In fairness, in the early stages of the project, this was attempted. We frequently discussed the ideas that we had and I definetly took alot of initiative in breaking down our initial brief into what we specifically needed, and then assisting our team lead at the time with the direction of the game. As mentioned above, MDA (MDA Framework- Unconnected Connectivity, n.d.) was especially important in the devising of ideas and potential ways we can add value to our game.
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Following on from this though, I developed a version-based game design document alongside the team, which detailed the expectations and direction of our project. As I wasn't always suited for things such as modelling, I left those elements down to the contributions of other members. I will note on the document though, that initially, this only covered the "simulator" elements of the game. We had decided early on to focus on the simulator aspect, as the game loop could be completed fairly quickly. However, what I didn't know, is how last minute this game loop would be planned.
Although we had spent alot of effort planning out the approach we would take, there were consistent points where members of the team were not on the same page on the direction of the project, and consistently throughout development, members of the team had differing ideas of what the game should be. |
Speaking of the UI, I had a specific set of guidelines that I assured my work followed while developing. A 2011 WHO report (World Report on Disability, 2011) suggested that 15% of the world lived with a disability, and thus this could potentially mean that 15% of people playing our game, could also have a disability. |
I made 3 of, and contributed to 4 different systems, out of the 17 that were present in the final version of the games. Of those systems, the 3 that I made were all high priority systems that were required for the brief, while the other 4 were complimentary/minor systems that I made alongside other people or fixed bugs and issues with.
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The first system I was tasked with creating was the User Interface Backend. In initial weeks, I drafted a greybox of the UI design at the time and started to plan out my approach. There needed to be a simple menu navigation system, while in the game, there would need to be support for displaying certain UI elements at certain times, for example, the Periscope HUD.
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My second system, the Submarine is fairly self explanatory. It was required to create a "submarine" that the player could move and see out of using the periscope. I was in charge of the movement aspect of the code, and I developed a system that controlled the acceleration, deceleration and velocity of the Submarine.
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From here, I setup the smooth deceleration of the submarine to simulate the motion after throttle has been set to 0. Depth and pitch adjustment were also setup, and I made turning dependant on forward force. At this point, I had reached a point where the wheel and throttle could now link to the system, and we could start attaching elements, such as the periscope camera.
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I also referenced Lego Universe’s Faction Selection UI (NetDevil, 2010) when planning, designing and making the initial whiteboard role selection screen (before we pushed for a single player experience over a multiplayer). The idea was that the player could select the role they wanted to portray, and then get some information about that role specifically.
However, later in development, this was condensed down to less information because of our switch in focus from Multiplayer to Singleplayer. It would not make sense to have information on two separate pages, if the player was going to be playing both at the same time, so it was all placed on one page and the redirection of the menus was simplified. |
For the art style of the UI, I wanted it to be very consistent and elements needed to fit in with the rest. I spent a bit of time early on trialling with different styles, and settled on three, to use in different ways.
The first art style would be that used on the screens and the HUD. Typically speaking, I used Red as the colour scheme, but also used black for certain elements, such as the Planesman Screen. I wanted to produce a feel that these were "digital values", so I researched for a font (DS-Digital Font | Dafont.Com, n.d.) that gives the impression of a digital alarm clock. |
The next art style was for a whiteboard. There was some initial deliberation over whether the whiteboard should be a digital whiteboard, or that of a marker, so part of this involved me going back and forth with the rest of the team to figure out the feel we wanted to go for.
In this stage, I drew heavy inspiration from games such as Phasmophobia, (Kinetic Games, 2020) which featured a Whiteboard Main Menu that is used to navigate into the game. In particular, we needed to make sure it was known that text was drawn by a whiteboard marker, so I again researched on Dafont and discovered a font (Google, n.d.). An important thing to note about the fonts as well, is that I took time to assure these fonts were either free to use, or had an Open Font License. |
Luckily, I was able to recycle the previous art style I used, and applied it to the Pause/Win/Loss and Tutorial Menus. In particular, I made use of RN image archive (Royal Navy Image and Video Archive, n.d.) to showcase images of submarines, and naval soldiers. There were conditions to using these images, which involve giving notice of the license that came with them, so we very careful in assuring that our client knew this (although they can technically use these.)
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