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MA Thesis Diary Post #7 – Moose

Back to work again so things are going to unfortunately slow down.  If I’m lucky I’ll be able to do a little bit each day.  For now I was only able to do the moose.  Lets see what else I can fit in this weekend.  I had less trouble with the antlers this time cause I treated them as flat objects and made them out of two parts, a front which was lighter and a back which was darker.

For now these are all the animals.  I will probably revisit and rework them later on in development, but they are fine for initial concepts.  Next will probably be a few humans or maybe going back to the environment.  Lets see…

moose

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Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #6 – Caribou and Boar

Woke up early today, it was so freaking dark and it was 8:30am.  Found out the Sun didn’t rise for another hour and woke back up around 1:30pm 😛  Helsinki only has about 5-6 hours of sun light during winter, so you gotta be careful not to sleep too late or you miss any and all light that might be in the sky.

I was able to still get two animals done today the caribou and the boar.  I wanted to do the moose and the caribou today, but the caribou’s antlers pissed me off so much; I decided to skip another antlered animal for today.

I also reworked some of the colors of the musk ox but I won’t be posting that today.  I’ll probably do a group post of all the animals when I’m done them.

CaribouAndBoar

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MA Thesis Diary Post #4 – Composing a Concept Scene

EnvironmentConceptWolfAfter a few attempts I was able to compose a scene of how I though the game would (or should :)) look like.  The initial image was very much the flat style I was looking for but I felt it needed a little “oomph” so took that into photoshop and played around a little to try and emulate some glow and blur effects to add a little depth.  I hope we are able to achieve something in this direction with Unity 3D, or at least something close.  Probably with some Pro effects or other shaders.  Let’s hope!

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Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #3 – Assets, Assets, Assets

The benefits of being alone during the holidays is that you have nothing better to do than get work done. 😛  Here is the result of the past few days of work:

With the worries of art style, perspective, and animation out of the way, I was able to spend the last three days working like a dog or wolf, and was able to produce the follow early draft work.  As you will see, initially I straight up copied Matthew’s tree style but then eventually broke off and began to reinterpret and add my own spin on things.  I think that is a big step for many non artists to understand, they think that if you are using someone else’s work as a reference it is somehow cheating, when in fact it is not.  Of course I will not be using all of these in the final product to be safe but either way I am extremely thankful for finding Mr. Curickshank’s work.

You will also notice I was able to eventually develop my own bushes, and trees based off of this style.  Finally I created some rocks and the wolf and musk ox to see how they fit together in this world, again only caring for 2D profiles and trying to limit myself to only 2-3 colors.  Doing front and back will be more difficult, especially if it becomes a 2.5D / 3 quarters view later on.  For now I’m going to just keep with this so I can keep moving forward.

ArtAssetsWolfGame

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Aalto University (TAIK), Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #2 – Reworking Art Direction

To address some of the issues that I have been having when creating art assets for the game I sat down and really thought about why I was having so much trouble actually creating them.  While I was thinking I thought long and hard why I was struggling so much.  I knew that I had enough skill and ability to at least produce something reasonable, so why was it that I could not do a thing.

After thinking for a while and talking with my collogue I came to the realization that I have not produced anything out of laziness but more because of the type of artist that I am.  There are many different types of artists with many different skill sets.  They have many different strengths and weaknesses.  There are some that have very unique styles and can always easily create imagery in that style.  Others art “styleless” who cannot create anything completely from their minds, but must see examples of what they need to create.  I fall into the later category.

I was having such a hard time creating art assets because two key things were missing, an art style, and examples.  After being forced by my collogue to address these issues by picking something and sticking to it I came to the following choices.

The art style will be simple and vector based (at least initially) because this is where most of my skill lies, two it should be simple so that I do not fall into the habit of trying to create highly realized (overly realistic) imagery.

Earlier in the week google had done a nice “interactive” story telling about the Brothers Grimm, which had a nice simplistic graphic style, which was done by Matthew Cruickshank.  Something about its simplicity had caught my eye and I really enjoyed how he was able to tell so much with so little.  After talking with a few artists at work, various artists and some 50’s – 60’s children’s books were suggested.  Finally the art of Josh Agle, better know as Shag were also recommended.

Taking these into account but leaning more towards Cruickshank’s style laied the foundation of our art style.  Now with that out of the way, we came across my other problem.  Since I could only create what I saw and now that I had a lot of reference, none of them were rendered from above but only from the side.  Again this was one of the biggest challenges I have had, seeing something then trying to imagine it from above.  It really twists your brain.  I could have of course created or found 3D models, then orbited around them to get the angle and look that I wanted but even this would take too much time.  So Björn and I decided that we will now just worry about a side (or semi-side view).  This made things a lot easier cause I just had to copy what I saw instead of try to imagine it.  Also I was told to ignore animation (one of my other weaknesses) for now and if and when the time comes that I could not do it, then we would hire someone to handle the animation.

And so my work began…

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Master Thesis

MA Thesis Diary Post #1 – Early Tree Concepts

Over the past year I’ve been working on iterations of my MA thesis that I and Björn Lindholm are collaborating on.  Though I’ve spent many days iterating on various designs and art styles I believe that I will probably be going for a more clean vector style which only uses 2-3 colors max per object.  Below is an example of some early concepts:

TreeConceptsFinal

As I continue to work I will post more images and discuss my progress.  I will continue now to iterate more landscape objects as well as work on more iconic representations of objects which will be used in another portion of the game.

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Mashable’s Game of the Year = BS.

