Evans super cool game dev blog (better than anyone elses)

The escape room we went to yesterday was really informative about level layouts and designs for me. I've been to a few escape rooms before and noticed the same things, but escape rooms are built and designed to flow together very well. From one room to another it works very well. The main way i've seen this be done is having something from the previous room needing to be used for the current one. Backtracking into previous rooms to help basically, it's something which a lot of games implement as well, especially in puzzle games. The different puzzles that are used in escape rooms could be turned into in game puzzles for escape room experiences in game. However something i soon noticed from doing an escape room is that they are very linear in their design. In some games you are given different options which can affect what ending or what path you take within the game. Everything in an escape room is designed to only be done one specific way, there are obviously games like th...

  Unit 1 - Assignment 1 Game designer – Game designers are responsible for creating the experiences in which players encounter. They are the people behind thinking of mechanics, rules and how the overall gameplay would work. They create the ideas for the experience and leave the rest of the team to create it.   Game writer – Game writers are the people responsible for creating the narrative s for games, and the dialogue within them. They work on storylines and how the flow of the game works with the story of the game. Using elements to try and immerse the player into the game’s world.   Game tester – Game testers are responsible for taking early builds of upcoming games and playing through them, searching for any bugs or glitches they can report back to the developers/programmers of the game. Testing the quality and functionality of the game.   I’m planning to either go into being a game designer, a game writer or a game tester, since these are all aspe...

Introduction: The purpose of this blog is to go through the different experiences i had whilst making the classroom, and whilst participating in the Game jam. This blog will be breaking both sections down and explaining what it took to create them, the process in which we made them, and how we felt about what we made at the end. (Screenshots provided as well to show progress) The purpose of this blog will be for me to show how my time was in level design whilst using Unreal 5. I enjoyed the experiences I had, though it was certainly hard as i needed to get myself used to the new version of Unreal.   Recreating the Classroom in Unreal: There were a lot of different steps involved in recreating the classroom in unreal 5. The first step was needing to grey box the room and the more basic shapes in the room which I could then add textures to later. In the first screenshot is the grey boxed room with some very basic textures on the tables and floor. I then added some more deta...

  What changed from your original idea? - We had the original idea to have a chess-like game, but all of the pieces had different stats which would fight against each other . We did technically make that, but not in the way we had originally intended to; HP was going to be a stat as well as defense, but it only seemed to make it more confusing so we got rid of it. The idea of cards was also not apart of the original ideas, but was one of the strongest additions to the mechanics that we currently have. The stats weren't  always going to be decided by dice rolls, but we couldn't   deicide  what else would determine the factors, so we went with dice rolls. We based a lot  off of the original mechanics of chess, though added our own spin onto the game by adding the card mechanics, but we also changed  the size/shape of the board, along with adding another piece to spice up the gameplay. Some of the first stats we came up with for the pieces (a example being the...

 Development of our board game: We started off development by thinking of a game which we could either add to, or modify in someway. I thought of chess, and we started thinking about different spin-offs of the game. We thought about a version of chess called "FPS chess" and thought about how that could be made into a board game, though gave up on the idea later after realizing it wouldn't really work out. But this did give us the idea to put a completely new spin on chess and try add some mechanics to make it feel more original .  We know that chess is pretty much a strictly skill-based game, though we wanted to change it up a little and our first idea was to give each piece a certain stat via dice roll. So for example a pawn would have 1d4 attack and 1d4 defense, if an attacking piece rolled higher than a defending piece, it would be taken. If the defending piece rolled higher than the attacking piece, the attack would fail. With this idea we decided to give a stat to ev...

  Board Game Analysis and Enhancement:   Settlers of Catan – Catan is a strategy game where the aim is to expand your roads and build settlements and cities to acquire the most victory points. The person who gets 10 victory points first wins the game. You have a board with many different tiles, which all have number tokens on them as well. Each tile will give you different resources, and the number on each tile represents if you will get the resource via dice roll. So, if I rolled a 6 and had a settlement on a forest which has a 6 on it, I would get 1 wood. Each settlement is 1 victory point, and a city is 2; these resources will be used to get you more settlements and cities until you have 10 victory points. A big part of the game as well is trading with the other players, before you build you are allowed to trade resources with any player of your choice. You can also use your resources on Development Cards, which can do a range of different things, but also allow you t...

  Analogue Game deconstruction:   Settlers of Catan Game structure and mechanics: Lay down houses and roads to collect resources. Long long set up time when you don't know the rules, can be a little complicated to start learning. A lot of the game is based around dice rolls, RNG dependent. Person with the most “Victory points” wins the game. You collect the resources to then create more houses and roads, getting houses, cities and development cards can give you a varying amount of victory points. The game can become very one sided depending on what happens. One team can get put in a corner and have very unfortunate luck. Apart from strategizing where you first place the pieces, there is little skill to the game which can be frustrating. You can trade resources with other players however, which can be a work around in case you run into bad luck.   Solar (Battleship but cool) Game structure and mechanics: It’s simple, just being a more modern v...