Mind Reading, Horror, and TOJam

Last weekend myself and a great team of game designers set out to make a game which uses basic EEG readings as a mechanic. The main source of inspiration of the game idea came from Doctor Who’s weeping angels. The gist of the angels is that if you look at them, they will get you when you look away. Don’t even blink.

Here’s what I sent out to the team prior to the jam so that we’ll all be on the same page:

So in sum, here’s the basics of the game:

  • Single player (1st person perspective)
  • Escape a procedurally generated room. Over and over again; like Groundhog Day but meant to scare.
  • Gameplay: Player starts with the camera locked on the statue then they have to navigate to the doorway to escape the statue without physically blinking. If the player blinks then the statue teleports to right in front of them, they are granted only three blinks. Too much blinking = death.
  • Art: all we need is furniture and a statue. I think dim lighting will allow us to get away with lame textures and stuff.

After that email one of the team members suggested we make the game playable without monitoring physical blinks, so we’d have a version everyone can play and a “hardcore” version. The core mechanics then should be similar in concept to how Slender Man games function.

In short, we didn’t finish the game but we did make something playable. We blinked.

Here’s what happened:

First some context, TOJam is a fantastic annual game jam held in Toronto and it gets bigger and better every year. The event has hundreds of people all descend on George Brown College to make games starting on Friday and having something playable by Sunday evening.

Reading minds

We wanted to use an entry-level EEG device the MindWave because I have previously seen it used for other games built on Unity. It was more complicated than anticipated to use the MindWave with Unity. We spent a good chunk of the first day trying to get the device to work.

This is after some time spent on Thursday trying by myself to connect Unity and MindWave. The image below shows that the device is connected, the connection software (ThinkGear) knows it there, but the application claims the device is not there. I didn’t know if I should’ve directed my anger at MindWave or Bluetooth. Overall, this was frustrating and I was hoping that the talented programers would know where I went wrong.

MindWave, Bluetooth, sigh.

After some struggle we figured out how to connect the MindWave and rewarded with this screen (enlarge to see what the MindWave records):
A connection is made

Fantastic! Now we can really make this game interesting.:)

Then we discovered that the blink mechanic we wanted to use in the game was actually hard to read with the MindWave. They have a blink detection system but it’s not clear and requires some educated guessing. A lot of this effort could have been avoided if the company behind MindWave released some Unity project files and demos (they have one but the download link was broken).

Even though we successfully had Unity and the MindWave talking to one another we decided to put it aside because of Bluetooth chaos. It was time to make the rest of the game.

The room

For the atmospehre of the game we originally envisioned something that seemed OK, but then got creepy like a museum after opening hours. When looking for reference pictures, I chanced across a great series of photos from the decaying Prince Edward Hotel in Brandon Manitoba (of all places) and it looked perfect.

Spooky

Saturday saw the game go from primarily creepy to something more typically found in the horror genre: the abandoned building. It wasn’t a big change and was decided upon before most of the modelling was started.

Getting the room to procedural generate wasn’t too complicated and we got that working. As the code was being written we had a statue constructed and then built all the furniture that will be placed around the room. Things were going smoothly. We had all the pieces of the game being built separately and by the end of Saturday it looked like all we had to do was put the pieces together.

It looked like we’d even have time to get the blink working. Even if couldn’t get blink functioning we had other mind-reading functions we could incorporate.

Here’s an early screenshot from the game:
BL_NK early screen

It’s so dark and gloomy to make the game hard without the MindWave.

It’s worth mentioning that we had off-site support for our audio and the fellow behind it made some insanely freighting sounds. The audio was done on time and, oddly, was the last thing we added to the game (just because it’s so easy).

The final day

After a late start, we got all the code from six separate computers on to one. We didn’t use Dropbox at the behest of the organizers, but in retrospect we should have broken that rule. Then we ensured that all the pieces would fit together.

I know it says 8:04, the Windows build was first.

I know it says 8:04, the Windows build was first.

This last days was the most hectic as it now relied mainly on the back of one of the programmers. We got the most important parts of the game working and some of the room elements working as well. We didn’t bother putting in all the assets we created as with what little time we had left we opted for function over form.

With that in mind, we decided not to incorporate the physical blink detection at all. It came down to a functioning game or a game that would probably break during the evening play sessions. One programmer went so far as to figure out some more of the MindWave but, due to too much going on, we didn’t incorporate it.

We figured we can easily add in the rest of the assets afterwards.

Around us other teams were play testing and celebrating their complete games. We, on the other hand, didn’t even have a chance to play test. TOJam game-building ends at 8pm and at 7:50 we tried our first complete build…and it worked!

This was particularly exciting for me as it was the first time at TOJam that I was part of a playable game by the end of the weekend. Of course, other games there were far better than ours, I was still pleased.

Next steps:

We will continue to work on the game to make it more playable and a better experience. By better I mean scarier. With luck, this will be playable for the TOJam Arcade for everyone to play.

Some stuff is obvious from what we ran out of time for:

  • More assets for the room and for the player to bump into.
  • Audio to accompany all the objects that move.
  • MindWave integration.
  • More early rooms to train the player before they get to the procedureally-generated rooms.

