Little Big Planet
Here’s the analysis for Little Big Planet. I think I’ll also should take the opportunity to thank everyone for a fun and interesting course! 🙂
Best regards, Johan Hedberg
Trackmania Nations Forever
Hello everyone
Here is my game analysis on the racing/puzzle game Trackmania Nations Forever.
First i have a small power point presentation of the game that you can read. if you like it you can read the whole assignment.
I hope you guys will like it!
/Jonas Nilsson
Dennis Wikman: Mount & Blade
Hello, and good day, fellow internetlurkers! Finally, the day of our final assignment. I almost feel bad about not uploading any silly pictures in this post – but I guess you will have to make due without them.
Without further ado, here is my final assignment project. Enjoy!
And here is the entire thing, if you would really like to see what I’ve made. Don’t worry, it’s awesome.
Thank you, everyone, and have a great summer!
Jakob Lindh: Far Cry 2
Hi everyone!
Found below is my Final Assignmnet Game Analysis slide show of the PC-version of Far Cry 2, with the sup-topic being Far Cry 2 and player created content. If you want to read my entire report, it can be found in .pdf-format here, and in .doc-format here. The report also includes all references and bibliography.
The embedded slideshare-version of my slide show looks kind of wierd here and there for some reason, probably due to the upload, because it looks fine in the original file. Besides the slideshare-version found below, the slide show can also be found in better quality in .ppt-format here and in .pptx-format here.
The embedded slideshare-version found below has one point missing at the bottom of slide 13, which should read:
“Creating stories for roleplaying games.”
Some text is also missing at the bottom of slide 14. The entire sentence there should read:
“Having so many pre made objects makes you rather limited in how unique and original settings and surroundings you can create.”
All the cover art pictures found on page 4 of the “Game Analysis: Far Cry 2” report (linked above), and on slide 5 of the “Game Analysis: Far Cry 2” slide show (linked above and viewed below), are the property of their respective owners.
With some final words I would like to thank all the teachers and lecturers of this course, as well as my fellow students. It has been a very instructive and interesting time together and I have learned a lot during this course. Thank you all!
Enjoy the analysis!
Regards
Jakob Lindh
Time for presentations!
This is an example slide show of how to present your work to others. Enjoy reading!
(you can also download the presentation and use it as your template, if you wish to)
We have time until Sunday (31.5.2009; 23:00 CET) to have discussions over the presentations!
Prototyping
I will start off with a direct reference to this week’s lecture. When it comes to prototyping I think the question “Are the scavengers too superior compared to the builders?” is very appropriate. Mostly the scavengers in a game are the most popular characters, the ones that sell most. One can ask the question “why?”. Well it is probably the mystery and the human search for “normality” that makes it, I guess.
What was simple?
It was fairly easy to pick a game. I chose Pacman because it is famous and it is simple in a graphical point of view and therefore fairly easy to replicate.
I can not ignore the fact that I am kind of a sucker for pacman for its simplicity and it is still brilliant.
What was difficult?
As always I found it most difficult to decide the concept and the context for my replica. I think this process is what takes up most of my working time, the thoughts. Even though it was kind of hard to break down a concept to be workable I think the choice of an arcade game was good because they do not rely so much on its concept as a game.
What did I learn from the process?
The knowledge I got out of this weeks project was really to concretize concepts and thoughts. I also learn how hard they can be to implement in a context. To give prototypes meaning and make them work somewhat like a marketing strategy.
What I really created:
I started off my searching the web for inspirations and different old games. Early on I found Pacman and got convinced to try to get it into today. The first action I took with Pacman was to download a lot of bitmaps which could be traced easily.
I searched and found both Pacman and the game’s villains. When I had traces them all I decided to make a short animation of Pacman in Flash. That was my first “prototype”, not a physical one but a CG one.
Unfortunately it seems as you can not upload them (swiff- files) here?!
