Designing a 4-Player Co-Op Role Playing Game (Using Unreal Editor)

Hey you guys.

Since I finished my Epically Awesome Super Dance Dance Dissertation of Doom I’ve had dreams of making it come to life (and perhaps this shall be the subject of my thesis, but we shall see) – but I’m somewhat limited in terms of my level design practical skills – something I do wish to change. In second year of Uni we used Source, and it was a harsh mistress – only doing what you wanted if you took her out for a fancy dinner first and told her that she looked “Beautiful in the summer moonlight!”. After hearing lots of people go on about how much more awesome Unreal 3 was, I set myself up with learning it last summer, and did pretty well, although didn’t get so far with Kismet and all it’s lovely tangliness (is that a word?).

Unreal Kismet

Flying Spaghetti Monster

After weighing up my options of creating my masterful level of effed up fantasy and childhood destroying creepy-ness, I’m still pretty sure that Unreal is my best bet to make a 4 Player Co-Op experience (My design was based around a 5 man party of MMO fashion, but hell, 4 player seems to be much more fashionable these days, darling.) – and in my head its something like if you could play Dragon Age with 3 of your best buddies – which sounds pretty awesome doesn’t it?

Tasty Tasty Co-Op?

Making it pretty and defining an art style free-standing from the Unreal Editor is not an issue, I like making things pretty and there is no end of craziness that has been creating in UDK or UnrealEd all over the internet which makes me drool. But what I’m not all too sure about is changing the gameplay and mechanics themselves.

So I’ve put together a little list of things which I think are most important in making this a real yummy RPG, with an immersive player experience  - fitting with the abstract of my original study.

Co-Op Gameplay. Ideally with 4 or 5 players.

Friendly NPCs with correct pathing and interaction with the player.

Quests

A Levelling System of some sort.

The ability to pick up and drop items.

Equipment that the player can choose and change to customise the character.

There are obviously many more, but these are what I can kinda see figuring out at the moment.

So after some research I found some links that proved pretty useful, many of which were on the same website.

“Friendly NPCs with correct pathing and interaction with the player.”

Over here I found an interesting tutorial to create conversation scenes in Unreal. It will create a conversation that will start up when you approach the NPC, and will go something like this:

NPC:

“Hi there stranger, want something from me?”

You:

1) I would like some banana’s (he will start laughing)

2) I would like to kill you….. (he will kill you with his Rocket Launcher)

3) I want a rocket launcher (he will keep talking, we’ll use this to start with)

NPC:

A Rocket Launcher huh? It will cost you €100,-

You:

1) I don’t have that, never mind then (conversation end)

2) Screw you, give it here! (he kills you)

3) Ok, here you go… Thank you! (you get a rocket launcher)

“The ability to pick up and drop items.”

Again on the same website, but over here I found a tutorial on picking up and dropping items. This may sound really simple, but it links into so many other things that will create that RPG experience, such as having an inventory, equipping your character with items and completing quests.

“Quests”

There is lots of information about Quests, again on the same website:

• Making Quests Part One
• Making Quests Part Two
• Making Quests Part Three: Collecting Objects
• Multiple Quests

I haven’t tried any of this out as of yet, apart from the Conversation tutorials. It’s all very interesting!

There’s lots of forums of people going crazy saying you can’t make an MMO in UnrealEd, and that’s all that seems to come up when searching for information on this sort of thing. It may be time to blow the dust off my book collection and see what kind of information I can find there. I wouldn’t think it was difficult to differentiate between this sort of project and an MMO, I don’t require a persistent world and I don’t really think it’s necessary to have hundreds of players in one instance – for this situation at least.

I’ll just keep digging through these angry nay-sayers till I find what I need

I shall be updating with another post when I find solutions to my other problems or have anything shiny to show!

Yay!

For all the links I mentioned earlier – go to http://www.olde-bijvank.nl

To see more updated shizzle and more randomness – follow me on Twitter @Purple_Yeti

x

Tired, Bored little Haiku Girl..

