Flash Movement

I wanted to further develop the technical aspect and mechanics of my game and started looking at different ways Flash and Actionscript work together to make different aspects of my game work. First and most importantly was the idea of being able to move my characters on the stage, not with just one control as most one-player flash games operate, but with two simultaneous controls working together to simulate the kind of movement I want to emulate in my game.

So I basically developed a stage in which I would be able to move a blue and red circle with the arrow keys and W, S, A, D keys respectively. As well as trying my best to avoid any "key-lock" arrangements (I'll explain this another time in detail) when mapping my controls to different keys, it was to have both controls move at controlled space with different variables to determine speeds.



Later in my game, I was considering adding power-up collectables in the game, which when picked up will enhance certain character qualities such as hit damage, character speed etc.
I consider this one of the more ambitious ideas of the game, but if I was to add equations to variables that when the powerups are collected, variable values are then altered as a result of that pickup. This will mean I have to look into hitTesting for moving objects and hitTesting in relation to combat.

Character Model Development

So after considering how I want to animate my game in Flash, I previously talked about developing a universal character model which can take multiple character skins being mapped onto the structure of the model itself. I thought that the benefit of doing this was great because actually having a character model means that any character that is reflected in game carries off a unique but continuous style throughout the game. I wanted to keep everything very consistent, but add lots of variety within that.

So here is a preview of the original character model developed further. On the left, there is an Illustrator improved version of the original bitmap character model in the middle. I want the graphics to be sharper, and converting my model to a vector graphic will keep the high quality I want to see in the game. I'm still wondering whether the Illustrator vector can be copied onto my scene effectively and preserve all of the separate elements of that character such as the arms, legs, etc.

You can also compare this to actually developing a skin for the character model which can be seen to the right. This vector is supposed to be a cartoon reflection of myself, wearing a white shirt and black trousers (I haven't worked around getting them to look like black jeans yet, but oh well), and white trainers. Although the model itself admittedly may deserve more detail, you can see how the basic character model has more or less been stuck to for this version, and I'm wanting to do this for the rest of my characters as I think there will be a genuine consistency and really nice value coming out of this.

The detail in the "skinned" model may need more work, but as I mentioned previously I'm unsure whether I am able to import my vectors into flash whilst preserving groups ready to be animated. If all of the layers become referenced as one, I can only animate and map controls to a static image, which isn't what I want (unless it's a statue fighting game). I'll be updating a little more as to how I came to my character model conclusion some other time in my blog.

Character Model + Mechanics

So with this selected idea, I considered developing one character model and then extrapolating that model with designs to go over the top of that model. Each character in the game will then use this model in order for me to correctly develop functional animations. The animations I need to consider are:

- Running
- Blocking
- Attacking
- Stationary Stance
- Jumping
- Power Moves

Each character is going to be an Interactive Media Design student. It would be unrealistic of me to develop every single character in our course, so I will select a few for character development and see if I can fit them to my animation model. If I can select some characters with more attributes, with identities that I can develop further, I think I can have some engaging characters to work with in my game.

The breakdown of the animation model is the body anchors and joints, and the connections between those elements. I will try to work with this basic character model first in order to get the animations right, before I move onto the aesthetic element of replacing the basic character model graphics for those which are going to be relevant to each character in my game.

Each character is going to of course experience different emotions, and I want to be able to get those emotions down and carried across as effectively as possible. As a result I am going to work with simple emoticon-inspired emotions, as they are very identifiable and it makes my designs more accessible for a broader audience. I want everyone to be able to enjoy my game, without having to read too much into body language and facial expression, so as long as I can communicate such expressions I think I can make a lot of progress on other important elements.

Market Research

So if I am going to work on a beat 'em up game, I need to of course understand what exists out there, not just in the flash platform but other platforms too, as there may be limiting cross-platform factors that I need to address.

Street Fighter (Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix)

So I wanted to take a look at the Street Fighter franchise started by Capcom. One of the first beat 'em up games known to videogamers, this is one of the immediate stimuli I considered when I first came up with the idea of working on this type of game. Why? Because it was hugely successful when Capcom released the first game of the series in August 1987. The latest Street Fighter IV release has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide as of March 31, 2009. 

- Simplicity: Street fighter is a hugely enjoyable game because the aim was easy, beat the other player up until they lose all of their health. The game dynamics and the introduction of a variety of moves meant that there is no singular path to success, but there are many interesting and quite possibly complex strategies to achieving your goal. Each strategy relied on the input of the user, moreso than the actual moves you're supplied with. And this is the great part of it, every user has a different way of playing, it doesn't matter if for one round you could effectively carry out a series of moves to win because every round is different. What I want for my game is to be able to simulate a similar experience where it depends on skill, not the tools you're given to reach your goals.

- Variety: As I mentioned above, the aim is simple, but there's a variety in the fights. As well as that, there's a variety in the players you can control, and consequently a variety in those players skills and techniques. If I can develop characters that can be identified with, and have a variety of styles and ideas, I can reach larger sectors of my target audience, especially when more and more people will be able to play my game.

- Animation: This will come with the variety, different players will have different styles, and different animations. The animations in Street Fighter seem to work well because of their fluency and accuracy, they relate to the player they are attributed to and I want to do the same, but of course in my own way.

King of Fighters (The King of Fighters Collection: The Orochi Saga)

Another franchise I wanted to understand was the King of Fighters series, which was a very similar take on the beat 'em up genre as compared to the Street Fighter series. There's an important point I wanted to address with this game though:

- Combos: Combos are a series of attacks which are stringed together and records hits made on your opponent in a row. The introduction of combos into these games added a new element of gameplay, as people who became aware of this wanted to string the highest number of consecutive hits in a row. This element alone made some players want to play the game aggressively, and some had to adapt to accommodate players who were aggressive by playing more defensively and smarter. To me it's amazing that one small element made such an impact, and this is the kind of interaction that made me want to develop a beat 'em up game in the first place. This type of gaming is something that brings players out of the box, and makes them want to parttake and play a more active role in their gaming experience. If I can take into account such ideas and innovate something new, it would surely be a bonus to my end product.

Selected Idea + Details

So the idea that I've selected to continue working on is the beat em up fighting game with Interactive Media Design students as characters in the game. I'm interested in seeing the results of having more than one person controlling characters that they can identify with, adding something deeper in the character development aspect as these will be people that are already existent. I will take a couple of people as starting points and try to develop them as much as I possibly can, from special moves to how they act in certain situations, and I think I can do something really positive with this.


The game will take place in a series of levels, and the interesting part for me is to be able to create some really nice environments, most probably with 3D software such as Blender or Cinema4D. It will give me experience in trying to model as well as create the 2D interactivity in Flash. I hope that the final result will be a flash game, so there will be a steep technical learning curve when it comes to actionscript, moreso than animating and tweening.


The end control will be the user playing as one of these in-game characters based on real people, and the aim is for one player to beat up the other (until the opposing player reaches zero health) to win the game. I will try to have two players playing simultaneously to breed some form of competition, which is what I hope will make the game itself successful, so two characters will be controlled by two players who really want to win. If I can develop at least one level or environment that the player gets to play, I'll be very happy with the progress I have made, as tackling one level is going to be a tougher process for me.


I'm creating this game because it presents me with a lot of opportunities to cover as much of the games design process as possible, developing characters, building environments, but also technical aspects such as animation, collision, statistics and more. What's going to be different about this game is the way that it plays, many games now separate players by controllers, so if I have two players controlling with one keyboard, it may bring them closer. The mechanics of the game itself will also differentiate it from some of the other games that are out in the market now, as well as other smaller flash games that have already been released online. 


The general features for the game will be as follows:


- Full Player Control: The ability to manipulate your player as you would like the player to be controlled. What is expected of the player that is being controlled, and how will that player fulfil his role in my game world, of beating the other player up.

- Health Tracking + Statistics: Monitoring health in games such as these is going to be imperative to realising the full concept, so I am going to do more research into how I can achieve this in Flash, if there are any other fighting game engines that exist which handle this appropriately, and if I can find any other games that do things differently.


- Collision + Hit testing: This is another primary function for me, preventing players from walking off-stage, through objects, and allowing the two combatants to hit each other and in turn affect the way health is reduced and calculated.


- Combat: The combat itself is something that I need to consider, whether I want players to continuously hit each other by running towards each other and making physical contact, or whether I should streamline the combat and give players projectiles to use instead. Depending on the option I pick, it will change the way the game plays, so more user testing will need to be done in order to see if either of the selected methods work well when taken forward.



Thinking about it now, I am considering adding a story to the game, possibly only following one perspective of a selected character. The idea is that when you pick a player, you also pick their story and their perspective, but for now I will try to work on one characters background and start taking in some research to see how others have dealt with stories in such genres of gaming.

