For this assignment, I have created a 2D space in Unity that imitates outer space (pun intended). I have taken the project’s theme quite literally because I find the concept very appropriate for the prompt. The mysteriousness and majesty of the outer space has made it a popular theme for artificially created spaces and stories as it provides unlimited options for creative interpretations of what is the world like outside the exosphere. Plus, I was curious to translate an inherently infinite 3D environment into a concise 2D space.

The canvas of the gamespace is pretty simple. I have used an image of a collection of starts as my background and added sprites of different celestial objects to fill up the space with planets, asteroids, star dust and even aliens! The final version of the assignment is a navigable virtual space that provides an opportunity for exploration and leaves a room for the user’s own imagination to visualize the story behind the given gamespace. It is a second player experience in which the user controls an astronaut floating in outer space with arrow keys. The game does not give specific direction or suggestions, so it is up to the player to explore and choose where to go.

As one navigates through my gamespace, he/she finds out that the astronaut’s rocket has crashed into a planet, and that is way he is lost and floats in his costume unattached to the aircraft. I have added the rocket crash to the scene in order to give the gamespace a certain narrative and justification. This detail that implies a certain plot or a story to what is happening on the screen  also contributes to the overall mood and the feelings that the space conveys. Since the astronaut floats aimlessly and purposefully, the user that controls him is able to visualize and reflect upon the feeling of being lost in an environment full of mysteries. For this reason my camera movement is set up in a way that one cannot see the whole canvas.

 

 

Several intentional design choices imply a certain behavior to the player. The cinemachine, as I have mentioned, is zoomed into the main character in order to force the user to move the sprite around to explore the space. The aesthetics of the game are intentionally artificial with cartoon-like illustrations of chosen objects because my goal was not to construct a realistic representation of the concept but to convey a certain feelings that is commonly associated with it. Needless to say, the game does not have a gravity component to it, the user’s keyboard determines the location of the astronaut as one must use arrow keys to move him. I have also tried to manipulate images to create “depth” to the game, figuratively speaking. For example, the area with a black hole sprite is intentionally darkened, so that when the user enters the outside areas, he/she would be curious to see why the background has changed. Same manipulation was used around the rocket crash along with a hand-drawn swirling line that suggests movement. Some sprites were blurred in Photoshop to give a sense of depth (literally speaking now) to a 2D environment.

 

 

Initially, I had ambitious plans for this project. I wanted to design my little universe with hand-drawn illustrations in a comic- or sketchbook-style of drawing. Although it would have given the created environment a consistent design and a cute aesthetic, it would have been very time consuming. Also, I have found the software to be very not beginner-friendly. I realize how many opportunities this game engine provides, yet, unfortunately, I have not had a chance to get comfortable with it. As a result, my project “Defying Gravity” is a very simple fictional environment that I hope you will enjoy.

-> Link 

Diya and I chose to do a 3D FPS style game for our project. Diya had the idea of navigating a forest at the very beginning. We began creating our game experience around that core idea. Our game, ‘valley’ – is an experience where the player can roam around a forest, interact with some of its elements, and explore the space. There is no objective in this game. It is meant to be a relaxing experience that hopefully takes you to a calm place.

 

We aimed to create an experience that closely borrowed elements from the real world. Real-ish trees, flowers, grassy textures and mushrooms are the various elements that we borrowed from an actual forest. The background sound is a recording of an actual forest that I found online. This, I felt would add to the experience of roaming a forest. The aspects of our game that break the assumptions of the real world are the mechanics of collecting mushrooms. Upon walking over the mushrooms, you hear a click sound and the mushroom vanishes. The disappearing, along with the fact that most other games use a similar mechanic to collect in game items gives the player a sense that they have collected a mushroom. Another aspect that breaks these assumptions are the size of some of the big mushrooms, they are almost as tall as the player. They also make a very comical sound when collected – this had no particular reason, I just wanted to see a smile on the player’s face.

