Saturday, April 29, 2017

Blog Post 7: GPS Game

Ingress Experience
Ingress had GPS-features for users to see what was near them on the phone to take over portals. In Ingress, taking over portals is called "hacking". Colors of the portals were different for both team. I went outside with a group of "Resistances" that was my group's team. The resistance had blue portals and the locations we went were mainly on campus and San Jose downtown.
A Group of Fellow Resistances
Experience With Peers
As we played on campus and downtown area, we didn't read the tutorials or some skimmed the tutorials so not many of us knew what was going on. Since tutorials didn't appear again and we didn't Google search a playthrough, we figured out along the way that the graphics with blue sparkles mean that an item was nearby, so we followed the trail of blue sparkling dots.
my username is meh108
In addition to following sparking blue trail, we also walked around to landmarks to uncover photos posted by other users.
La Lune Sucree Cafe in SJ downtown
Aside from my teammates findings, I would sometimes stray away from the group to find interesting features of the game. I found out that if I were in a location that had a weak location signal, such as walking towards Panda Express, the screen turns into a cool static warning message. This ruined my gameplay as my item searching was lost.
Game Mechanics
The gaming mechanics of Ingress were mostly cooperative play and gps/real world movement. With our combined skillsets of inductive reasoning and critical observations, we were able to have an enjoyable play-through and earned some items. The aesthetics, such as the design of blue dots, helped a lot.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Blog Post 6: Video Game Prototype

Game started

Game Title: Escape Door
Credits: Xiao Li Wu (programmer) and Omar Guzman (artist)

Issues
This game was made on Gamemaker 8. The executable file should run smoothly without needing to download anything else on windows. Make sure to make this file an exception on any antivirus.

How to Play:
Use arrow keys (up, down, left, right) to navigate the player. 

Use the key to open the door.

To get the key, interact with the objects around and figure out what needs to be moved to open the door to get the key.

Description
Currently, the game has a simple escape puzzle with a "?" button that helps user solve the puzzle. 
This appears when you click the help button.
When the player escapes, it transitions to a text that says they escape which is pretty anti-climactic. I would create a more satisfying end screen than it is now, and zero text in this game. 
anti-climatic ending
The journey that it took to create this game was pretty tedious. Although, it is a simple game, I used a mac to program on and used parallels free 14-day trial to create the original game. But later, I learned about a homebrew install called wine that didn't need a virtual machine.

The negative part of the journey would be not having the right machine and doing it the hard way for a simple game. 

The positive part is that I, now, know of a cool install called wine that can run almost any windows application. 🍷