Game Ideas

So I went away and took time to work on my ideas for a game and come up with some new concepts. I was aiming for some completely fresh ideas that stood out for their ability to engagethe audience through the gameplay experience and graphics, moreso than the game being story-heavy.

So the first idea I had for my game is a holiday-based tourist "survival" platformer, in which you play a character on his vacation in Paris. You start off in a very adequate hotel where breakfast is free, however paying for food is just too much for you and your family. So the objective is to steal as much free breakfast as you can in order to feed your family for the rest of the day. As this would be based in Paris, your entire meals would consist of baguettes, croissants, butter, cheese, milk, juice and other varieties of breakfast foods.

The game itself would operate as a platformer in which you walk, sneak, or prone around the hotel breakfast area making trips from the breakfast tables back to your table with this free food. Hotel staff such as waiters and possibly managers will be on duty who don't take kindly to such behaviour, and if your character happens to get caught, you will lose your lives which in turn cause you to lose the game.

The good thing about this game is that it is constantly engaging your mind, having to be spatially aware within a new environment and splitting your attention across many areas. As well as it being a platformer, it is a mentally stimulating game and I think this is going to help make the actual game successful. One drawback I have considered however is actually developing this artificial intelligence that will move onstage and have this moving field of vision that catches you out. This may be too ambitious for me to code as an inexperienced flash user, and this slightly worries me in comparison to the value of the learning experience I get out of it.

So my second idea was to develop a beat-'em-up composed of people from the Interactive Media Design course, in which each character would have special abilities developed from existing in-jokes, personality traits and other qualities. To further the interaction in the game, I wanted to couple this with the possibility of making it a platformer game, in which characters would be able to use platforms as interesting obstacles to give the combat a new dimension. If this was possible, I would also like to include the ability to obtain randomly appearing power-up collectables which enhances your characters qualities such as strength or speed. Another introduction I would like to see as well as having an interface that tracks health (and possibly time) is the addition of a "special bar" in the form of an anger system. As you lose health, your bar increases, and when your bar is full you can utilise a very special character ability which will deal significantly larger damage to your opponent.

The idea is that the characters which are developed into functional and animated sprites share a likeness to the characters which they are based on, however they will be simplified in detail. I think that itself will add more personality to the game, as emotions are much easier to capture in simplified illustrations. More emphasis will be on the gameplay itself and the graphics, again more than having something based on the story as my target is to have a game that is entertaining to play and replay.

There are some ambitious qualities to this game such as the special system and the platformer aspect of the experience, however I think I can break this down by starting with the basic movements which will allow me to transition much easier to the more complex areas of the game. What I have also been interested in is actually getting some hands-on with Blender software in order to model and develop environments for my game to take place, so importing those environments into flash (where the game will actually be developed) would be great for my whole learning experience.

Ok, so the third idea of my game was to develop this highly physics based game in which you're controlling a cannon mechanism at the bottom of the level, which aims to fire a ball into a hole or target at the top of the level. On the way there are some platforms which are controllable via Keyboard controls. These platforms will rotate at 360 degrees and help you use gravity and momentum to hit the ball towards the intended target. As the game progresses, there will be more interesting and creative ways in which you have to hit the target, more obstacles and platforms will be present making the game more difficult as you progress.
The thing I like about this idea is that there is more than one point of control, many objects are going to be interacting with each other in different ways, depending on the positioning of platforms and how many the player will be able to control at once. And this brings me to one of those problems, how many platforms is a player going to be able to control at a time? If I make more than one platform move at once with one control, will I then end up developing levels that are too difficult?
The concept itself is something I like, and there'll be a hell of a lot of usability testing to do once the levels are completed, but unlike the previous two ideas this one can be implemented into a 3D environment. If the game was then opened up to the possibility of it being in a 3D environment as opposed to being just 3D in a 2D plane, what more options can I add and how can I control all of these variables in such a setting? This is something I'll definitely have to think about.

Blender: First Impression + GE System

So today I wanted to take some time to understand Blender, because I've wondered what it could do for me and what kind of game ideas I can run by it. I guess it's an opportunity for me to filter out most of my either overambitious or lacking ideas by studying the possibilities and tools, so I'm not aiming too high or low.


