Stumble To London

A little while ago, perhaps a little longer, we took a trip to London to take a look at some of the artefacts in the British museum which are related to our course. Amongst them was a The Lewis Chessmen, some counter pieces, the royal game of Ur and various other game related artefacts.

Lewis Chessmen

The array of artefacts gave a great perspective to the length and breadth of games throughout the eras, the ways of playing games and the reasons behind them. However, that aside; That is not what this blog is about, and neither (surprisingly) the main point of interest, or learning of our trip... For me, anyway.

Readers may be a little disheartened; but never fear - In the world of Sean Edwick, You just end up seeing things completely differently to everyone, resulting in slight deviations in outcomes.

The first of any deviations on the trip to London was Architecture.

Now let me explain; I was born in Felixstowe, and have lived in it ever since - It typically consists of 99.5% square, pointy-roof, red-brick houses. For somebody who likes pretty and interesting architecture (though specific reason cannot be found) going to London was very interesting and eye-opening - Despite having a rubbish camera and taking photos at jogging pace.

Perrrty!

I got told I looked like a stereotypical Japanese tourist several times.

So why did I take so many pictures of random parts of buildings and ceilings? Well, when designing things, I usually start from simple shapes, or combination of shapes, and build from there. I find architecture has a wide range of wonderful shapes which often aren't used in many other places - A great point of inspiration if you are in need of a strange set of assets for a game with no preconceived ideas.

Okay, so that was a slight deviation - Some of the pictures taken seen above.

The second deviation we took was the side-trip to the science museum. I say a side trip - it was a pretty long visit, and we managed to visit every part of the building (which I was told by my mother was impossible in a day)

The science museum was wonderful - I mean, I haven't been there since I was knee-high (and we all know how much attention we pay at knee-high-hight). Yes, the science museum was sciency; I've always been interested in science - but there was something else of interest - Interactivity.

By now we should all know that Costikyan talks about interactivity as one of the main key points of games (just thought I'd put that there).

Anyway, This interactivity - It was mostly only small things; like a button which turned a motor or played sounds - But it made an incredible difference to how people learn, and even interact with each-other; visitors actually discussed (with people they don't know) and learnt about the contents of the museum. The closest the British museum has to interactivity is the 'play' button on the anti-sociable headphones you can use to read for you.Now, I know many people go to such places for quiet (however little there may be) and to look at shiny things in glass cabinets - But you are also able to do that in the science museum. I'm pretty sure that if Ipswich museum an have some simple quizzes and puzzles to enforce facts about artefacts and how they are found, a massive museum in London could too.

So, Now I shall continue to talk about another aspect of the science museum - Games and digital quizzes.
Although they often look complicated and expensive - Below the covers of the moulded plastic covers is a PC monitor displaying a flash game and a few buttons; and yet, these simple games and quizzes can be, and usually are much more effective than plaques and sounds. Why?
I believe that the reason games such as 'flood simulator' or quizzes such as 'what personality type are you and why?' (typical types of games found in the science museum) are so popular and (probably) better at getting information across to visitors is that they cater for almost every audience (well, if it is designed well!). A digital quiz or game can be visually seen for hard of hearing and it can often be simplified or picturised for older and younger audiences. On top of this, such media can show things that wouldn't normally be able to show (size, cost), show things at speeded up rates or see instantly the different effects that choices have on things.

So when all is said and done; If you are reading this British museum - Yes; I am willing to design you some educational games, but not right now - I have assessments to do. ;-)


the last thing I have to talk about is the interactive stuff; as I've said, I don't remember much about the science museum from when I was knee-high, but I remember running around like a headless chicken while running from demonstration to demonstration - hyper on fruit-shoots.

Note these pretty tubes - displaying viscosity and bubble-size; My health bars for my coding project are now designed on a similar principal.

Note the electronic circuits - A bit late, but probably would have been a good start for our circuitry group project.

Note - This is a pretty good idea for a flash game - The aim is to place the hoops in the same position as the ball bounce.

So yeah, that is all - It took me long enough to write!

Bibliography, Finally!

Bibliography

Books:

Schrieber, I.; Brathwaite, B; 2009. Challenges for Game Designers. Charles River Media: Boston.

Scott, R; 2010. Level up!: The guide to great video game design. John Wiley & Sons: Chichester

Articles:

Zagal, J. Fernández – Vara, C. Mateas, M. 2008. Rounds, Levels, and Waves: The Early Evolution of Gameplay Segmentation. Games and Culture. Volume 3 Number 2

Venturelli, M. 2009. Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design: A PopCap Case Study. VIII Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment.

Contributions: 

Caillois, R. 'The Definition of Play: The Classification of Games', Salen, K., Zimmerman, E., The Game Design Reader, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

If I find another contribution I can soon put it in... but it's about finding them rather than typing them out correctly... I think...

Bits And Bobs

Okay, so this morning I spent some more quality time with several pages of code and updated my "Epic Dragon" flash game. it took a while to figure some things out, but I now have a map and enemies (skeletons) which have health, attack, move, die and spawn. I also have a use for the wings of the Dragon (explore a wider area of the map by holding space) and improved moment for the dragon. The dragon now has functioning health and so on. The skeletons currently have a newly discovered disease which means they die after a short period of time; don't worry, it isn't contagious and it also helps dwindle their numbers.

Here is the game so far:

Move with the mouse
Click to shoot (not functional yet)
Hold space to fly around the map
(I think the old link in the posts below has been overwritten)

on top of this I have also improved on my 3D model of the Space needle. It now has a considerably complex and detailed incomplete tower structure beneath. I'm dreading adding to this more because I have considerably less pictures and angles of the tower platforms and the building on the ground. also the remaining parts of the tower are a rather odd shape...

Anyway, here it is:

View of the real thing

I'm also deciding whether or not to make the lift cars too; I've added the lift rails to the tower though.

In other news - I have seen the first sign of sun this week, you almost forget what sun is like during the winter... So I went out on my bike and took some pictures!

A photo taken at the viewing point in Felixstowe... Directly into the sun.

I had a couple of people that liked these photos (there is more than one, but they are very similar). They also told me that telling them I simply placed my mirrored sunglasses over the top of my phone camera and shot into the sun ruined the mental illusion for them. (You notice you can see the reflection outline of the phone camera lens to the right of the sun)

Furthermore... After a long time of searching and various other things, i got my hands on a decent guitar for a reasonable price:

And now I have to learn how to play the thing!

To be honest, so far it hasn't gone so bad, and after spending years trying to get my head around how to play a keyboard reasonably, I'm hoping it's not going to be such a drain. My fingers need to man-up though, the strings feel like cheese-wire and still hurt!

Coming soon, Possibly - Our trip to London!

Epic Dragon Test

 -=Here it is!=-

(Hopefully it should work!)

Oooh, Pretty!

I've been doing quite a lot of stuff lately, so I thought that I might show y'all.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Most of the work i do these days seems to be code-based; and I'm pretty sure everybody doesn't wasn't to see 10 pages of solid code-gibberish, So I'll just show you the pretty stuff instead!

Really, the world seems quite unfair to coders; nobody ever sees the streams code that drove them to their inevitable insanity...

The first thing I've started work on again is my Dragon!

I'm very proud of my Dragon - I've got it following the mouse cursor and it articulates all the way down its body accordingly. I also spent many hours last week playing with animation and I eventually managed to make the animation for the wings; after adding code this week the wings now open and close varying amounts by holding down or releasing the space bar!

Here you can see the Dragon with folded wings!

The Dragon also now launches fireballs on the click of the mouse! They currently grow in size over time, but I'm hoping to set it so that the duration that mouse is held down as the size and damage of the fireball.

You may also notice that each fireball above looks different; this is because I added animation to it which gives the effect of backspin.

If Epic Dragons and fireballs are not your thing, perhaps Architecture might be instead - I am currently recreating the Seattle Space Needle in 3DS Max. So far I'm thoroughly enjoying it because things are actually going to plan:

Experementation

I've just spent a while trying to get used to 3ds Max:

 

This actually took a couple of hours, but I had an earlier version which didn't turn out right which took me weeks. Easy when you know how.

