Pac-Man-Game Theory

Pac-man is an arcade game that was developed by Namco and released in 1980. Pac-man is a little yellow circle with a segment missing (mouth) which believe it or not was a design from a pizza with a slice taken out. Pac-man runs around a maze to pick up as many of the dots as possible whilst avoiding the ghosts (Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde). If you get caught by any of them pac-man dies and you lose a life, once all your lives are gone the game is over and your score from how many dots you collected is revealed.

Flow:

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi’s theory of flow applies to pac-man as the arcade game requires the player to deal with collecting dots whilst navigating around the maze quickly or intelligently to avoid the enemies, If you eat a big dot you can then eat an enemy but only for a limited amount of time as they return to the ghost enclosure to come back to get you again. The aim is to collect all the dots and gain as many points as possible, the difficulty is the same but you can get yourself into difficult situations where the ghosts are closing in on you and your reactions really have to be sharp to get away otherwise its a life lost. I achieved flow in pac-man due to playing against class students to try get the highest score possible so I was really focusing on every move made and how I can get to the next set of dots without being caught.

Using Csikzentmihalyi’s flow diagram Pac-man can fall into any of them categories it depends how addicted and immersed you in the game. Some cases of flow when Pac-man was released were quite extreme, in the documentary “Thumb Candy” they meet the makers of Pac-man to discuss the popularity of the game 24minutes into the video is the section on Pac-man. 28 minutes in they mention it made “60 billion yen, so roughly 60 million dollars…in one year” for Namco.

Categories of Play:

For Roger Caillois’s ‘categories of play’ Pac-man would fall under primarily ‘Agon’. Agon is games of competition, with Pac-man you are playing to achieve as much points as possible which will require you to survive longer and gain a high score. The replayability to make this a competition with others includes leader boards and also trying to beat your own personal best. An example of Agon would be when we was asked to play free online PC games to later analyse through game theory and in teams of 4 we was to also play against each other for score then rank through score before moving onto the next game.

It also falls under ‘Alea’. Alea is games of chance, with Pac-man the movement of the enemy that the game presents you with is that chance, you could be pinned in a corner by the enemies but somehow manage to escape the navigate randomly but primarily try to chase you but if not they patrol the maze. So chance has a part to play with the enemy, some would say skill is a large part of avoiding them but sometimes you just need that bit of luck to reach the big dot in time before they catch you and eat them all to give you space to continue.

Bartle Test:

To link this into Bartle’s test which defines you as a player through a series of questions this type of game being puzzle based and score based would appeal to an ‘achiever’ style of player due to the points system and the survival aspect.

But it also links to the “Killer” category as Pac-man is a predator, he eats all the dots and if a big dot is activated can eat his enemies which rewards you with bonus score. Therefore it does have killer aspects to the gameplay and rewards.

Socialiser can also link in as when Pac-man was a hugely popular arcade game people would go down to the arcade to play with or against each other, at the end a leaderboard would reveal and you could enter your initials so you was constantly competing with others if you should so choose to treat it that way.

My personal playing of pac-man was that I was either really good at it or just rubbish, when I doing well I enjoyed the game alot and wanted to play more but when i was doing badly it just frustrated me and i wanted to move onto another game. Emotional reactions to the game shows this game has a psychological effect on the player through performance. This is arguable present in all games but this proves the game could be critically analysed using psychoanalysis as a perspective.

Manic Moles- Studio Game Jam 2

Continuing on from the previous Game Jam (Plant Trap) our tutor decided to organise another game jam to once again give people the opportunity to gain extra credit. With this Game Jam my team was Me, Phil, Mark and Shane. The topic for this game jam was an application (mobile game) and we have to have 1 main character, 1 main mechanic and 1 environment. We could do this however we liked to build any game we wanted along as it tailored to these categories. To begin the design process as always we planned our what makes a good game. We went down the route of mobile games being addictive, fun to play and easy to pick up. Due to this we collectively thought of examples of games on our phones:

• Flappy Bird
• Bloons: Tower Defense
• Paper Toss
• Angry Birds

These are just a couple of examples, from this we determined that animals in games birds and monkeys etc. So from that we tried to list as many animals as we could that potentially had or hadn’t been done. From this we narrowed it down to a Mole, obviously games like Whack-a-mole are in existence but we could do our own game with a mole character. From this somehow we decided it would be fun to make him a funky disco mole with huge sunglasses and an Afro who has friendly disco moles and rival gang moles trying to sabotage his funky life. Alongside other moles trying to sabotage his mole hill we looked into common predators for moles, this came back with snakes so another enemy designed was a snake. Then to gain a life we had what moles like to eat which is worms once you collected enough worms you gained a life. My personal involvement in this project was in 3D and HUD, I designed the main character also known as “Molevin” it was a really simple design but could be edited and re-textured to create other characters. Which is what I turned Molevin into the enemy character who had different attire wearing a vest and a top hat with a flower in, then for a boss I scaled it up added a bandanna, match in his mouth and a bomb in hand with gloves on. Simply by reusing and editing the initial main character I created 3 characters for in game use good, bad and boss. I also created a tree stump that i projection painted using a mudbox preset to be used for the environment which wasn’t implemented in the end due to it being a unnecessary obstacle on a small environment game but it was used in the Game Over screen to add a visual. The environment is a field and the mole sits in the middle in what was supposed to be a mole hill but its more of a ditch at the moment. It has randomly place assets of grass and stones in the level just to add to the visuals.

This is my work for the HUD designs, using Photoshop to create simple circle icons, i took images of the characters to link it directly to the game, good guy is people saved, worms are lives, and the enemies are how many you have killed throughout the game. Very simple icons but still useful for covering the HUD elements in the game and also with it being a mobile game we didn’t want too much going on to get in the way of the game so small simple icons were effective in avoiding too much distraction from the game.

Here is the in game screenshots of the working HUD and game with my characters in. The menu system, game over and leaderboard design was made by Mark using the custom typeface we created by using a paint brush to go the font on paper then scan them in to be textured on the signposts. Mark used assets from all team members to piece together the menus, start featured everything, game over features the bad guys to symbolise they won and you lost, then the leaderboard was just visual models like grass, rocks and tree stumps. This game I had quite a prominent role in the modelling due to my increased skills over the year and primarily being the more advanced modeler in my group. As for HUD designs I was pleased with my products as they was simplistic but worked well with the theme of the product. As for the game to evaluate it we was very pleased with the end product it was fun and addictive players had to click (or tap for mobile which didn’t work) the enemies to kill them (1 for standard enemy and 2 for the snake). This racked up your score for kills and the aim was to last as long as possible as move and move waves of good and bad characters came into the level at varied speeds and difficulty as it progressed. Only disappointment I had was that my boss character never got time to be implemented but like the other game jams if we had time to progress we would implement a boss level for example. This was my personal favourite of all the game jams as i liked the style of game we had created. I’m looking forward to next next game jam which is in Cambridge Jun 2015.

Here is the video footage of game play from Mark Shaw’s YouTube channel:

Plant Trap- Studio Game Jam 1

This was a in house game jam in the studio, due to the success and benefits from entering the Cambridge Game Jam I kept pressuring the tutors to either find and enter us into a new one through the course or host an in house one potentially over the holidays, which would be optional but beneficial to students if they attended.

This game jam split us into 2 teams of 5 mixed with 3rd, 2nd and 1st years so experience would be shared across the team to try help the 1st years improve. The theme was “Life” we could interpret this how we liked but the game would be assessed on features:

• Interactivity
• Replay-ability
• HUD/UI
• Research
• Mechanics

With this like the previous game jam we got into our group and put down everything we could think of life related, this included:

• Plants
• survival
• evolution
• life cycles
• achievements/goals
• life system (3 lives etc.)
• Humans/animals/aliens/robots

We decided on Plants, and the idea behind the game was that you are a plant in a farmers field/maze and you have to collect water and sunlight to stay alive. By going around the maze to collect randomly spawning water you would gain speed, without water you would eventually slow down and die. Also in the maze was enemies of plants which patrolled areas of the maze in the form of an ant and a spider if they caught you it was game over, but you had a limited ability to fire a razor leaf at them which stunned them for 5 seconds so you could get away. Also the maze changed as you played so suddenly you could be caught in a dead end without prior notice of change.

