Project final submission – Snowblind

screenshot

You are a park ranger called up to investigate the troubles of a camper in the midst of a blizzard. However, once you get there, you find that the camper is missing save for a few bloodstains and a trail of campfires leading away from the site. What discovery will you find at the end of the trail?

You play the game by moving with traditional first person controls – wasd and mouse. Warmth is your life in this game, and moving close to fires will keep you alive; stay out in the cold for too long and you’ll freeze to death.

Spoilers: There is no way to win the game, you will always die, if you make it to the end, there is the revelation that the camper had a run-in with a wild animal and you succumb to the same fate.

Gameplay

Windows Version

Mac Version

Source

 

Farbs: ROM CHECK FAIL, Captain Forever, Playpen

“Farbs” is a pseudonym of Jarrad Woods, an indie developer who became prominent after quitting his job at 2K Australia using a video game (I may have quit my job). This was inspired by the rising popularity of indie games as a form of expression, and gave him his start as Farbs.

ROM CHECK FAIL:
ROM CHECK FAIL is a 2D survival game that after a short period of time, swaps between classic 2D games (Legend of Zelda, Mario, Pac-Man). Like a typical survival game, enemies will spawn, be it Koopas, Ghosts, etc. and the player must defeat them to gain extra lives. The twist though, is that not only do backgrounds/sprites change, the gameplay changes. For example, when you’re Mario, you can run side to side, jump, and your main method of defeating enemies is to jump on top of them. When it swaps to Link, all of a sudden you’re able to walk up, down, left, right, and your mode of defeating enemies is by slashing them with your sword.

Captain Forever:
Captain Forever is one game in a series of four space shooter games. It’s name comes from both the development process – new versions are constantly being developed and released, and from it’s potentially endless gameplay. In addition, the first game costs $9, and after that one time purchase, players gain access to any future iterations of the game. Captain Forever’s gameplay is in-line with most 2D space shooter games, you can fly across a nearly endless plane of space, defeating enemy ships, and salvaging their parts to improve your own ship. The controls took a little getting used to (W/S for forward or backwards, and A/D to rotate your ship), but were fairly intuitive.

Playpen:
Playpen is a point and click – choose/create your own adventure game. You can choose to play as a passive viewer of the scenes, going through a multitude of different paths, or you can draw your own scenes and story at which point, it becomes available for other players to play or build upon. There were some…interesting scenes, almost like a mad lib sort of journey. It was somewhat confusing, but really intriguing that you can add whatever you want (within reason, the game is built around MediaWiki technology, so past scenes are recorded and can be rolled back).

playpen

playpen-2

Final Project Proposals

  • “Scaling Everest”

Description: This is a game about climbing a mountain. In order to progress, you need to balance your oxygen level with your movement frequency: If you stop moving, you freeze, but if you move too much you’ll run out of oxygen.

Statement: I want to see how finding a balance between motion and stillness can constitute an engaging game. The game could be as simple as a one button game, but the feeling of agency the player has through that one button will stem from their management of Oxygen and Temperature. I’d like to explore that feeling of control (or lack of control) through this game. This was inspired after hearing stories about the “death zone” on Mt. Everest, above 26,247 feet, where climbers must manage their time and oxygen – summit and descend quickly so you don’t run out of oxygen, but don’t go too fast and exhaust yourself.

References: Sisyphus (Global Game Jam 2016), Saints Row 3 (car-surfing minigame), swimming (in real life), and Don’t Scare the Bug.

  • “I know where I’m going”

Description: This is a game where you have to navigate through a world, from destination to destination…but you can only look at your phone.

Statement: This idea came to me on the way to class, five different people almost walked into me and what better way to bring people’s awareness to an issue than gameify it? I also want to play around with the surroundings of the player – what if the environment is interesting enough to make them want to look up? The game would involve walking through an environment with limited vision for the player, players would get strikes against them for hitting other people and colliding with the environment. Yes, it’d be challenging. Yes, it’d be irritating. That’s the point, it doesn’t make much sense to do it in real life does it?

References: Real life experiences, Slender, DreadOut (limited fov).

  • “Multiplayer Tower Defense”

Description: Two player versus tower defense game.

Statement: My interest in this project is making a game that is ordinarily a pretty passive single player game, into a fairly active and engaging multiplayer game. I propose a game where two players battle via tower defenses, and minions clash in the center, gaining or losing ground. Once the minions reach a player’s base, they lose. This could be engaging in multiple ways: minions could have different attributes, towers could be set up differently, terrain could be asymmetrical between the players, etc. It comes down to finding a fun balance between those resources.

References: Tower defense: Infinite War, League of Legends, Bloons.

Don’t scare the bug

manflybug

Authors: Cindy Hsu, Vanessa Kim, Omar Cheikh-Ali

This is a game about the anxiety of having an unwanted bug in your personal space. Don’t move, or the bug will get angry at you. (There is physical feedback in this game)

Originally we wanted this game to be played in a VR headset, and things were looking good for that up until this past weekend when we ran into some strange problems with cameras flipping out, and scenes rapidly switching back and forth unprompted.

Controls: Mouse to look.

Builds: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzQVO0EXIPVna2VRYkdQN3NqUk0

Time is ticking.

vanitas

For this piece, I decided to try a hybrid of static and falling objects. During my first try on Monday, I tossed around the idea of actually putting colliders on everything and letting them fall as they may, so I figured this would be a good compromise. The coins, bowl, apples and table are from the tutorial assets, while I got the record player, picture frame, and clock from the Unity asset store. The background, I decided to texture an elongated cube as a sort of wallpaper.

The arrangement is similar to vanitas, but instead of including a skull, I went with a skull-like figure in the portrait. To relate to the passage of time, I decided to include a clock and record player, as well as the objects falling and coming to rest on the table; all indicative of how time passes.

Bumper Lucios (Overwatch)

So the focus of my Subversive Play project, was to utilize the custom game feature that Blizzard has implemented in Overwatch to try out something different than the normal way the game is played…the result is something similar to bumper cars.

To explain, Lucio, one of the characters in the Overwatch cast, has an ability to knock people away from him in a small cone directly in front of him. This, in combination with his low damage (he’s a support class), has led people to be opportunistic and look for easy kills by simply pushing people off the map.

So, I wanted to see how far I could push this character ability by changing customization options; modifying health values to 300%, reducing damage done to 25%, and lowering the knockback cooldown to 0% (meaning the only way to get kills was to knock people into the hole in the map).

This lead to a much longer game than normal, as people would spam their knockback as soon as you got close – it was almost like magnets repelling each other. Once in a while, you’d get lucky with a double or triple, but it was incredibly hard to clear the point to capture it; it took 12 minutes to finally satisfy the victory condition, and while it was initially a novel idea and pretty fun, at around 5 minutes in I started to get tired of playing. I feel like playing the game in this context kind of gave me an appreciation for the work that was put in by the developers to balance the game and keep gameplay succinct and fun.

Omar Cheikh-Ali

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Not sure if this profile is entirely accurate of my gaming preferences.

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Portfolio: (work in progress) http://mu5ikalme.tumblr.com/
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/kangmu