3D - My Way

I've been making 3D models for a while now; I started by making user content packs for Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 (helped with coding too), then to Technical 3D models for Product design, then I started trying to make pretty things and trying to combine animations with it. I haven't done much 3D work recently, partly because of workload and lack of imagination, but mainly because my computer really can't handle the workload of spending hours on a heavy program, then rendering for god knows how long, and saving. Y'see - I didn't use to have this problem, but it seems my ambitions and progression have very quickly bypassed my current computer specs.

However,my computer CAN run Google Sketchup.

Yes - Google Sketchup. Despite progressing in every way, I still stick to Google Sketchup for creating my models - Even if I end up importing it into other programs to finish the job. I have an uhh... 'unique' method of creating 3D models, and Sketchup seems to cater for them perfectly.

So, what is 'Unique'?
I honestly don't know - I regularly get asked 'how do you do that', and I just end up saying ' I dunno...' it's possibly the one of the hardest things to explain... but, it obviously works - but probably just for me.
all I know is that it includes;

• Splitting up everything I see, or want to model the world into thousands of simple shapes.
• Finding patterns in these shapes, even if there are none apparent.
• Modularising everything.
• Creating everything to exact decimal accuracy: 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125 all the way down to.. about 0.001 (or any multiples which don't include huge strings of random numbers like "73.57924..."... *shivers*)

"I'm sorry, did you just say you want to rotate that component on an unknown axis in an unknown point in space to 'about there' and then move that vertex 'a little to the right'? Step away from the computer. Now."


Anyway! I thought I'd make a little something, take pictures along the way so you can try and understand my strange ways and fail, and then guess what the hell it is. Fun? Yes!

Here I am simply segmenting the half-sphere into appropriate bits to fit the shapes in my reference pictures, simple right? No. I calculated exactly how many segments I would need (32) so I didn't have to unevenly split segments later.

adding small shapes to what I have. Technically it was two lines to make the points, then copying them around every 45 degrees. Notice how they fir exactly to the segments and have the height of exactly three-quarters of a segment.

There was quite a big step missing from above - It basically involved copying what I already had and expanding it by exactly 0.05, then I joined the outer and inner bits to amke it sticky- outy

Another View

The above might look like the same thing, but I actually expanded the sphere again and made the middle dome so it stuck out a little bit extra. what you also might not have noticed is that the edges of the spike ring are all now curved, as are the middle dome edges.

I copied all of what I made and rotated it 180 degrees to create the other end of the model (which is very similar), the above three photos show me creating a slice, intersecting it with the dome and then removing it to create a screw-head type-thing.

Whole back end with some block colour added

It's hard to explain what went on above - I basically made a small and basic LED-shaped component, precisely positioned and angled it flush with the sphere and then cut a hole in the sphere. I then rounded the edge of the hole and copied it around several times.

Front end with block colour - If you look closely you can probably see the rounded edges of the LED-holes.

Side view of both ends

I then started making the middle segments; This is where the whole 32-segment sphere came in - if the object has 8 sticky-out segments and 8 - inner segments... that makes 16 slices, that means 2 segments per slice which will make the segments slightly rounded rather than flat. Got it? Good.

This is the pattern for each segment. the problem I found was that the pattern isn't flat, it's embedded into the sphere at different depths - This creates slight problems,especially when the item is a sphere - you can't just embed everything on one axis like you would with a box because the angles of the sides are all different and.. well... Lots of other stuff. The point is that my 'unique' methods do not cater for this so I devised a new way of doing it which conformed. - I drew it once on a face of a sphere (so it was curved) and then drew lines down to the centre of the sphere from all parts of the pattern - it means if you lower the pattern equally on these lines, it's the equivalent of scaling down, only you can do it for specific aspects of the pattern

it's hard to explain, but you can see - the pattern is at different heights in different places because I varied how far down into the sphere I drew the pattern lines... Anyway - I give up on explaining that.
 

I made a screw/bolt and did it the same as I did for the LED's

I copied and rotated the pattern around 22.5 degrees, then flipped and rotated it.

then i copied and rotated both 8 times

 

And then I added some block colours.

The model isn't actually finished yet - it's basically the main shapes - It's missing detail and textures and loads of other stuff, but I don't think my computer can handle such things a the moment.

Have fun guessing what it is!