Category: Archive

The final mini game is ready! And that means all part of the game are complete and ready for the final set up.

Anothe completely new mechanics for me which I called the sequence puzzle. It turned up quite easy to make. Now I know how to work with string variables, check if the input is in correct order and set up volumes for each puzzle element. That was interesting.

Also as you can see I included particle system ,which I heard of, but didn’t use much before. It was fun playing with its properties.

And again the game required more animation drawing, but I’m happy with the result. By this point I already changed the cursor for a custom one for narrative purposes.

Now I can connect all the parts into one game and hopefully I’ll be done with the project in a couple of days. Can’t wait!

It’s time to learn something new again! For the ball scene I wanted to make the player play with the cat to entertain him a little bit and raise up his spirits. And I had a thought that Pong-like mechanics would fit quite well here. I have spent the whole day following a tutorial, but managed to recreate it successfully. It even has simple AI , which I never thought I’d be capable to implement. But it works and works smoothly. I only have to create additional asset to make the AI paddle look like a cat.

The rest of the scene is also good to go

And I created some more animation for the cut-scene right after this part of the game. Pretty much like it. I never thought I’ll need animation courses I took quite some years ago by this point. But having to work so much with it for this project I can feel the improvement already.

One more mini game to build and I can finally compile all the parts into one game. The ending is near and I’m happy about that, because the work is becoming exhausing. But I want my holidays, so going on.

I’m proceeding well enough with game development. So far I have completed the camp scene and a mini game attached to it. At this poit I’ve beem working very much time with unity animation system, learned to use bools and triggers as well as change sprites on interaction. Who knew that such small interactions with little coding can work quite well, when being compiled in a scene.

Sometimes funny bloopers happen, which give you a good laugh. Especially when you forget to set ridgid body to a kinematic mode =)

Also as you can spot, I’ve learned another new feature which is camera following the character. I can even control the offset borders, which makes it quite handy. It’s a Mario style camera follow when the character is pushing the bounds. I’ve never done that before, but like the result very much. It looks like a real game now.

I also started to set up the first part with the cat just running. Nothing much to show, it’s just running along the snow desert, I’ve just added landscape assets and a trigger to launch the cut-scene with the freight train. Two locations of the second part with cat walking are ready as well. The cat prefab was ready beforehand, so for now I have only one scene to build with mini game and related cut-scene, create one more game for the final part and compile all that together with scene transitions.

We have finally submitted collab project which means I can fully focus on the game. After ragdoll issues I wanted to take it a bit easy and make the parts I’m sure about and which won’t require long hours of coding or setting issues.

Though in the shield game I used a familiar mechanics, similar to the one I used in the first game with cats attacking a plant, I added and practiced a new feature for me, which is life count. After bats hit the cat 3 times, the game is relodaded. Player has to keep them away for 30 seconds and the game will proceed.

Other simple cut-scenes such as bus travel was easy as well and doesn’t need much description.

Finally I came up with and updated game scheme and is certain about the connections between scenes and locations.

First of all the game consists of 5 locations, each of them has corresponding symol, mini game and cut-scene attached to it. The game plays with the direction the cat is moving towards in the game. The idea is that at the very beginning we don’t know, where the cat is heading to. On default we assume that he’s going somewhere from starting point to his goal. But as the game proceeds and we see more and more cut-scenes, we realize that locations that we see there are going in reverse order in the game. Which means that the cat is actually not moving forward, but going back.

I’m trying to do a bit of environmental storytelling here as in cut-scenes the locations look more happy and lively (because the cat feels happy in anticipation of a long awaited meeting), while in the game they look more abandoned and lonely to share the disappointed feelings. Especially it will be seen in the camp location as an example.

Arrows in the upper part show my struggles to choose the order of locations. At some point I got lost in them, so that even now I can’t already describe precisely what I was thinking about at the moment and why they ended up in such an order. But this wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was to mix and distribute games and cut-scenes along the game. As you can see on the upper scheme, cut-scenes should tell the actual (back)story – the things that happened before the game started and contains character’s motives together with the correct order of locations.