I had many thoughts on how I could create a physical prototype before I decided to print one of the traced bitmaps on high grade paper and just cut it out with scissors. Then I started to think of situations where Pacman could appear today, here are some:
What I wanted to create:
My first Idea was to make Pacman in Styrofoam and cut it out and paint it yellow but my ambitions got crushed when I realized how though it would be to get such a large piece. This concept was also going to result in photographs of pacman in different positions in today’s society.
Cheers!
/Fredrik Åström
Exploring QUAKE LIVE
Its Evaluation Time! This week we’ll be looking at the BETA version of Quake Live that can be played online at www.quakelive.com
First impression
Wow, now this is messy. Those were the very first thoughts I had when I stumbled in on the web site of Quake Live. Although the overall look & feel of the interface was smooth, colorful and futuristically cool I thought that there was no obvious way of knowing where to go. Of course, that was about the time I saw that Register button up in the toolbar, and then things went a bit better. One thing that annoys me in the graphics design is the dropdown shadow of the middle section. It bothers me that it is wider at the bottom and then narrows down further up on the screen. It doesn’t feel right. I think it might have something to do with the darker section in the upper part of the page, something that implies that the light comes in from the top and down. But since the dropdown shadow is wider at the bottom that indicates that the light is displayed from underneath and upwards. These two contradictions makes the page feel “funny” or “not quite right”. One thing I did like however was the progress indicator showing while the page was being loaded. Having visual feedback during lengthy operations is a good way of indicating to the user that the application is still alive but currently busy processing something else.
Input validation works fine
The first thing I did, being the curious one that I am, was to test the input form. It had been divided into three steps, like a wizard, which is always a user friendly way to handle a situation where the user has to enter a lot of information at the same time. At first I tried not to enter any fields at all, but threw myself directly on the Next button instead. It turned out they had a fairly solid validation process for the input data.
If something had been left out, a little red/orange label was displayed under the control with the missing value. One thing I did not like about the form was the dark red color for displaying the error message at the top, right under the page’s title. Against the dark gray background of the page, that red color could be a bit hard to read. For people with vision problems, like color blindness, the text would probably be even more difficult to see.
The art of naming
Then came the next challenge, naming your character. Like with any other globally spread online service today, coming up with a unique identifier is almost an impossible task by itself. I went from everything between MrPink to silly names like TheCookieMonster, but no matter how hard I tried there always seemed to be someone else out there who had thought of it first. Finally, I found my new alias – CobolHacker. (Note: I did try just Cobol at first but obviously, that was already taken as well).
Confirmation e-mail
Once all the details had been entered in the form, it was time to click Next to proceed to the e-mail confirmation step of the process. Now this is where my problems started to appear.
I did receive the e-mail pretty short after it had been sent from the web site. It contained a link and an activation code. I took the code and went back to the web form which was now at Step 2/3 – account activation. I entered the code in a small textbox and clicked on the Next button. Funny enough, I was redirected to the same page. So I tried to enter the code again, but this time it said that the account had already been activated. But how was I to get to Step 3? There was a link on the form for requesting a new confirmation e-mail. I clicked it, but received no new mail. This was probably because the account already was activated, but if that was the case there should have been an information message to the user about it. There was none.
I went back to the original e-mail and tried to click on the URL provided. Well, that actually got me to the downloading page. But I had to click twice on “Download” to obtain the MSI-file. It got caught by the security filter of my browser, so I had to manually approve to retrieve the file.
Executing the msi and installing the plug-in went fine. No problems there. I re-opened my browser to have a go at playing. First you had to choose a character from a selection of various figures. You could also customize the controls if you wanted to. Bu then when I was to start playing a looping screeching sound appeared from my speakers and the game froze. This was at the same time as the welcome message was displaying, so the game hadn’t actually started yet. I tried to re-open the browser to start all over. I selected a character, went to the playing area and the game froze again. Crap.
I tried to navigate myself back a few pages but ended up with a big error message on screen saying:
“An instance of Quake Live is already running. Please close this web page.
Error Code: 3
Click close to reload the page.”
