Hello everyone! It has been two weeks! Ain't that crazy? I know my activity has been somewhat sparse but I try to keep things updated in here. Still between school, work and this crazy Jam, I had a lot to do. And so I have a lot to talk about in that regards.

The jam was organized by game for change and the french embassy in the US in association with Unity. It mixed together student from Senegal, France, the USA and Canada.
Long story short it was amazing and people were very supportive. I might post my face because I did a couple of interviews and talks so I might post my face here and there.
Anyway we had one week while being in school or working or internship, whatever. But we had to work on a small game around the theme "Amplifying Voices". We chose to talk about livestock that gets massively killed everyday. Since pigs are really compassionate and smart. We chose to control a pig. Since I love the Nine Inch Nails song, we named the game Piggy!
You can play it here!

We didn't have a lot of time but I decided to invest my days I was working on City of Love into Piggy. I didn't extensively worked and once tired, went to sleep, took break. And all that beautiful stuff.
We thought at first about some game ideas, but we liked the idea of being a truck driver that didn't know was delivering live stock to be killed. From that idea we turned it around on its head a bit, and we wanted to make a horror game where you are the livestock to make the main interaction with the game being around empathy.
​I also love horror games, like a lot.
I was the programmer and I took a bit of the role of technical lead, offering advice and help to my team mates, as well as doing demos, teaching unity, and doing a bit of coordination with time zone. And it worked really well. I'm really happy about that.
Our artist and other programmer had very busy schedule. The other programmer had a bit of Unity experience prior to this jam but not a lot. And our level designer was not used to the tasks needed for the jam.
Still they all managed pretty well.

Here's a breakdown of how it all went

With time zone and constraint and school work, we needed tools to be able to relay work without being necessarily present. Here's what we did set up for that.

As you can see, it was heavily used by the end, also I crunched a bit there to finalize the project. Very sorry about that. It was an ok crunch and it was only one night. Still you will see the scope was a bit too big.

This way we can put some work to be done there and someone can just take it and work with it. I also took the time to put some gifs and steps on how it works, especially for the butcher, the only enemy in the game.

Every time some work needed to be potentially done by someone other than me, since I made all the architecture, I would give samples examples and assets to help other devs do the tasks that were asked for the game.

Communication

Even though we have all that going for us, brainstorming, talking and having an actual conversation about stuff might be needed. In that regard we asked the organizer over discord to set things up for us to share progress to the team so they have an idea on how the game is going on as well as meeting once per day if we can to talk about what's going on and what's a priority.

Everyone did that, not just me or Mouhamadou!

And with all that set up we can focus heavily on developing while being sure that important dev informations could be conveyed throughout those tools.

(I used a lot of reference through the editor for my designers, and it ended up being a problem, I'll bring that up later)

Merged all that work together

So far, project seems to be going pretty smoothly. Every technology that needed to be imported was imported. And I need to start creating more game specific features.

As always, progression is going smooth, but as you might see, assets are yet to be implemented. With everyone schedule it was hard to have them early on and so I did my best to make prefabs as well as placeholder stuff to be able to implement that quickly. That way, with minor tweaks, the whole game would be ready to ship.

Did you know that using events everywhere makes some assets and function unavailable ?
I use a lot of Unity Events so everything can be set in game like call a music or a sound to be played. Well unity events CAN'T interact with audio sources or Playable assets.
Made me stay way too late on night to fix the build.
After fixing that I did...

An interactive title screen

...and everything nice!

Anyway after a lot of work, our level designer went and replaced all the prefabs and made the game that we had in the end. As you can see, a lot of worked was put into details and some late additions made the workload a bit strong at the end. But not so much.
We were very ready and we had a lot of information to just adapt and make the game like it was.

As usual a bit more time for polishing the level design and the game as a whole once everything was imported would have improved a lot the game. But still, all the audio work that you can't see there and all of the ambiance worked really made the game.

​I'm so proud!

On a more personal level, during the Jam, as I said earlier, we were asked to participate in zoom calls, meetings, feedback sessions and such.
If you don't know me... Even if you know me you might think I'm a pretty social person. It may be true, in an environment I can adapt, small talk, make jokes and just like being your everyday co worker, or student pal or anything.
But this is not my comfort zone, I learned the skill but it wasn't innate if I may say.

Well...

Out of my nature, I participated a lot during the session through writing or vocal. The reason why was that people were pretty shy at the beginning, and as an aspiring game dev that gets oneself into situations to understand things in a more thorough manner, I know how much feedback and participation is important. Especially from other game devs.
And so since it was pretty quiet I stressed out and I did talk. I gave feedback as honestly and openly as I could and did everything I wish I had when it came to encouragement and feedback as a game dev.
At first I felt pretty alone but once I shared that I felt I talked too much a lot of people gave me a lot of praise. And it was very heartfelt and wholesome and...

I don't know, I'm just so thankful about all these people.
They rock.

