unreal Engine and it would take time for them to get the hang of it, but I was not ready for the crashes we had and that it would consume that much time.

Even when the people played the game and liked it, I was disappointed, mostly at myself. I was so caught up with reaching deadlines that I forgot about making the game.

I decided to ask my team to redo the project for next year, I will rewrite the hole design and portray the game as it was intended to be and as for now, they still want to do this and make it better. We may need to change the engine for the sake of the programmers.

I’ve made a lot of new contacts and hopefully they would be a great resource for our second try.
Our site may be inactive for a while, but hopefully we will set off at the start of our third year. NaarTheGame

Presenting the team one more time

Ahmad Ali, Producer/Lead Designer: https://ashvaganza.wordpress.com/

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Big Game Project; Week 7

The week of beta

First of the late post was due to the fact that we had been working overtime the whole week as we fell behind schedule. We had a lot of deadlines that we had to complete and then realizing at the final hour that the presentation deadline was closing in. That one took a lot more time than anticipated and left no time for posting in this blog.

Anyway, the beta session did not go as planned, just before the testers entered the room our build crashed, so we had to quickly gather the things we had and throw it in and the results were flawed. The testers ended up with playing a patched together version, but they could still tell us what we lacked in our gameplay.

The feedback we received while they were playing was that the controllers were to hard for us to have for GGC, even though our target audience are experienced players we need to make it easier for non-players to be able to do some gestures.
Then there was the lack of feedback when you actually succeeded in executing a gesture, we need to tell the player when a spell has failed. We also should extend the “Harakat-Mode” (A bullet-time mode where everything but the player moves in slow-motion), so that the player will have more time to make a gesture.

We need to balance the enemies more, make them bigger, slow their projectile speed etc. Feedback when hit, a forced trailer (you wont be able to continue unless the tutorial is completed).

We are trying to clean up Everything we have so far, we are working on the spell effects, all of the textures are almost done and the level is almost complete. Animations are done and are waiting to be applied to the “Ghoul” and the boss. A lot of tweaking is being done this week, like enemy stats, spell damage etc.

Our programmers are working on the last spells, implementing easier controls and the boss AI. They will also work together with the effect feedback so that the game would explain itself.

We managed to borrow music from various artists for our project as long as it is non-commercial, different sounds are being outsourced and streaming in as we work.

We also made a quick trailer for the game, the music is from Antti Martikanien.

Visit our site for more: https://www.facebook.com/NaarTheGame

This week will be our final week, hopefully everything will be in order! The Gotland Game Conference will be held at 24th of May until 26th. I will write a last blog on how it went and maybe post some pictures.

Art by William Mayer

The team

Ahmad Ali, Producer/Lead Designer: https://ashvaganza.wordpress.com/

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Big Game Project; Week 6

The week of the Pre-Beta.

In this week we had to prepare the features that needed to be present for the next week deadline and that is the Beta week, at that stage everything should be ready and done leaving the last week (week 8) for polishing only and getting rid of bugs that are present in the game.

This week we aimed at getting the main feature ready and that is casting and combining magic, this involves the control mechanism of casting different magic with the movement patterns done by using the analog sticks.

The spells that existed for this pre-beta were (Xbox Controller);
Fireball, which is the main casting and is executed by pressing X.
Firewall
Fireflies
Fireblast
Blackhole
Gravity

And the combination Fireball + Fireflies = resulting in the spell “Fire rain”,
Also Blackhole + Fireball = Big bang.

Combining spells does not only mean that some spells are compatible and creates new spells, casting spells on the field and using them to your advantage is a tactical choice a player can make, Ex; Casting gravity to trap enemies in the air while making time to cast more devastating spells.

Some visual effects were present but not all of them, for the rest of the spells we used placeholders that indicated the spell placed onto the field. But all of them had environmental effects.

The enemies we had in this stage where only the “Hasharas” (Insects), small djinns that resembles a combination between an angler fish and spider. They are smaller and move in packs but should be easier to kill.

HUD
A Health and Harakat (special move) meter was present, there was also an indicator that showed how you moved your analog according to a spell and what gesture you executed.

Harakat Mode
This mode did not have a finished GUI layout, the Slowmotion/Bullettime was present and you could cast three spells that would be thrown at the same time when the mode ends.

Level
The build for the level is have a lot of textured props placed out; Stones, vegetation, glowing mushrooms, hanging bridge, breakable objects and more.
The light is being set and the central room is being worked on. Soon everything will be up and presentable.

Open play testing
An second play testing was held on Friday, where anyone who felt to try out the games would have the chance to do so, and also for us to receive feedback on what we need to adjust.

A lot of it involved the actual gameplay and how it felt, the combat mechanics with the gesture movements is something new and also confusing for a lot of testers, this is to be expected as it is a new way of casting spells. We need to teach the player how to do it in an easy way with the help of a tutorial.

The spell fireball did not have a cooldown which resulted in constant attacking the enemies with the same spell and neglecting the use of the other spells as it became unnecessary to use them. Spamming the fireball was the dominant way to defeat the enemies.

