CDN Speedgame 2018

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/43670

6-10-2018 CDN Speed Game rough draft idea

Inspirational Bible Text:

1 Thess. 5:11

Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another, even as also ye do.

Story:

The story is about a young boy, whose friend had committed suicide, latter on that night, the boy has a dream that he has assembled a super team of kids to save the city from depression.

Game Title:

The Encouragement Kids

Game Overview:

The Encouragement Kids is an open-world Christian game where you must find a set number of depressed people in town and encourage them with uplifting bible text.

Game Highlights:

Open World City – with 3 time variations (As Speed Game Timeline allows), Day (skybox sunny), Evening (skybox red), Night (skybox night)

Collect Bibles – they keep you alive, like rings in sonic

Defeat Depression Spirits – they are the bad guys

Find Citizens – to encourage, some maybe locked away by the depression demons, and need to unlocked by finding nearby switches

Unity Assets:

Game Template: Bumper Engine by SuperSonic68, based on LakeFeperd's HedgePhysics

(Sonic Adventure Style) -

Buildings/ skyboxes/ vehicles – Hammer 2

Enemies - Armored Guardians – Depression Spirits

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41230

Dialog Engine – Will use either of these

NPC Chat - Dialogue & Event Trigger System

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/9723

Localized Dialogs & Cutscenes (LDC)

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/5020

Player Characters:

Scripture Bot – RoboDude

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13319

Bible Bunny (Grey Male)

Hymnal Hare (White Female) - Toon Bunny

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/50273

Stoic the Android - Platforming Game Development Kit

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/28476

Deborah - Cute Casual Female

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/12308

Daniel - Cute Male Hoodie

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/12064

Solomon - Cute Male 2

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13331

Sheba - Cute Female 2

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14144

Lydia - Female 3

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34929

Levi - Cute Male 3

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/18090

City Citizens - 32 Extra Human Pack (depreciated)

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/20291

Mini Map System - DragNDrop Minimap(Radar)

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/91675

Will try to work on a proper game design document today

Burnerknight StudiosSubmitted6 years ago

This looks like it'll be fun! Looking forward to your next updates!

It is good someone took a heavy topic (suicide) to see what comes out of it. Perhaps some worthy idea to be reused in some bigger product even. Although, right now it seems bit strange, a heavy topic, yet it seems like a light game? But maybe I am just not able to vision it right. Also, one thing to take into consideration when dealing with topic like suicide is the conclusion they came about talking of that subject. For they had this talk show where they were hoping to prevent suicides, and that show resulted in more suicides happening that night.
Social psychologists came to conclusion that when ever suicide is even talked about, it becomes more acceptable. That people who are thinking of suicide, one thing keeping them from doing that is, that they feel it is not acceptable to do so. So when it is being talked on TV, or it is told on newspaper that someone else have done, then they feel like it is more acceptable for themselves too to do it. Hence, be careful how you handle this topic.

Thanks for the heads up about possibly glorifying suicide. I'll change my backstory. I had hoped to approach such a deep and heavy subject, mainly due to the 2 celebrities that recently committed suicide, while the topic was fresh in the public eye. The light and cartoony presentation was not to take away from the seriousness of the topic of suicide or depression, but use it as an easier way to break the ice on such a subject. I'm sure that you have heard of 'Bert the Turtle' and the whole concept of "Duck and Cover", which dealt with the very serious subject matter of nuclear threats upon America. This message was presented to hundreds of schoolchildren with a cartoon turtle and a catchy little jingle, followed by live action demonstrations of ducking and covering. What this does is catches your attention and helps you to remember the topic more easily than if you had someone just start with an explanation or expounding on a subject. But, thanks again mentioning how I may actually end up doing the reverse of what I had hoped and intended to do with my speed game.

idlministry6 years ago

I like your idea for a game. Continue in prayer and ask God to guide you as you are dealing with the subject. Things that are personal and passionate for us is one way God uses us to do certain tasks. I think one way we can keep from glorifying the idea of suicide is by helping people realize the affect their actions have on those family members and friends left behind, especially children. They need to think of those things and also realize that tomorrow is a new day. God is sovereign and in control. Somehow, they need to change their perspective and see some hope for a better tomorrow.

