All stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere should go here. If we end up having too much things here, we'll create new pages to keep things tidy. You're welcome to create new pages anyway, of course.
Links
- [http://blogs.dr.dk/blogs/navigate-chaos/default.aspx] - DR-blog slowly up running..
Art
- article about stylized darkness in Left4Dead
- mesh particle emmiter - think if it's good for the avatar
- a note on making lightmaps in Maya for Unity
- really awesome explosions - we could use them as well :)
- Stylization with a Purpose This is some slides from valve on how to make gameplay and visual design work together. The dimmed down texture details might be useful for our games as well.
- Numb3rs - a nice mesh particle emitter created by Kuba; the 'cylinder' is actually just a moving sphere
- Yankee Gal
- Avatar glowing - pretty :)
- Fertile Ground effect
- cartoony explosion -a link for what will happen to our robot, once it explodes..cartoony-funny way.
- Battlefield Heroes - quite pretty game with toony-style graphics, you might want to checkout their trees, grass and clouds and the mood of a sunny day they create
Software
- behaviour trees article at arges
- AngryAnt's AI solutions for Unity
- EditorObjExporter - export geometry from Unity to .obj, which can then be imported into an external tool
- TextMate Unity JavaScript bundle for Unity 2.1
- Setting Up Visual Studio for Unity
- path-finding example - hopefully this is better than arngryants :)
Audio
- An interview with the audio designer for Flower: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22454
Narrative
- larval-shaped robots - this is very much related to the main charachter of the game. The small creature, caterpillar-organic-creature, that moves into the human-creatures, that are almost "dead", just doing rutines, and wake them up to "life" again.
- CANOTILA
A fragment among other fragments is drifting around in the universe.
The forest fairy CANOTILA has landed on the one fragment, where the SmallHeads are living. CANOTILA is tired of the meaninglessness and greyness that rules this place.
Through using her special power of flying from SmallHead to Smallhead CANOTILAs mission is to help the SmallHeads make it through the fragment.
They need to make it through the whole fragment to make sure that all SmallHeads help spread nature.
CANOTILA will remind the SmallHeads how it used to be, before the industry took over nature.
With the help from CANOTILA the Smallheads will walk through the whole fragment to change the place. During the trip, and as the SmallHeads see the world change from dust to plants and flowers, it helps them remember how it used to be.
All at the end, when SmallHeads have made it through the first fragment, CANOTILA will create the bridge that connects to the next fragment.
…and here is another world to change..
VOICEOVER-TESTS, right now just throwing a brainstorm
CANOTILA talking to the Small-Heads or Lost-Heads
dependent of how the player makes it through the puzzle, CANOTILA changes character
1)the friendly voice, giving information about the past=where the SmallHead is heading
2)the dark side of CANOTILA, when SmallHead is doing bad. CANOTILAs small monster appears.
..
„dont keep on wasting your time on this rutine work“
„look at you, your head has become so small“
„you use it to little“
„Hi lost-head“
„ooooh, it is so dusty in here“
„Smell this iron. Uarrgg. I miss the smell of flowers.
I wanna hear the butterflies sing“
„ look at this small machine. He wants to be a Bummble Bee, but every creature can see that he looks like a vacuumcleaner“
"look at yourself. You can not even move somewhere without me“
„And what about these Cable Trees? They look like a place to swing around like Tarzan, but they are dangerous .Just one swing and you would be not only a Lost-Head,but also a Dead-Head."
Movement-related:
"Quick, over there"
"In that direction"
"Okay, now just stay here"
"I'll just leave you for a short while"
I was thinking about the slaves-race in the game and it seems odd that they have no greater purpose than just transportatio. I think it would make the game more interesting if they were used more in the story and in the setting. Like it could be that your goal in the game would be to free them and create balance in the nature or something like that. Just having them without telling their story makes everything..like…uvedkommende ?! Would someone please give me a english word for this :)
irellevant I think.
I aggree, and it would make them stronger as maincharacters. working on that.
I agree as well, that they should play an important part in the story.
The hard part though is that in many puzzles some of the vessels will inevitably die, so we would need a good explanation story-wise why is it necessary or maybe why their death is not a bad thing: maybe if, while dying, they would pop open and spread some grass and flowers around, maybe a tree even, you might say they've moved to a new, more peaceful life. You know, that hippie sort of crap ;)
It looks hard to tie all that together, but I'm sure Carina or just one of us will come up with something great :)
well, to me, it makes sence that you free them no matter what happens.
1) eather they make it out of the game to the next level
or
2) they are saved from their destiny on this "terrible place", the fragment, and when they die, at least their soul fly away as a happy saved soul.
if it is possible due to animation, programming and time scedule, that for me would be a nice solution.
And viusally I think it would aswell be a possibillity for us, to work more on our TARGET GROUP-the 25-35 year woman, intellectual player, not interested in killing but in cleaning up, exploring and saving the fragment, and the characters living there.
When did we decide that the target audience was 25-35 year old women?! Just because that woman at the film school tried the demo? I'm confused. I don't think it would make any sense to make this our target audience if we hope to get people to actually play this game.
Why strive for maximum accessibility and then pick a target audience that does not really play games?
I believe that we agreed that we wanted this game to be in fact played online and that we did NOT seek to make some people that otherwise do not play computer games do so…
That said I think that picking a target audience more or less at random with no respect to the game play that we have in our working prototype is rather thoughtless.
