Camera Move Reference

The ending scene to the movie V for Vendetta has some very nice camera movements that showcase the exploding houses of parliament. Here's a video of the scene:

I think that the way the shots are cut between long, medium, and close up throughout the sequence very effectively showcases the exciting special effects. The long shots effectively give a sense of the massive scale of destruction that's going on, while the closer shots add to the impact of the explosions. The horizontal tracking shots work very well in following the progression of explosions as they follow the music. The shot of the clock tower exploding effectively uses a camera tilt to showcase the explosions working their way up the clock tower, leading to a final reveal of the face of the clock tower that erupts into a climactic explosion that's then showcased from many different angles. I think this will be a great reference as I start to create some camera movements in my game design class.

Boss Battle Analysis

   I'll be analyzing the boss battle from the first level in the game Jamestown. Jamestown is a vertically scrolling shoot'em up game where you fly through levels in a ship of your choice and shoot at enemies while dodging the bullets that they shoot at you. Every ship in the game has a primary and secondary weapon, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. For instance, the ship that you start with has a scatter shot that covers a wide area, but does less damage, or a laser beam that does a lot of damage over a small area. As the player shoots enemies, they drop coins that can be collected to increase his or her score. After surviving for a long enough time and accumulating enough points, you get a shield power up that you can activate at any point for a limited time. The difficulty of the game ramps up very quickly and even this first boss is pretty challenging to beat.
  The initial encounter with the boss is established as the screen begins to slow down and a burning cabin comes into view. As soon as you reach this point, you are confronted with the boss and the battle immediately begins. There is a very specific pattern to the boss battle that depends on how much health the boss has left. It starts out with the boss shooting a few scattered bullets that are easy to dodge. Then the boss shoots some homing bullets that take a bit more maneuvering to avoid.

Its fairly simple to dodge these red homing bullets

Next, the boss will shoot the scattered or homing bullets as a huge wave of enemies travels down either the right or left side of the screen.

The wave of enemies increases the challenge while adding some variety to the fight.

The wave of enemies adds more difficulty to the previous obstacles, while also adding a rewarding element because its a lot of fun to shoot at these easier enemies and they drop a lot of gold to collect. The boss will continue cycling through these three actions until his health is lowered to the halfway point.
After passing the halfway point, the arrangement of the bullets starts to become much more complex. First, there is a stream of bullets that radiate outwards from the boss, which requires faster reflexes to avoid. This section consists mostly of the standard blue bullets mixed with some of the red homing bullets.

Next, the boss creates a sort of spiral pattern of bullets which are very difficult to dodge, requiring a lot of quick back and forth movement. Due to the spiral pattern, there also tends to be far more bullets towards the center of the boss, meaning that its far more risky to stay in the center to shoot at the boss, as opposed to staying towards the edge where your bullets will be out of range.

 Finally, the boss shoots out a substantial amount of red homing bullets that travel very quickly towards the player. This tends to force the player to move away from the boss, meaning that they will have to regain a position that's in range after.

Again, the boss continues to repeat these moves until he is defeated. During this section, the player is occasionally rewarded with some gold coins after doing damage to the boss. After defeating the boss, the final reward is some victory music along with a screen that comes up, counting out bonus points and rewarding the player with stars and achievements depending on how well they did in the level.

Here's a sketch of the major parts to the boss battle:

Here's a link to a video with this boss battle in it, it begins two minutes in.

Game Mechanic Experimentation

So far, I've tried experimenting with creating the wing suit and ball rolling mechanic ideas from my previous post.

Here are two videos of the mechanics:





For the ball rolling, I think the goal could potentially be to roll all of the balls to the center box on the opposite side while avoiding all of the holes.

For the wing suit idea, I'm thinking it could involve flying down a very steep mountain and avoiding all of the rocks and trees that show up in your path.

Game Mechanic Ideas

Here's a few game mechanic ideas that I have for my next project.
1. Building structures out of different pieces, much like building blocks or Lincoln logs.

2. Driving a motor boat from a top down perspective that physically interacts with the waves of the water.

3. Flying through the air in a wing suit and trying to make a safe landing.

4.Trying to reach the end of procedurally generated hedge mazes.

5. Putting puzzle blocks together to make a solid geometric form, like a soma cube.

6.A piano key board that one would walk across to make different arrangements of notes.

7.Tilting a box to roll a ball inside past obstacles.

8.Balancing a stack of rocks that increases in height over time.

9.Controlling the wind to guide hot air balloons past obstacles.


10.Various hibachi chef activities, such as cutting food, starting fires, and juggling kitchen tools.



