Unit 66-67 3D Modelling & Animation – Assignment 2

Unit 4-5 Assignment P3P4 1617

Unit 4-5 Assignment P3P4 1617

Since the start of the year the development off our game has changed drastically. Below are the initial ideas we had based on the brief.

Gameplay: For our first idea we decided to create a game based on the style of gameplay found in the Devil May Cry series and a style of fighting based on the popular JoJo's Bizarre Adventure series' "Stands", spirits with special abilities that appear from a user and fight. The demographic we would be aiming for would be a teen audience due to the violent nature of what we are aiming for but the lack of intense gore we feel stops it becoming a Mature Only game.

Protagonist: The protagonist Kenny Lown (K.Lown) becomes possessed by a demonic clown spirit after trying it on in a costume shop, be begins making his way through town and becomes driven to murder all in his way. In combat the clown spirit emerges from K. Lown and does the fighting.

Starting Weapon: Because of how we chose to we wanted the style of combat to be we decided the player's starting weapons, wielded by the clown, are a giant hammer melee weapon, and Water Balloons, a low impact projectile weapon. Due to the nature of the appearance of clowns being ridiculous and the juxtaposition that creates when compared to the murderous intent of the clown spirit in this project we decided that the weapons should have a "silly yet sinister" feel to them.

Unlockable Weapons: In order to vary the player's combat some of the possible unlockable weapons would be Balloon nun-chucks melee weapons, Balloon Rapier melee weapon, Cartoon Chainsaw melee weapon,

handkerchief chain with low damage, good range, able to pull enemies closer as well, and custard pies as a mid impact projectile weapon and an upgrade from the water balloons.

Items: In order to keep with the Devil May Cry style of gameplay, we decided to try and incorporate many varid items for use in combat such as;

Acid Flower (activates on low health, cancels enemy attack to prevent death, one time use)

Silly String (use to immobilise enemy's for a short time)

Trap whoopee cushion (enemy triggers it, cloud of gas released and damages enemy)

Candy floss (Candy Floss S heals %33 of your health, Candy Floss L heals %75 of your health)

Puppet Show (distracts enemies for a short period of time)

Balloon Dog (tracks enemies, pops on impact and deals low damage briefly staggering enemies)

Snake Tin Prank (Trap that damages single target when triggered)

Save Point: As the save point, in order to keep the clown them, the save point we want to use a circus style tent.

Enemies:

Stage 1: Skaters

Stage 1 Boss: Skate Leader

Stage 2: Jocks

Stage 2 Boss: Coach

Stage 3: Biker Gang

Stage 3 Boss: Biker Leader

3D model dersigns: For this project we decided to base our 3D models off those found in the game JoJo's Bizzare Adventure: Eyes of Heaven.

Idea 2 Survival Horror: After stumbling across the crash site of a crashed alien space craft the player is knocked out by a strange clown and soon wakes up on an operating table, the player then has to try and escape from the nightmarish alien Clowns and the horrifying experiments they're trying to perform on you.

Idea 3 FPS: one of our back up ideas is a simple FPS more based on the movie Killer Klowns From Outerspace, where you play as the hero of the film as you chase down clowns after they kidnap your friend Debbie.

What Changed:
As the year went on it gradually became more apparent that due to time constraints as well as the technical limitations we had that it wouldn't be possible for us to achieve the goals set out within our first 2 ideas so instead of a third person beat em up/hack 'n slash or a straight up survival horror we decided it was best to use the basis of the third idea, a First Person Shooter, but wanted to attempt to blend in some of the elements of idea 2 and set it in a more interesting setting than a standard town. Thus i ended up setting the game on an island prison. This prison, including all the cells, walls, bridge, gate, guard post, benches and basket ball hoops, were made from scratch in the 3D modelling software maya the parts of the environment such as the islands and water however were created using the features available in the Unreal engine 4.

I also therefore had to change the story of the game, instead of playing as one of the heroes of the film the player now plays as an inmate of the prison who is awoken by a sudden scream, he goes to investigate to find his cell door suddenly unlocking, he then exits the cell and finds a dead guard and after picking up his weapon he spots the first clown shortly before finding out that everyone is already dead and he must now fight his way out if he is to survive. The size and amount of levels also had to change to fit the new setting as now instead of three separate levels of intermediate size I decided it was best to have one very large level with a detailed environment, thus the prison two separate was given multiple floors filled with cells, a large courtyard with a great amount of benches as well as some basket ball hoops for the prisoners that would be there, a large bridge stretching from the main island to a sub island with a guard booth and many other bridges and islands going off into the distance. Sadly I also had to remove the high number of unique and interesting weapons that I wanted the player to be able to find as they no longer had a place within the game, instead using a simpler gun. Next the player and enemies had to be coded to perform the actions such as enemies chasing the player and doing damage, enemies dying upon being shot, adding a health bar for the player, and having the player respawn and begin again in the starting cell upon death. During development I have had to deal with many bugs, some of which i have sadly been unable to identify the cause of and fix, others that were fixed include problems with the enemies being destroyed upon the player killing them where they would simply keep coming instead as well as issues with getting the health bar to appear on screen.