Commenting about that suicide topic again, this might be useless, since I dont know what to think of this myself either. But in these maybe two last days, it seems that suicide topic keeps popping up to me from all around. Perhaps God is trying to tell me something that I am not able to understand. One possibility could be that there is either in world right now something about suicide topic going on all around, either in positive or negative sense, or then it might be just around me, and maybe even part of it is that you will talk about the subject something that no one else can.

As example about the topic popping up is that there was this facebook update about a guy i knew who died three years ago. I always thought he died of natural cause like hear attack, but today i saw hes wifes post where she started that it is now three years since her husbands suicide. So maybe you shouldnt give up that topic just like that because of what i warned earlier, but pray about it first. Maybe it is such a time, that you even have some message about it, or maybe someone else figures it out while playing your game. So pray about it.

I like the idea of helping depressed people. Can't wait to see this game come about.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LaypVSMan8AG1C7iEvSPqHUVR2U4fe_u

Just finished my Design Doc. This is the first time I've ever actually made one! Hopefully it will help me to stay on task!

The Encouragement Kids - Design Document

Christ GamesSubmitted6 years ago

Impressive doc. :)

Burnerknight StudiosSubmitted6 years ago

Great design doc!

Made a tiny bit of progress. Got most of the art assets into the bumper engine in unity. Managed to reskin the Sonic Motobug enemy into a Depression Spirit. Also, managed to reskin one of the 10 playable characters (flat poly Mania Sonic), however since the Bumper Engine characters all use Generic mecanim animations, and I prefer to use Humanoid (makes it easier to share animations between characters, in my opinon) I used the animations from the SD Unity-chan Adventure Action Pack. It took a few tries to get it right, but 1 down and 9 more to go...(or I may want to consider having fewer playable characters since they will mostly all play similarly to each other unless I can convert the Generic animations to Humanoid). I am still staying prayerful about how to bring up the topic of suicide in this game, if I will even at all in this game, or if I should make a completely different game, more serious to tackle the issue. Will keep everyone posted.

Christ GamesSubmitted6 years ago

A short video of day 2 progress

Wow that is a lot of progress in two days. Looking good.

Nothing much to post for the last 2 days. Yesterday after work and dinner, went to prayer meeting and after that went to bed. Today, after work and dinner, I put the finishing touches on another game jam game. Definitely tomorrow i'll be back working on my CDN speed game.

Looks like a fun playstyle. I like the city in the background and the stadium in front. looking forward to playing it.

Made a little bit of progress today. I recorded 2 songs for the game that my wife played on the keyboard and got 2 more characters reskined. 3 characters down and 7 more to go!

Made a bit more progress today. Got the rest of the 7 characters reskinned, managed to get a game play flow from title screen to character select to stage select to actual level. Made a game play vid, currently waiting for it to upload to youtube. While playing saw a few character select name stuff I need to change, and found out one of the player characters pause menu is all jumbled up. Next up is implementing the dialog / encouragement interactions, followed by pickup item and enemy placement.

Here is the test video from yesterday

Looking pretty good so far. You've put a lot of work into it. Looks like its shaping up into a fun and charming little game.

Hello everyone. Sorry if I seemed to drop off the face of the Earth. I just had waaay more problems with my speed game than I anticipated. 1st of all, having 10 playable characters meant testing 10 different characters, and I still don't think I gave each character proper bug testing sessions, so it may be some bugs in the final project.

Also, most assets for dialog or even the waypoint arrow that I wanted to implement are setup for a single player character, in the game scene, at game start, and not multiple player characters that are added to the game scene at run time.

It took alot of time (and prayer) to get the game working in a somewhat close manner to how I originally envisioned it. Also, there was sooo much stuff I added. Strangely, it was not feature creep (which usually hits hard about week 2 of speed game for me), but it was actually sticking to my design doc. I hadn't realized that I had actually overreached quite a bit in my initial concepts for my speed game. But with some help from the Lord and some perseverance, my final project should be about 80 - 85% of what my original concept was for my speed game. I know that some features where there as a "only if time permits" scenario, but strangely enough, most stuff made it into the final.

For example, the day, evening , and night variations (although in my opinion, evening looks the best, and night isn't dark enough) made it into the final, although the citizens to find are all the same number, instead of incrementing as the day drew on.

