Group Project: Pixel Art

During my 2nd group project our team decided that we were going to do pixel art for our game on "The Road". I personally had never done pixel art before, but was keen on learning different techniques and how its done, so first I started where we always do... Research!

I checked out a few very simple tutorials to get me started, first creating basic shapes like squares as pixel art in photoshop:

But even after learning simple techniques, I knew there was more to Pixel art than that, all of the detail of pixel art came from shading or "Dithering", that was next on the list of things to learn!

I checked out simple Dithering tutorials to add to the Boxes I'd made and learnt some more simple techniques:

Dithering took some getting used to, but added a whole new element to the Pixel art itself, it was great learning and I was excited to try some of the Techniques on my Art Tasks assigned through my Group Project Sprint Work.

Here are a few examples of different Pixel Art Styles ive made through my Group Project:

Bibliography

V, Mall. (2014). How to start with pixel art. Available: http://vanmall.deviantart.com/art/How-to-start-with-pixel-art-121520884. Last accessed 13/03/2015.

R, Adi. (2011). Dithering Tutorial. Available: http://kitted.deviantart.com/art/DITHERING-TUTORIAL-Basics-69747353. Last accessed 13/03/2015.

Design Document Part 2

After doing my rules I decided to start working on my board design and playing pieces for my design document, for this I first spent a few hours doing research and just image searching things which i thought were cool, colors I liked, pictures and textures that felt "Egyptian".

After a while I had plenty to work with, and started thinking about how I wanted my board to be portrayed and what feeling I wanted it to give off.

I made a color palette for my board and pieces of various colors id gathered from images I liked and started creating my first iteration of my board.

Some of the colors worked but it didnt feel as "Egyptian" as i would of liked, so I added a few different layers and filters. After a few iterations it was started to give the right feel i wanted to portray.

I made a few more minor alterations and after a few hours I was happy with my board, next was my game-pieces.

I started thinking about what best fit for Ancient Egyptian pieces and I had a few ideas. I started modelling a few different things and played around with different designs and how they fit/worked with the board.

After some working I made something I was happy with, it fit the board well and seemed to work well with the game mechanics.

I'll post some pictures of my Board and Game-Piece designs soon.

David Parlett - Race Games Lecture

Today we had David Parlett visit the University to give Computer games design students a lecture on Race games.

David noted that there are only 2 types of real board games, Race games and War games. He proceeded to ask us questions about our opinions on various board games and if they would be defined as a race game or not, including cribbage and chess.

After a interesting discussion, David went on to talk about some ancient games, some that we had covered in previous lectures like Senet, but also introduced to some other ancient games I hadnt seen before including Patolli from Aztec, and Nyout from Korea.

After a lunch break we came back and were told we would be split into groups to make our own race games. David told us to keep in mind a few questions we should be asking ourselves about our games, These were

• What is your mechanism?
• Will your board be Linear?
• How do players interact?
• What is your goal? How do you win?
• Whats it all about (if anything)

Me and mark teamed up and came up with a 2 person race game where players would race around a track but can only move until the hit a wall or obsticle, and players may only move in a straight line.

We came up with a few different board designs and began iterating our mechanics and design until we came up with something we were fairly happy with.

We presented our game to Eddie and David and the response was fairly good! I think with more time me and mark could fine tune the game we came up with into something really great. 

Me and mark decided we are going to carry on with the game in our spare time! I will update the blog with more information as we do.

I have attached a picture of the rough board we came up with in the lecture to give you a better idea of what it looked like.

Senet Design Document part 1

For our second critcal game studies assignment Eddie asked us to make a Design Document on the Ancient game we chose and iterated for our first assignment.

Things the assignment must include are:

• A paragraph on the game scenario
• Board Design
• Game-piece Design
• An Asset List
• A couple of paragraphs each on game design and gameplay
• A rule set for the player (full but brief rules, in an appendix)

After receiving the brief i started thinking about research and things i wanted to include within my Design Document, I revisited some reading materials from the VLE and came across a few interesting and helpful pages.

The first page i looked at was Catus Marketing. They are a Toy and Game inventor who wrote a very helpful guideline for writing rules for games.

After reading their guidelines it got me thinking about the layout I wanted for my design document and the things I wanted it to include, I started splitting up my page into different headings of important area's I wanted to cover including Object of the game, preparation for playing, how to play, order of play, movement, how scoring work, how to win and lots more!

I found i had so much to talk about but now had the problem of keeping my sentances and rules short and simple so the player doesnt lose intrest.

I'll blog again when ive worked some more on other parts of my design document, like board design and game-pieces.

Jayme

La decima vittima

In this weeks lecture we watched La Decima Vitimma (The Tenth Victim).

The film was published in 1965 and is about a real life killing game known as the "Big Hunt". The big hunt consists of groups of killers and hunters, whoever survives 10 rounds win 1 million dollars and gain the status of being a hero.

I feel that this feel inspired many others like Battle Royale and the hunger games, aswell as alot of games like assassins. I also felt that the film was more of a comedy than anything else and wasnt portrayed very well compared to something like battle royale. Besides this the film had some good moments and humorous ones .

Games Britannia part 3: "Joystick Generation"

In this episode of Games Britannia, Benjamin Woolley talks about the modernizing of games where it started as board games, and how it has progressed through the ages to RPG's like dungeons and dragons and 3D entertainment.

Woolley talks about how familys and people needed an escape from reality and all the things that were happening in the world. Then in 1973 a group of Californian Gamers created Dungeons and Dragons from their love for Lord of the Rings. This was the foundation of the morden gaming era. The use of choices given within the game to decide what and where you go is what made the game so unique as it was completely new for people to have to understand that a game was neither won nor did it end, in the case of some Dungeons and Dragons.

The first Computer video game Woolley comes across is Elite, the pioneer of video games. This was a space themed 3D game which let you upgrade your ship. The next he covered was black and white, a game which allowed you to play as a god an control people and what they do,

Benjamin then goes on to talk about Lara Croft, this was one of the most revolutionary games of its time as it was one of the first games to put a face and attributes onto a 3D character, This really helped people feel for a game character and emerged them within the game world more, it also makes people have a sense of responsibility of what happens to the character, along with its roam-able 3D world.

On the other hand he talks about games like Grand Theft Auto, which are socially seen as wrong as it encourages players to do things which are morally wrong like killing people and running them over in your car. Furthermore the freedom to explore such a detailed world really emerged people in the gameplay.

I really enjoyed this 3 part Games Britannia series, It helped open my mind to how we think about Games as Designers, but also understand how board games and things worked back in the day.

Ancient Board Games - Duodecim Scripta

This week we looked at more Ancient Board Games, This weeks included Duodecim Scripta and Tabula.

Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum, also known as the game of twelve lines.

Bell shows an image of a man and woman playing a game marked with twelve lines in the C2nd-3rd BC). He also notes that the engravings may show a early version of the game known as XII Scripta.

There have been lots of different board designs, some of which use symbols while others use words.

H.J.R. Murray describes the game as a backgammon-style race game for two players. 

Within gameplay each player has 15 pieces and the game is played with three six sided dice. Players roll the three dice and can either use scores individually or combined.

I think this is an interesting game with unique mechanics, but isn't one of the most interesting Ancient Games we have studied in Eddies lectures.