Blog #5
Welcome back to the fifth installment of Greg’s life since transitioning to a game developer. The last week has been crazy. RPP game 3 has been assigned, this game’s theme is education. We’re taking an interesting spin on the assignment and making it an ethics in news reporting game. Check that out in the RPP section! In level design we had an extracurricular portfolio showoff where we all took turns showing off our personal projects and portfolio pieces. This was surprisingly much more than a vanity show, lots of information was exchanged about tools used, development processes, blueprinting strategies, and more. I really enjoyed it, so shout out Elon for putting that together for us!
RPP
This is the first block out of the RPP educational game called Fake News. The gameplay pattern revolves around exploring the city and finding three newsworthy events to write your stories on. Each time you find a newsworthy moment in the city the player is presented with three different ways to report the news. The first option is to take a boring but accurate depiction of the event as it unfolds. The second option is to embellish a little, nothing too crazy. The third option is to completely lie. For example, one of the events you will see is a house on fire. The player-reporter is allows to report this newsworthy event as either “a stove left on”, “teenage arsonists?”, or “TERRORISTS ATTACK!!!”. Depending on what choice you make the city will change. If you choose to lie you will notice that your news agency is making a LOT of money and you will find yourself being promoted because your stories are bringing in tons of advertisement revenue from all of the clicks. You will also notice that the city is becoming chaotic and people are panicking directly because of your story. If you choose to tell the truth the city will bright and cheerful but your company won’t make as much money. The choice is yours, but the principal is that not all news stories can be believed at face value because news reporters have incentives to embellish their story for views and advertisement revenue.
Level Design
This week I’ve added a lot to my FPS 5v5 map. It’s inspired by a call of duty style map. The idea behind it is a three lane map where team A will spawn in the forge area and have the choice to run straight to the shooting range where team B’s domination flag would be, the middle domination flag in the loading dock area, or to quickly capture their own flag in the storage room. Team B will spawn in the gun range building and will have early access to the flag in the gun range. Both team’s spawns are ~15 seconds away from the center objective area. The game map is flexible enough to have room for search and destroy style objective sites or to be a purely team deathmatch style. A king of the hill site could easily be set up in the loading dock area as the terrain is elevated. Potential infrastructure that is to come is a second floor in the loading dock area. Once that and the security building is completed I will be doubling back to every room to do a second round of block meshing and make each space more precise. Adding furniture and being specific with how the furniture will look like and how it can be used (ie cover) is also coming in the second round of blockmesh.
Video Game Design
In video game design we have been doing rounds of game pitches. The first game pitch I made was Elemental Siege. A game focused on environmental warfare between two players. The gimmick with this assignment was to design combat without a hit-points system. My take on this was a time based combat system where “damage” was inflicted by delaying or stalling your opponent from getting to their goal. Check out the slides below:
