Guard mock-up among other things

This weeks blog post is the most difficult one to do so far and I couldn’t find any image to properly depict my work, so the picture below is the mock-up of how the guards will patrol the building and it also shows where the objective and exit. The reason behind this week being hard to post about is that alot of what I’ve done has been adding in new sprites and testing them out against our floor and the rest of the sprites.

The largest thing I‘ve done was when I added in the furniture for the ”Break room” or cafeteria and some of the furniture for the final area, the ”front desk” of the building. When we have a new build of our game I will probably have to change around some of the guard patrolling patterns, maybe remove some guards and perhaps even changing how parts of the level are built. The issue with building levels the way we do it is that when I’m building it, I have a really hard time figuring out how things will look in the actual game, since the color codes are purely representative and remain as colored squares until added in the game. This is also the reason why a lot of the work I’ve done is hard to put into pictures, since my work has essentially been: Add in new floor. Doesn’t work? Change it back. And it’s been a lot of these tests, with plenty of different values on furniture and so forth, to see if they would even be visible in the game.

Today (Thursday) has consisted largely of testing out variations of floors, we have had a lot of floors that plainly look strange, some that blur out when the player moves around and a few potentially useful ones. We tried a plain one, without any sort of patterns and that ended up looking… Plain. All the ones with smaller patterns were safe to scrap immediately since these always cause the illusion of the floor moving around.

Anyways, this weeks blog post ended up being more boring than ever before, I’m sorry for whoever might end up reading  this one… Hopefully next weeks blog post will be far more exciting since we will have a better AI and a fresher build of the game to play around with and when we do, I will get back to play testing and balancing the entire level (mainly the middle route though which is insanely hard by the looks of it).

Explaining the ”Noise maker”

This week I’ve been working on completing our design documents since we got a few comments on our first hand in.
The picture above is the image I made to briefly explain how one of our usable items will work. The Item I’m referring to is the ”Noise maker”. This item is meant to be a none-violent alternative to the rest of the players arsenal. It’s supposed to be a single use item which emits sound circles that will draw away guards from their original position/patrol path.

The sound circles are used in almost every step of the game, walking around creates smaller sound circles, sneaking removes them, using weapons (especially the gun) creates larger sound circles and the noise maker creates circles equal to the gun. These circles represent the sound made by everything in the game and helps show the player from what distance guards will hear the sound and go to investigate.

What the image above represents is:

The first image depicts the player seeing an enemy guarding the objective and throwing the noise maker to the opposite side of the room.
The second image shows an example of how large the sound circles emitted by the noise maker could be, and also shows the guard hearing the sound and starting to move towards the source of the sound.
Lastly, the third image shows the guard standing by the noise maker, investigating, while the player is able to sneak past towards the objective unnoticed.

Other than what I’ve explained above, I have also worked on other things for our design document, mainly a few minor corrections that needed to be made and further explanations of some specific things. I also made a quick drawing showing the movement patterns of our patrolling guards, as well as marking out the objective and exit. It had to be done since we previously had no visual explanation of how the level looks or what the guards potential moving patterns might be.

Just today (Thursday) I also had to continue working on our level, adding in new objects, trying out revised environmental sprites, now made to look darker, to better fit with our visual aesthetics. Previously the game was far to bright to be able to be taking place during night time.

All in all this week has consisted of a lot of smaller tasks put together, becoming time consuming. As soon as we get our AI’s to work properly I will probably have to rework the guards patrol patterns and positioning to make it more balanced again.

Level Design

So this week I have been working on our level drawing and I must say it’s a lot of fun! Now I know that unfortunately you can’t make out everything that’s on the map, but for those of you with keen eyes, I can quickly explain what the different colors in the drawing means.
The way we create our level is through color coding, this means that for us to create the level we draw out different colors and each different color code represents an object. A few examples of the most obvious ones in this drawing would be yellow, brown and lightblue. Each pixel that has yellow drawn on it will represent a wall, each pixel with brown will represent floor and each pixel with lightblue will be bathroom floor.
Some of the less visible ones are red for patrolling guards and light purple for stationary guards, there is also different varieties of green representing hiding spots in different angles. Some of the things that we are still missing in this level drawing would be filler objects with no particular function but that will fill out the level and make it look better.

So, about the level design itself: The player will start in the top left bathroom (this will probably be flipped upside down, making the player work his way up the level instead of down) where he/she will be briefly introduced to the game. This starting area is made so that the player is quickly shown all (or atleast most of) the mechanics in the game. The bathroom has a wall separating the position of the player and the first guard which will be turned towards a urinal. When the player moves he will have no choice but to move towards the first door, this door however will be locked, forcing the player to seek out a way to get around this first obstacle. At this point you will notice a guard with its back turned towards you, when you have killed the guard you will receive a keycard enabling you to unlock the first door. Immediately after leaving the bathroom there will be a stationary guard scanning up and down the hallway, the only way to get past the guard is by using the conveniently placed hiding spot right across the hallway from the guards position. The controls will also be explained in a subtle way which is too early to be writing about now, since we are not yet entirely decided on how it will be presented.