My role in this game was design of the main character the plant, razor leaf model and blueprints (projectile), navigation mesh of the maze for the AI, AI tracking of the player in blueprints and the logo design. I also worked alongside Mark in trying to figure out animation for my character and his enemy characters.

Here are some in game footage images from Plant Trap:

Then here is my work (without blueprints):

The main focus was on the design and texturing of the character as this was only a 24 hour game jam, then animation also took some time. Once they was out of the way getting the AI to work was my priority with building the nav mesh so that one enemy had one half of the maze and the other patrolled the rest, the varied difficulty of the maze depended on which section you was in due to the upped speed of the ant so you needed alot of water and quick reactions to collect water in that area. As a final extra touch due to time left over I added a projectile system to our main character which allowed the player on pressing space bar to use a razor leaf ability to disable the enemy for a temporary time on a delay node of 5 seconds.

Here are the blueprints I did:

This is for the razor leaf projectile which disables the enemy characters for a set delay, and then the movement of the AI characters around the area tracking the player character to try end the game.

Unfortunately we completely overlooked the HUD/UI features for the game and this cost us in the marking, we did have a sort of display of points by using blueprints print strings but this isn’t a proper working HUD/UI. The menu system was implemented using my logo design as the background and a simple “Start Game” so the game did have a navigation system.

I used a contrast of green for plants to simulate life in the plant then black for trap and the spider to symbolise death. The simplicity of the logo in colour scheme gives it a nice professional flat look to it, I didn’t try to over do anything it was simple silhouettes of the characters then a type that I felt suited the game bold but also edgy. I used the L to balance the plant on due to it looking like a solid unit you would place a plant on, then the spider suspended down from the loop in the A seemed to suit nicely for layout. If you choose to read further into it the semiotics behind the plant in higher position is to show authority over the spider as you are the main character, but also the spider despite being lower and therefore inferior being black in a poised position to pounce its not to be under estimated as it can bring death upon you.

Overall I am pleased with the final product from the Plant Trap game, some features that we designed such as models for power-ups and bad pick-ups such as seed fertilizer for growth, and then toxic pollution to damage the plant didn’t get implemented but they are there if the game was to be progressed upon. My disappointment would be that we forgot to implement a HUD system which evidently cost us in the end.

My own personal contributions to the project I felt that I was a key member of the team that had involvement in all aspects of the project, including leadership which was sort of collaborative dependent on the situation but an overall id say I called a few decisions in the project and tasked people with work once they had completed a previous task.

Here is a video of captured game play footage from me playing the game on Mark Shaw’s YouTube channel:

Cambridge Game Jam

In July last year I entered my first official Game jam, this was run by JAGEX at their studios in Cambridge. We entered as a course and took 6 members and our tutor with us to form a team (Paul observed and graded). With this being right after the end of first year it was great practice to keep the ball rolling with work and improving all the time, the most valuable part of it was being part of a mixed team with 2nd years this allowed us to work with people who was further along in the course to try bring us up to speed for this 48 hour straight game jam.

The theme was “cycles” due to the Tour de France taking part at the same time. We could interpret this theme how we wished so it didn’t specifically have to do with bicycles, to try and expand our area of “cycles” and find a idea to build a game we sat in a group and threw down anything we could think of to do with cycles this included ideas such as:

• cycling
• recycling
• life
• day/night
• water

These were the main features we could come up with and eventually we settled on a slight incorporation of a few of them. We pinned down a cyclist who is in a dream and he has the power to change the day night cycle to solve puzzles and piece together his bicycle. So it was a puzzle 2.5D side scrolling game we decided to go with to support this and it was fairly basic to do in a shorter space of time, showing we didn’t punch above our weight implying we would do a fully immersive 3D environment with multiplayer online time trials.

My role in the project initially was alongside Phil to sketch up some level designs, so plan out issues that the player would come across forcing them to go back or use the power to change the day/night cycle. We decided that a journey from city to countryside so sort of a race in his dreams to the start line of the race, settings would go from city to park to village to countryside (hills) to start line. This was obviously ambitious to have 5 environments in the final project but at least we had considered how the game could have gone forward with extra time.

