Week 8 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog

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Week 8 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
 
Hello everyone,

Welcome to week 8 of my course game development blog in correlation with the game I’m working on trimester.
 
Week 8
As I have been largely working on designing the games UI, I have subsequently done a lot of research into good UI design practices. I found this great article that addresses 7 Unbreakable Laws of UI Design: 99designs.com/designer-blog/20… Even though the information is from a web design perspective, I still find most of these rules to be applicable to game UI design. The laws they list here go over things such as having iconography with clear meaning that a user can easily understand and how clear and constant visual feedback will make the user feel confident in the product. I have found this article to be really useful and informative and I have been following these ideas when approaching the design.
 
This article on Gamasutra was something I came across when I was first researching into what UI design is and it introduces terms for different types of interfaces depending on how linked to the narrative and game geometry they are. These are Non-Diegetic, Spatial, Meta and Diegetic.
 
These are some flow charts I made to help visualise and communicate the UI flow for the Construction, Upgrades and Infrastructure Placement:
Untitled-3 by charligal-stock
This week I’ve been doing a lot of work on UI design and also the art assets for that. These are some of the art elements that I have created for the UI.
UI Corc Icon by charligal-stock

559588 10205079871497032 520212647085681691 N by charligal-stock


Gelicons by charligal-stock
10806967 10205094111853032 1318171563 N by charligal-stock
I learned some new texture painting techniques. The following tutorials were integral bits of research to some of the painted UI elements I’ve been doing across the last few weeks and will be continuing with throughout the project.
 
 
When I was doing all the painting techniques research I tried really hard to find a good tutorial on painting copper. Unfortunately I didn’t have much luck and ended up having to work it out myself the old fashioned way by doing some reference studies haha. I was pretty pleased with my result so I decided to make a tutorial for anyone else who might find themselves needing to paint copper:
How To Paint Copper by charligal-stock
 
I also made this animated gif. It is not the final layout setting but one of the first of a string of visual problem solving things I was doing.

 
Also I have been doing a bit of research into psychology in games and some of the theories etc that encompasses. In doing that I came across this website which has a wealth of information: www.psychologyofgames.com/ I found the Theory of Spatial Presence to be quite interesting as well as the fact that psychologists refer to immersion as presence.
 
A researcher named Werner Wirth’s “theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps:
- Players form a representation in their minds of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.
- Players begin to favour the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they “are” (or to put it in psychological gobblety-gook, their “primary ego reference frame”)
- Profit!”
Til next week!
:bulletblue: Week 1: Week 1 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 1 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
Hello everyone,
For the course of the next trimester I will be commandeering my DeviantArt journal to use as a game development blog in correlation with the game I’ll be working on across the following months.
As such, please feel free to join in on discussion, concept art, and design topics and any game or development related information. I encourage you to chat to me about things I will be discussing so we can hopefully get some interesting dialogue happening.
 
Week 1
This week has been the first week back to college and has been the week that we’ve been introduced to our studio unit game brief.  Our class is divided into two separate teams of six people with a combination of game designers and game programmers.
This trimester each group has been tasked to design and develop a transport management game based upon real-world principles and data such as crowd management, business management, physical facilities and

:bulletblue: Week 2: Week 2 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 2 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
Find Week 1’s entry here:
Hello everyone,
For the course of the next trimester I will be commandeering my DeviantArt journal to use as a game development blog in correlation with the game I’ll be working on across the following months.
As such, please feel free to join in on discussion, concept art, and design topics and any game or development related information. I encourage you to chat to me about things I will be discussing so we can hopefully get some interesting dialogue happening.
 
Week 2
This week has been rather interesting for the fact that we have had more of a chance to feel out our groups dynamic and really focus on the idea that we will be committing to for the rest of this trimester.
Our group has scheduled our weekly sprint meetings for each Monday of the week and it is during these meetings that we have further worked on brainstorming each idea, allocating roles and defining a meaning that our game

:bulletblue: Week 3: Week 3 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 3 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
:bulletblue: Week 1: :bulletblue: Week 2:
Hello everyone,
Welcome to week 3 of my course game development blog in correlation with the game I’m working on trimester.
Week 3
This week’s sprint meeting just so happened to fall on a public holiday that we had all forgotten about so we organized to meet at Aaron’s place seeing as the campus was closed. We focused a lot of our time working on the scope documentation, high concept documentation and the pitch as the deadline for these were midweek. I believe we also we spent time discussing tasks and finalising design points for the pitch. 
During this session I worked on some concept art for the game including some scene setting imagery and a title design. This group has been heavy on the puns, which is something I really enjoy and the game has been titled Orcward.


On Tu

:bulletblue: Week 4: Week 4 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 4 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
 
:bulletblue: Week 1: :bulletblue: Week 2: :bulletblue: Week 3:
 
Hello everyone,
Welcome to week 4 of my course game development blog in correlation with the game I’m working on trimester.
 
Week 4
Mondays sprint meeting saw the team discuss further possible game modes and the possibility of implementing a multiplayer mode. As I was pretty sick on Monday, I stayed for the general sprint and left early once the sprint schedule had been sorted. Also, my Wacom tablet died during this sprint which was a huge pain and it meant I ended up having to buy a new one.... oh well.. at least I have a shiny new tablet.
 
This sprint I was scheduled to work on C’orc character designs, UI layouts and gameplay specifics, building, transport and environment concept art and documentation for the GDD. Sections of the GDD I have been tasked to talk about include gameplay specifics about

:bulletblue: Week 5 & 6: Week 5 and 6 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 5 & 6 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
 
:bulletblue: Week 1: :bulletblue: Week 2: :bulletblue: Week 3: :bulletblue: Week 4:
Hello everyone,
Welcome to week 5 of my course game development blog in correlation with the game I’m working on trimester.
 
Week 5
My sprint schedule this week involved finishing off various concept art pieces and writing documentation for the art bible and aesthetics section of the GDD. Once I completed this then I moved onto designing the UI, figuring out the finer details of how transports and signs would be placed and how its connection with the UI display system.
 
During this time I also spent some time planning how stations would work and creating some visual references of how I envisioned them working. As a group we discussed having stations as small floating islands that would be chained to the large core islands. The player must repair the chain mechanisms b

:bulletblue: Week 7: Week 7 Game Studio 2 Dev BlogWeek 7 Game Studio 2 Dev Blog
Lots of pictures :D
Hello everyone,
Welcome to week 7 of my course game development blog in correlation with the game I’m working on trimester.
 
Week 7
This week our team had a milestone deliverable to meet so the majority of the sprint meeting was spent sorting out sections of the GDD that needed completing and working on the prototype. We also had to present an update report on the game so far and this required creating a powerpoint to go over where we were at so far.
 
For the week 7 deliverable we said that we would have working Orc and C’orc agents, working spirit and possession mode, at least one working transport system and station, at least one piece of advertising or propaganda that would influence an Orc and at least one building that would fulfil their interests based on the signs that affected them. On top of this, we managed to have multiple signs and buildings for the Orcs, the musical composition added, day nigh


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Venom-V13's avatar
Nice i likes and cool you made that tutorial for others i suppose, game sounds like it ought to be something, i bet other teams in that class must be grinding hard at work on their game too i suppose!