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!!!