Then after level design I worked on hand painted texturing of the level, my limited skill in texturing at the time Paul suggested I used Mudbox’s projection painting. This proved very quick and useful granted it wasn’t all perfect when it came to bricks but with the time length of the project the visuals was still impressive. I then used this to projection paint graffiti onto a bus for the city level, I did this using many iconic game characters and general graffiti (even had Banksy art on the bus). Then I modeled a taxi (this first ever car I had done) which I was very pleased with at the time for the quality of my 3D and it actually made me pursue automotive modelling throughout the summer. Alongside general texturing of other peoples models and doing little assets myself I then took it upon myself to think or a name and design the logo.

Here are all the contributions to the game jam I could recover:

Then some engine shots (taken from James Cook’s blog):

This shows my work in level design, hand painted texturing and models.

Here is my logo designs I tried to tie all the theme in of cycles to the logo as well and with it being Tour de France “Le Cyc” seemed relevant, here it is:

Admittedly a quick logo at best but you can see the idea behind it with the “cyc” making a bicycle, with more time alot of this would have been alot further along, some models didn’t make it in but nothing is wasted as if we was to progress this idea at any point we have put in the work through a design process to easily expand on what we have.

To evaluate the game jam overall it was a very worthwhile experience for myself, it allowed me chance to work in a team to push along together with a 48 hour deadline, which testing teamwork, communication and overall commitment to stay awake and work. I have taken alot away from this game jam in relation to how my 2nd year has gone, I view it as the starting point of my 2nd year to push on, after I began work on my personal classic mini project due to enjoying the modeling of the taxi. One thing I have reigned in is the graffiti, granted projection painting was very enjoyable and produced decent results but graffiti took over my game jam i remember doing it on a coke can just because I could, should the opportunity ever arise in a project requiring graffiti you can be sure I have it covered though.

Despite not winning on this case the JAGEX judges was impressed with our work and the visuals of the project. Most of the other teams was programmers which we didnt have any we are all artists so naturally our game would look better but maybe not play as well, but personally I think what we produced with the issues James had with Kizmit on his own was a great achievement. Maybe a programmer would be advisable next time but now our knowledge in blueprints is more that enough for a Game Jam so we should in future have a visually and interactive game, to hopefully win with.

Client Project Session 16/17

Through illness I missed one client session but have been informed by fellow students on the goings on of the project. In session 16 (my absent session) the group held a group critique so that we could evaluate if the new formed pipeline and sub-teams are working more effectively than the process we was following previously. From what ive been told much higher quality work and amount has been produced since the formation of this pipeline. This pleases me greatly as the method of industry practice that we have implemented has worked and collaboratively we are now showing that we can work as a team effeciently. For the rest of that session everybody continued with the work already tasked to them after Phil had introduced to the group the research on PBR (Physical Based Rendering), with a little bit of research we realised that UE4 our engine is a PBR engine, therefore all the texturing we have currently done is not going to be the standard it could be if we did PBR methods.

PBR basically deals with light naturally like it is in real life, the most common maps to use are diffuse/albedo and gloss then you can apply normals and so on. Basically with PBR there is no need to adjust brightness/darkness on your textures for different lighting in engine it is one texture that works for all the albedo map has no lighting information on it so its all calculated in engine. It the latest exciting thing in games that is currently being used in next gen games such as RYSE and Dragon Age Inquisiton.

PBR is briefly explained here:

Then an example of how amazing PBR can be is demonstarted in Quixel’s Demo Reel here:

A brief glimpse there of the types of maps all used just to make a incredibly realistic leaf. If we want our project to look and feel real we have to really look into this and learn the tips and tricks behind pulling it off for the project. I found this demo reel after a bit of PBR research one night and then showed it to the group, it just proves how amazing the detail can be all in texturing we just need to knuckle down and work it out to maximise the potential of our work. This project using PBR could we a fantastic porfolio piece, so this is now the art teams main focus.

