I’ve been working on trying to come up with some games that can be played using the current engine that I have put together.
While coming up with ideas for the games I have to take into consideration the limited space available on the page of the sketchbook.

I have come up with a simple game concept which can be seen in the video below.  The objective is to collect the item that is placed in a random position on the page. Once you collect the item you get a point and the item then moves to another random location. In order for you to be able to reach the item when it is in a position that is higher than that which the character can jump, the player can draw on the page to create platforms that the character can then jump on to reach the items that are higher up.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

To give the game an objective and a challenge I will add a timer that will count down from one minute. The challenge is to collect as many of the pips in the minute as possible. Because the items are placed at random positions the game will be different every time, this will hopefully add to the reply-ability of the game. Also once I add a timer people will try to beat their own or other people’s scores making them want to play again.

A lot of games use timer based puzzles and challenges to add reply value to a game. Because the rounds are short people won’t mind having another go.

While looking around the Information super highway today I came across a cool collection of flash games/tutorials that attempt to teach you some of the basic elements of game design. The series has a brief look at how people understand the rules of a game, interactivity, what makes a game hold the player’s attention and many other subjects.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

I found these useful in helping me plan my own games

The Sony Eye Pet is a cool little project that is currently in development. It caught my eye because it’s mixing real life and digital images together letting people interact with the character on screen in interesting ways. This is obviously only a trailer so it’s hard to tell exactly what you are able to do with the creature, but it does look an interesting piece.

This is a cool little video of a project that is very similar to what I’m trying to do. Its a game of pong being played on a white board.

The ball is being projected onto the whiteboard and is able to detect when it comes into contact with the black lines. They draw lines to bounce the ball back to each other.

Because the character looked so flat in my last test with the box idea I decided to try and create a 3d that would hopefully look more natural and realistic when projected into the box.

I tried designing a quick gradiant character at first rather then going right in and making a fully 3d model.

This didn’t really work out and so I ended up creating a proper 3d character.

I created a character and animated a quick walk cycle using 3DsMax and the exported the animation as images with a transparent background so I could then rearrange them within flash so the animation was on a movieclips timeline. I then added a drop shadow and some slight blurring to the edges of the character so that it would blend nicely when it was projected into the box. I then projected the character.

Below is a video of it in action

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

I was really pleased with the result from this. From certain angles it actually looked as though the character was walking within the box. The thing that I found really striking was how the character actually cast its own reflection within the platform below it, adding to the realism.

While looking at this I started to come up with loads of different ideas of how I could develop this further. I spoke with some of our tutors and showed them the videos that I had taken of this in action. They also seemed to like the idea, however they felt that it was a different project to my original plan and felt that I would be better off focusing all of my attention on one area. So I had to decide to either continue to develop the box idea or stick to my original plan with designing my project around the sketch book.
As I have come so far with the sketchbook idea I felt it would be wisest to continue with my original plan and perhaps develop this one further if I have time at the end of this project or after I have completed the EMP.

Part of my plan in developing this project further was to see how the character looked when projected on different surfaces. I liked the idea of the character being able to jump around on physical objects. So I came up with the idea of projecting the character into a box and in the box people would be able to place different objects that the character could jump on and interact with.

The great thing about this is that I can use the same code and the same games that I design for the sketchbook version. I set up a box and stuck a smaller box inside so that it would act as a platform and then projected the character into the box.

Once I had projected the character into the box I quickly came across some problems. One was that because the platforms are actual 3d objects they cast shadows. This meant that the character would land on the shadows rather then look as though it is standing on the actual platforms. Another problem was that the character looked flat when projected into the box. The character didn’t sit right in the 3d area of the box.

I managed to tighten up how the game controls today. Before I had a problem where the character had to be always jumping but after messing around with it some more I managed to find a surprisingly easy solution.

Jumping = false;

It really was as simple as that, how I managed to over look it I have no idea, but hey ho it works now so yay.

I also tightened up the mouse control some more so that the character will now ease to the position of the mouse. Before the character was attached to the exact X position of the mouse, this didn’t feel right when controlling the character, but with the easing it does feel much nicer.