After the first area the player reaches a hub-like area where three choices of paths will be presented to the player. There is the left path, which will take the player on a slightly longer, but not as security heavy area leading up to the main office (or objective room, currently placed at the bottom). The right path will be a slightly shorter path to the objective room and will eventually place you in a hallway between the exit and the objective room, the right area will also have slightly more tricky guard patterns than the left path. And lastly there is the middle path which will be the shortest and most direct route, but nearly impossible to get through due to security. The way these choices will be presented in the hub area are:  The door leading to the left path has no guards around it and will be unlocked. The door leading right will be locked but still has no guards around it. And lastly the door taking the player down the middle area will be heavily guarded and with a locked door.

All this is made so that the player has a choice of play style, and since we have a time-based score system the player would have to choose (after having tried a couple of games) which path will be the most time efficient to the way he/she likes to play.

That’s it for this weeks post, I hope it’s in some way helpful or at least interesting to whoever ends up reading it. I also hope that it wasn’t long enough to boor you!

Bathroom Sprites

 

Right! So this week I started working on some environmental sprites. What we have to the left is a urinal, in the middle there’s a sink and to the right is a toilet. The reason why I needed to start working on bathroom sprites was because the area where the player is supposed to start in, happens to be a bathroom.  This bathroom is going to act as the introduction to the game for the player and will have some form of tutorial like function. The idea we have for this part of the level is that the player is going to start inside a bathroom stall, which he will exit by pressing ”E” a hint will be given as to what the player is supposed to be doing aswell. After having exited the stall, the player will be given a new hint, telling the player to press the space bar, what the player will than notice is that he’s moving slower and stops making noise. After that, the player is lead around a corner where an idle guard will be standing in front of a urinal with his back turned towards the room. The player will be given a hint as to how to attack, and since this guard has his back turned, he will be an easy target so long as the player uses what he/she has learned. When the guard dies, the idea is that we are going to show the player how to use keycards. The door exiting the first area is locked, but the player has obtained a keycard when killing the guard. This keycard will be used up once the player uses the ”E” button in front of the door, the door will open up and the player is let out.
Now, I know these objects would be black and white either way, but there is a reason why I can’t put any color on them at all. The reason would be that our game is made in black and white, only objects of interest and things the player can interact with will be colored. This is in accordance with the graphic style we want for the game, and while its very tempting to put in one of those tablets in the urinal (which I did) I wouldn’t be able to color it, making it very hard to notice (as you can see). It will probably be invisible to the player in the end, but it felt good to add it in anyways. It simply didn’t feel completed without it!

Thats about as much as I have to say regarding pixeled bathrooms in a game for now!

The baton of Futura

This is the baton icon which will be represented in the interface when the baton is wielded. The idea behind it, as with all the weaponry and objects, was to take something old and make it new while still keeping the old feel. We did the same thing with the gun we designed for the game, we took an old revolver and made it more futuristic. Doing so with a baton is difficult because there isn’t a lot of room for varied details since it’s just a stick. So what did I feel would make a baton look more futuristic?
Well, the first thing that came to mind was some form of light, when doing this you also create an opportunity to add something to the handle, such as a button to control the lights. Secondly, when deciding on what color to use for the lamps, I felt like a neon type of light would be best suited. The reason for this is that when adding a light with a color like this it makes the baton look more harmful if it to come in contact with your body. It makes it look like a stun baton or something of the sorts. Seeing how the gun uses a sort of ”plasma” type of projectile, I figured the baton could go with the same theme and that’s the reasoning behind the color. The lights in the baton also makes it look more like a weapon by not giving it a smooth surface. The lamps also works with logic since they are carried by night-shift guards, an extra light source would be a welcome addition the their arsenal.

The weapon itself will act as a direct upgrade to the standard weapon which is a Garrote, the baton will be both quicker and more silent than the standard weapon. Both the Garrote and Baton will have activation times, making direct combat undesirable, encouraging stealth. It will also act as a middle stage of weaponry and being a all round good choice, the gun has range, but you are able to miss with it and it makes a lot of noise, attracting guards. The Garrote, being your standard weapon will be slightly worse at everything and the Noise Maker does not have an offensive function but only acts as a distraction/maneuver item.

The power-ups will naturally undergo balancing once we get to that point, but for now this is what we are working with!