Moving on to session 17, I return still not 100% but I dont like being off. The begin the session Phil had been showing me his progress on a portion of the street he was remodelling from semester 1 which he had now included shop interiors, this had been discussed earlier on in the year but never materialised. Now to show what it would look like and how it would be done Phil showed his work to the group and we delivered a group meeting based on interior design for the buildings. We stated this would not be applicable for all the buildings as we may be trying to run before we can walk but certainly for certain shops that we can show off 60s fashion, music and culture this oppurtunity shouldnt be passed up. This means more work for me and my 3D team but it will be beneifical for the project, one of the feedback notes we was given for the project at Hand in is that the shops dont look realistic when looked at because of the shop fronts/ windows by modelling a simple interior (possibly inaccessable) it creates a more naturalistic feel to the project that will further immerse the public in our work.

We then proposed to the group to do a section of the project each for my 3d team. By doing this models should all meet up correctly, be to scale, and having multiple buildings produced side by side by yourself will be great for a porfolio piece. The street i chose to take was Silver Street (Right side) this was because i currently have wetherspoons on trinity house land which goes round the corner onto that side of Silver Street so its only logicial to continue with that area. The street section chosen by each person will require them to model interiors (where applicable and approved by myself) and all assets related to that area of the street. For example if my street has a flower shop, that would require me to model flower shop related assets such as a flowers in a vase to go in the shop window.

After this i had a little talk with Paul my tutor, he expressed he is pleased with the groups advancement and focus since the return but as team leaders myself, Phil and James need to keep a close eye on who isnt working enough. To tackle this Paul proposed we set weekly tasks to the individuals in our team to complete by the next client session, this will make sure people have a sense of deadlines and produce the work. Now as a leader i have to dicuss with my individuals what they think for them is achievable in that period of time. I explained to each one of them this will be a trial and error thing what do they think they can do in a week and what they actually can do, so one week i may realise that as Viktor has sculpted a statue by friday instead of tuesday is that he has been under tasked so in coming weeks a balance can be formed to how much they can do. Its a test to show that those that might not always be in fifth gear if they complete an amount of work then underachieve in the following weeks they should be working harder as i know they can.

Alongside this obviously i have to task myself some work to do. Currently im working on wetherspoons on trinity house lane and my new tasked street is Silver Street’s right hand side.

This will be very helpful for the speed of the project, the sooner we get the streets done the more time we have to fine tune and improve every aspect of our work. With 9 weeks left times running out for us but we can do it.

Year 1 Challenge revisited- Low Poly Guitar

In the Year 1’s session today they was set the same task we had last year, to model assets with a restricted polycount to make them aware of polycount limits in games also known as a budget.

They proceeded to model the items they had drawn by card and by the end of the session handed in what they had got. Paul then proposed for the guitar controller to be done by next week in 128 polys to everyones disbelief and shock, operant conditioning was applied to this of a reward of a sausage roll if someone could complete it in half of that so 64 poly’s…challenge accepted. Realising i did the guitar last year i did it in 188 polys, now i thought it would be beneficial to myself to try model it again as fast as i could in as low poly as possible.

In around 5 minutes i had a 88 poly guitar, loosing some loops and strategically placing certain edges to create a similar shape without the loop i managed to get it down to 68. Not much could be seen to do, then i realised i still had my reference image underneath my model for shape…this cut it down to 48. So i had won id done it, but i didnt stop there i wanted to optimise it to the lowest possible it could be still looking like a guitar.

Fully optimised I managed to get it to 39 poly’s by this time a had the majority of first year surrounding me.

So in around 15minutes i had a 39 poly guitar, which was modelled in 5minutes then it just took some thinking to how i could keep the shape but lower the polycount. In comparison to last years 188 which admittedly i loaded up and it was horrific topology I can clearly see how much i have come on since this time last year. The 1st years now dislike me as I have proved it can be done and in very little time giving them no excuses…sorry guys!

Client Project- Session 15

Following on from last weeks session we asked the group inidvidually what area of work they would like to be in for the rest of the cleint project. As explained last session this is purely to try maximise workflow getting people to work in the area they want to go into industry with for the majority with other areas on the side. This group session really felt like we had all clicked and finally collaborated to try maximise the potential of the project.

Here is what we came up with:

3d team is myself, Viktor, Brad and Rinalds with myself as leader.

Art team is James (wolfy), Barrie and Abbie with James as leader.

Engine team is Phil, David and Steve with Phil as leader.

