A profile on the job of ‘Game Director/Creative Director’ with specific focus on ‘The Last Of Us’ game. Information was taken mainly from a documentary on the games production, but also from wikipedia pages on the two directors:
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Game Box Art Analysis
4 P’s of Marketing – TITANFALL
AO5 Squidiverse Walkthrough
AO5 ‘Squidiverse’ 10 point Design Document
AO6 Squidiverse Final Build
The play-able game uploaded to the Gamesalad arcade:
AO6 Finalising Checkpoints
After spending a long time trying to find a way of getting the program to save the clue count, I thought of another way to implement checkpoint, by approaching the problem differently. So I have my basic position checkpoints, so the game resets at death and the checkpoints spawn Squid at different locations depending on his progress.
If I take out the ‘Reset Game’ behaviour, so death doesn’t reset the game, only destroys the Squid actor, then I’m basically just bringing in a new Squid actor to replace the dead one. all the progress the player made will be saved: score, crabs killed, clues, etc. It’s the same level, in the same state, but with a new Squid.
Just to finish this up and make it game ready, I made a graphic for the checkpoints.
Whilst this is a nice and simple way around my problem, I don’t want the game becoming easy, if it impossible for the player to die and reset the level. So I need a life bar, an amount of times you can use the check point.
So I set up an integer game attribute called ‘Restart Death’ and set it to automatically be 3 at the start of a level. I then go in to each checkpoint, and add logic so that every time it spawns a Squid, it should change Restart Death to Restart Death – 1. And now a rule that states that if Restart Death = -1, then the scene should reset. Now the player has 3 lives, and if they use them up then they must restart the level over.
Next I want a graphical representation of this to communicate the live system to the player, So I quickly took the same Squid Head icon I had used for the back and pause buttons, and made a new actor with it. I then gave it a ‘Replicate’ behavior, with the amount of replications controlled by the Restart Death attribute.
AO3 Industry Profile – Edmund McMillen
AO6 Working on Checkpoints
As a lot of the feedback was about the difficulty of the game, We decided to attempt to implement checkpoints into the game. This way the challenge that some players responded to will still be there, but will be softened slightly to make the game a bit more accessible.
My original thought process of how to tackle it was this: We want an attribute that records which checkpoints Squid has crossed, so an integer perhaps, that goes up with every point passed. I then want the game to somehow look at this attribute each time it resets and spawn Squid at the appropriate checkpoint.
The attribute is pretty simple to set up, just making a checkpoint actor, and adding logic so that if it overlaps with Squid then it should change my new attribute: ‘Checkpoints’ to 1. The hard part is working out how to get Gamesalad to use this as a spawning point.
After failed experiments with constraining attributes and trying to move the actor, I though of using ‘Spawn Actor’.
What I’ve got this to do, as that if Squid dies (‘Death’ = true) and the checkpoint is at 1, then that first checkpoint should spawn a new Squid.
This almost works, although there are still a few things that make it glitch.
First I needed to change my death conditions a bit, so that when ‘Death’ is true it not only resets the scene but also destroys Squid, so that the level resets clean, with no Squid actor. Before I did this the first Squid reset along with the newly spawned Checkpoint Squid, resulting in two duplicates running around the screen.
I also want to add another checkpoint, a level start. This is where Squid spawns if ‘Checkpoints’ is 0. It’s basically just an instance of my checkpoint actor, with some rules changed from the prototype. Here there is no overlapping rule, so passing it doesn’t change the attribute at all. I also take out that Death must be true, As I want Squid to spawn here at the start of the game before he will have died.
Then I just wanted to clean up this effect a bit, and make it more visually appealing. What was happening was that the re-spawn was instant, so that the new Squid and the dieing Squid where onscreen together for a moment. To fix this I simply put the Spawn Actor into a timer of 0.4 seconds, just delaying it slightly and giving the first Squid time to destroy.
I also offset the spawn point a bit. Before it spawned in a bit of an awkward position and jittered around. I wanted Squid to have a little drop in, so offset the Y spawning by 30. Now Squid spawns in the air and falls down onto the platform.
I still haven’t worked out the second part of the Checkpoint system, which is getting it to record and save all things relating to the clues, so how many, and which Clues have been collected.
AO6 New To-Do-List
Based on our feedback we’ve created a new checklist of improvements needed.
– Re-map controls to something easier to use.
– Add instructions screen to pause menu.
– Add checkpoints into the game.
– Fix the bug preventing audio from playing.
PHOENIX'S MEDIA 