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My game concept for the independent project is a COD: Zombies/ Gears of War Horde style game where you fight off waves of enemies against a timer with a scoreboard and I'm going for quite a simplified, sci-fi, cartoonish aestetic. Here's a really early treatment: In the futuristic fast moving city of Greater New Utopia there is an invention for every ailment, a wonder for every woe. The city is built upon the backs not of the Humans who inhabit but instead the perfect workers, the chemically engineered Gibbies, a hivemind collective that perform simply programmed manual labour, however after a lab accident, a simple chemical miscalculation, the latest batch of Gibbies has gone berserk and started tearing up the city. You are Lance Lazerblast, a G.N.U.P.D. Specialist Officer and total maverick tasked with cleaning up any and all incidents of a scientific nature in the city of wonders. Lance has managed to divert all the Gibbies’ attention to the City’s ‘Advancement Square’ where...

I read this article today which covered some conventions of Text Based adventure games and one aspect which stuck out to me was the 'Story' vs. 'Scenario' idea where when making a text based adventure game, rather than making some grand epic about a fully developed world it can be a small scenario with lower stakes and less exposition to better immerse a player.   https://medium.com/@model_train/text-adventure-game-design-in-2020-608528ac8bda I also developed my idea for a story more so without the specifics as of yet. It will be about a Grave Robber who gets captured by Skeletons and has to escape the winding and perilous crypt. I think the difficulty will be mapping out the space and getting to grips with coding the scenarios with variables and such. Coming from a non-coding background, I think this'll be challenging Bibliography: Ainsley, C. (2020) Text adventure game design in 2020 , Medium . Available at: https://medium.com/@model_train/text-adventure-game-desi...

 I have practiced with the basics of Twine for an hour or so now and came up with this test story. With the basic tools alone I could probably craft a fairly entertaining narrative, I want to learn how to use variables also which add code that checks if you made certain choices in the game so you can create more complex options and choices while also reducing the size of all the branches. Here is my first test game. Download it and run it from the file explorer. This was made purely for coding practice and NOT the writing, I understand that I am no Tolkien yet https://drive.google.com/file/d/192U4HM7JIFeG2N2L5ZGfW6qxBY9LfZV6/view?usp=drive_link

 For this storytelling and gaming project, I have decided that I wish to make a text-based adventure game because I frequently enjoy playing and there are surprisingly immersive stories that have been told via this medium such as with modern examples in text-based MMORPGs that I know of and have played such as TORN, Written Realms and AI Dungeon and then there are also the classics which I have less familiarity with such as Zork, Oregon Trail and Dungeon. The program I use to make my game will most likely be Twine as it has a Node-based browser version. I will have to learn it but I think a lot of this challenge will be understanding what makes a text-based High-Fantasy game fun and engaging to the player. Do I wanted the Player to play as themself or a pre-made character as they roleplay. Do I want combat encounters that use number and other RPG mechanics or just a choice that the player comes to like in 'Choose your own Adventure Books'? Either way, I will also have to do a l...

Preview https://www.figma.com/proto/8zZtoF5R0wHjih7QYEVJb5/DITU-v1?typ e=design&node-id=7-934&t=Jz0TTn3HtOnQhZF1-1&scaling=scale-do wn&page-id=0%3A1&starting-point-node-id=20%3A1043&mode=desi gn Prototype File https://www.figma.com/file/8zZtoF5R0wHjih7QYEVJb5/DITU-v1?type =design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=I06PHoM57xjK1Skx-1

 Exporting the game has also had many roadblocks as I have found. I could not even export my game on the PCs at the university because they are not allowed to install SDKs on any of the machines, so I could not do the final export that I needed to do and had to ask josh if I could use his Laptop. After that I tried to test the game at home but my PC could not run the project in Unreal Engine because of the 3D model makers and their poor practice, making models with file sizes that far exceed the rest of the game put together, to the point where my PC says it is dangerous to run it and could case damage to my graphics card. Other than that, the game ran fine on my PC on the.exe export, which I am thankful for. Overall, I am proud of my group's work but I must say all the technical issues from the the restricted access nature of  the A234 PCs has left me with permanent mental scars. My PC has crashed innumerable times as a result and there have been...

  Many, many updates since the last Blogpost.  First of all, the enemy is now fully implemented with its chasing mechanics and animation, it is also rigged properly, using Mixamo, and a reasonable File size too. There were issues rigging it however as we needed to Enable Root Motion for its chase animation as it would run away from the player as it would detect them, the animation was only rotated 90 degrees away from the direction it was travelling too which impacted the issue also. Thankfully these were two quick fixes after hours of anguish... There were also all of the buildings added, which include the Huts, the Barn and the Church. The first two were added just fine but they were missing collision so I had to add invisible walls all over the buildings to simulate collision for them, which they didn't have, which was quite a lot of work. The Barn however, froze Unreal for about 10 minutes when first implementing it, which leads on to my second issue with the Church where ...

Team evaluation Jimmy:   A very dedicated 3d Model maker, responsible for the torch, fences, batteries and buildings. Very ambitious and detailed with the objects he made and would tweak them to better assist the programmers such as moving geometry on the buildings rather than having to change the level. An excellent Teammate. The only issue was some of the buildings being too large or not file efficient such as the church which would cause UE5 to crash and the barn model which would freeze the editor when being imported. As a result, the Church wasn't included but I have its Files. 8/10 - Hardworking, dedicated, enthusiastic. Minus one point for overambition. Minus another point for lacking knowledge of 3D Graphics that caused technical issues in the Game such as with the oversized Barn and Church models. Mo:   The other programmer, bug/ level tester, character designer who also gathered Audio assets. When he did work, it helped, such as with adding and refining movement for...

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1b0uPuuPQtnFJFjdTAyXZEaB3KE7Towzb1ViIp7nad38/edit?usp=sharing Today, I worked on this Presentation for the submission, it was very helpful I think as a learning experience as it will be important in the future to not only know what a user journey/ scenario/ task will be but also other aspects in professional practice like an appendix, or branding guidelines too. There is also balancing the amount of text too and rehearsing what I say, which are obviously key to presenting to a client. As a result, I decided to keep the text quite short as obviously I am there to present and not make the clientele read everything.