Steve, Viktor and Brad was absent for this session so as leaders we placed them into the teams that we felt they are most effective in and want to do in future.

group planning

collaboration

communication

We then sat down and discussed the plan of action (POA abbreviated) for each of the teams and how we would collaborate between teams. For my 3D team we set a target of a street a week, this maybe rather high expectations but until we test if we can meet this deadline we wont know also placing this deadline will push us as a team to focus and improved speed of work. I personally think a week is a good target dependent on the skill and difficulty of the buildings but 2 weeks should be the limit if we are to push on.

The art team we all sat down including myself and Phil as we are overall team leaders to have final decisions on work. We discussed the art team and their collaboration with the engine team, there priority is to upskill in texturing and uv mapping to work with the 3d buildings handed over. Then to produce basic, slightly visual and then some high quality (public viewed) concepts. The engine team just need the basic concepts where its simple boxes labelled car or building etc with some annotations of angles and maybe movement mechanics. This will assist them with the engine block out and add to our design work rather than first decision of put that there it will do. James is inevitably leader of the art team and will have to pass on some skills to his co workers to produce quality for this process. Im sure more has been added to this plan of action i believe the production of atlas mapping has been worked on over the day.

Then the engine team currently has HUD to work on, additional blueprints that could be implemented for interactivity (e.g. ladder climb) and then the rest is working on the block out with relies on the 3d and art team to collaborate with them. I think we have formulated a effective team workflow with a good balance to it for everyone to have equal input. Hopefully this goes as well as we plan it to as this goes towards credit for our professionalism and industry practice marks.

For today we borrowed Phil and David from the engine team as currently they have little to do and 3D is a priority so loaning them to 3D was a way of showing we are all team players if needs we interchangable team positions to accelerate the process will occur.

As 3D team leader i tasked my group to Trinity House Lane, myself and rinalds picked 3 buildings and Phil and David picked 1. Leaving a few for Viktor and Brad when they return, the lists are up on Basecamp and they are yet to claim buildings and i havent seen them so hopefully they are in tuesday to catch up. Currently i am working on weatherspoons up to Bob carvers they are my 3 buildings all connected so should be no issues.

Throughout the day teams sat with their teams worked together and it just felt like we had missed a trick not doing this from the start, lots of peer to peer learning and group/team critique will come from this our communication has definately improved and has been underlined as key for this to succeed. On a final note we have decided to implement the Oculus Rift into our project which will hopefully attract alot of attention when we finally display to the public.

Gamification- Research and My Ideas

Last week i was absent from the session in which Paul delivered a brief for gamification. The brief is the gamificate something that hasn’t been gamified before, we have to research ideas on gamification in everyday life to see if it has been done before then try come up with an individual idea to make a game from. If it has been done before or the overarching theme (example working) has been over done then it will be denied by Paul and we will have to find another idea.

With missing the session I have also missed any videos or examples that was shown in session. Therefore im going to research into gamification myself to get up to speed.

What is gamification:

The application of typical elements of game playing (e.g. point scoring, competition with others, rules of play) to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service: ‘gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun’ – Oxford dictionary definition

That being the definition the key in that would be the example quote

“Gamification is exciting because it promises to make the hard stuff in life fun”

This should immediately spring loads of ideas to mind as surely everything can be gamified in some way or other. One example of this I found was a game called HabitRPG this game basically makes your life a game in order to create habits, it rewards you for meeting targets and punishes you for missing them. The idea is to form working habits so that could be do the ironing at 8pm every Tuesday, you can set this in a to-do which if you meet it a reward can be redeemed using in game coin to have say 1hour of video games.

Layout of HabitRPG on laptop and phone

This is a fairly simple idea but with rewards and graphs showing you your productivity progress it gives purpose to those boring household chores. Something similar to this targeted at children is the app ChoreMonster its a childs version and when they meet the chores they get a ticket to the monster carnival to earn random monsters to help them on their journey. Simple things like this really help people engage in what they are doing as it gives purpose, especially for children it adds fun to the dreaded clear your toys away as they get rewarded for it.

ChoreMonster multiple levels, design, layout, platforms.

