Game Flow

The balance between anxiety and boredom is where psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (Chick–send-me-hi) noticed similarities in people enjoying tasks.  He observed these nine characteristics of people in their "flow" (reference):

1. There are clear goals every step of the way.
2. There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
3. There is a balance between challenges and skills.
4. Action and awareness are merged.
5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
6. There is no worry of failure.
7. Self-consciousness disappears.
8. The sense of time becomes distorted.
9. The activity becomes an end in itself.

"The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen." (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p.3)

Here's a link to his TED talk.

Here's a short video that talks about how the psychological aspects tie into good game design.

Creating Glen from The Walking Dead in Mixamo Fuse

I was inspired by Glen's recent events in The Walking Dead and thought a Mixamo Fuse version of him might play nice in my AGP island game. This ended-up being a good lesson in how to use the Fuse texture editor to change clothing materials and colors. Discovered how difficult it can be to match an actor's exact facial features using the default shaping capabilities. As an example, I spent a lot of time trying to get Glen's eye shapes represented as accurately as possible using the default eye sections provided by the basic Fuse character.  I still didn't get as much detail as I had hoped, but at least I managed a fair representation. After creating Glen, I created a few zombies because we can't have Glen feel all alone on the island!

Scene before Glen's suspected death, my Fuse model inspiration

The Fuse version of Glen

You can create your own textures in Photoshop and then import them, but you do quite a bit with the built-in materials and then use the editor to change colors, luminosity, etc.

"Skinny Zombie" from Fuse base model

Woman model from base model

Tips and Resources for Unity Assets

Listened to a Unity employee (Adam Crespi) talk about seeing 10,000 to 20,000 poly count characters and vehicles--main point is to use occlusion and other tricks to keep the total number of visible items manageable to reduce the total amount of overhead involved in redraws.  Go high detail when building new models and then back off the poly count if you notice that game performance lags.  He said that there's a point when the high poly count starts to look like the normal and then you should consider lowering polys.

Mudbox is one of Adam's tools of choice for modeling: http://www.autodesk.com/products/mudbox/overview

He shared these links:

• http://gdcvault.com/search.php#&category=free&firstfocus=&keyword=joel+burgess&conference_id=
• http://www.slideshare.net/JoelBurgess/gdc2013-kit-buildingfinal
• http://www.xnormal.net/
• https://www.knaldtech.com/
• http://quixel.se/
• http://www.sharecg.com/

Screen recording with open source software

Just discovered Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) which is an excellent free and open source tool for screen recording to a local file or for full featured streaming to Twitch, YouTube, YouTube Gaming, and others to include a custom defined server.

The Sources feature is extremely powerful for capturing individual applications, desktops (even in multi-display environments), and web cameras.  You can easily move the sources up and down in the hierarchy to display one source on top of another.  Here's an example of using OBS to record from my web camera while simultaneously recording from my desktop.

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) with desktop and web camera capture sources

Games Design - Week 2

I'm enrolled in the Adobe Generation Professional: Games Design course.  It's week 2 and so far I've created a couple textures in Photoshop and just created an island in Unity.  These are the three textures I created in Photoshop for the sand, rock, and crate surfaces:

Rock

Sand

My version of a sea crate

And these are scenes from my island in Unity:

Camera view, third person perspective complete with my crates

Full island view

And here's a quick view from a couple in-game cameras; one's attached to character and the other's fixed in the mountain to watch the bolder:

Within Unity, I quickly came to appreciate the Q, W, E, and R buttons for switching between the different environment navigation and asset modifier controls while maintaining use of my mouse for direct manipulations.

I wanted to incorporate some 3D assets from the Sketch-up Warehouse and from Unity's store, but the process of finding the right assets and then trying to incorporate them was taking me way longer than I had expected.  One character that I did find interesting is Unity Chan.  She's a free 3D model that provides several capabilities as a prefab asset for learning how to connect animation controls to model through scripts and human inputs.