Improvements;
Whilst we were able to accomplish a great many things in creating the game there are several notable improvements i would have liked to have made. The first is an idea from earlier in development where i had wanted to add a mini boss for the player to fight which would have been larger, dealt more damage and took several shots more to defeat than the standard enemies. I also wanted to add a far greater amount of textures as most models sadly look rather plain with a simple chrome look to them but every time we tried to add new textures unreal would crash and lose large amounts of data. I also wanted to add items player to be able to use many different weapons with different perks and weakness for fighting the enemies. The lighting is another area i wish i had been able to improve in order to give the environment a far creepier feel to them so as to make the threat from the enemies feel greater. I also wanted to add a skyline off towards the background of the map so it looked far less barren in the distance. As well as this we had also created a clown model in Maya and downloaded a second one that we wished to use as skins for the enemies though sadly we were unable to get the animations to work so they had to be left out, as well as models for dead guards and inmates we had wanted littered around the environment. I would also have liked to add a death animation for the enemies so they do not just despawn suddenly once defeated. I also wanted to a bug that is still present where the player will take damage for no discernible reason. Lastly i wanted to improve the way the water texture flows as it is rather visibly choppy.

Evaluation:
I feel that where different from the initial ideas we had the game still fits the brief of being based on the movie Killer Klowns From Outer Space as the prison setting itself was inspired by the scene in the town jail.

Unit 66-67 3D Modelling & Animation – Assignment 3

We have been tasked with creating a 3D model based on the brief we were given for our game and with the brief we have been given being 'Killer Klowns From Outer Space' i have made an evil clown model.

To start the model I loaded in a reference image as an image plane. I used a rather standard human body shape as a reference to get the basic silhouette of the model. I started with a polygon cube and changed the amount of vertical and horizontal subdivisions the cube has in order to make the process both easier and to get far greater detail on the model before selecting features such as the faces, edges and vertexes to pull and move each segment into the right place. After i had the polygons of the model in the right place i used the smooth feature too round the edges of the polygons and make it generally more visually appealing. I applied the same process for the limbs on the left side, neck, head and the waist.

Then i edited the head so a portion would dip inwards slightly, creating a mouth. After I had done this I went about duplicating the parts that needed to be done. I selected the appropriate parts all at once by holding shift and clicking on each part, then I selected the duplicate special feature from the drop down menu, after editing some of the info about the parts it created a mirrored duplicate of each part which i then moved into place. This feature saved me a great amount of time and reduced the chance of errors making the limbs on the other side unsymmetrical.

Next I removed the image plane as i no longer had need of it and then simply edited some of the dimensions and way each part was placed in order get the slightly inhuman look I wanted. After this I selected the entirety of what i had made so far and then used to combine feature to group all of the parts together as one larger mesh.




Following this I began to create the attire for the clown by using images of clowns such as depictions of Penywise the clown from Steven King's novel 'It' and the clown outfit the artist David Bowie wore in the music video for his song 'Ashes to Ashes'. i then used simple polygon spheres that i had flattened slightly on certain sides to create the large bulbous shoulders, then I took some far more flattened polygon spheres to use as the ruff like collar of the clown's top as well as the large bottoms of his gloves. After I used some polygon cylinders I edited as the basis for the baggy shorts the clown wears.

The next step was adding the details and features of the clown. I decided i wanted to give its face a somewhat cartoonish look so chose to go for large and striking yet simple shapes. I once again took a polygon sphere as the nose for the clown before taking more spheres and adding them down the front of the clown's top in order to make it seem less plain and bland. Then using more spheres I began making the eyes by flattening and stretching them out to create the large cartoony irises and then taking yet more spheres and shrinking them down and flattening them down in order to make the pupils of the eyes. Then i used a polygon ring to make the lips which I had to stretch and bend in order to fit the shape of the mouth. Next i added polygon cones for the hair on the head before finally adding more cones to use as fangs in order to make the clown seem more sinister.

