Tag «Unity3D»

Play Your Self

A decade ago we were students of multimedia design at the Burg Giebichenstein, an art school in Halle, Germany. Probably our most memorable time there was when Peter Hann, who was part of the Sacred 2 development team, was brought in by Professor Bernd Hanisch and became our tutor for a semester. He gave lectures in game creation, and we could prototype our very own game ideas (Fascinated By Evil by me, and Mummenschanz by Jana). It was an inspiration to be able to talk to a game designer from the industry, who is also a very good technical artist.

Last semester, years later, we finally had the chance to do something very similar, but of course with our own "twist". Jonas Hansen, professor at the very same degree programme we were part of back then, invited us to be tutors for a semester project (“Kreatives Gestalten” - usually a free project where students can decide the focus themselves). We would think of a theme for the applicants to follow, and then support our students with advice and suggestions, and finally grade their results. An interesting opportunity indeed, and of course we said yes.

After a few sessions of thinking and discussing we decided for the topic “memories”. The title “Play Your Self” would emphasize that our course is about creating a game that tells of a personal experience, so it was narrower than the usual semester project proposals. 13 students applied. We were thrilled.

When the semester started, we asked each student to draw their portrait on a piece of paper, which already served a purpose of finding out how everybody saw him-/herself. We also had a much easier time remembering names and faces later on. Right after this introductory routine we did a play session - everybody had to do a short “Let’s Play” of one of 13 personal indie games we selected beforehand, and talk about it while playing. This would tell us how experienced our students were with indie games and art games.

The next week we made it personal. We tasked the students to bring along an object connected with a strong memory; ideally something small-ish and unique (both in terms of the object and the memory). They had to talk about it in front of the class, and then try to create a rough, short game concept for it. It would prepare everybody, us included, theoretically of what was about to be expected of this semester.

On the practical side we thought of a ‘game jam’ for the week after this. On Monday we presented a text by Christian Morgenstern, Der Zwölf-Elf, a very linguistical poem with twelve verses. We assigned each student one of the lines (the 13th got the title) with the task to create a room that conveys an interpretation of that verse. The room should tell a small story by revealing the line in the end, and allow the player to leave it. Amazingly, on Wednesday all the students could present a result, even though some of them didn’t know the engine well, or weren’t comfortable with 3D modeling. Interesting enough, a lot of the created rooms actually were open spaces (usually with forests).

We had to be pretty rigid in regard to the limitations of this jam: the room had to be 3D, first-person, and made with Unity. This way, we could mash all of them together into a single Unity project, in order to ultimately create a “hotel” with a lobby and 13 rooms. The final Zwölf-Elf game can be downloaded on itch.io.


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These sessions concluded the preparation part - from now on every student had to think about the memory they wanted to translate into an interactive game, and how they would like to achieve their goal. Some memories were very specific in time and place, others concentrated on a place only from the student’s general past, others on a person who is dear to them. Some games became 3D, others 2D. Two of the students tried Unreal more or less for the first time and yet succeeded - kudos! A highly interesting (and entertaining) mix indeed.

After the idea and concept phase we demanded timetables and weekly status reports - which sounds more strict than it was. We just wanted to make sure nobody was out of the loop, and everybody would be serious about their personal, emotional experience. That’s why we also set up a public blog, for everyone to post progress updates and musings.

At one point we assigned groups of three to four students who would then play-test the current state of their projects; which was something we already did with the Zwölf-Elf rooms. We felt this could have been done more often, but then again we are aware most semester projects are only playable shortly before the final presentation. It also didn’t help much that the pandemic was still going on, and after the first few weeks we had to move all consultations to Jitsi. Even though chats (e.g. via Discord) were available all the time, a presence at a real location would have been better for bonding and interim test sessions.

The final presentation at the end of the semester was held online too, and this time the other professors (which also were our professors back then) of the degree programme would watch. The presentation went smooth, because together with Professor Hansen we decided that our students should make presentation videos beforehand, instead of doing live presentations. This was because of the often wonky internet connections, and Jitsi’s subpar screen-sharing abilities.


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We liked all of the results; nearly everybody stuck to the idea from the beginning and could showcase a polished prototype representing their memory, and their abilities as designers, very well. We are super proud.

Would we like to be tutors again? Very much so! Alas, we also learned something: it’s a lot of work. Consultations with our students happened only once every week, but preparation work, discussions and other things made the job a lot more time-consuming, even though it was always fun of course. (Un)fortunately we have a new game project currently, and we need to do our own timetables and status reports for the next foreseeable months.