Awesome explosion - I can't stop clicking. But it makes me wonder again:
Is our Target Audience set now? As in women in the age of 25-35?
If it is, I'd love it if stuff like that was stated here on the wiki in the Gameplay Ideas or similar.
If it is NOT detirmined yet, I think its something we(and by we, I mean you) need to have down by the next meeting.
Personally, after watching that lady at the last pitch try out the prototype, I think it will kill off alot of what -for me- is the entertaining part of this game. The reason for this is that we will then have to drastically lower both the difficulty of the gameplay AND the "edge" and uniqueness of the artwork - and no one wants this, right? I think you will make a better piece of work if you find what you are doing to be interesting - therefore, I think the target audience should be us selves.
This is my oppinion since I can't be there personally. But let me know what you decide on.
See you soonish!
-Jonas
explosions, YEP they are great, can only aggree!
It makes me think of the machine at Roskilde Festival last year, mayby someone saw it, made by Halfmachine.dk
let´s see how we can use it for our game.
concerning target group.
The target group women(and men most welcome) is a way of focusing on the not killing game.
Or if needing to kill, the effect of killing is not diying in the classical game sence.
I see no conflict there in what we are allready working on.
I guess a non gamer would never even enter a game to try and play it, but I think our universe has a possibillity of reaching people not spending to much time on games.
I see it as just a way of thinking, that we introduce our player to our game slowly.
see you soon
I think we all agree on those bits:
(Carina: I think it sums up well the last part of what you've said, right?)
We don't agree on making it girls-only and that's what we need to discuss tomorrow. Daniel suggested that narrowing our audience down to girls will result in possibility of defining our goals better, but I agree with Jess here more: it's not worth it, as it narrows down the audience in an absurd way. Additionally it's not like girls 25-35 are a social group that's easy to define - I couldn't come up with any sensible description of what this audience likes or what magazine does it read and I don't think it's even possible to generalize here so that it would be useful enough for us.
Personally I'm in favor of not killing the neutral race in blood'n'gore fashion, because female part of our audience wouldn't like it and it doesn't make sense story-wise. However having the creatures from the neutral race die is inevitable in many puzzles, but I think again we all agree we can make it look like a happy passage to next life or something along those lines. This way we won't loose the female part of our audience here.
On the other hand it would make sense to have some destruction in the game: after all we're on the quest for destroying the machines, so we could have each sequence of puzzles ending with a bit more complex puzzle, solving which results in a more spectacular destruction of a bigger machine (explosions!). I think it won't scare off girls (since we're destroying bad an ugly stuff and not directly by shooting at it, just by solving a puzzle), while it will make the game have more appeal towards the male part of the audience.
Regarding Thomas's comment from last time: it's true that women enjoy puzzles, but there's a big percentage of male players who enjoy puzzles as well - and since there are many male players in total, the puzzle-loving part is hard to ignore. If we add to that our ambition of reaching wide audience, we should tell him that we're advertising our game in Politiken, some women's magazine and Steam as well.
Robert, I can´t somehow suddenly not answer to this so I added a new comment…
well, just briefly, I think you made a very good summary, and as said in last comment, I am also for communicating to the men.
we´lll talk more tomorrow
C
Ok, cool :)
About replies: I switched off nesting of the comments (the possibility to reply to given comment) since it was creating a total chaos here and I didn't know who's replying to what ;) So from now on let's just add comments at the bottom, it should be clearer this way.
a place to throw in titlesuggestions
I am after titles that support the character, the one who invades/mindcontrols
this is true brainstorming:)
PARASITE INVADER
PUPPA-the invader
VALDA
wolbachia(name of parasite)
parasite hostage
fairy parasite
fairy-parasite invader
pupal parasite
LARVA
Well in Polish 'pupa' means 'ass', so I would like to avoid having that in our game's title ;)
Additionally girls are usually disgusted by all kinds of larvae and worms, so I don't think it's a good idea after all.
But I was thinking, that since we'll be having a lot of glow, motion blur and particle effects involving leaves, flowers and dandelion seeds ;) we won't be able to see the precise shape of the avatar anyway. In that case we could say, the avatar is a immaterial entity, a ghost or spirit maybe and it's domain is mainly nature, plants, earth maybe…
So Gaia fits to that image perfectly, right? :) (sorry for a bit cheesy image, couldn't find anything better) So now it would make perfect sense, that Gaia is striving to heal the earth (get rid of polluting machines), can control only organic creatures, since this is her exclusive domain, and is very weak (can control only one creature at a time) since her world is in very bad shape and she has nowhere to draw her energy from.
Z e p h y r u s
Zephyrus was the west wind and bringer of light spring and early summer breezes
well, is an allready excisting game, I just noticed..
Check out the link for texture cross-fade I've made - it's in the Art section.
I also moved the link for Kuba's numbers there from concept art.
Btw: Bidda, could you maybe from now on post new images to concept art at the top, instead of at the bottom? This way we'll see the new stuff just after opening the page. Thanks :)
new title-tests:
MUSE
MUSAGETES-it is not directly our story, but it links to "someone" guiding the muses. our smallheads are off course not muses, but they are beeing guided through the world.
CANOTILA
In Lakota mythology, Canotila ("they live in a tree") are a race of forest-dwelling creatures, similar to fairies.
and to the texture: hey, looks great I think!