The final step was texturing the clown. I highlighted the whole model and used the separate feature to make each individual part once again easily selectable so that i could give each part the texture it needed. The way I put the texture on was by selecting the part and then choosing to add new favourite material to it then selecting the lambert option from the menu that appeared. Certain areas such as the hair, skin and body merely needed a change of the colour of the lambert but other parts like the gloves, shoulders and shorts required me to upload an image in order to get the texture of cloth that i wanted on those areas.

Additional: This was actually the second version of the model I created as I had initially struggled with the creation of the model as I was relatively new to using the software. Roughly two thirds of the way through creating the first model I became very unhappy with what i had made and decided to scrap it and start again, thankfully being more experienced with the software i was able to create a model I was far happier with in a considerably quicker time. Though i am pleased with the finished result i would have liked to create a more detailed hair a,d a better shape for the head.

Unit 67 – Assignment 4 Task 1

For our game we have been tasked with creating am animation as a custcense or advert using Maya for our game. I have chosen to create a cutscene that would play when the player reaches the end of the level.

The scene starts off on the bridge to escape the island prison they were held on as the player character looks at a clown enemy they have just killed in game. They then hear a sudden noise and look up, they see an identical enemy and raise their gun only to find that they have run out of bullets and are defenceless. Panicking they drop their gun and look back towards the clown enemy as it throws a car at them before the screen abruptly cuts to black, indicating the player has been killed.

However the videos for task 2 are different from this way the story board depicts the animation as i was working in a group with Luke Anderson and the he animated this segment where as I ended up animating the part he had storyboarded out as can be found on his version of this assignment.

Unit 6 Task 1 P3: Audience response to Media Products

For this assignment we were tasked with gathering information on how violence and disturbing imagery in games effect the people who play them and the preconceived notions of what the effects would be. We researched other studies looking into the effects of games and conducted a survey of our own in order to gather data. The data we gathered yielded these results:

Of the people we asked most of them answered that they were between 18 and 24 with smaller amount commenting that they were 17 and under. this told us the most popular demographic for games appears to be late teens and people in their early 20s. Of this age group we discovered an overwhelming majority of the players were male, telling us that the appeal of video games is one that appears to still register stronger with males than females. We also found that among those who play games the most common amount of time spent playing games was between 10 and 20 hours per week with our research indiacting that the genre of game that most people play and spend long periods of time on are RPGs (Role Playing Games) closely folowed by FPS games (First Person Shooter games) and a small majority of these gamers prefer to play casually as opposed to competitively. This tells us that the most common demographic of gamer is a male in his late teens or early 20s that plays RPGs for between 10 and 20 hours a week most likely in order to relax due to the casual nature of their way of gaming. We also discovered that games often have the ability to frustrate the people playing them with one of the most common ways this happens is when the player achieves a fail state in the game. Our data also indicates that this frustration has often lead to the gamers who took part in our survey showing their momentary frustration in a variety of ways from simply turning off the game they are playing to throwing expensive pieces of hardware at a wall. Though almost all of the people who took the survey said they experienced this momentary increase in frustration and aggression l significant majority of them reported it having no long term effect and the rage they felt very rarely if ever staying with them outside of the heat of the moment, and where most of them reported this short increase in aggression most reported that they felt very little to no other effects from games with the most they felt they might do is slightly desensitise them to more graphic imagery as they may have seen similar scenes in a video game.

Audience Theory:

Hypodermic Needle Model - The Hypodermic Needle Model attempts to report and explain the occurrence when media is able to affect an individual to the point where they go out and recreate the actions or events they have seen in real life on either a large or small scale. Whilst extremely rare, it has happened before but can also be linked to mental health issues in those instances with a famous example of this being an where someone murdered another person after over extensively playing the highly violent game Manhunt, however due to only a single person and not the numerous other players that have also played the game committing similar actions the accusation that the game was responsible was found to be untrue by court in which the accusation was being examined and was dropped.

With the large amount of gamers who report playing mature and 18+ games from young ages like 14 and 11 and most of these said people being largely non violent people it would suggest that the vast majority are not affected by games in this way.

Uses and Gratification Theory - The Uses and Gratification Theory is used to try and explain why someone is drawn to specific media, whether it is caused by the stimulation from accomplishing a goal such as completing a game, the challenge they must face to complete said game, the competitive nature of facing off against other players, a simple way to pass the time, or escapism and allowing one to briefly feel free of reality. Many suggest that violent games will not lead to violent actions such as crimes as committing these violent crimes doesn't offer the same type of stimulation as it does in a game where actions are almost completely consequence free, making the player less likely to feel things like guilt over their actions, the challenge in conquering a difficult goal is also highly detached than the challenge in performing a violent crime like murder, the competitive nature of team shooters where one strives to get the most kills in a match is highly unlikely to be matched due to the incredibly unlikely nature of one such violent individual knowing someone with the same level of malice and violent impulses, and the escapism factor isn't nearly as attainable due to actions such as murder having huge consequences.