11.Sculpting forms into a block of marble. Maybe you would need to sculpt shapes that would fit into corresponding crevices.

12.Arranging words in a crossword puzzle that line up in 3 dimensions.

Multiplayer Level Idea

I would like to make a multiplayer level that takes place on the rooftop of a skyscraper. Here's my idea for the layout:

I'm basing this idea is partially inspired from this rooftop pool in Singapore:

  

I imagine that the time period for this environment would be somewhere in the near future during springtime in the morning. This building would be a luxury resort hotel that wealthy people stay at. The architecture would be very modern and clean, kind of like this:

The vegetation would include palm trees in planter boxes by the pool, as well as a rooftop garden.

I'm thinking that the story for the building could be that it's currently under renovation, which would explain why some of the guard rails along the precarious edges would be missing.

Team Fortress 2 Level Analysis

Team Fortress 2 is a class-based, team-based online shooter. The game is centered around the competition between two opposing teams, red and blu. Players from either team choose to play as one of nine classes. Each class plays a different role in the game and players must use the strengths of their chosen class to benefit the team. Some classes play an offensive role, such as the Scout, Soldier and Pyro. Meanwhile, the Demoman, Heavy and Engineer play more defensive roles. The Medic, Sniper and Spy serve a support role to the other classes and help in tipping the balance of the encounters during the match. In this way, Team Fortress 2 is a game that values collaboration with team mates more than individual skill. There are a variety of game modes in Team Fortress 2, including arena, control point, king of the hill, payload, payload race, territorial control, and capture the flag.

For my analysis, I played a capture the flag map called ctf_turbine. The setting for this map isn't incredibly distinct, but it's essentially some form of secret spy building with a large generator room in the center taking place at some time during the 1960's. The level is visually very simple, with signs and arrows scattered about to guide the player and a very minimal amount of props, such as old fashioned computers, fire extinguishers, and alarms to give a sense of what the space is. The color scheme of either side of the map matches the corresponding team color with the central area taking on a neutral color palette. The lighting is rather high key, giving the level a fairly light-hearted mood, which goes pretty well with all of the crazy cartoon violence in the game.

Here's a diagram of the layout of the map:

 The object of the capture the flag game mode is to reach the opposing side of the level and capture the opposing team's intelligence and return it to your team's side. Due to the way this game mode works, all of the players end up passing through the large generator room in the center, making it one of the primary areas where the fighting occurs. This generator room features some turbines in the center, as well as two large shipping containers. These objects serve as cover for the players, and the shipping containers also act as a platform that certain classes can jump on to and take advantage of the higher ground. On either side of the room, there are also walkways that can serve as good vantage points for snipers. The walkways are very exposed though, so you need to be careful of staying up there for too long. The walkways also have a small covered area in the center that players can use as cover. One more thing about the walkways is that they are just high enough to give the player a little bit of falling damage if they jump off the side, which forces the player to decide if they want to jump off and take damage, or run to the stairs instead. The generator room also has a small room on either side that contains a health pack. These rooms are another good source of cover.

The generator room is where both teams meet as they advance to the opposing side.

Another important area in the map is the room where the intelligence is stored.

This is the intelligence room. The intelligence floats over a large pad and is marked by an arrow on the wall.

 There are a couple of aspects to the room that help to make it challenging to enter. For one thing, the primary entrance to the room consists of two circular doors. These doors are placed in such a way to make it very hard to see what's on the other side, which allows the opposing team to have an easier time defending. Usually engineers will place sentry turrets behind the wall that the player typically wont see until they enter the room and immediately become a target for the sentry.

These doorways only allow a small glimpse into the room

 The other entrance is through a stair case. Again the way the staircase is angled makes it difficult to see the entire room when you are about to enter it. The third entrance to this room is through a ventilation shaft. While the ventilation shaft offers opportunities for surprise attacks, it also puts players in a very vulnerable position after jumping through.

This is the vent entrance. The little legs poking out are from an enemy scout that tried to steal the intelligence.

 Here's a short video where I was healing a Heavy and we jumped through the vent to go after the intelligence.

Another important area in the map is the hallway leading up to the intelligence room. One very unique aspect about this section is that there is a small un-enterable room with glass windows. These windows give players a glimpse of what's going on beyond the corner in the hallway and is useful for both defenders and attackers.

I can see where the enemy is by looking through these windows

 The hallway also features a raised platform section that players of certain classes can reach to get a height advantage. This tends to be another area where engineers will place sentries, but it's much more difficult to build them in this area due to the exposure.