Today I decided to write some Haiku. (I’m told Haiku is the singular and the plural, yet it still seems weird. Haiki? Haikus? I dunno…)

Every few days or so I’m trying to do something creative to get my brain going, and as I woke up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday (Actually, normal people wake up “on the wrong side of the bed”, this was more like I woke up headfirst hanging out the window with birds pecking at my face.) I thought some good inspirational stuff would help cheer me up and get me going again.

Most people write Haiku when they’re in Primary School, but I can’t remember writing any, so it sounded like fun to give these a go. While thinking of my first one, all I could think of was this picture:

Which was really annoying, because my brain kept wanting to put “Refrigerator” on the end of every Haiku. Silly thing. (Also notice they used “Haikus” there, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong…ha ha ha oh I love grammar.)

Okay, so bearing in mind I’ve never done this before, I wrote 5 just now, and here they are:

(I’ve also picked some appropriate pictures randomly from Flickr, credit where credit is due.)

1.

You flow from my pen

Clouds painted on paper sky

Water Colour Sun

2.

Her Inspiration

Outweighed by her Laziness

Always “tomorrow!”.

3.

Slightest things; “I’m pissed.”

Tired, bored little Haiku Girl

And now it’s raining…

4.

Golden Island Palm

Brown and hairy; tiresome fruit.

Stupid Coconuts.

5.

A Monochrome World.

Last. Colour. Drop. Down the drain.

I’ll paint it for you?

Thanks for reading Hope they make you think, I did lots of thinking while writing them. Apart from the coconut one, I just hate coconuts.

Yeti x

My 3rd Year Uni Results I AM SUPERAWESOME WAT

So it seems staying up for 70 hours typing is definately worth it.

Narrative for Massively Multiplayer Online Games – 15/15  (Pass with Distinction)

Advanced Multiplayer Online Gaming Technology – 11/15 (Pass with Merit)

Handheld Games Design – 11/15 (Pass with Merit)

Advanced 3D Modelling Portfolio – 10/15 – (Pass with Merit)

Advanced Modelling in the Games Engine – 8/15 (Pass)

But this, oh THIS is what I’m most proud of. God I loved doing my dissertation, even though it was a total bitch.

Entertainment Research Dissertation – 14/15 (Pass with Distinction)

Entertainment Portfolio – 14/15  (Pass with Distinction)

HELL YEAH

So happy.

Gunna go dance around now, k?

I’ll take this opportunity to say sorry for all my moaning this year about work loads, and to thank all you awesome people (you know who you are) for all the support you gave me, and for telling me to stfu and get on with it when I needed to.

But you know what this means? I’ll be back in September to do my Masters.

MORE MOANING ABOUT WORK YEEAAAAHHH

x

Little Miss Busy Pants

Last week I officially finished the last thing I needed to do for my Third year at uni (possibly uni altogether might I add) by presenting my dissertation in some horribly wordy slideshows and talking for pretty much half an hour more than I should have, but it’s all good and I’m pretty proud of the project overall.

I’ll be uploading the final pieces in some form or another (either online or downloadable PDF) on here pretty soon, so those of you with any particular interest in MMOs or multiplayer RPG gaming in general might find it interesting to read.

So – with the daunting prospect of four months till the beginning of Masters year, what am I going to do to keep my hyperactive brain occupied??

Well – I’ve been applying for some jobs, it’s all a bit hush hush atm, but depending on what I hear back from those will depend on whether I’ll be in Stafford next year or off adventuring in some other weird and wonderful place in the UK. Only had telephone interviews so far, and all in all I’m not entirely sure how they went (I tend to get nervous and stumble and forget EVERYTHING ) but I guess we’ll see what happens.

I’ve also been filling my time with practising the use of Unreal since I love level design but have struggled to implement designs on a practical level so far, and also been attempting to get better at ZBrush, and more specifically the use of Z Spheres and re-topology, since I’ve only used sculpting tools before, and find it really interesting

Finally, I’m excited to say I’ll be doing some writing for the awesome crew over at Crush! Frag! Destroy! – mainly gaming news and reviews and such (If they don’t get fed up of me ), but putting into practice some of the skills I learnt last summer while reviewing in my own time. They’ve got some awesome stuff going on over there, and you guys should check it out!