Passive or Active Consumption - Passive or Active Consumption occurs when someone listens to a media outlet and takes everything as its presented to them without questioning any of it. This can lead to further issues in cases of a person having been previously unable to develop their own sets of morals or suffering from mental illness, which while highly unlikely are some of the very few plausible ways one might be influenced to enact violence on others due to media such as video games.

Effects Database:

Exposure to Explicit Sexual or Violent Content - On the market today their are a high number of violent and highly sexual games, however there have been many steps taken in order to prevent children from gaining access to such materials. One way this has been achieved is by putting an age restriction rating into video games where children under the age rating of the game are unable to acquire the game and access its contents, the only real way around this is if an adult or older person were to buy the game and hand it to the child however these actions would then leave the blame resting solely on the adult's shoulders.

Effects of Advertising - Effective advertisement is used to make people desire a game and long to play it with a famous example being the viral marketing strategy that was used to sell the game Dead Space 2 in which several mothers were invited to watch gameplay of the game in order to catch their reactions of appal and disgust, which was designed to appeal to the more rebellious side of teenage customers.

Health Concerns - Over the years video games have had many health issues linked to them, some like aggressive or violent actions and behaviour are inconsistent with research at best but other accusations have also been levelled that they encourage a generally more lazy lifestyle which can lead to obesity and the corresponding issues. However other studies show that video games can help improve things like eye sight and the ability to track multiple objects at once.

Censorship Debates - Many organisation have also protested various video games insisting that they need to be either censored or outright banned, this can often be for violent or sexual content as well as having a political message some are opposed to or just being seen by some to be in some way offensive. However movements have also sprung up to counter the censorship and banning of games as many people see it as an attack of free speech and a way of censoring art as well as ideas and beliefs.

Responses:

Negotiated - An instance where the player may be given many ideals and views to choose between and come to their own conclusion whilst leaving the possibility for the player to interject their own views, which can help make a player more invested in a game

Preferred -  The Preferred response is where a game tries to elicit a certain response from the gamer, such as agreement with an ideal or disgust at a more disturbing scene. An example is how many games avoid glorifying violent acts so that the player can be aware of their abhorrent nature.

Oppositional -  The oppositional response to a game may be disagreeing with a message it or its characters convey to the player. There are no reported incidences of people being moved to violent or criminal actions due to this reaction as most people are often able to deal with other having opposing and conflicting views with their own.

Participatory - The key interactivity of video games makes participation the player needs to take the biggest difference between other forms of media like television, the downside of this is that it has lead video games to be accused of being negatively influential more so than things like movies and music. One example of this is how on 25 June 2003, the teenage Buckner stepbrothers Josh and William Aaron Hamel and Kimberly Bede via gunshot. Soon the game GTA 3 began being blamed wit people insisting that the violent thoughts and actions were put in the boys head by the contents of the game. However these accusations were once again dismissed due to the lack of other players effected in a similar way.

Cultural Competence - This refers to how a game goes about adjusting to different regions and cultures. Obvious examples are when a game changes the language its played in or adjusts names and items to fall in line with the culture of the new target audience more easily.

Fan Culture - Fan culture refers to the communities that form from fan response to games, this can include things such as fan made content based on the games like art, merchandise, mods, forums and often even additional content like games based off the preexisting franchise. This fan made content usually makes a community stronger and makes people outside that community more interested in the game the community is based around. The kind of content created based on the franchise can be more adult, violent, or family friendly depending on what kind of franchise it is based around. Though not all fans and their creation will generate a positive view for the product, such as how the infamous columbine highschool shooters had created their own level based off the popular game doom in which they recreated their school and used it to plan their attack before carrying it out. Whilst not entirely indicative of any original franchise it can bring a huge amount of negative public attention and help give the original franchise and games as a whole a bad reputation.

Conclusion:

To summarise i feel that the evidence pointing to video games causing violence is weak and inconsistent at best and the conflicting evidence that there is no direct causation between violence and video games being far stronger shows that the impact of video games causing one to become violent is entirely dissmisable as the panicked outcrys of many who are simply opposed to the popular form of entertainment with no real scientific backing. Video games have huge markets and are the world's biggest entertainment industry so when someone that happens to play a video game commits a violent crime the immediate reaction shouldn't be to blame a benign form of entertainment like video games and should be evaluate the other factors in the perpetrators life. With as broad a market as games have it should be no wonder some less than savoury characters would end up playing them from time to time. Besides that i feel that video games are a fun and creative hobby that create far more enjoyment and good than harm.