The tricky part was that locations in cut-scenes must appear before the character actually reaches them. Otherwise the player won’t get the “reverse order and going back” thing. So at least one cut-scene needs to be played ahead of the first mini game. Because I initially thought that cut-scenes will be something like a reward for winning and should be related to the actions (or theme) in mini game. In the first part of the game you can see that the first cut-scene (marked in clowdy bubble) will just spawn on trigger without any additional interation. It was needed just to break this initial order and thematic connection between cut-scene and corresponding mini game.

But by doing that I ran into another problem: the reason of mini games being there. I unerstand that initially the games are there just to include some intercation into the story. And with breaking connection between game and cut-scene I have lost the reason of mini games to be present. Untill I came up with the solution that has put all the puzzle pieces together. Instead of connecting them to cut-scenes, I’ll connect them to locations. Since the whole intention of the game is to make the player care for the cat, I’ll adjust the games, so that as the result of playing them, you help the cat to move to another location. For example, in the train location cat spots an open carriage where he stays for some time to rest and sleep. The player in the meantime must scare away bad dreams (bats) to let him rest somehow.

Since I already know the climax scene, I want to create a little plot twist by creating custom cursor in the shape of the sparkle in the ending to hint on that all this time it was us – cat’s friend, who guided and helped him all along the trip.

So having decided all that, I’m fully entering the development step and now it’s more about technical implementation. Some changes are possible, of course, in case I don’t manage to implement something physically.

These days I’m spending most of my work time on creating the minimum amount of assets to continue building the game in Unity. Especially it concerns animations for cut-scenes, which I’m making from scratch. Actually this fact was a major argument for the style, which evolved fron the thumbnails as it was much quicker and easier to animate, bwcause there was no need to deal with outlines, colours and shadows. And overal I found this black&white style very appealing for a lyric and partly philosophical story. A bit later I understood that it’s similar to Limbo, but I use it differently, not in order to create a fearsome and grave atmosphere. Prevailance of white instead of black refers more to light and isolation instead to darkness and unknown, compared to Limbo. From the concept-art point of view we’re more likely to wait for something grim from a dark silhouette rather than a white one.

But coming back to animations, there is not much to say apart from that they take quite a lot of time to make, so I decided that the last climax cut-scene that I’ve finished by this point will have the most animation, whilst the rest of them will be mostly animated in Unity with more or less static images as it’s much faster. This is the example of character animation for the meeting scene.

Thus working on animated scenes is a routine work for me, but for implementing that in Unity I had to get to know the Timeline tool, which I found very useful as it’s possible to control the length and order of animated bits as well as switching from scene to scene without having to create scripts for activating certain objects at the right time. Very handy and this is the second brand new thing to learn about Unity during this project.

I’m still struggling with the complete image of my story and I know I should have finished the concept long ago. Hopefully, when I’m done with the cut-scene, and have no certain areas to work on, the decisions will come faster.

I’ve breen struggling these days with bringing all the ideas and thoughts about the game to some kind of an order. Actually I wasn’t sure about where to start with developing my story. So I started with simple questions which came to my mind, while I was looking at the image, that the player will see for most of the game:

By this point I have already dropped the idea of path choices, because it would be too much work for this project. I still must remain realistic about the deadlines and my work capacity, taking into account we have one more project going and me still having another part-time course. So the game will be very linear with one thing being determined by the other.

After asking myself these questions, I managed to figure out what is the bare minumum of information I have to include in order to produce a complete story. They are “Where is he going?” aka the game goal, and “How did he end up here?” aka the backstory.

Ok, now I need to decide, how to present these parts of story coherently. Almost immediately I thought about cut-scenes, which are a nice way to set a parallel story without messing up the actual gameplay story. So that current events are happenig as the game flows, while bits of backstory are shown in flashbacks.

But at this point I have a problem going on, which is such approach will turn my game into animation actually made in Unity even though player will be able to control the character in one way or another. A very boring walking simulator. So, to include some interaction I’m thinking about incorporating mini games, that will happen, for example, after the character finds a symbolic item. A game will be played and after that a piece of backstory is revealed.