My first bit went up yesterday, a little news piece on the announcement of Super Scribblenauts, which sounds awesome!

Apart from that, I wanna catch up with some gaming, I’ve been playing The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom with a view to reviewing it when I’ve played it some more, and I really want NIER, even though I haven’t heard/read much about it. I think the trailer has subliminal messaging. Anyone out there played it and have some thoughts on it? What are you playing at the moment?

Gimme a shout, I get lonely sometimes ;P

Where Have I Been? O_o

So you might, or maybe not, have noticed that I’ve been a little absent from the internetz for quite a while – I’ve not been doing everyone’s head in tweeting all day, and my trend of almost-daily blogs kinda went down the toilet.

But I didn’t die, honest – and now I’m back >;D

This semester has been a very busy one, with some hardcore modules to juggle with the dreaded dissertation – which I started off being very passionate about and ended up hating more than life itself for keeping me awake for so long. The topic I covered was “Dynamic Design” – I’m saying this again, I can’t remember if I talked about it in another blog, but hey…and yeah, basically I designed a dungeon for a MMORPG environment which encouraged deep narrative, interesting and exciting player experience and player interaction at all times. I used a Dungeons and Dragons prototype of the dungeon to show how it would work, and all in all I think it worked pretty well – even if two documents of more than 10k words each don’t sound very exciting. I would have loved to do much more concept art for this document, but by the time the deadline reached, I kept finding more and more problems to deal with, and finally caved at around 60-70 hours of being awake.

My computer and work station in general has changed a few times, I have a new case now – but the new motherboard I bought is being annoying and wont give my processor enough noms to run it…so I’m bitching at overclockers till they give me a new one which actually works. I have a new monitor too – after surviving three years of uni with the 17inch one that my ex boyfriend gave me, I decided I really should stop being so stupid and just BUY A NEW ONE ALREADY!! haha. The one I found was super cheap on eBay, and is technically a 1080p TV rather than a monitor, so I can use it to play Xbox on too ^-^

I’ve updated my gallery page a little, theres some new videos up there and some real pictures, including a real scary facial model of me that I hate to look at – but I’m going to be uploading some writing work that I’m much more proud of over the next few days, and an updated resumé.

The reason for all this being sorted out is mainly because of GradEx – last week at uni this took place – the “Graduate Exhibition” – where we show off our final pieces and stand there and look pretty and get really scared every time a judge comes near you. Sadly I didn’t win anything (there was some damn good work there) but I did get to have some really interesting conversations, mainly with Howard Tomlinson of Astraware and Tim Browne of Codemasters. Speaking to lots of people in industry really inspired me to get going, and I sorted out my CV and examples of work properly and applied for some jobs. Not really sure what I’m going to do, since I’m supposed to be doing my masters year next year, but if I get a job offer I’ll just decide what I do from there I guess.

Since all my work was in, I’ve just been chilling out really (after recovering from being ill after staying awake for so long) – playing some games that I haven’t had a chance to for a long while, and I went to see Iron Man 2 last night (which was awesome – hilariously funny) and wandered around today looking in charity shops and buying blueberry muffins. Charity shops are so awesome – I got a Sims 2 pack and a Hardback ed. of Terry Pratchett’s “Thud!” (which I’ve never read) for less than £2 each! Woop!

Got lots planned for the summer, along with getting some part time work for money, depending on whether I get a “real job” but theres one thing for sure – I’ll be online a lot more from now on! xD

Yeti

xxx

Directed Gameplay

Okay so anyone who knows me IRL atm will know that I’m doing lots and lots of research for my dissertation

So yeah, this means reading HUNDREDS OF BOOOKS and watching lots of videos of guys talking for two hours.

One thing that I’m obsessed with atm is a term coined by Blizzard – “Directed Gameplay”.