Hopefully we can show more of our project soon. From time to time we stream our development process, which currently consists of researching stealth games. And of course there's still our Discord!

Rat King at the Gamescom 2017

In the last full week of August we not only visited the Gamescom, which is the biggest gaming convention in Europe - we actually went there to showcase our current project, Behind Stars and Under Hills, at the Indie Arena Booth. As Jana is part of the orga team of this 'convention within the convention' we took the opportunity to present the game on 9m² and get some feedback by gamers. (Of course, the 'game' itself still is a prototype, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung.)

Behind Stars and Under Hills is very much pre-alpha (which means nothing is set in stone, everything is a placeholder, and anything can change) and won't be finished for at least a year. But it's important to let people see and feel a project early enough, so you don't develop a game eventually nobody wants to play. This is why this time, in contrast to our Gamescom presence 3 years ago (with TRI), we offered sheets of paper and felt-tip pens so players could write down their feedback. Quite an impressive amount of colorful text was produced this way, filled with criticism, wishes and comments.

So, to say it loud and clear: thanks to all our players! While for me just standing around and talking all the time quickly became tiring, and the whole experience was stressful and even annoying sometimes (thanks to loud presentations by some hardware vendor, offering t-shirts to the cheering masses), meeting so many cool, polite and interested gamers was a blast and made up for any inconveniences. Personally I was a bit surprised that most visitors of our booth were delighted by the design of our game and of the dialogs. To be honest, I expected people to be less patient - but here it shows the benefit of being part of a site dedicated to indies only, as the expectations of the visitors coming by are different.

During the five days of Gamescom the most common gripes with the game were the lack of a button for sprinting and a missing (auto-)map. Of course we already planned some kind of map, but are not sure yet how to implement it exactly. We'd like some kind of 'cartography skill', to make the maps more meaningful and part of the gameplay. Or maybe we'll just distribute hand-drawn maps in the game's world, to support the lore and the immersion.

On the other hand, sprinting is a different thing. We never planned to have it, as we actually want to make a "slower" game with a certain atmosphere to convey. (If you remember the development of TRI, you will feel like having a deja vu.) And maybe such a sprint mechanic could even lead to new problems especially for people with short attention spans, where they wouldn't process the environment anymore and just rush through, and find their way even less. So it's possible not the lack of running is the problem, but the amount of backtracking (e.g. having to go back to familiar place because of a quest with an NPC there). Maybe having a map already fixes this particular problem; thus adding maps has a higher priority for us. In any case, something like teleporters between the levels (anchored in the background story) are definitely planned.

A bug found during the gamescom: sometimes an NPC can stand on their head

I regret a bit that I wasn't able (physically and mentally) to play some of the other games, not even at the Indie Arena Booth. Behind Stars and Under Hills is so unfinished, fragile even, that I couldn't bear leaving it alone to the masses for too long. I mean, it was the first time the game was playable for the public!

But of course it never really was alone, as we had help by our wonderful volunteers - here's a shoutout to Björn, Jacky, Ludwig and Max! Not only did they explain the game to interested bystanders and answered questions, or helped players who got stuck, they also handed out flyers and made the whole experience much less of a hassle than it could've been. Here's hoping the Gamescom, loud and chaotic as it was, has been a wonderfully crazy experience for them, too.

Our next plans are to develop Behind Stars and Under Hills further of course, and refine it a bit - for example, the whole storyline still is too hazy so we need to work on it a lot more. More gameplay has to be implemented, more characters created, more levels built... Also coming up is the Poznan Game Arena in October, but it's much too soon, i.e. that we probably won't have much new to show. Still, if you happen to be around, come by and try to find crazy old Willard in our small game demo!

That's all, folks!

Power of Love now available on itch.io

POWER OF LOVE Although Power of Love, our co-op dungeon crawler made for the PGA, is not yet and might never be finished, we uploaded the current prototype on itch.io, because we thought the game is just too much fun to not have it played by other people. You actually get it alongside the soundtrack, which was composed by Ludwig Hanisch and consists of three crazy songs and a bonus track.

Way Of Love
Even as a prototype only the game is fully playable from start to finish! You and your partner can shoot enemies anytime, but when there are too many foes at once you need to carefully time cooperative actions like the Shockwave or the Laser.

Check the game out on itch.io or the official project page - and in order to give you a feeling for the game and also present one full track of the game, we recorded the following video. Have fun!

Power of Love: "The Way of Love" Music Track

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