So I clicked Close but got the same error page. I tried again – same error. Once again I closed my browser, re-opened it, and went back to Quake Live. When I logged in with my credentials, I was shown that same error AGAIN. Is there no way to end that session?! So there was not much more for me to do – I went to bed. This morning (10 minutes ago) I tried to log in once more. Guess what? Same error.
So it seems that my account is stuck somewhere out there in hyperspace, in a nasty jungle of error code 3’s, forever useless…
/Johan Hedberg
Killzone2 Annoyances
This week’s blogging assignments contains the option to ‘playtest’ a game and
look for bugs or flaws. As the topic of this post suggests I am taking a closer
look at Killzone 2 on the PS3.
The most obvious bug in Killzone2 is that it crashes. The game doesn’t crash a
lot, but sometimes, suddenly right in the middle of a game it freezes. Sometimes
it is enough to hold down the PS-button on the remote and exit the game and
start it again, sometimes you have to restart the console. Had this been a game
on Windows I would have just shrug and blamed the OS or graphics drivers, those
crashes are not that frequent after all, but on a console? I don’t think I
should have to suffer random crashes on a console, while I am pretty new to the
PS3 I have never had a game crash on me on the Xbox, GameCube or Wii. I think
fixing the crashing is simply a matter of reviewing crashdumps, but perhaps the
PS3 is more complex than that to work with.
Anyway, such matters are not really interesting, run another Q&A cycle and
you should have them sorted out. What I find more intriguing is stuff that is
broken by design, the ‘features’ that someone deliberately designed that way,
and it makes for a worse game. For the rest of this blog post I will address
what I perceive to be such flaws.
Controller precendence
There has been some uproar in the community over the sluggish controls, but this
is not what I am having problems with, the game is supposed to be slower and
more tactical. Being able to read the game and place yourself in the right
position is more important than a straight and quick aim, in my opinion. But the
way that the controls are prioritized are plain broken. The game makes a
difference between walking and running, while you walk you can shoot, while you
run you can’t. Straight and simple. But, if I am running down a corridor and
suddenly press the fire button to shoot (presumably because an enemy turned a
corner and started firing at me), what is the anticipated response from the
game? Spend a few moments here, try to visualize the situation and form your own
opinion. Ready?
In my opinion the character should stop running and shoot. Ordering the game to
shoot seems to me to be something that has higher priority than running. This
is not how the game prioritizes the controls though, it merrily keeps you
running until you manually stop or slow down to a walk, only at then may you
return fire.
This I perceive to be a flaw in the game. Simply giving the shooting higher
priority in interpreting the controls would solve the issue. You still have to
wait though the animation of bringing the weapon up in the firing position
again, so anyone waiting for you would still have the edge in the exchange of fire.
Controller precendence again
In Killzone2 you are limited to two weapons at a time, one being your main gun
(a rifle, rocket launcher, shotgun, sniper rifle or whatever) and the other
being a pistol or revolver. The game also is somewhat realistic, in the sense
that your guns fire ordinary bullets instead of fancy futuristic rays, so you
have to reload the gun every so often. Sometimes during the game you may come
into the situation that your magazine gets empty, while there still are highly
hostile enemies close by, shooting at you. Early in the (online) game you are
limited to the pistol, that has so low stopping power that it is next to
useless, better to wait through the reloading animation, hoping that the enemies
are bad shots. But later, once the revolver has been unlocked it is usually
advantageous to change weapon and continuing the firing with the revolver and
save the reloading of the main weapon until a later time when you are in less of
a peril.
To change weapon you press the change weapon button on the controller once, and
the weapon is changed, do it again, and you change back. Again and again you can
press it, cycling back and forth between your main weapon and the (useless)
pistol or revolver. That is, as long as you are not reloading your main weapon,
something that is automatically initiated as soon as you fire the last shot in
the magazine. Because the game will not listen to that change weapon request if
you are in the middle of a fight and reloading, not unless you press the change
weapon button TWICE!
This I perceive to be a flaw in the game. It could be fixed by giving the change
weapon button higher priority over whatever it is that causes the reloading to
continue.
/Wilhelm Person
Introduction to Game Design - Group 3 
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