With these thoughts in mind I created the Plan, which helped me get some structure of my future work:

So now we can see that the game is separated into 3 parts depending on the character state. In the beginning the cat is still full of power and is running on his own without player being able to control him. Since it would be boring to just watch the cat running, this part should be relatively short with just, maybe, one mini game. The main part is where the player gets control over the cat with keyboard buttons and has to walk around to find mini games and trigger flashbacks. At this stage the cat is pretty much tired, but still can walk. The further he gets the slower he becomes. Eventually he collapses and final part happens, where the player has to drag the character, making him get to his final destination. I hope that this feature will be able to communicate the filling that only player’s help can bring the cat to his goal.

But with that being said, I still couldn’t see the whole story. Only some parts of it like the final mimigame and cut-scene, following it, which will be the climax of the whole story, that reveals why the cat took this trip, what happened just before the strat of the game, when we see him alone in snow desert, and where is he actually going. That will connect story with the backstory.

By that time I was already uncomfortable that I still have nothing done physically about the game, so even without having all parts of the story thought through, I started working on the parts I was sure enough about. I understand that it’s not the best way to do, because it can end up with these pieces being reworked or cut out eventually. But at least I can set up at least a small piece of prototype and create some assets.

As a warm-up I started with the music mini game, where you have to recreate the melody the cat sings. And I couldn’t think that such a simple task would require me much more time than I expected. About 2 days actually. I did the drag&drop mechanics before, but I ran into the problem of spawning notes in a particular order while clicking the same button. This is where I had to learn about lists and resourses folder. Fortunately, with the help of Zhan, fellow students and a couple of youtube tutorials, I solved the issue and the first mini game was ready.

Music is symbolic, because my friend is a musician, so it’s one of the first things to come to my mind. The notes are also special which are first 4 notes of Lensky arioso from Eugene Onegin opera, which contain phrase “I love you”. Actually this refers to a post, spotted in russian social media from time to time about the strength of education in tzar Russia. The post tells about a girl, who saw these 4 notes in a lock charm of her granddad. When he asked her to guess, what’s encrypted in these notes, she quickly sang them and recognized the arioso and the words “I love you”.

I thought that this would be a clever reference, but quite soon realized that barely anyone will be able to understand the reference, so I eventually changed the song to the current main theme. But the original notes still left and my friend even recorded sounds for them.

Apart from that I made some preparatory work at this stage that is background elements, cat run and walk animations and controls, which I will need later.

Since we are about to make a pitch of our game, I need to develop the idea a little bit to understand myself what I’m about to do. So first of all I need to decide on what I want from this project and set up some key points as well as personal objectives (which I will still need in future for the report).

I have already done my research, which helped me to clarify some concept points. For example, the relation between story and gameplay. That I must find the way to support the narrative with interaction that player is about to perform (I’ll elaborate on that down below). Environmental storytelling will play a significant role in the project as this is one of the main sourses of information and ques in wordless games. I also started thinking about particular game mechanics like choices, so that different choices (for example choose to go to an abandoned village which will lead to some kind of flashback memory or proceed through the snow field and not get that) will lead to different bits of information, to actually affecting the ending, but can bring some amount of replayability as you can see from the list of my inspirations like games from Dark pictures.

My main challendge to overcome here is to compensate lack of game mechanics with visuals and story because I’m still lacking enough coding skills to implement something complicated or completely new for me as I’ll have to spend a lot of time learning the coding itself while project development will stay on halt untill I manage to mage a small game feature. So since I’m making a story – then I’m making a story, not a challenge experience.

Also, following my case study analysis scheme, I made the same analysis for my future game to help me understand, that the features I’m going to implement are there for a reason, but not just because I want to.

Also as you can see, I’m already thinking through the commection between story and gameplay. So that as the game proceeds, the cat will get more and more tired up to the point when the player has to literary drag him further to eventually bring him to the final destination. I believe that playing around with character controlls will be an interesting solution to intertwining gameplay and narrative.