Game Stories - Group Diary - Roxanne H, Dikla, Yiyi

Topics: Character design. The Eliza effect.

Tools: Ren’py

Brief: Meet Emma. Emma is teaching Digital Games at OCAD University. Emma is not much of a morning person; she needs caffeine to function well during her morning classes. The only problem is, after drinking coffee, Emma tends to get, how should we put it… extremely excited, and starts speaking fast.

Your goal is to make Emma speaks in the right paste, so you take notes during the class.

Process:

And created the coffee cup and background illustration of the class

Note:

Errors

Python is very sensitive to spaces/tabs, and it can easily change the hierarchy of the items if you accidentally change those. Once running the script you might get this message “Indentation Mismatch error “which means that there’s an extra space before the line (you’ll get an indication of which line).

Personal Reflection:

I found it needs a lot of logistic thinking when making game stories and it’s super helpful when we sketch the workflow out before actually making the game. It will make the storyline more clear and the personality (reactions to caffeine and questions) of our character more stand out. We keep our main goal in mind when designing the storyline, which is proper interactions with our character to make her speaking at the right speed. The talking speed of our character is crucial for our players to be able to understand the contents she is talking and to make the right choices to win the game eventually. We think of three kinds of interactions which will affect the talking speed: caffeine(speed up), questions(speed up), no questions(speed down),  

We chose Emma as our game character because she is the person we’re all familiar with and she has a very special personality that we can work on and possibly exaggerate for the purpose of our game. We spent some time to analyze the personality of our character including adding the talking habit such as “sort of” into the dialog and possible responses to the players.

Story background:

The main concept coming from a conversation with my grandparents. They said China is developing so fast, every year the environment surrounding us is shifting. The place we lived right now used to be a forest just 20 years ago, and now the land has been covered with residential buildings and shopping malls. So I want to create an immersive VR game to tell the story and also be playful and interactive with the environment. I decide my game sketch to be an aesthetic puzzle and adventure game on iOS device.

Mechanism:

• Taking accelerometer sensors from a smartphone so the player can turn around head to look at and explore the environment.
• Looking down at a certain angle, the player can move forward
• Interacting(tapping) with the tree to make them rise to the sky (tree ceremony).
• Player need to make a decision about which tree to select and which area to go, she/he will receive a seed after making a right decision and lose a seed when after making a wrong decision.
• Player need to plant the seed to the ground in a certain area.
• After every tree in the scene going to a safe place there will be an animation tell how many forest are disappearing each year and please be appreciate to what we took from the nature and pay them back.
• Game will start from beginning

Process:

I tried to build iOS game before, but it getting confusing when GoogleVr, Xcode, iOS and Untiy3d all release their latest version and make a big change of their calling functions. And there aren’t any uptodate tutorials online. So I decided to find a more steady combination of versions and build out the game one by one.

So I first follow the tutorial from this and to see if my iPhone can be built with unity file. It’s a simple interaction of tapping the cube to make it spin, and it has been successfully built out.

Unity window

Iphone screen

 Then after some research I choose to install the Unity 5.6.1.f1 with GoogleVR (2017 May), my iPhone is in version 11.1.2, my Xcode is in version 9.2. These are crucial elements when building VR game to iOS devices in the Unity player setting and Xcode. After importing with GoogleVR package to unity, I checked out the demoscene with main interactions and build it out to test. I faced a problem that I couldn’t build out on my iPhone successfully. So when unity builds out the game for iOS devices, it will create a folder contains the file that can be read from Xcode and then Xcode will build to the iOS devices. After some research I found that it’s different to build out the iOS game with iOS VR game. For iOS game we need to run the .xcodeproj file in Xcode and for iOS VR game we need to run the .scworkspace file instead.

Unity window

Iphone screen

After all the technical issues solved, I can start to create my own game sketch. I followed this tutorial to write a new script to move in a VR environment and then I followed this tutorial to write a new script to make my trees rising to the sky. I download a free assets to put as a place holder for my tree and add particles system as a child of tree to add more effects. And then finally I followed this tutorial to add a background sound in my scene.

Conclusion:

I still have some glitches on my screen after building to my ios devices, I would love to fix that for my future development. I also want to explore more interactions in a VR game and take more advantage of built-in sensors in iOS devices. Many interesting interactions like VR gaze loading and some suggestions from the class like nodding head to one object. I would keep in mind to take more natural body movement to achieve my intentions and line in with my storytelling.