But yea it was very wholesome and eye opening and I feel more confident into helping others and doing it in a way that would benefit them. And I'm happy I could learn that. I think it was one if not the most important thing I take out of this jam.

Wanna check the code out?
​
You can download the whole project here: Click me!
You'll need Unity 2020.3

City of Love is still on hold!

I know it sucks I want to keep doing it...

BUT!

I have friends in need of help that are doing some small scaled projects for their studies. I'm helping in the art and sound department. It will improve my art, and will allow me to have some more credits on some more project which is good for personal growth but also I get to help an old friend on a project and make it better than what it would have been if he worked on it on his own.

So far not much work was done but here are some rejected arts!

That's it for this week, I'll keep you in touch with the other project progress and hope I can get back into my passion project soon!

Until next time!

I don't want to go in any detail as it was gruesome. I'll just say, nothing Covid related! Anyway I was literally stuck in bed for a whole weak. I still tried to work but I couldn't go as far as I wanted. Didn't open the project. Just added the new team member to the project and shared all my work file with them. But that was it.

Still I did a lot of thinking, especially since I had someone to talk to and dive deep inside my project and there were some unanswered question I had to deal with. And I answered the most important one of them all.

First thing I did is I created a visual research document. I already had all that in mind but in order to convey an idea about what the game is going to be, I have to make clear and precise examples. I love video game above else but I also love cinema, especially animation. Luckily I have now a beta account to SHOTDECK which allows me to take good screenshots of movie shots to convey my visual ideas for the game.
You also can check my visual document here as it gets updated and I'll share a few screens if you don't have the patience.

Here you can see that direct movie comparaison can shine what Paris looks like compared to, even if retro, a US city

Here you can see a direct comparaison of urban poly games that have a good look but not specifically suited for my game. A good balance would be an in-between those two pictures as a game style.

So as you can see. Even in my state, work has been done but it's not super impressive if I may say so hahaha. Still I'm glad I was able to do something at least.

For a long time, I knew the game was going to be about someone that fights, and struggle. And I had to have game mechanics around that but I didn't want them to be secondary to the story. It's a game. Gameplay should be a center part to the narrative and the narrative a center part to the gameplay. Not two separated entities.
I know the main character first choice is non lethal combat. And I loved some ways of fighting in some games that seemed powerful while not killing the enemy. Its then I realized unique games that were openworld or somewhat openworld where I loved the feel and gameplay behind fighting.

For the feel, someone that I know a lot of people love deerly.

Tifa feels very powerful with just fist and kicks. She can kill with them, but she can also powerfully knock out enemies with that. And I want the player to feel as powerful as Tifa when playing my game.

If you didn't know, Dead Island has a unique combat control system that has a very heavy impact in the gameplay. The analogue mode allow you to lock on an enemy and swing your right joystick in any direction in order to aim at limbs or push an enemy towards a certain direction.
ITS AMAZING.
You can break specific arms in order to prevent them from fighting and in this video we can see the player just launching zombies overboard by specifically swimming from right to left.
It's unique, it uses dynamically the environment as well as interact a lot with a simple zombie enemy, it brings a lot of variety and I want that to be center in my game. Top down will allow to project on top of the verticality our enemies in a number of ways. And believe me, I'll make that awesome.

Finally, a game that uses a lot of melee fighting, and in first person, is an early Arkane title (that is amazing, play it if you didn't) that is called Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Arkane used the source engine, that was made by valve and used in every game they made, because of its heavy physic oriented design. They used the engine not only for puzzle but in fights as well.
The fighting is still pretty simple but the level design makes up for that. It even makes it super good with traps, empty space and all that kind of juicy things to use during enemy encounter to use the environment as a weapon.
If I can mix all that in my top down that uses verticality... I will be able to make a game with unique fighting style that will allow for very good gameplay on top of a game with, I hope, a good narrative.

I never talked about it, but I also wanted these logs to share more than just me working on a project. I wanted to share a little bit of myself. So if I get the time and I heal, I will also sometimes post about two things I really want to express.
The thing is, right now it feels a bit pointless as (it's not bad in any way) these logs don't have a big audience and so my thoughts will be for myself only. And what I'd really want when sharing an opinion is to have someone with a different opinion. So we can share arguments about why and elevate both our opinions and construct them better, improve them.

​Anyway. I have always some insight that needs someone to contradict them, especially towards gaming and game experiences. Recently I've played a bunch of ps4 exclusives that happens to be HUGE OPEN WORLDS WITH PLAY TIME SUPER LONG, and while I have nothing against the gendra, I have some criticism that I'd like to state. Like why most of them can't handle an ending that feels complete narrative and gameplay wise? It has to have something to do with how much you stretch both of them for such a long experience but some studios like Rockstar manage to make their ending super good so...

Anyway I'd like to do entire articles about that. Also I'd like to share stuff I love, like movies or taking screenshots of games.