Also, I was starting to fear that because I was adding so much to my game, that Unity was eventually going to just throw a fit and just not work anymore or I import some asset and completely mess up all of my project settings. Thankfully, even with almost 18 different unity store assets added and everything was still working fine, Praise God!

In hindsight, I really think I could've made a much nicer, (and less stress inducing) and simpler game and just called it a day. All in all, I like my speed game, only because of how much effort I put into it (and how much fighting and prayer went into it). I honestly don't know how fun it is, or how easy or hard it is, or how Christian it is (I mean it is, if you read the dialogs, but if you don't read the dialogs then I guess its not actually). Hopefully, someone, somewhere will find it to be a blessing.

Just upped my game... and found out that Hymnal Hare is actually Bible Bunny.

I mean I know they were supposed to be a simple palette swap anyway but... I don't think I have enough time to re-export and re-upload the 4 files (webgl, win, mac and linux executables)

ugh... beta / bug testing... there's nothing else like it...

So I did manage to squeeze in a bit of time to fix the Bible Bunny / Hymnal Hare palette swap and to make the night time stage "bluer" and reupload them this morning. Also, you could check out the webgl version if you didn't want to download the game just yet.

Great to hear! Can't wait to play.

I played through the day stage and then moved on to next, but seems like they all the same, just different graphics, right?

GamesForFun, you are correct. The 3 different times of day all have the same level, just different musics and skyboxes. I originally intended to have 20 civilians on day, 30 on evening and 50 at night, but due to time constraints, they all are the same.

Ah, that explains it then. Thought you were just one of those skin fans that you wanted to give player a choice to do same thing on day, evening and night time.

My thoughts about your game then.

First of all, I like to point out that your game is bit of a miss to me, since I am not the correct audience, since I dont really care of skins. I have never quite understood why does someone want to pay one euro to get virtual sofa on their virtual home. Therefore obviously you having 10 different characters didnt mean much to me, as they seemed to work pretty much the same anyway, in which case to me it doesnt really matter that much to have that many different characters that do the same. Buy and girl i well understand etc. But all in all, i dont care so much of that.

Another thing that i havent liked in christian games have been the idea of throwing bible verses around interrupting the game every now on then without actual good point with them (but you mentioned in dev blog you were actually planning to have some sensible structure to them, which had been much better), however, to this I have to say that playing your game made me change my thought on that a bit.

Anyway, graphics were nice and worked fine for a free game. Obviously movement wasnt as nice as in 3D super Marios, but then again, that seems to be extremely hard thing to do, since even commercial Super Mario like games seem to fail to do that properly, hence i suppose it is just amazingly difficult thing to achieve, and your level of fluidness is probably already good.

The first thing that sticked to my ear this time, was the title music. It was very different kind of title music i had hear before, and I have to say that i liked it. However, as ingame music it didnt work so well anymore, although, later bit more about this.

It felt fun double jumping around, and basically jumping on enemy felt like you jumped on top of them, although aiming was difficult and the bounce effect many times made the game very hard, especially with those enemies appearing back.

It was especially difficult on that one point where there were two enemies in front of a doorway which was bit too small to be jumping inside. I jumped on top of them both, and ended up to be jumping towards wall, when i finally got to doorway, the enemy was already back there and chaced me. Because there was not enough space to jump properly, i couldnt jump inside that room space anymore on top of the enemy and he got me, repeatedly.

Which reminds me of a second point. It was very annoying going back to start place everytime. I would have preferred there to be more spawning points to get at least bit closet. Especially on that before mentioned place it was boring going back log way to that same place three times just to die there again.

I like very much from the structure upon in which order the kids were supposed to be talked. That pathway was somewhat exciting even. First you just go around find kids in open spaces, which is nothing exciting, but since its beginning, just finding a kid is exciting. Then comes the first switch guy, and right after that came the railway tunnel. That was instantly exciting going on that tunnel. Then back to streets for a while, and then goes inside that building, which was exciting again, couple of kids on street again, and then to that parking lot, and finally get to that ring, which i liked too, that you aimed at ring and at beginning again to finish the level. I think that structure was very good, that basically my only complain about that is, that there were too many kids to be rescued.

Oh, and the Christiandevs and GCDC signs were nice touch in that city. Also that kid beside that sign was nice.