Here is the video if anyone is interested – it’s kinda tedious, just Kaplan’s sexy voice over slides, but it’s real interesting if you can stick it out

The general idea of Directed Gameplay is how – using quests, narrative and other devices such as achievements – the designers influence the player’s actions while still making them feel as though they have free will in an open world.

Really quite relevant for my research area XD

I’ve found lots of interesting stuff while doing my research, I’ll probably link more stuff when I have more time but right now I’m so busy I haven’t really been online all that much

I’ve even been staying away from twitter! XD

But yeah, internet detox for me atm, but I’ve been making lots of lists and getting all organised and I’m already making lots of plans for what to do with my time in the Summer (I’ll be staying in Stafford.). Most of this includes lots more reviews which I’ve been DYING to do since before xmas, but haven’t had time/chance to do, but also some really interesting stuff to do with MMO narratives and maybe some quest designs, inspired by both my FYP research and my narrative for MMO modules.

For Gradex (presentation of final year projects) I’ve bought some map tiles and lots of D&D models, and I’m planning to create a campaign for some friends to run through to show off my sexy dungeon

So yeah, even though it’s super nerdy I might be DMing for a while

So here is a little update on my super boring life xD Just so you know I haven’t died. I’m just busy, yo.

Plus now I’m doing a masters year loads of AWESOME jobs come up. FFS. Not necessarily that I would have a chance, but yknow.

OH OH OH and I’m beta testing APB when I get home and get the chance to download it

I’ll tell you how AWESOME (or dissapointing) it is

Peace&Love

xxxxxxxxxx

Wondertoonel

Just a little blog post to mention my new favourite Artist.

I’ve always loved StumbleUpon for firefox for being the ultimate procrastination tool, but another reason why it is so awesome is for the little gems it occasionally throws my way.

Mark Ryden is a wonderful painter who captures an image of cuteness, creepy-ness, and pop-culture references – always with tasteful colour and composition.

An excerpt from his Biography found on his website here:

“Upon first glance Ryden’s work seems to mirror the Surrealists’ fascination with the subconscious and collective memories. However, Ryden transcends the initial Surrealists’ strategies by consciously choosing subject matter loaded with cultural connotation. His dewy vixens, cuddly plush pets, alchemical symbols, religious emblems, primordial landscapes and slabs of meat challenge his audience not necessarily with their own oddity but with the introduction of their soothing cultural familiarity into unsettling circumstances.

Viewers are initially drawn in by the comforting beauty of Ryden’s pop-culture references, then challenged by their circumstances, and finally transported to the artist’s final intent – a world where creatures speak from a place of childlike honesty about the state of mankind and our relationships with ourselves, each other and our past.”

Always a fan of regularly changing wallpapers, here is one I made earlier (Send me a Blue Peter badge, yeah?) taking a piece from his “Wondertoonel” site, and making it look like an actual wallpaper – HELL YEAH

(I know theres some smudging and stuff, but it only took like 2 mins, so it’s akay )

I would love to go to one of his exhibitions, but of course as usual nothing awesome like that ever happens in the UK -_-

haha :3

Role Playing: Character Bio

Something we’re doing in our Narrative for MMOs classes atm, which I’m finding really interesting, is Role Playing Seminars. It’s really cool to actually have a proper go in a decent environment where it’s a perfect balance of new role players and experienced, so you don’t end up with people being silly, and you don’t have the extreme elitism that you can find on some servers in WoW.

Since we all had WoW  accounts, it was done in WoW – and we had to come up with a Character, with a real bio, a back story, and some sort of quest for that character’s life journey to be heading towards.

It’s probably not that interesting lmao but I thought I’d post up my Bio here, and see what you all think. I’ve gone for a Troll this time (How I resisted Forsaken I’ll never know) but I did succumb to being a rogue, although I’ve been desperate to do a real role playing rogue since I first started playing them!

Anyway here goes:

Character Bio

Full Name: Lilíth Du Valle
In-Game Name: Lilíth
Nickname: Lil’

Guild: None as of yet.
Affiliation: Darkspear Tribe, Horde

Race: Troll
Class: Rogue
Professions: None as of yet.