At the start, the interface was really annoying especially when I started using the 3D viewer. Even when I changed it into perspective mode (definitely helpful), it's still the same controls to take a look around my scene and I can't really control it as well as I wanted to, maybe Mike will help me with that.

But then I started with the Game Engine (GE), it uses this "Logic" system and I was able to create an action that mapped my keyboard input to movement of a cube on my screen, and it worked instantly. Now that was really cool, and though it's a completely basic action, I totally understood the system of connecting the Sensor to the Controller and then the Actuator.

Though I'm not sure if I'll use this for the Game Engine, I'll have to invest more time into it, and then invest more time into understanding the modelling aspect that will be the essential elements to the game. Even if I don't use the GE, I think the modelling will be useful to me in some form or another.

Subspace Presentation

So as part of this module, I worked on an analysis for the still running massively multiplayer online 2D spaceship fighter game Continuum (formerly recognised as Subspace). The game was originally developed in 1995 as "Sniper", which was a project that utilised advanced (at that time) prediction algorithm(s) that reduced network overhead (lag), which in turn enabled a larger multiple player online game to be played over dial-up connections. This was the only real "online game" innovation it has had, but the game itself has had a huge influence on other sci-fi related videogames.


The game was released by Virgin Interactive Entertainment publicly as Subspace in 1997, but the servers were shut down after a few years. The game was originally developed by Burst, led by Jeff Peterson (aka Jeff P.) and Rod Humble, for the US branch of the now-defunct Virgin Interactive. Later on, Jeff Petersen would use SubSpace as inspiration for Sony Online Entertainment's Infantry and Cosmic Rift. This was when Estonian developer Priit Kasesalu (who later became head programmer developing Skype and Kazaa) developed an identical client and renamed it "Continuum". 




Games today strive for the kind of support from players with new mods and maps that this game has had for 13 years, and that is what interests me a hell of a lot. Also notably the well-structured functional chat system which accommodated the full spectrum of communication. It works simply and allows players to effectively communicate with each other efficiently, and I think that is part of the massively addictive quality that this game holds. The ability to customise and create your own maps and additions to the game is something that may appeal more to a different area of the gaming population, the ability to modify aspects of the game and have that control makes people want to share experiences fascinates me. This aspect also seems to contribute to the feeling of "community", as even relations between the playing population and the staff members that moderate the game. In fact, I was actually staff for a while myself, so I had the ability to host games, answer help calls, ban players who would make the general gaming experience less pleasant for others (cheaters, racists, spammers and other abusive individuals).


But anyway, I think I took a lot in from actually analysing this game, it has allowed me to take into account the gaming experience more than the technicalities and the physical aspects that make those experiences possible. I've looked into many areas of the game although that may not actually be reflected in my powerpoint slides, and I'm happy that I have taken enough into account so that I understand what kind of output I want for my game.

Mindmapping + General Direction

Okay, so I've taken the time to mindmap what I'm going to work on with this project by developing a mindmap that let me understand what's in my reach, what I should look into and just to generally see what I'd like to do. Here it is:

So now my mind is focused on a few points, relevant to what kind of outcome I want out of this and what targets I want to hit:

• User Experience - I want people to enjoy playing my game; It's probably a bit of a "Captain Obvious" thing to say, but I'm starting to realise that although I'm the one actually working on this project, it's not about me because I'm not designing the game so that I can enjoy it. That's pretty much number one on my mind.
• Audience - I want to identify with the people playing the game and develop a system that decides how my users will feel. Hopefully I can do this by reviewing a couple of games and their rules once I get some more defined concepts out of my next "idea" mindmap.
• Fluency - I may have a personal bias towards this, but I'm generally a sucker for really smooth gameplay, smooth animation. With that I normally see simple games with these great subtleties and though I may not have an idea yet, it would be nice to capture a similar experience.

Now looking over what I've just said, I know I have these thoughts in my head and it's quite tempting for me to go with it, but I want to maintain a very open mind. Some projects before, I could have done better and let inspiration hit me from every direction, so now seems like a good opportunity to let things take their natural course. My next update will have some general game ideas which I'll have to talk to Mike about, I haven't had a chance to so I should really get that out of the way so I don't fall in some massive disasterous pothole..

Hi!

Hey, this will be my update blog for my Games Design module at Northumbria University. I'll be updating this with little tidbits and interesting things, work, inspiration, ideas, and more.

I will update this later with my initial thoughts, plans, and maybe some other interesting things.