So overall, ctf_turbine has quite a few interesting design aspects that helps to create many fun confrontations for the two teams. The varying heights in the space offer unique opportunities for certain classes, the different approaches to the intelligence room allow for players to form different strategies, and the changes in visibility offered in the level makes capturing the intelligence more challenging and, as a result, more rewarding. 

Platforming Tutorial Level Idea

I would like to make a tutorial level for a platforming game that involves playing as a piece of sushi. The conflict of the game would involve the sushi's struggle to escape the sushi bar before he can get eaten by the hungry customers. The twist is that the other food on the sushi bar is getting in the way of the sushi's escape. The location would be on the sushi bar and tables in a Japanese restaurant. The time of year is early spring. The time of day is in the morning right before the lunch hour is about to start. Other pieces of sushi live in this environment, but they have no desire to escape the restaurant and act as obstacles to the player. The overall architecture of the level would consist of plates, bowls, and chopsticks on the surface of a table, and this would all reside in a fairly traditional looking sushi restaurant. Prior to the sushi arriving to his plate on the sushi bar, the table was cleaned and then stacked with plates and bowls of food to serve the restaurant's customers. The piece of sushi was prepared by a master chef and placed on a platter for the customers, but what this chef didn't expect was that this little piece of sushi had no plans of getting eaten.

Here is my idea for the level layout.

The level would start with fairly simple jumps that slowly increase in difficulty. Eventually you reach the first obstacle, which is a giant bowl of hot miso soup. The jump over the soup is made easier by a piece of tofu floating in the soup that you can jump on to. You will have to act quickly though, because the tofu starts to sink into the soup as you're standing on it. Eventually, you come across a piece of bouncy tofu, which acts like a trampoline and allows the player to jump onto a tall stack of plates. After that, you get to a slightly harder miso soup obstacle where you must jump across multiple pieces of floating tofu without sinking into the soup. After rolling down a spoon, the player is met with two bouncy tofu pieces. In this part, the player learns that jumping on the tofu from a higher distance creates a larger bounce. By bouncing along these pieces of tofu, the player will be able to land on top of the tallest stack of plates in the level and finally finish the level.

VVVVVV Tutorial Level Analysis

VVVVVV is a platforming game designed by Terry Cavanagh. The core mechanic of this game involves reversing gravity in the level to maneuver past obstacles. There is no jumping, the player can only move to the left or right and reverse gravity. The first level in the game introduces the mechanic and very quickly builds in complexity as the obstacles become more difficult. Here's an image of the level layout:

In the first section, there aren't any obstacles at all, and there is clearly only one direction for the player to go. This section allows the player to learn movement. The next section presents a pit of spikes. The game offers a brief reminder message about which buttons the player can press to reverse gravity. In this way, the player is fairly easily introduced to the gravity reversal mechanic.

 Next, the player reaches the first checkpoint. Here the player has no choice, but to go up, essentially taking a blind leap through the next few sections. In this case, there are no obstacles that the player is in danger of hitting at the top. In this way, the player learns that he or she will need to travel between screens without knowing what lies ahead.

The player takes a leap of faith

The leap of faith has a safe landing

Next the player reaches a set of moving obstacles. They require the same skills to get past as the spikes while also adding a new element of timing. The next few sections are variations in the spike traps and moving obstacles, which helps the player to continue practicing. When the player reaches Gantry and Dolly, vanishing and moving platforms are combined with the spikes. This is the first point where the player needs to be conscious of static and dynamic obstacles.

 Later on in Boo! Think Fast! and Driller, the player needs to take a leap of faith similar to the beginning, but this time there are obstacles along the way that the player must deal with, such as disappearing platforms and spikes.

Here's a video of the obstacles that the player must face through these new leaps of faith:


 This is another example of how the tutorial builds in complexity based on what was previously introduced. After going through a few more sections with moving obstacles and spikes, the player reaches the teleporter that marks the end of the level.

A lot of different elements are introduced in the first level of VVVVVV. They are introduced in a sequence that allows the player to readily interact with them without becoming overwhelmed too quickly while also becoming increasingly complex over a short time, providing a lot of challenge for the player. Aside from the order in which things are presented, I also think that the checkpoints are very useful sources of positive feedback that help in leading the player through the level. Quite often, a new checkpoint is within view of the player, which helps provide a clear idea of where he or she needs to go. It's also a very positive experience to reach a new checkpoint, which provides a feeling of accomplishment and relief after clearing the previous obstacles.

The checkpoint clearly indicates that the player needs to find a way past the spikes in the middle

  

Some work from this semester