Age: 24 – Young to Middle Aged Troll.
Sex: Female.
Weight: Around 190 pounds. Strong muscles.
Height: Around 6’6”

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral – she is a free spirit who caters to her own needs and looks after herself before others.

Personality: She is a very shy and quiet character, who is suspicious of everyone. She also dislikes magic users, due to incidents in her past, and suspects that all magic users may eventually turn to necromancy. She especially dislikes Blood Elves, as she sees their thirst for magic as weakness, and prefers the Orc mentality of a thirst for blood. For this reason she is much more likely to become friends with an Orc – or of course a fellow Troll, but in both cases she is more likely to trust a Sword-wielding character over a Magic user.
She doesn’t like to talk all that much, and would rather fade into the shadows and look after number one.
She does have a few friends, however, and to those she is fiercely loyal. Her friends all claim she is very tiresome, since at least once a week she will turn on them and accuse them of things they haven’t done – although it could be said that is all part of her charm!
She is named after the Mesopotamian Storm Goddess Lilith – named after the wind since when she is hunting her prey she is so silent one could mistake her for a summer breeze. Furthermore she is said to bring Illness, Disease and finally Death – her swift slices and crippling poisins mean no-one is likely to survive once she has them in her sights.

History: When she was a child, her parents, both members of the Darkspear Tribe, were taken against their will as members of the army of Zalazane – a witch doctor who used dark magic to rob Trolls of their free will and enslave them on the Echo Isles – an area of Azeroth which used to be sacred, a safe place allocated for the Trolls by Thrall himself. For this very reason she is now suspicious of everyone and everything – but especially magic users, fearing that they may turn to necromancy at any time.
Lil’ managed to escape, only just, by being swift and silent – the traits which have allowed her to survive all this time. As a child roaming helplessly through the unforgiving jungle, Lil’ became proficient at hunting beasts and repairing her wounds – which have resulted in her battle hardened exterior that she now has.
Her parents are long dead, and Lil’ has since found her way back into the World, once again taking her place as an honorary member of the Horde, but she remains forever bitter about the events of her past.

Because of the events of her past, Lil’s first Quest is to become strong enough to take on Zalazane ((Level 10)) and beat him in his hideout on Echo Isles. Although this may seem a small aim, it is a strong feat for Lil’ – who has had her life turned upside down by the evil troll since she was a child. Zalazane, however, is only a small fish in a big pond, and Lilíth’s biggest wish is that she could rid the whole world of Necromancy before she passed on to the next realm.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

So far these sessions have been really useful, since I’ve learnt so much about Warcraft Lore and Narrative which will be helpful in both the assignment and my (dreaded) FYP.

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh

Good times xD

Peace, Love and Necromancy

Yeti

xxx

Global Games Jam 2010

Those of you who know me may have noticed that I was online much less this weekend – and this was because of the Global Games Jam! For those of you who don’t know what the GGJ is, this is the website. It’s a 48 hour global event, where teams from around the world create games and break creative barriers based on a specific theme. For the first time ever a Jam ran near me – and so off I went with my bag of snacks and laptop to the Staffs Games Academy running site, which was in the Games Design labs at my university

Across the 48 hours there was much fun had, many pizzas eaten, and lots of crazy sleep deprivation – but maybe best of all was how much we all learnt, how we surprised ourselves with what we could acomplish in such a short time, and how many awesome friends we could make if we took a risk and were in groups with people we wouldn’t normally work with.

Here is an awesome picture of alllll the people who turned up for the weekend – a really surprising and awesome turnout

And ofc here is the most awesome team of all – the Orange Team!

There were lots of arguments to be had over what the exact type of game we would create would be – there was a severe divide in the group as some wanted to do a side scroller, some wanted to do a point and click, and some wanted to do something very similar to UT3. One thing we did decide on was the fact that we would use the UDK, since we didn’t have a designated programmer in our group, and we were all used to using the engine before.

After a couple of hours of whiteboard brainstorming and heated debates from some people, we finally rested on a compromise – a side scrolling multiplayer race, created in UT3 but with custom characters.

