Development Blog – Cursed

Team: Cassie & Nico

April 6

Concept brainstorming/storyboard – see Nico’s post

April 14

Today we tested out a paper version of our game on our friend Emma. We had several objects made out of paper cardboard: a headset to limit the field of view, a sword, several stones, the statue, and some monsters.

The monsters and statues were pictures of the actual assets we are using.

We set up the room so that the statue was resting on a chair, which will be a platform in the game. The stones were scattered on the floor by the chair.

To start, we had Emma put on the cardboard headset. When she picked up the statue, I wheeled away the chair (the platform will sink down in the game), and Nico announced that the curse has been released, and Emma must now protect herself. Nico then dropped the cardboard sword from above her head. To represent the monsters, Nico and I held up the printouts of the monsters and ran towards Emma one at a time. Here’s how our first test went:

For that first test, we didn’t give Emma any prior instructions, although she had heard about our concept before from casual conversation. However, we did another test where we gave her the instruction to try using the stones. Here’s how that test went:

In this test, she ended up dropping the statue, which means she lost the game.

Here’s what we learned from these tests:

  • In the first test, Emma didn’t notice the stones on the ground or knew that she could use them.
  • In the second test, when Emma wanted to use the stones, she dropped the statue so that she could have stones in one hand and a sword in the other. However, the game doesn’t allow this to happen.
  • The statue stood out enough for Emma to want to pick it up
  • Emma suggested that we should tell people that they have to hold onto the statue, like the voice could say something like “protect the statue” rather than just “protect yourself.” The reason she kept holding onto the statue in the first test was just because she wasn’t really thinking about it.
  • When asked if she thought it would be better if the stones weren’t there at all, she said the stones could be useful and she would rather have the option to use the stones in addition to the sword.

April 15

Feedback from Sarah Rothberg’s visit:

  • Why does the user want the statue? Why does the statue cause a curse?
  • Maybe there can be more things the user can interact with in the environment so that there is more build-up before the user picks up the statue. This would also build more of a narrative, because then it would be like “oh no, I messed with the wrong thing” when the user does pick up the statue.
  • Consider the difficulty of the game in relation to the user. Who is the user and how do we want them to feel?
  • Think about what kind of sounds to implement

April 16

Today I began to build up the environment:

  • Created a terrain. I made it much much smaller this time…lesson learned from Zenboo. Added a grass texture to this as well as a few raised and smoothed sections so that the ground wasn’t super flat.
  • Added in walls and ruins from Cartoon Temple Building Kit. The ruins could possibly add more to the narrative…could cause the user to wonder what this place used to be, potentially adding onto a more “cursed” feeling. Decided to make the ruins like four walls surrounding the player so that when the monsters come out it kind of feels like an arena of sorts…adds on to the feeling that the user is supposed to fight the monsters.
  • Added in trees from the Fantasy Forest pack. Have to have trees. 🙂

Progress pic:

April 17

Class playtesting feedback:

  • Simran went first – she first looked around a bit before picking up the statue and throwing it. She eventually picked up the stones and threw them, though she mentioned that the stones look like you’re not supposed to move them because of their placement
    • Perhaps the rocks can shake or tremble to signify that the user can pick them up
  • Mai went second – she said the monsters were pretty scary, but they look kind of like Shrek.
  • The monsters might be coming out too fast – would be nice if it was slow at first and then became faster and faster
  • Would be cool if lightning struck when the statue was picked up
  • Maybe fire or some sort of goblets could be put up to prevent users from moving away from the center (although you can’t move around that much anyway with the space we are in)
  • Either change the size of the rocks or change the gravity so that they feel heavier…kind of strange that the rocks are huge but easy to pick up. Also makes it seem like the user isn’t supposed to pick them up, because they are so large
  • Maybe limit the amount of rocks there are so that you are forced to use the sword

April 27

Today I worked on:

  • Putting more trees outside of the walls to make the forest more populated
  • Raising the terrain in the background to make everything less flat
  • Putting stones in the background to add variation
  • Putting more decorative objects within the walls: mushrooms, a rock, another stone structure
  • Adding lights to the rest of the doors
  • Finding a skybox for the initial scene (before statue is picked up)
  • Experimenting with a couple floating blocks, but I don’t think it looked that good. Also not sure if we would want these sorts of fantasy elements in the beginning scene, as it would disrupt the sort of “where am I but also this could be somewhere in the real world” initial feeling.

Progress pic:

May 1

Playtesting feedback:

  • Would be cool to have blood when the monsters get hit
  • The headset cable is annoying because it kind of twists around you when you’re playing – would be nice to have it hung up in final presentation
  • A creepy voice would be better than a loud booming voice for the voiceovers

May 5

Today I worked on gathering and creating all of the sound for the game. I first worked on the voiceover instructions:

  • First I recorded the audio, and tried to say the lines kind of creepily:
    • When the user picks up the statue: “The curse has been released…now you must protect the statue or risk releasing the curse forever.” This was taking into account feedback for instructing the user to take care of the statue, hopefully putting into their heads that they aren’t supposed to drop it.
    • When the user loses (either drops statue or monster gets to statue): “You have failed to protect the statue…the curse has taken over….”
    • User wins (kills x amount of monsters): “Congratulations…the curse has been contained, and peace will be restored.”
  • I then found an evil laugh on freesound.org (https://freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/132252/), which I mixed together with the recorded audio on Audacity.
  • To add a more eerie effect and to also match the sound quality of the laughter, I added a slight echo to the recorded audio.

The next type of sounds I gathered were the background music sounds:

  • First, some sort of calm music was needed for both before the statue is picked up and for after the user wins and peace is restored. For this, I found forest sounds off of Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnS8VPxpHI&t=92s
  • Perhaps more importantly is the music that plays when you must kill the monsters. I tested out different music out while listening to the recorded soundtracks on top to see what sounded good, and settled on the intro song in this video about creepy video game music ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8FN29sHWq8), editing out the rest of the video sounds with Audacity.

And last but not certainly not least, the sound effects:

I then added the scary background music and the first introduction audio when the user picks up the statue to our game. I tried adding in a couple other sounds but was having a little trouble getting the sounds to play, so I will have to spend more time figuring that out!

May 10

Today I worked on the sound effects, the lighting/skybox, the environment, and the blood particle system.

All of the sound effects have now been added into the game, except for a clang sound when the sword first drops to the ground. The way I placed it in the code it was playing but would make a very strange sound at first, like it was starting over and over again. I might also create another sound that instructs the user they can grab the sphere to restart the game if they lose, since one of the feedback we received during playtesting was that it wasn’t clear that the user could restart the game.

The idea for the lighting is that at first, it will be bright and sunny, but when the user picks up the statue it will become dark and creepy. The sky will return to being bright and sunny once the user wins. I thought it would be easiest to switch the skyboxes themselves between the sunny and creepy situations, and accomplished this through this code (at least partly – to change the skybox back to how it was before I put it in a different script, but with the same concept/logic as this):

However, the ambient intensity also had to be lowered because without this, the sky was dark but everything else was still light.

For the environment, I added more things like grass, logs, ruins, trees, and rocks to make everything look less barren and more like a forest. This was a lot easier to do now thanks to Nico who made a layer to place objects in so that they wouldn’t disrupt the monsters’ movements.

Lastly, I worked on making the blood particle system look slightly more realistic and subtle. I made the particles a darker shade of red, made the circles larger so it looked more like a “gush” rather than splatters, changed the shape from cone to box, turned off the loop, made the particle system play for a shorter period of time, and changed the particle’s texture.



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