Game file available at:

Unity Package File

Unity Project File

I used to spend most of my time playing games but as a person who will easily get addicted and for the sake’s of focusing more on studying,  before I came to Canada, I deleted all the game on my mobile phones and didn’t bring my game console. When I started to look for games to do this experiment, there is nothing accessible to me. That’s the beginning story of my subversive play.

After installing most of my familiar games and tried to come back to each different game world. Here I come, the weirdest feeling… Friend lists are in grey, nobody is online. Some even are purely blank as I am connecting to a new server which is not the area I was playing before. It’s the like feeling of going back to an abandoned world.

After adjusting my emotions, I chose the game called Arena of Valor (aka Kings of Glory 王者荣耀）for my subversive play experiment. It’s a PVP online mobile game features many similarities to League of Legends published by Tencent company. This game required players either having QQ or Wechat accounts (main social media in China). So I am still having most of my friends there. FYI, Wechat is more than just a social media to Chinese people, it becomes an essential in people’s daily life including daily consumption, education and working communication. As a consequence, Kings of Glory becomes the most popular game in China, it shows players’ ranking on Wechat account and becomes a kind of conversation starter among Chinese people.

How this game works:

• Each player chooses one character who has a set of unique skills and assigned to one of the teams for every match. There are 6 types of characters–warrior, tank, assassin, mage, archer and support, which will play different roles in the team.
  
• When the match begins, each character starts with an equal low level and then gain Exp. by either killing the enemy, minors or monsters over the course of the match to achieve a maximum level of 15. Each character starts with an equal gold too, gold is used to buy equipment and can be gained in a various way.  
  
• There are two teams, which team destroy the enemy team’s crystal/home will win the match. 
  
• There are three paths with defending towers leading to enemy’s home. 
  

How to subversive play:

• Walk around the whole map but not killing the enemy 
  
• Get into the enemy home without getting shot by defending tower
  
• After choosing one character, typing he/her history background story to everyone.
  

First attempt:

As a player for both League of Legends and Kings of Glory, I am not very professional but I did have a goal of improving my physical gaming skills every time when playing, in other words, kill the enemy as fast as I can. So when I try to achieve my subversive play goal, I feel really uncomfortable because I already have muscle memory in my fingers and I can’t help to press the button when I saw enemy running towards me. As I only need to run across the whole map, I didn’t buy any weapons but only 5 sets of shoes to speed up my movement. I walked into the enemy’s home but eventually get caught by them and lost my life. Surprisingly, none of my team members cursed me by my unusual actions, the chatting channel is so quiet during the whole game. This is a game about teamwork if one of the players is not performing well, which will drag down the whole team and we eventually lost the match. However, I did get reported because of negative attitude.

Second attempt:

Kings of Glory used a lot of real people from the history. For my second attempt, I chose a respected woman from Han Dynasty– Wang Zhaojun. She is also known as one of four beauties in ancient China. She nominated herself to marry to the Huns in order to establish the friendly relationships. After her marriage, she still tried her best to dissuade from the war between two countries and maintain the peace for a very long period of time. For this round of match, I want to keep playing the game but also typing out my character’s historic story. One of my team members replied ” So, are you my bro or sister?” I didn’t reply back but keep typing the story. The final result is that we win the match.

Conclusion:

This experiment of subversive play is very interesting, it raised up some topics around the boundaries between the game battle and real life. From the player’s point of view, it’s really difficult to play in a subversive way which is already rooted in my mind. After some research, some popular games like Kings of Glory have a quite big effect on players’ life, especially most players are young people which will mislead their understanding of history.

Reference List:

“Authorities to reinforce inspection over games “distorting history” · TechNode.” TechNode, 24 Jan. 2018, technode.com/2018/01/24/authorities-reinforce-inspection-games-distorting-history/.

“Arena of Valor — true MOBA on mobile phones.” Gamasutra Article, www.gamasutra.com/blogs/VadimBulatov/20171226/312233/Arena_of_Valor__true_MOBA_on_mobile_phones.php.

Liu, Yong, and Hongxiu Li. “Exploring the impact of use context on mobile hedonic services adoption: An empirical study on mobile gaming in China.” Computers in Human Behavior 27.2 (2011): 890-898.