 

We first tried to get the mechanics working. The player should move as expected. The player should collide with objects within the game – like the trees, for example. The next step was figuring out how to create the environment we wanted. We decided we wanted a path in the woods that would add some sense of direction. Diya began reworking a sample terrain she found but that was too much work. We then found Unity’s terrain maker. This allowed us to use a square and adjust heights, draw textures and paint trees. We later found out that this didn’t let us paint gameobjects with audio sources and scripts attached to them so I found a gameobject brush in the asset store which allowed us to do exactly that. Then we added flowers, mushrooms and other little details. We added colliders where necessary and scripts that would destroy mushrooms on collisions. We added a player respawn functionality. This was the version that we presented in class. We made changes to our game after our playtest in class and the feedback we received. We added little vignettes that the user could go to. It was meant to create a place to explore. The feedback we received was that for a large part, the space felt like it was on repeat. So added some elements that were different.

 

The choices that were made for movement and interaction were inline with gaming conventions. Over the years, we have gotten accustomed to a certain style of game mechanics. These seems pretty “natural” to us now. We borrowed mechanics from these “conventions” to make the experience easy and understandable.

 

The environment gives an exploratory narrative. 2 friends of mine who played the game told me that the sound and the feel of the game takes them back home where there were forest nearby and they’d into the forests just to walk around. Since the game draws so much from the real world, it is in some sense relatable. The lack of objective in the game also adds to this narrative. The ambience adds to the narrative. The game could be confusing to some, since there is no discernible goal. I find that it could also be interpreted as mysterious or exciting in this sense, since you have no idea what you might see next.

 

Files – https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xIWQ7997REO8swUPN8KmjJ9a2NymHEfs?usp=sharing

Code – https://github.com/navyasuri/ForestGame

The game is built around the idea of a revisit. The game is 3D and the interaction with the game is about navigating around the space, grasping the story being conveyed. Seeing the flaws through someone else’s perspective is the main theme. This is not a proud revisit but rather a mocking and sarcastic one. This theme aims at judging the flaws in a nondirect, nonvocal way. The judged object in the game is the humanity itself. The game is about a robot’s visit to a once populated island with the objective of rescuing different animals. This event is what makes the game a visit because it is the repetition of another historical event: Noah’s Ark. Through walking around, we observe the leftovers of an abandoned land; trying to understand the reasons behind this migration. The aim in the game is to collect all the animals, through such a collection the story continues and we get a hint about why the habitants left. These hints are not clearly revealed, the player should observe the surroundings well to understand them.

 

The conveyed theme is not a cheerful one so the light of the game is dark. The game space is a desert so there is a sandstorm which makes the navigation more challenging. Desert is a good choice to convey the idea of loneliness. It strengthens the idea of abandonment. To create a space that conveys the message of being abandoned, we added many empty buildings to the island. This clearly shows once there were people living in this space. There are many buildings around which most of them have interior design and the robot can enter them. The space where the people live tell a lot about their way of living, the gadgets they used, the way the society functioned. Overall, the details of these designs tell a lot about the people who left. For example, there is a room with many technological devices such as televisions and laptops; and there is a horse to be collected right next to them. This clearly conveys the message that we are like racehorses competing with one another, constantly working on our laptops. Another example is the chicken to be collected next to a person who just committed a suicide. This is criticizing the people who take the simple way. The animals and the specific design that surrounds the animals advances the story while making statements about humanity one after another. We hoped that through creating these spaces, the player would be prompted to think about this representation of humanity and reflect on certain trends that are relevant right now, such as immersion in technology and consumerism, the use of guns, and addiction. Thus, the player is given a platform to reflect on flaws of humanity. Thus, to convey the negativity of these trends, we made the game as realistic as possible. To make the game realistic, the laws of physics apply to everything but our robot is like a superhuman that can jump from really high buildings. The system does not let the robot to leave the island unless all the animals are collected. The excuse to such a limit of the space is the water surrounding the island. Because of the water, it logically makes sense that the robot cannot get outside of the designed space. We picked the robot as the protagonist to convey a futuristic feel to the game and we wanted to convey the message that space was being experienced by an outsider. The shininess of the robot contrast to the dusty surroundings emphasized the fact that the robot did not belong there.

 

The final version of the game was great at conveying the message. The size of the space was satisfactory in a way that it was not too big so the story was not being interrupted by failing to find the animals, nor it was too small so the game would end instantly. The light of the game dark was enough that it established the feeling of abandonment along with the desert. The feedback we received was positive. The player talked about the quality of the graphics and the variety of space. One downside was that the rendered version of the game was laggy because of the high graphics.

 

Playtesting

 

The game space was successful in conveying the certain critiques it was trying voice out of humanity. In the end, the robot completed the Noah’s Ark (with much few animals but the message was clear). There was another hidden message in using a robot to complete this mission. “Perhaps the robots are the heirs of humans”.