The name for our game was Chibi Chasers - an amazing idea from me of course, since yknow, they’re chibi, and they’re chasing… and it sounds like chubby chasers!! Ahaha I’m a genious..

We never really thought of this at the time, but after comments from people afterwards, yes, I suppose our game mechanics are a little like Mario Kart – apart from the obvious like you’re not in a Kart and you aren’t Mario XD

The theme for this year’s Jam was “Deception” and it was very interesting to see how everyone would interpret this differently. The way we incorporated this into the game was the fact that the player would have to decept the other players into running into traps they had set, which would then be triggered and have one of many negative effects on them. Another constraint for the game was that in each time zone, a certain item had to be included in the game. For our time zone, the things which had to be included were a Sink, Rink or a Wink. This was open to interpretation, although most people just included a sink as an easter egg in their level. As part of our level, one of the traps set off an icy floor trap, which would slow the other players. This was our way of incorporating a Rink, as in an ice rink

Here is a little video from Youtube filmed by Nia – introducing all of the groups from Staffs Games Academy

The first thing that we needed to sort out was the side scrolling, since that was the thing which was most different from the original engine. This proved to be a little bit more of a problem than we originally anticipated, since the actual mechanic worked fine, but getting the camera to follow the player properly, especially in the multiplayer modes.

So we needed lots of books and DVDs and stuff >.<

Here is a video of all the intial game ideas, again filmed by the lovely Nia

After some decision making, we decided on a basic story, which would be something around the theme of four factions racing after an object of power, which would then give that faction the advantage in the overall power-struggle. This is why all the characters are racing to get to the end of each level, and attempting to use the traps to stop the other players getting there first.

The four characters are somewhat loosely based on the four elements to represent the four factions.

These are:

• Credo – Credo is a spaceman. He represents the “Air” element.

• Stuane – Stuane is a rock elemental. He represents the “Rock” element.

• Jimbo – Jimbo is an Eskimo. He represents the “Water” element.

• And last but not least – Oswald – Oswald is a fire demon. He represents the “Fire” element.

(Some concept art for the fire demon, ensuring he fits to the Epic Rig whilst still maintaining the chibi elements of the character.)

Therefore in the character customization screen the player would select the character that they want to play as, and so which faction they want to represent.  There were no weapons in our game, and so the mouse click became a trap activation button, when the player walks over certain runes in the game and clicks, it will set a trap for the other player. This can also include other elements of deception such as the setting of fake platforms which have no collision model, causing the player to fall to their doom should they be fooled by these traps.

Overall the game wasn’t finished – but a prototype was created which provides a great example of what the game could be – which at the end of the day was the aim of the event.

There was a list of achievements that you could score extra points by incorporating, and we did aim to complete the one which stated that all music had to be created using body parts, and although the piece was recorded we didn’t manage to get it into the engine on time. Overall lots of Relentless was drank, and many sleeps were needed once we had finished. We were in E6 so long without even looking out of a window that we didnt even realise it was snowing until the Sunday:

Here is a video of the last 5 mins of the Jam, with some awesomely clever musical timing:

And here is our brain storming/organisation for the weekend (complete with Awesome Board and Moan Board)

And finally here is us uploading our game to the GGJ website at 3pm on Sunday!

It was soooo much fun, I really can’t wait till next year, it’ll be amazing!

Any of you that can make it to one, I would really recommend it – it’s hard work and tiring, but totally worth it and I’ve learnt so much! Only difference is, next year I’ll probably bring a sleeping bag so I wont have to walk home at 5am again for 2 hours sleep XD

AHH it was soo good

And the craziness that ensues after 23048230498 cans of Relentless and no sleep for two nights just cannot be missed

So yeah, see you next year if you can make it

Peace, Love and Chibi Chasers

xxx

Global Games Jam

Sorry I’ve not updated much, but I’m currently in e6 at Staffs Uni, participating in the 2010 Global Games Jam!

It’s awesome!

Got lots of photos, I’ll upload them when I’m done (:

Hope you’re all ok, and good luck to anyone else taking part <3

xxx