The enemies need to have their health reduced a lot as they come in large quantities and took to long time to kill.

The Harakat mode was not functioning in a good way which also was neglected by testers.

A lot of bugs was reported and falling off the cliff resulted in crashing the game.

Some of the animations needs to be blended properly as they was not synchronized with the character movements.

We have a large list of feedback received from the play testing, all of them will be compiled to a list that should be checked off as team work.

The Designer
The logotype for Naar is done, and also the group logo that would represent us as a team.

As you can see the turban on the Naar logo was remade and the fire background was removed which made the logo clean and consistent in the art style.

The tutorial have not been done yet but there are some solutions planned for it, we will place hints on how to use them in combat and how the player should use them tactically to their advantage. Most will need to be illustrated through pictures that are easy to understand, due to the limited time they have to learn it.

We have a short narrative written for the game but it is being discussed in the team, we have a suggestion about using it in the title screen in form of murals on the wall, there is another suggestion of having it all explained in a training area by a “teacher”, then jumping into action with defeated enemies at the start of the level.
Displaying a narrative in a 10 minutes gameplay is a difficult task to achieve, and therefore will take a lot of time to get done, I will need to find the easiest and most effective way to display it so that the player understands why the are in that location and why they are fighting these monsters.
Doing this with cut scenes may not be possible due to the lack of time, but that would have been the best possible way to do it.

As I as the producer and lead designer have a lot of tasks on my plate to do, these things have been on hold for a time, but next week I need to find a solution for this, in the worst possible scenario I need to skip the narrative part and make a tutorial in which the player have to read what to do before they start, and maybe read about the story through a start text that can be skipped by pressing a button.

Next week
In the upcoming week we will need to crunch and play test the game every day until the Beta deadline on Friday. A lot of the coding needs to be complete and all the spells should be present and the combat system should make it feel as a good gameplay.

And also a new enemy will be put in to the game (The Ghoul), we have the final mesh ready and will work with the animations as soon as possible.

A lot of visual information and screenshots can be seen at our Facebook site: NaarTheGame, like and follow it to keep updated of the development.
And we shall try to get a gameplay video up at the page too for people to see.

Wish us luck!

Team Members

Ahmad Ali, Producer/Lead Designer

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Big Game Project; Week 5

For this week I will try to discuss the alpha testing and how it went.

The goals for alpha was that we should have:

– A playable map and some fights that could go on.

– Harakat mode should be functional and the magic casting and combinations should be available.

– A menu should be implemented.

All in all the level will be whiteboxed and tested to see if it follows a progression. The build should be in a stage where the game features and gameplay are testable.

Now talking about the alpha session;

First off something went wrong with the build, the enemies did not work as intended, the boss did not spawn, but the level was there.

The level was a rough build so we did not have too much props on there, except of our target dummies for the tutorial.

As for fights the player could shoot a fireball, cast the spell fireflies then combine it by shooting a fireball at it to activate the spell fire rain. All off the spells had placeholders and would serve as an example of how the mechanic worked. The spells was cased with the help of the analog movements.

Harakat mode was present but only as slowing down time and did not have the proper function with combining spells and giving feedback to the player.

We did not have a menu or GUI, we decided to prioritize the main features instead as we were running out of time.

To summarize

We did not come as far as we intended with the alpha, the biggest reason for this was that the team members are constantly learning and in search of new ways to learn how to make our features work, most of the time things don’t work for us. The AI started to crash days before we needed to present the alpha.

During the alpha testing we had two guys from the industry trying our game out, we had to pitch our concept to them before letting them play. They liked the narrative of the concept and where hopeful of seeing it.

During the testing we received a lot of feedback in which we wrote down. We needed to put a GUI that would make the player understand what’s going on, and also a way to indicate the start of the game and to quickly being able to restart. They really wanted us to make use of the narrative we have and implement it in the game as it was an attractive feature, we should implement it by either doing a small comic or cut scenes (but they told us that we would not have the time to do that and we agreed).

As the alpha took place on Wednesday we had the rest of the time to try to fix our misses. The lead artist sat down and started to work on the GUI, and the lead designer started working on the logotype that would later on be used for the menu and the game overall. We made a quick rescheduling of what we needed and started to concentrate on doing a good tutorial at the start and work our way through the game.

We are running out of time and we may need to scrap a lot of things if we want to have a game that works, but hopefully next week will look better and we manage to reach the goal of our concept.

The designer

The first layout of the controller didn’t seem difficult according to the testers, sadly we didn’t have enough for them to test them on except for one enemy.

So far we have planned the mapping for all of the spells and should have them available at the start of next week, after that it would be easier to test how they work and if they feel natural.

The GUI should not take too long to get done, if we get that out of the way then we can concentrate on everything else, like animations, effects, textures etc.

In the upcoming week we have our pre-beta, and after that only two weeks before we have to have the game ready to play. Hopefully this week would be the one that brings us ahead of the game so that we can make it feel whole and complete, leaving more time for polishing the game and getting rid of bugs etc.

