Context of Practice 3: Game Mechanics and Testing

I then wanted to think about what game mechanics that I wanted to use. Originally I was very struck on the game Monument Valley but I struggled to think about how I could use this mechanic in my own way and create a game using the same idea but in a different fashion and I really didn’t want to just make another level for their game. This is when I played The Room and I really enjoyed everything about this game, but wondered how good the puzzle, included at the end of most of the levels where you have to make the symbol out of the broken pieces, would be if you could move around an entire room instead of just being locked to an axis and moving around it. I thought about it and really wanted to challenge myself with this project and look at how I could create something like this on a larger scale.

This kind of thing is also done in many other things, and the Uncharted 3 game is something that aims to do this in a similar way as well. There is one section where you are in a well of some kind and you have on a piece of paper in front of you some column markings that will match up with certain ones in the area. This involves you to move around the environment and make a decision on where you think the picture matches up to. It’s a fairly easy puzzle in comparison to the ones in The Room but it’s a good example of how this perspective can be used appropriately in a game environment and how you can move around it freely at the same time as trying to work out the perspective on it.

I then also had a quick look at tape optical illusions which are very popular at the moment. This is again is an example-ish on the kind of perspective that I want to achieve. The tape illusions are spread out over different walls in a room and it’s only until you get to a certain place that you can see everything lined up correctly in place. This is very similar to what I want to do and definitely find this useful to look at as its about getting everything lined up correctly in place so that when you do look at it in the right way you can see the shape.

Channel 4 Logo Test
I knew I would have to start off small though, especially with my testing to ensure that I could create something like this on a larger scale later when the channel 4 logo came into mind. There are now many different variations on the advert that channel 4 use, but many of them take an environment and then transform some of the elements to create a 4 in the middle of it. For example they shoot a video of a field with a few straw bales in and then in the sky they place straw bales and when the footage gets to a certain point the 4 is seen for a second before the footage moves on. It’s a really nice technique and this is definitely something that I think I could recreate.

When you watch most of the trailers you can see the separate parts of the four and how they are broken up into the different sections which will make it easier to recreate in Unity, which is what I am briefly going to test here to see if it’s possible to create. Below is the steps I took to create the replica of the channel 4 logo and it does look good and I am happy with what I managed to produce in the end. It was fairly tricky to work out how to begin with it, but I tried to just get the pieces together first before then moving them apart from each other so that you could move away from it and it would be distorted but then once you move back, it fits together well and you can clearly see what it is.

I tarted by using the existing channel 4 logo as an image for mine to be made over it and started by just mapping out the basic shapes, before moving closer in the front perspective view and getting it accurate.

 I then made the entire logo slightly thicker and then moved all of the pieces forwards and backwards so that they weren't in line with each other. This was then the tricky bit as I had to then pick a point to stand in and then move the pieces until they all lined up again like below. This meant changing the sizes of some of the pieces so that the perspective was right.

 Then below is what it looks like if we move away from it slightly out of that fixed position.

 I then took it into Unity to be able to test it out and realised to get the shape in the perfect place you would need to walk all around it so that you could view it from different sides, so I used planes to make a circle were the character can walk around. This was fairly easy and then I put the logo in the middle and made sure that it was going to be at the right level and not too high or low.

Below is the final video walkthrough showing how it looks from all sides walking around the shape until it finally lines up. I am very happy with how this looks and definitely think that I can recreate something similar with a shape or object that will be in my game level. This seems like a really nice way to create a simple but effective puzzle in my environment and there are many different things that can be done with it, the puzzle could even be moving up and down as well.