Designing Environments

For this assignment the class must design an environment based on a building in Manchester city centre. I chose a small pub for the basis of a small village in the hills.

First I made a simple 3D model of the scene in 3DS Max to help with perspective, which is an important anspect of this assignment.

Here is the progress made so far. The colours have been created from the 3D models and I am using it as a guide to draw. The scene will be wintery, but with no snow, just colder colours being used (such as blues and bluey greens and greys). I've not followed the model exactly but that doesn't matter for now.

I'll have to add more detail aswell, there might be a forrest or something in the background, faded with the mountains.

Creating accessibility for FPS games

Here we were tasked with taking a popular FPS and making it more accessable to the mass audience. I chose Team Fortress 2 to modify and ended up adding a few modes to accomodate these new players.

It should be noted that I dodn't really like this assignment as a problem is that if you try to appeal to the largest audience you tend to take away what was originaly challenging and fun to the original fan of the game. A series which appeals to a wide audience is Call of Duty, which has seemingly not seen many improvement since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. This is due to the fact that the mass audience enjoys the Call of Duty games and will willingly buy new versions even with little change and so the developers have no need to improve the game series if they can keep it roughly the same and make a lot of money. This saves effort for them, which is understandable, but it gives a bad impression to people who value games and actually want to see them improve.

Creating a Concept Document

Creating a small concept document was the task of this assignment. The concept document must have been a game design idea for a game of your creation based on an 80's cartoon. The cartoon I was assigned was Jem, a very pink and vibrant cartoon with a musical basis.

The difficult part of this assignment was coming up with how to change the show into a game. That is why I tried to design a game which fitted to the original show as closely as possible. After looking at other documents and my own I seem to notice that visual appeal is important for a design document. So, later I will add many more images from various points in the show to illustrate my points. I'll also likely remove mentioning on how the controls will work in favour of an image showing them instead.

From this assignment I learned that in games design you might not work with any kind of interlectual property you particularly like and so that you should not limit your ideas to just what you want to do, otherwise you could miss out some good oppertunities.

Imagery is also essential. It's best to use an image where possible instrad of text. Pictures are worth a thousand words. I'm trying to remove a lot of text and replace it with images. The updated version of the document should be available soon.

Designing Characters and Locations

For this assignment skills learned from a lecture about adding characters and story to a game to create both one character, and one location of our own choice. The assignment is now finished and is ready to be handed in.

My character idea is a Latvian cat woman (still based in the world created in the Heroes and Villains assignment for creative thinking) who is the vice president of the company the villain (from the assignment mentioned above) owns. She can be quite forgetful but is a friendly and morally guided character.

The location is a city of which was bought out by the Business TonCat (ran by the villain). The primary location is the TonCat headquaters which is a very tall tower that stands out from the surrounding city. It contains many things, the primary purpose of the tower is to house 10,000 offices which have won multiple awards over the years for their user friendliness. The ground level of the tower is open to the public and is actually a shopping centre. It houses many shops which offer a wide range of goods. From Video games to food, everything is available here. Finally, the basement levels house small assembly plants which manufacture the electronic goods that TonCat is also known for.

This assignment was difficult as thinking up a character and their backstory is difficult. Including having to detail a location added to this. However, it was fun to create a story and invent new people and places, letting the imagination run wild.

Designing a level in UDK

For this assignment the class was told to create a multiplayer level (either Capture the Flag or Deathmatch) in the Unreal Development Kit (UDK).

I had trouble coming up with a good idea for the level, but in the end I based it on a symmetrical stadium which allows players to fall to their death on the sides. It has two levels of height, the lower path safer to travel but likely to have more players running around, and the higher path, which is more difficult to travel and use effectively, but less players will use.

Overall, I'm reworking the level and have somethings I need to improve on it. These are that I need to make the higher level more difficult to use (for example making platforms thinner), apply textures fully (I ran out of time the first time it was handed in), reconfigure paths for bots, to make paths smoother and finally to add more lights to increase the levels general aesthetic appeal.