We have started a Facebook site for our game, and it is under construction, later on you will find in-game footage and information about the GGC event. Visit the site here: Naar Facebok

You can find each team members blogs below:

William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/

Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/

Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/

Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/

Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/

Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com

Wish us luck as we will need it a lot!!!

Big Game Project; Week 4

For this week I planned a Pre-Alpha for our group in order to help us stay ahead of schedule. And for the alpha until the final stage we need to have our main features implemented.

The features that need to ready for this week, which also are our priorities for the whole game and our goal for GGC are:

• Gesture magic, you move the analog controllers in a pattern to conjure magical spells.
• Combining magic: After casting a spell onto the field which has a set duration time, you can hit it with another spell to combine it into a new spell with enhanced properties.
• Harakat-Mode: bullet time mode where you take control over time to execute and combine magic.
• Artificial intelligence (AI), Enemy behavior.

*Harakat in arabic means “movements”, or “stylized movements”.

Below ill present every area in short and also refer to their individual blogs for further reading in the areas that may interest you.

Programming

AI
Enemy behaviors that are implemented for alpha involve chasing, attacking the player and have a range of vision. They can detect you by sound and has a guard area in which they return to when they stray too far from their area.

The boss “Qadher” is programmed to have different behaviors (attack patterns) when he reaches certain points of his health meter. A player needs to rethink strategies and make use of the spells in store.

For more reading regarding this matter read Ladbon´s blog

Controls
We have an alpha set up for the control buttons which will surely change as we iterate them further through play-testing.

But for now, this is how the input looks:

This is only a mockup as we need to make the controls function properly. We need to get the main function of the analog sticks to be set for the alpha on Wednesday.

Read more about it in Herman’s blogg

Gesture Magic Casting
The analog controls for magic casting, has a script ready. What needs to be done for this is that the patterns need to be mapped for the player to cast spells that are assigned to them.
Magic Combination
The ability to cast the spell “fireflies” and hitting it with a “fireball”, which results in the spell “fire shots”, is written and ready as a script but we only have cubes placeholder for visual representations..

The lead programmer will further explain this matter in his blog, Oscar´s blog

 

Graphics

There is a lot of interesting visuals you should see in the artists individual blogs, you should visit them as I only write about their work and don’t show much of it here.

Animation

The animations for are mostly done, we have a spider that needs to be animated but we can’t do it in motionbuilder so we need to animate it in 3Ds Max, just recently we learned how to do that so unfortunately we may not be able to have it ready for Alpha. Mokhtar has some animations that need to be blended properly in Unreal Engine that should be only some small fixes, but for now we need to focus on features of the game rather than polishing the animations.

2D

Our Lead artist that also works as our concept artist, have provided us with a lot of art for our artists to follow. He makes a good job in representing the arabic style in artifacts and texts, he as gathered a lot of information and reference pictures that he and I have sat down and looked at.

I am not picky about it becoming 100% accurate but I want it to at leas be looking similar so that it gives the right feeling for our arabic influenced setting.

William´s blogg

3D

A lot of props are done, around 30 different stone shapes, mushrooms, the final mesh for our boss is being worked on and one extra enemy will have its base mesh done soon. And dont miss out on the bridges and other level based props he have prepeared.

Marcus blogg

Level

The level has the whole layout built, and should be placed in the alpha, later on we will make small changes in the level after we playtest it more. The level has still not been textured yet, but for now the lighting and some of the props are placed.

The level will always be under construction throughout the whole game developing process, so stay tuned by following Andreas blog below.

Andreas blogg

 

As far as we have come I can admit that I am a bit stressed as it feels like I am missing something, I tried to join the group as much as I could and help them out so I took it upon myself to learn how to animate in 3Ds Max to complete the spider animations, so far I’ve done a walking animation to 90% just need to do some final touches and try it in the engine and see if it works. If I get it up and running I’ll try to complete the rest of the animations; attack, idle and death.

 

The designing mission

I have a side assignment and that is also what I will be writing in my “post mortem”, that is about how I will try to teach the player about how to learn unconventional controls in an easy way, this and to make a short and understandable tutorial. I will write a bit more about it further in when we start to reach the Beta-stage.

So far regarding the controls in the pre-alpha stage, we haven’t gotten that far as the player can do some basic stuff like jumping and shooting a fireball but not doing the gesture moves with the analog sticks. But that was promised to be delivered for the Alpha on Wednesday, so I will have to keep track on what is done to make sure that it is done by then. But as far as I am concerned the control overall felt smooth according to the people that play tested it in school so that’s a good start I guess, and hopefully we will have something fun to play soon.

Next week will be a bit hectic for me as the I as a producer need to start attending presentation practices, and we still haven’t done much on the 2D side like for example the logotype for our game yet. But at the same time I don’t want to put too much pressure on our artists, so I’ll have to figure it out somehow.

Wish us luck for Alpha!