It’s not about the destination, but the voyage, and the true treasure was friendship.

What a semester! Never though I would have done so much in a single class, but I feel very accomplished, and equally exhausted.

The first project: DIY

This was that one time I built a janky guitar in my dorm room.  It was a very rough and simple instrument, but it had character, and was s really fun and rewarding project.

 

The second project: Heavy Metal Band

Yikes.  An animation of a heavy metal band playing Chop Suey!  If there was ever a project that nearly made me go insane, it is this one.  Making and animated music video is not easy.  All the timing was mind-numbing, and the animations were not cooperating at all.  This being said, every time I watch the video I feel a fuzzy warm feeling of accomplishment, and I would go through all of that work again and again to experience this pride any day of the week.

 

The third project: Skeleton Castle

A pixel, GBA style, spooky skeleton platform game.  It was a lot of fun to make, and even more fun making people play it and try to beat it (so far only my brother has managed to complete it).

 

The Final: The Unusual Suspects: Detention Room (Game Design)

This was the project that put everything I had learned throughout the semester into a single task.  A puzzle, story-telling game about a high school crime told in a noir comic book style.  This is something I would love to continue in my game design adventure.

The Unusual Suspects: Detention Room.

Overall vision:

Summary:  You’re stuck in detention at Ridgemont High with 5 other fellow students. The School faculty has reason to believe one member of this wannabe Breakfast Club is the culprit of the graffiti scandal that happened in the teachers’ lounge the other night. It wasn’t you, but they aren’t letting anyone out until someone squeals. Time for some interrogating…

Genre:  The Unusual Suspects: Detention Room is a storytelling-based puzzle game.  It is all about interacting with the characters to gather enough insight to solve the mystery.

 

Mechanics

Character Goals:

1. Abilities:  The player’s abilities in the game are simple asking questions.  He or she can click on any photo and ask any one of the questions displayed.  The player must then draw his or her own conclusions and start narrowing the suspect pool.
2. Obstacles:  The main obstacle is the fact that all the suspects have some sort of reason to be suspicious.  Judgement is necessary to find the culprit.
3. Items:  The only real items are the photos, and throughout the game the goal is to end up with just one photo: the culprit’s.
4. Resources:  The main resource that must be managed in the game is knowledge.  All sides of the story must be kept in mind, and all options considered.

Dynamics:

1. User Interaction:  Keyboard and mouse are both necessary for the game.  The mouse is used to select photos and enter the interrogation.  The keys (1,2,3, and Space) are used to ask the questions and navigate the interrogation interface.
2. Proficiency: Intuition is key.  The player must also pay attention to the stories and keep every detail in mind, so memory is also an important factor.
3. Gameplay Data:  The game records the alibis, the possible motives, and reasons for suspicion that the player gathers by interrogating the suspects.  The initial data is simply the suspects’ names, their hobbies, and some generic hints.
4. Controlling the Game:  The user starts the game by clicking on the title screen, which leads to a prologue (which can be skipped by pressing Space).  There is no need to pause this game, as it is not a live-action style game, and the player can spend as much time as desired on each screen.  Once the player makes a final accusation, the game goes to a screen that tells him or her if they caught the real culprit or not.  From that layout, the game can be started over.

Aesthetics:

1. Overall: The game is supposed to feel like a mix of a noir detective story, and a comic book about highschool drama.  The art style is cartoony, and the dialogue is displayed in speech bubbles, like a comic book.  The fonts chosen and the photos are meant to resemble a noir detective story, as well as the cool jazz in the background.  The hints are also meant to resemble the interior monologues of tormented noir protagonists, but in a lighthearted, comic book style.
2. Game Art: The game uses characters from an amazing character design sketch by the artist Jorge Capote.  They are very characterized, and their personalities are all associated with the stereotypical high school subcultures.  The rest of the game looks more realistic.  The cork board, Polaroid photos, and  high school hallway background are all photos of real objects, or similar to them.
3. Sound: The only sound in the game is a cool jazz background, meant to set a detective story atmosphere.  It is also just an enjoyable track that really adds to the overall experience of the game, making it more pleasurable.
4. Plot: The player explores a web of high school drama and mystery to try to unravel the puzzle.  One of the characters is guilty of the crime, and all the characters have differing opinions on each other, both negative and positive.  The more questions the player asks, the more is revealed about the characters’ personalities and the overall story of the game.
5. Emotional State:  The game is made to be lighthearted and fun.  Everyone loves a good high school drama, just like everyone enjoys a good mystery story.  The game mashes the two experiences together.
6. Fun: The game’s main gratification is the storytelling aspect.  It is also just enjoyable to mess around with the characters and “get to know them”.  The game also aims to make the players feel smart, like a real detective.

Reflection:

This game was particularly tricky to make.  The first step was creating the story.  I ended up coming up with a pretty simple story for coding purposes, but I definitely want to work more on this concept and maybe make some sequels to the game with more complex investigations in different scenarios other than high school.  The second step was finding the art.  The initial idea was to create my own characters, but that turned out being too difficult and time consuming, and I really liked the characters created by Jorge Capote, so I ended up using those.  The final, and most complicated step, was figuring out for to code everything.  I decided to create a system that used a lot of arrays.  I created one, two, and three-dimensional arrays with all the possible questions, answers, and any other kinds of text that the game would display.  This was very time consuming, and the real bulk of the project, but it was also fun to write the lines of each character and create the high school story of the game.  I had a really good time, an am excited to possibly continue the concept.