This was what i intended to do on first thought before research was a chore game so that when you ticked off chores done in a day you gained points to earn relax time, but as it has been clearly done for adults and children this can be ruled out as my tutor will most likely deny it.

My other idea I had was a waste/recycling game where if I made sure i partitioned recycling and rubbish waste i would be rewarded and shown a healthier planet. This could be a good app where you swipe the food on the screen into either the blue recycle bin or the green waste bin. It would make people more aware of what goes in which bin and reward them for it by maybe showing a field if you do wrong trees are lost as less recycling is done but if recycle more trees are saved.

With a bit of research I found out this is also done, not in the same style at what i was thinking but on a more global scale and has been running for a while called Recycle Bank and here is a article on it at mashable. Here is a video on it showing some really inspiring stuff to bring a wider community together to benefit the planet and reward them for it:

This may have been done in a professional manner but as a little mini game/app im sure i should be able to proceed with this idea. I was thinking due to the tutors and cleaners constantly mentioning about tidying up in the studio a cartoon style game where you need to clear the studio of litter as fast as possible but swiping the litter into the bin. This would be good on the app store as currently i haven’t found anything of the sort.

The best idea i felt I had though was a walking to work or shopping or anything you need to be at, the idea you set your track using a  map of your area and then you are time trialed to get there as fast as you can walking. This then would be saved into a leaderboard of times to compete with yourself and colleagues, when loading up you could choose previous tracks done named appropriately by yourself so try beat your last time or friends time. This would then give you points dependent on speed, beating others, beating your own time, arriving early to work and so on. The funny side of it I would like implemented but its unrealistic due to technical restraints would be walking down a road your phone connects to another if headphones are connected to ask another person to race on a set track, this would then show the other persons statistics, win ratio, average speed etc. It would look rather odd seeing two people busting a gut to out walk another from McDonald’s to city hall but it gamifies your standard journey. I know that walking races are an actual sport and profession for trained professionals but applied in a daily life journey I don’t believe has been done. How I would go about this i have no idea as of yet but if accepted i would have to research into custom tracks on a map that are timed and tracked by your phones location sort of like a sat nav in a car.

So these are my ideas I can propose there are many other things i have considered but dont feel them to be as strong as ones mentioned, but if none are accepted i can possibly fall back on other ideas. I think the key is to apply gamification to something that is boring, something you dont like to do so that it gives it a goal at the end of it. There are plenty of day to day life tasks that this can be applied to such as brushing your teeth for 2 minutes twice a day or more.

Once doing some research and actually thinking about it alot of things are now gamified in some shape or form, WordPress tracks your statistics and has little achievements for amount of blog posts, Snapchat has a points system dependent on your use, Tesco’s has club card points for purchasing products as do most shops on and offline now. The list goes on some seem dull but in many ways life is a game and everything is permitted to be made a game. Finding that unique idea though is the harder task in this.

Client Project- Session 14

Recently we all had our hand ins at the beginning of January, this was a mock deadline for us set to give us a halfway tutorial point from our tutors to give feedback on our work so far. Last blog of mine for client was some final tweaks to my hand in like improved textures. I managed to hand in on time and made sure that the engine was functional with Phil for all the learning objectives in the interactive environments module as well as peoples work handed to us to go in engine.

Moving on from that during the assessment period myself and Phil as team leaders discussed how we can try a new way of keeping everyone engaged in the project with faster work rate, this was because towards the end of the semester people was saying they didn’t enjoy doing for example 3D or a specific area of 3D like buildings. This gave an idea of a industry style pipeline to be implemented, this means that the group would be given a chance to partition into groups (maybe people they don’t normally work with) to work in smaller mini teams showing collaboration in their given specific areas. For example one person may think after this course they want to be a concept artist, so we would allocate that person to the art team. This would mean they focus mainly on the art side of work so concepts, public visuals (logos etc.) and texturing. Despite this it would not give them total immunity to 3D and other work as it is needed from everyone just they will have less of it than the 3D team.

Now this may not work and may take some adapting for people to get their own design process to adapt to the pipeline but if we can pull it off it shows we can work collaboratively as a team using industry practice which would surely add to our marks for professionalism. There may be areas that work and area that don’t so we can hopefully tailor the process to maximise our workflow. I’m thinking the pipeline as in handing your model to someone else to texture to get it back as its not fully optimised may cause some issues but im hoping the mini teams will definitely work, to start getting people to work with other people that like the same area of work and they will hopefully teach each other techniques for speed.

All that being said I called a group meeting to discuss this semester and last semester, how we did and how we are going to move forward. This was sort of a reiteration of Gareth and Paul’s meeting about us being way behind schedule and alot not being up to scratch. Nothing was targeted at any individual just a general grilling for everyone trying to hammer in that we need to pull together to finish this project. Mainly we need more work but we need speed with that, peoples speed of work is what could cost us so whether some extra tutorials or peer help would benefit the group wide up-skilling. To try implement that we are going to set deadlines, so a deadline will be set per piece and if the person does not meet the deadline then the work shall be taken off them for someone else to do, then its only yourself you are letting down the work is getting done just less and less by the people who don’t put in the time.

A few things was highlighted about re addressing our hand in work like texturing, texture quality, and optimising models. This was obvious from the hand in it needed to be higher quality but i just pointed out again.

I then moved onto the Hellblade development diary that i found, i did a blog post on this and put it on basecamp for the group to see. Unfortunately a few missed this notification so i did a little session where we watched the video as a group and then i took us through the features of collaboration, team work, design process, and adapting to your working environment. All of these we are going to try implement into our work as described above with the pipeline. The other thing was to do a development diary of our own, currently we have 2 development videos but we believe the style of the video Hellblade did was much more descriptive and professional that the process we have been taking.

We have now decided to implement the Oculus Rift into our project which when implemented into the project should attract as much attention as the last years Paragon project which had alot of views assisted by trying the rift. This is an exciting feature for us as virtual reality headsets seem to be edging into next generation gaming especially with Sony Ps4’s upcoming Project Morpheus.

This concluded this weeks client project meeting, we left giving everyone a week to figure out what they want to do in this project. But it was cleared up that they should not focus so much on what for the client project but a deeper thought into what they want to do after the course.

Then the remainder of the buildings was put into “to-do’s” on basecamp for people to claim and complete, this is just for grabs until next week when the 3D team will take priority over buildings.

Client Project- Hand In

It came around alot faster than expected but we have now handed in for the client project. Despite a recently blog on my christmas and session 13 work we was given a slight extension to our initial Tuesday hand in to the Friday due to some engine issues that with slight extra time would be implemented, also a lack of textures from most people was still to come in so we was grateful for the extra time. Despite that by now we should be tuned to deadlines having them done before the actual day so any fine tweaks can be made with little panic.

With this slight extension it gave me some room to do some more work. I could have gone many ways to add to my work like texturing my car but I realised this process may need slightly longer and not to be rushed. So instead I re-addressed my textures from the whole process going back to my first buildings to improve the general look.

When I went back to look at some of my early unwraps and textures it shocked me how far i have come in advancing my unwrapping and texturing skills. With some quick tweaks to early unwraps without redoing it all i made some more room for larger uv’s which means higher quality. One thing in particular lacking from some early buildings was that of doors and windows, early on we mentioned the idea of multi subbing windows to give a realistic reflection and look to the buildings but to do this we needed an interior otherwise you just see emptiness behind your building. I decided for now to apply some simple window textures which isnt as realistic but at least its not seethrough glass or a grey untextured area. Then for the doors most of my buildings are shops and with our setting being night time i just applied some shutters so imply its closed and locked up.

Here are my hand in buildings:

Crawshaws

Poundland

M&S

Cheque centre

Parliament street building

Quick Silver

I was pleased with the outcomes of m&s, poundland and parliament street building probably because they are my later buildings to be textured i had a bit more knowledge to improve my work. With the other 3 being basic buildings not much could be done but correct stiching unwrapping has been done so cannot complain much just needs a bit of work. There was a minor issue with the windows on crawshaws they look very washed out and white also the bottom windows have some random shapes on them, im yet to figure out why this is its probably a quick fix once i figure it out though.

Overall very pleased with my extra work done in the additional time and feel i am improving on the texturing with each piece of work i do. Next is to tackle unwrapping and texturing the cars for the level, this may take alot of time but it will get there and make me a better worker for it.