Ok someone here please help me figure this one out as I’m completely baffled!

WWE’12 won Game of the Year for the Mashable Awards 2011. The only problem is that it was released on November 22, 2011 in North America and on November 25 in the United Kingdom.

The rules, taken directly from Mashable’s site:

Readers can nominate their favorite companies, people, sites and gadgets once a day for each category between Oct. 11 and Nov. 18. Mashable’s editors will select the seven finalists for each category. The final nominees will be announced on Nov. 21, at which time readers will vote for the winners.

Does anyone else see the problem? People nominated a game which was not even out in the publics hands. How can you nominate something for GOTY without ever playing it? Then the judges just blindly miss this huge discrepancy? Something smells extremely fishy.

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A Heuristic Evaluation of Backyard Monsters Facebook Game Against Paavilainen’s Social Game Heuristics.

I will be doing a general heuristic evaluation of the Backyard Monsters Facebook game against Paavilainen’s Social Games Heuristics. Backyard Monsters is a online strategy / tower defence game that allows players to build various forms of defensive and offensive strategies using a monster thematic in hopes of attracting players to work with or against their facebook friends. Using these said heuristics, I hope to be able to break down the game’s primary elements and evaluate the positive and negative aspects of the game against those heuristics.

1. Accessibility: Making the game easy to approach, understand, and play.
The amount of information that needs to be assimilated by the player early on can be extremely daunting, especially when there are so many different things to choose from in the game. To counteract this issue, the player is hand held throughout the beginning of the game and is told exactly what to do until they have eventually survived an attack and have been able to build up enough defensive measures as well as resource producing systems.

Even after the initial walk through, the system continues to pay attention to how the players manages their resources and will even give hints much later on in the game if they are letting something sit idle and what they should do to correct their mistake. This happened to me about four hours into the game where I had left my monster locker sitting idle and not producing a monster, where as if I had known earlier, I could have had several new monster types already ready to be created. During this time, the system eventually warned me of my problem and told me that I should take advantage of this and what I should do.

From a graphics standpoint the screen can get very crowded and the strange art style can be confusing to look at, at times. Fortunately by clicking on the objects a description is given, and also more info is given in the various sub menus of the game system.

Interactively, everything is done with only single left mouse clicks which makes it easily approachable for most people.

2. Interruptability: Taking advantage of asynchronous, spontaneous and irregular play sessions.

The system time and the real world time are synced. Therefore, if it says it will take one hour to build an item then it literally takes one full hour to build that item. This is where the game uses time as one form of monetization in that the players can speed up time by using “shiny” (which may be purchased with real money) to buy items that speed up time, or to purchase other items that may give them other abilities. Game time is always moving so the players can at any time close their browser and come back the next day and time would have moved forward that similar amount. This gives the players the ability to set a task and then go do something else and return when the task is completed. This flexibility allows the players to play in any style or fashion as they like, but if they want to play the game quickly and continue playing, they are very likely to have to spend real world money.

3. Continuity: Providing asynchronous and permanent game world which attracts the player to come back.

This is addressed in question 2.

4. Discovery: Providing new experiences, content, and surprises.

The game has many elements that offer the players some spice to their gameplay. Most of these lie in random or attacks by other players, or things that are found or received as gifts from other players. There are also many different creature types and items that can eventually be used.

5. Virality: Supporting viral growth in the player’s social network.

The game rewards players with shiny by getting their Facebook friends (and others via email) to also begin playing the game as well. It also allows friends to help each other decrease the time it takes to build objects as well as give gifts to each other, thus allowing the game to spread and be played by many people. It also shows the top playing friends at the bottom of the player’s screen where he or she can quickly go to visit his or her backyard, thus increasing chances of competition.

6. Narrativity: Creating in-game and off-game narratives that elicit curiosity

I would say that there is a narrative element in the game which has monsters pitted in fights against each other but I would l say that it is very lose and the a totally different thematic could be pasted in place of it without much effect. Off-game I could say it is up to the players to either make up their own stories where they may fight each other or team up to attack or defend against other players.

7. Expression: Supporting self-discovery, customization and virtual spaces.

One of the key strengths of the game is that it allows the character freedom to choose how they want to build their backyard. They can play defensively, offensively, a mix, and they can pretty much create any type of layout that they like. They can even decorate their backyard with items that are purely just for decoration. It is kind of like building your own self contained world that you can move buildings around as you please within the limits of the game world and your resources / shiny.

8. Sharing: Collaborating with friends by gifting and boosting.

As mentioned earlier, this is friends can work together by giving gifts to each other as well as helping to decrease build time of objects. They also are able to team up together so they in a sense build a community.

9. Sociability: Supporting sociability among friends in the game dynamics.

Again this was addressed earlier as it allows for friends to help each other via communicating to help each other with the various aspect of the game, from attacking, defending, upgrading, gifting, etc.

10. Competition: Promoting playful social competition with others.

The bar that is at the bottom of the screen shows the ranking of the player’s various friends and the world map also shows their location. All of these tempt the player to either temporary help or attack the other players in hopes to take they might take the top rank.

Conclusion:

Overall the game Backyard Monsters has a decent game mechanic with enough social elements that it can be worthwhile to play at least for a short time. I believe that it is successful because it contains enough of Paavilainen’s heuristics. I do not know however, how long I will continue playing it. I would say for example, what is the incentive or motivation for people that lose the game to continue to play? Several of the people on my list had destroyed backyards, and I believe they just stopped playing because they did not want to start completely from scratch again. So they took their time and money elsewhere.

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