The game is on Scirra Arcade.  Here is the link!

Credits:  The music in the unofficial version is Chet Baker’s Almost blue.  The music in the Scirra Arcade version is royalty free cool jazz from the YouTube channel Gee Royalty Free Music.  The character art is taken from a character design sketch by Jorge Capote (this is a link to the image on Pintrest).  The cork board is public domain art by the user Petr Kratochvil (here).  The Polaroids come from here.

 

 

 

Skeleton Castle

Overall Vision

1. Summary: Skeleton Castle is a 2D, side scrolling platform game. The main character is a brave knight venturing into a castle full of spooky skeletons and weird hooded dudes that shoot fireballs. Can you make it to the and of the castle?
2. Genre: The genre is pretty straight-forward fantasy dungeon crawling, similar to something you would expect from an old GBA game. The second level kind of takes a spin on the genre and makes it more into an escape game, where the main player is being chased and has to avoid obstacles.
3. Target Audience: The game is hard. The target audience is anyone who enjoys more difficult games that require more blood, sweat, and tears to beat, but also give a great sense of accomplishment.

Mechanics: Rules of the game world

1. Character Goals: Reach the end of the castle and feel that sweet sense of accomplishment.
2. Abilities: The core mechanics are relatively simple. It’s a platform game, similar to old Megaman games in terms of controls. You are armed with a sword, that hits enemies in front of you, and a shield, to protect you from fireballs. This is how you survive. The second level uses the same mechanics, but instead of lives, enemies hinder your speed, making you easier prey for the giant chasing skeleton.
3. Obstacles: The obstacles in the castle are skeletons popping out of coffins, traps, and hooded cultists who summon skeletons and shoot fireballs. In the second level, there is a giant skeleton as well, and the player needs to run through an obstacle course of sorts and dodge fireballs.
4. Items: There is not much in terms of items for the player. The only 2 items you can interact with are hearts that heal you and a key that is necessary to open the door to level 2.
5. Resources: The resource to manage in level one is lives. You have 3, you lose one when you are damaged, and you gain one when you pick up hearts. When you have zero, you die horribly. In level 2 it is a little difference. The only thing that can kill you is the giant skeleton. It only takes him one hit. The fireballs, however, slow you down and make you easier prey for the giant, while the hearts restore some of the speed you have lost.

Dynamics

1. User Interaction: The hardware required to play Skeleton Castle is pretty standard. You need a computer with a keyboard and a mouse to click start. The player moves the knight with the arrow keys, attack with the space bar, and blocks with x. The z button is used to restart the level after death. These basic instructions are in the Instructions layout, which can be reached from the main menu.
2. Proficiency: The skills required for level one and two are kind of different. I’d say on a player’s first try, it is difficult to beat the level. Obviously there are general mechanical skills that are common to all platform games, which mostly have to do with movement. However, some skills are only developed actually playing this game, such as breaking the boxes for hearts and avoiding the coffins to deal with less skeletons. Also, there is a specific way of fighting the skeletons that makes it easier to not lose hearts, but I won’t spoil it in this post. The second level is much more about pure mechanical skills with the platform game genre.
3. Gameplay Data: The necessary data is really only health in level one and speed in level two. The health is displayed as three hearts in the top corner of the screen. Broken hearts indicate missing health. Speed is indicated similarly, but with a number, which starts at the maximum of 100 and decreases and increases throughout the game.
4. Controlling the Game: There is no way to pause the game. The user starts from the main menu and restarts from the death screen.

Aesthetics

1. Overall: Skeleton Castle is meant to be a silly/spooky pixel GBA style fantasy platformer.
2. Game Art: All the assets are pixel art, and the colors are dark. The aren’t really any special effects, except for, maybe, when the chandelier shakes and breaks and when the stairs fall in the first level.
3. Sound: The menu has a spooky organ song straight out of a Transylvania vampire movie. The levels have a 8-bit version of the popular meme-song Spooky Scary Skeletons. The end screen features audio from the final scene of the anime Evangelion, which is also kind of a meme on the internet.
4. Plot: The player is kind of thrown into skeleton castle, playing as a knight. The plot is really up to you. There is no explanation as to why you are adventuring, only that you are, and that you are determined to win!
5. Emotional State: While playful in nature, Skeleton Castle is also meant to test the player’s patience, perseverance, and ability to adapt and function under pressure. The feel should be that of both spooky fun as well as determination.
6. Fun: The main gratification given by the game is that of getting closer and closer to the end and, finally, the sense of accomplishment on the final screen.
7. Credits: The sprites for the characters were all created by an Opengameart user called Disthron. They are really fantastic, and were my inspiration for the game. The chandelier was created by a user on a Terraria forum called Exodus Starlit (find him here). The dungeon background and the statue come from a game called Tiny Dangerous Dungeon (here). The coffin used is a replica of the one from Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, submitted by Pingu! on spriters-resource.com.  The crate is from the same game. The stairs were created by z11z11 on piq (here). The fireball comes from codeus.com. The heart comes from pixabay. The sound effects come from freesoundeffects.com and youtube.com on the channel Sound Effects. The music at the beginning is called Vampire Music Transylvania, and can be found on YouTube here. The song throughout the game is an 8-bit remix of Spooky Scary Skeletons, and can be found on YouTube here. The ending is an audio clip from the anime series Evangelion, from the last episode.