From play testing at the jam I noticed we need:

  • A way to end the madness as both “win” and “fail” states are the same – you end up in a new room. This was always intended but we never gave the player a stop button.
  • Better training levels to cue the player as to what’s going on.
  • The exit needs to be more visible.
  • We need a better way for the player to figure out where the statue initially is.

Thanks!
A BIG thank you to all of team Oh My Glob!

And thanks to all the wonderful people who made TOJam happen from the organizers to the sponsors to the volunteers! Without all their combined efforts we never would’ve had this game this far along.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I felt the need to write all this down. Thanks for reading!



May 9th, 2013 by Adam

Board Gaming’s Golden Age

This is a great talk on the contemporary world of board games. Definitely worth your time!

SU&SD Present: Board Gaming’s Golden Age from ShutUpShow on Vimeo.

Thanks to Ryan Thomas!



May 8th, 2013 by Adam

Visualizing Pathfinding Algorithms

pathfinding

Pathfinding is used in games to construct how AIs (and/or non-player characters) navigate the environment. At it’s core it is to emulate wayfinding. When working on a board game it’s easy to see and modify how characters and whatnot move around the board. In video games it can be hard to figure out exactly why a character is moving in a particular way.

For non-programemrs understanding the algorithms at work behind the scenes can be difficult. At GitHub there is a PathFinding visualization project which allows you to play with different algorithms.



May 2nd, 2013 by Adam

Playing Game Theory with Monkeys

The title of this post is half true, but it sounds awesome doesn’t it? This TED talk by Colin Camerer is a good illustration off the predictive power of game theory.

When two people are trying to make a deal — whether they’re competing or cooperating — what’s really going on inside their brains? Behavioral economist Colin Camerer shows research that reveals just how little we’re able to predict what others are thinking. And he presents an unexpected study that shows chimpanzees might just be better at it than we are. (Filmed at TEDxCalTech.)



May 2nd, 2013 by Adam

Two Approaches to Making Large Lands: Procedural and Modular

Creating large game environments takes a large amount of time no matter how one goes about creating it. I’m quite interested in procedural generation to decrease production time and provide an easy way to add variety to environments. The upcoming game Sir, You Are Being Hunted is being designed using procedural generation of the English countryside.

Despite the fact that you get landscapes by pressing a button it’s such a large undertaking to make procedural generated spaces. The effort is direct more to code and bug fixies instead of other aspects of design. To get an idea of this, the Sir team wrote about procedurally generating the countryside.

One of the more complex regions are the village cells. These have detailed scripts to generate the layout of houses, roads and gardens. First, roads are drawn into the terrain splatmap extending out at different angles from the village centre. Then a series of functions line the roads with houses and other buildings. Finally there is a chance for houses to have a range of garden types behind them, these gardens are themselves populated by various scenery elements and other features. Villages provide a much more complex environment for exploration and combat, and may include lootable containers with valuable resources. They are also more likely to harbour enemies.

being hunted

At BLDBLOG there is a piece on how their procedural countryside design is made with the added bonus of comparing it to an ongoing project in reality (at the end of the article). The countryside is being created digitally and physically.

There is another approach though, and that is modular design using kits.

Bethesda makes games set in expansive places like Fallout 3 and Skyrim. In fact, Skyrim is so large that I felt the need to make a post about it. The use of in-house art kits allow designers to create such vast lands to explore.

In a very in-dpeth post about modular design two designers from Bethesda (based off their GDC 2013 presentation) discuss their approach. I really appreciate how they connect what they are doing digitally with a physical comparison:

Kits aren’t a new idea. They aren’t unique to Bethesda or to the types of games we make. Consider the board game Carcassone. Unlike Monopoly or Scrabble, the board changes every time you play Carcassone. The tiles are arranged so that roads meet roads, rivers meet rivers, and so on, creating an effectively randomized yet visually cohesive whole. It’s easy to see the grid when looking at a Carcassone table, and how this system of art works together to make a unique play field.

Their post outlines how to rethink some aspects of the design process to better use time and other resources. They have stages of designing, testing, and iterating that are all worth looking into if you want to use modular design.

Level design

Throughout their post they mention the pros and cons of modular design from multiple perspectives. Some artists may find it scary (or just wrong) as an approach and level designers may find it to be limiting. I think that the most important take is the following:

Looking again towards the benefits of working modular, one of the big bonuses (especially from a production viewpoint) is that a modular approach helps if your team has a low ratio of artists to designers. Remember the ten people responsible for the dungeon content in Skyrim? Eight of them are the level designers, and only two represent the entirety of our full-time kit art team. They generated seven kits, which the level design team used to create well over 400 cells, or unique loaded interiors, of dungeon content. And those dungeons were built in about two and a half years, from start to finish.

At the end of the day is it better to use modular or procedural? There is no clear answer and in many cases they can be related to one another (just think that procedural needs modular pieces). It comes down to the skills on your team and what kind of game you’re building.



April 29th, 2013 by Adam
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