Bootcamps, Classes

Unityversity Rebootcamp 2016 1/6: Project Ideation Kickoff

Posted by Primerist on

We had a kickoff for the first Unityversity Bootcamp and you can watch the recorded Twitch stream. 

https://www.twitch.tv/primerist/v/90525508
The video on demand recording of our twitch stream for anyone who wants to review anything or share with friends who are thinking of participating

The screen is mostly just onenote frozen but the camera at bottom shows a good amount on the projector behind me and gets pointed at our group to show the breakout part which was the most fun from a teacher perspective.

Afters

We have an official venue to eat after class now: Cease & Desist is at 2331 Mission St. a couple blocks away. It has all you can eat pizza Tuesdays for $8. And Robocop is serving justice and pizza there.

Group Infrastructure

We went through the tech we’ll be using.
Everyone should at minimum:

Everyone should set up their own team infrastructure for their project:

  • Go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a free wordpress for your team.
  • Participate in the Discord chat and post updates there for feedback in your team channel and in #general.
  • Post regular blog posts with all the media like screenshots and thoughts about your game’s progress.

QUESTION: How do you decide on a  perspective for your game?

Generally, do what you have the most experience with, budget for or fits your concept best.

  • 2D/3D: 3D is recommended for this bootcamp since we have most expertise in it but 2D is great too and Mark can help 2D teams.
  • FPS/3rd person: 1st person is much easier than 3rd person  because of character animation not being necessary for the player. You can adapt a 1st person prototype to 3rd person later once you have the character animation figured out.
  • Top down: Lower detail art works if you go with top down, but again the 3rd person issues apply if you have a character in third person you have to learn more animation or be very abastract like rolling ball characters.
  • Isometric: Retro cool, harder than regular free camera top down but doable.

HOW WE USE DISCORD

We are using Discord chat and we’re going to learn to use it with Twitch streaming and other tools for building developer community.

  • Our discord channels are our warmup towards having our own complete online community that extends our own devlopment efforts to include our peers and fans.
  • We are going to recruit people to follow our channels.
  • It might feel lonely and pointless when you start blogging for what seems like no audience but the pindrop lonely posts are the funniest later when your project has people reading the backlog.
  • OPTIONAL: Make a public channel and private team channel.
  • HOW TO USE THIS: Give out the invite link from the side of your channel to your audience to bring them directly to you.

We’ll soon cover how to set up enhancements to Twitch and Discord streams such as Discord Streamkit integration.

Local Gaming Events

The MADE video game museum 5 year anniversary party Sept 24 come celebrate games and play some super rare classic arcade and console games.

Gamenest Out of the Shell Sept 30 is an awesome gathering monthly at  https://www.facebook.com/thegamenest and you can participate in the community there free with events like this.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131791/the_anatomy_of_a_design_document_.php

WEEK 2 QUEST: START WRITING A GAME DESIGN DOC

It is time to start preparing a game design and prototyping it as that’s what we’ll be finalizing in week 2.

  • Create a Google Doc or OneNote notebook or another such shared writing space.
  • Share it with alex@primerlabs.com and any other teammates, buddies and mentors you have.
  • Install OneNote and OneDrive so it syncs properly on your mac/pc and phone
  • Try prototyping simple parts of your game mechanics in Unity or your other engine and see what seems fun as soon as possible.
  • Expand on the ideas that seem promising in a design document.

Inspirational game design reading

Here are some things to read to prepare for week 2’s focus on game design.

The Anatomy of a game design document

“Every time I sit down with a finely crafted title such as Tetris or Super Mario Brothers, I catch hints of a concise and clearly defined structure behind the gameplay. It is my belief that a highly mechanical and predictable heart, built on the foundation of basic human psychology, beats at the core of every single successful game.

What would happen if we codified those systems and turned them into a practical technique for designing games?”

–The Chemistry of Game Design

alchemy_3

Game Design & Writing Tools

Free tools

Not bad to get started.

Fungus is a free flowchart game writing tool. Not bad, quite free, and makes great 2D visual novels with animation or good dialog boxes in your 3D game.

Twine is an online and downloadable tool but it doesn’t plug into Unity directly.

Commercial tools

Worth every penny whenyou’re serious and free trials you can start with right away.

Articy:Draft is the ultimate game design & story tool used by all the best RPG and adventure games and many more. Get the trial, it is worth the money if you are serious about making games. Discount code is TWINS-GIFT.

Dialogue System is the king of Unity dialogue engines and it imports ALL of these dialogue making tools into native nice diagrammed dialogue systems that work in Unity!

Chat Mapper is free for non-commercial and pretty good.

 

 

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