Reflection

It was not easy to make this game. The first major difficulty was finding all the assets, right off the bat it was already a challenge. I was already frustrated in the initial phase, but even more so in the actual coding. I tried so many different methods to make all the mechanics work, and every new addition to the game was like a whole new challenge, from fixing the combat, to the enemy A.I., to balancing the game (especially in the second level), to fixing all the small bugs my code had created. As frustrating and hopeless as this process seemed in many phases, just like in the game itself, perseverance was necessary, and the sense of accomplishment at the end was extremely gratifying. The combat was fixed with hitboxes and animations. The A.I. problems were solved with a little bit of creative thought and logic. Balance was achieved by being critical and just grinding through Skeleton Castle countless times. At the end of it all, I could hear all the voices saying Congratulations in my head, just like at the end of the game.

HEAVY METAL BAND

Full Video

My movie is called Heavy Metal Band. The title is self-explanatory, it’s just a depiction of your average high school metal band practicing in their garage. Their jam session going through Chop Suey! by System of a Down (from their album Toxicity) is, however, interrupted by one of the members’ mom coming into the garage and rudely offering cookies to the band. How dare she?! The whole video is kind of made thinking of a spooky metal music video.

The first step to making Heavy Metal Band more than just an idea was creating the characters. I just used the paintbrush tool in Adobe Animate to make some cartoon-ish dudes, kind of resembling some old flash animations I saw on YouTube a kid. I tried to make them look as brutal and hard-core as possible, but at the same time keep some form of playfulness.

The garage is a photo of a garage that I found online (here is the link for all your digital garage-related needs). I also used a bunch of  more abstract and Heavy Metal related backgrounds that would alternate in every scene (scraped metal, flames, skulls, pentagram) and also I created a rectangle that would quickly switch between colors to create a flashing, more violent background. Once all these components, along with the musical instruments, were made into symbols, the real project started, and it was not easy.

The first step to actually animating the video, other that a storyboard, was to position all the figures in their garage lineup. Once I did that, I started testing out how much time each measure of the song was, and converted that into frames, so as to have a general guideline of how my video had to be divided to make it in-sync with the music. This was the real bulk of the project, because I could never seem to get exactly the right amount of time as a standardized amount, so for each scene I had to remove or add single frames at a time to make the transitions as smooth as possible. Another difficulty was creating versions of all the characters playing their instruments or moving in any other way. To do this I just made new symbols with nested timelines.

Once I managed to animate the instrumental part of the song, once again the whole project shifted gears, because once the voice came in, not only did I have to keep making the transitions in-sync (which got progressively harder as the music got more dynamic), but I also had to figure out how to make the characters’ mouths move in a semi-believable way in time with the words of the lyrics. The hardest part was specifically “when angels deserve to die”. That alone took me at least an hour. To make the mouths move I simply created an open mouth symbol, and put it on top of the closed moth of the character symbol on a one-frame key frame, then delete it on the next frame and so on.

After having to build my entire animation around audio, once the mom came into the room I had to do the exact opposite. I first created the video, then me and my girlfriend recorded the dubs for the band members talking (played by me) and the mom (played by her). I just ended up doing this on a recording app on my phone and emailing it to myself. I then created the title and ending scenes by writing the letters as symbols, then adding a nested timeline to make them move around really fact. This was dome with key frames.

The final step was finishing up the video on Premiere. As I have mentioned before, Animate is not ideal for audio editing, and it wouldn’t let me cut off the song when the mom came in, so I just put a no-audio version of the video on Premiere and added Chop Suey! there, along with the sound effects for the words appearing at the beginning (a bass drum sample you can download here) and for the door slamming (here) , and all the voices I recorded after animating everything.

In the end, I was highly satisfied with my work. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears but it was fun to go down nostalgia lane with the song I chose, and also the whole story of a high school band practicing in sub-optimal places brought back fond memories. If I were to do an animation of this this again, I would definitely figure out a way to correctly estimate the number of frames for each measure of the song, as not to have to individually do each scene frame by frame. Other than that, I am very happy I got to do this! Thanks for watching!

 

Credits:

Background artwork and photos: see blog post (links on 3rd paragraph)

Music: Chop Suey, by System of a Down, from the 2001 album Toxicity (definitely check them out if you haven’t ever listened to them, I mean look at these guys!).

Audio: Door Closing and Bass Drum mp3 files (download link is in second to last paragraph) and voices recorded my Thomas Johnson and Loretta Rodriguez using the phone app Smart Recorder