Basically I had hoped buildings to be more jumpable, i enjoyed at one point when i ws able to climb couple of roofs up and jump from roof to roof, but it was only veruy short fun, it wasnt really designed so i could keep doing that continuosly, i had also hoped more kids to be found that way, and one thing i was looking forward had been to find one kid in some very narrow path between buildings, since thanks to arrow, that had been very much doable, but there never was one. On that parking lot there was also another puzzle element possiblity that could have been used, thanks to arrow again. For in that parking lot at one point i went towards the arrow, an suddenly it turned around, then i took a closer look, and i noticed it was pointing up at one point. At that point i realised there is another floor to this parking lot, but where to get there? That was bit of fun too figuring that out. So things like that could have been done by purpose to the game where you see where the arrow is pointing at, but question is, how do i get there. Or maybe even see kid on edge of building from outside, but question is how to get there from inside to reach him.

SoundFX was very good and worked during the whole game. No complains there. All the jumps, hits etc. sounded proper and well and made the game better.

But then comes the music again. Ingame music didnt really hit me and it didnt feel very much like it belonged there. However, at same breath I am going to mention that I have disliked the idea of throwing bible verses around the game just to make it christian game, but i changed my view after playing your game a bit. For while it was bit slow tempoed etc. making it not too exciting game, I however realised something else. It was almost enjoyable playing that game relaxingly with that somewhat relaxed music on background and then getting those bible verses thrown every now and then.

I could actually see that this kind of game could be done in such way that you do some relaxing activity that doesnt take much brain activity to do and relax in it with nice relaxing scenery, nice relaxing tasks, nice relaxing music, and then those bible verses comes every now and then. I could see myself enjoying something like that, since i noticed that at one point playing your game, i almost did enjoy those bible verses for a while. Was just going forward aiming at kids and got another verses again. Quite nice and relaxing, probably got interrupted by either somethign exciting happening, or some enemy killing me ruining the relax mood.

All in all, not a bad entry. It has a lot of promise, there are good concepts in this game and good ideas, and level structure is to some extent even quite good, it is just missing too much at this point to really be a good game. But I could see this either becoming that before mentioned relaxing game with not that much effort, or with more effort it could become even a very worthy exciting game, for it does have lots of good exciting pieces, just not enough yet and it comes short on some departments, like game consists too much of just wandering around when at same time player is expecting some marioish action. Of course if you would go and aim at that relaxing game, then that wandering would be a good thing and you should try to get it even more and try to pace the game even more relaxing, right now the pace is clearly towards more exciting game, and you have even done that very well in my opinion. I very much liked the pacing when thinking that you would be able to complete the game straightaway without dieing and in right order.

Oh, and while i dont really appreciate those skins personally, i think it is a good idea, especially if it be relaxing game in which case things like that would be more of importance.

Hey Bugala, thanks for the review!

By the way, I really love your reviews as they are so through.

Yeah, about the number of players, it was actually more of a hassle than I expected it to be. The game template that I used had 10 characters so I figure as to not break anything to keep 10 characters. The characters pretty much all play the same, so you can pick one you like and not be at a disadvantage for not choose a specific character.

Another thing, the bumper engine is made formaking games like the Dreamcast era Sonic Adventure games, that focus on speed based platforming, not really exploration type platforming, although that's what I was going for with my speed game. Myself personally, I don't think that an open world sonic game would work too well, but I decided to give it a try anyhow.

Also, level design / level difficulty has always been something that I have struggled with. Again, I could have implemented more, level design wise, if I didn't have to fight with getting the dialog and way point arrow to work with 10 different players. That alone ate up most of my 2nd week of speed game.

Lastly, I always have a struggle with designing bible games, as I want to present the Bible, without seeming too preachy or not making a lack of Bible knowledge a game penalty. I wan't my games to be a way to learn more and not make you fell bad if you you don't know any. And this always seems to be a challenge.

And lastly, lastly all of the music in my game was played on keyboard by my lovely and talented wife. She loves to play hymns and I love how she plays. I know not all of my speed games have used christian music, some used royalty free music without words or chiptune music. I know that not everyone will like christian music, so there is an option to turn the in game music off, so you can listen to your own music as you play, if you wish.

But definitely the biggest take away I got from this years speed game was to not think big. Think small, and as time allows, get bigger.

God Bless!

Sketche99, please get in touch with me to claim your prize.