Link to the game

 

Dogukan Avci and Simran Parwani

Our game, Stranded, is a 3D walking simulator, where a protagonist is stranded in a desert/canyon environment and must find their way to water. For this game, we wanted to go with a reality-subversion theme, where opposites are true; to get to the water, the player must climb on and jump inside of a volcano, where there is an underground oasis. When the player meets cute foxes, they pursue you and kill you if they get too close, while snakes are harmless and only follow you around out of affection. We also wanted to give the player a sense of both being lost and timelessness, where there is no clear-cut goal to attain with a clear path to it.

To implement the game, we divided the job into two different tasks; designing the level, and creating the main character interactions. For the first part of design of the level, we used a desert Low-Poly Pack that included assets such as rocks, plants, and palm trees. We distributed the assets throughout the environment creating an explorable desert. We didn’t want to add a clear path for the player to follow because we wanted the player to explore around and actually experience the feeling of being trapped in a vast and interminable desert in. The only thing that we did put in were the boundaries, so the player wouldn’t just wander into a free fall. For the second part of the design, we 3D modeled a volcano in Blender and gave it texture in Unity. This is the contradictory part where we wanted the player to jump inside without really knowing what would happen. For the third part, we created an oasis inside the volcano. Here, the player can wander as long as he or she desires, without the possibility of exiting it or ending the game.

As for the interactions, we used assets taken from the Low-Poly pack, as well as Pokémon models from the games Pokémon Sun & Moon and Pokémon Ranch. This part consisted of writing and assigning scripts to models taken from different sources; the player model, which needed scripts for walking, jumping, losing health, and dying, the fox model, which needed scripts for following the player and attacking, and the snake model, which needed scripts for following the player and having heart shapes appear around its head when close to the player. We also had to create a death screen that restarted the game, a message at the beginning that briefly explains the premise (“you are lost in the desert. find water.”) and background and footstep sounds.

We believe that we were successful at not forcing the players to follow a specific path. The two people that tried our game did so in two very different ways; while one of them immediately started to look for the oasis and focus on it, the other one preferred to wander around the desert area and try to climb rocks everywhere. However, we did make a few changes thanks to a few concerns raised during the test. The first one was that it wasn’t too hard to climb the rocks on the boundaries of the space we created and wander off, so we made it so that the player would die and respawn if they get too far. The players also had issues with finding the oasis when they did decided to look for it, so we made the path there a little clearer by concentrating enemies at the entry of the valley leading up to it.

We were also successful at allowing players to wander but still have a degree of challenge in the game. When we initially play tested the game, we didn’t have any enemies on the environment, so players could walk around calmly. However, now that there are enemies that can follow and kill the character, players will still explore but be tense. The way they should feel when stranded at a desert. When we were play testing ourselves, we were able to see that the enemies were not as fast and not positioned in the best locations to surprise the player. Therefore, we decided to increase the difficulty by increasing speed and changing their positions.

Stranded is a game that is capable of conveying narrative. There is an element of solitude and survival as one walks through the space. The landscape was carefully chosen and curated to emulate the experience of a desertic region. The obstacles did not immediately destruct the gameplay, but in maintaining a consistency to reality they hindered a player’s progress to an eventual halt. One encounters obstacles, foxes, that seek to harm the player and impede him from getting water. Amongst those, there were elements of neutrality in the form of snakes which could serve the dual purpose of protecting the player from foxes or obstructing the path to the oasis. The animals simply added to the context of the space to make the player feel even more part of the environment.

The only instruction that the player ever receives is “to find water”, which allows free wandering across the desert, the canyon, and the oasis. Once the player reaches the oasis, there is no win scenario. The player has found water and survived, but life still goes on. The character will be stuck inside the volcano having completed the task, but unable to get out. The interesting part is that player can play the game for as long as he or she wishes with no end, but the fate of the character will always be unknown. How long will they play, we do not know. But we are hoping to find out. Our emulation of reality adds to the narrative of the game.

 

File (Windows): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RTKJhs279ssocIIDERKLHD1R7PPhRsh9

File (MAC): https://drive.google.com/open?id=1C64jNIztTEj2CQ_H-20w3GacN8Gg_WMT

 

-Hatim and Arantza