For my industry event I decided to attend PAX Unplugged, which was an event focused around nondigital games. During the event, there were a few panels relating to game design and resources that can aid in that, and I feel as though I learned a substantial amount while attending them. Since a large part of… Continue reading Snyder Industry Event
For this prototype I created a basic UI that will be used in the digital aspect of the game. This UI included a list of available units, an overview of a specific unit, a health bar for units, and the screen that appears when you are about to have a unit engage in battle. At… Continue reading Snyder Prototype 3
This week I worked on the physical and digital pieces that will be used to represent the unit in my game. There are 7 units in total, each with a unique design. My goal for this sprint was to find out if the piece designations made sense, and if they would be easily distinguishable. I… Continue reading Snyder Prototype Sprint 2
For this prototype session I decided to make the basic framework for the tactical movement for the digital part of the game that I’m making. I also have created a basic AI that will attack the nearest player character. This was done using a breadth-first search algorithm, which is typically used to find data in… Continue reading Snyder’s Prototype Sprint 1
When making a project that has both physical and digital components, it’s important to have prototypes for both aspects. To this end, I plan on making a roughly functional version of the movement system for the first week, along with, hopefully, the turn manager and a base AI. This means that the actual combat portion… Continue reading Snyder Prototype Plan
This week I looked into how movement and pathing work for tactics/strategy games. I learned about something called Breadth First Search, which is an algorithm used to search graphs. I suppose that it works in this case because the board is a grid, and so it can be used for determining positions, and then it… Continue reading Snyder Research Update 3
This week I looked quite a bit into how Arduino works, as this will end up being an important part of the final project. I actually got a chance to use an Arduino during my Digital Fabrication class, and so I got the chance to learn some of the absolute basics. As a follow-up to… Continue reading Colin’s Research Update 2
This week I spent some time looking at several different games to help me get a different perspective on what I am planning to create. I started by looking at Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, which were fairly early Strategy RPGs. Both of these games had isometric perspectives and maps with several elevations. This… Continue reading Snyder Research Update 1
To prepare for the creation of the project, I will have to do a large amount of research. I would look through the history of the genre, which includes titles like X-Com, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Civilization, etc. All of these different games use different objects and mechanics, but they all share some similarities,… Continue reading Snyder’s Research Plan
The thesis project concept that I will be pursuing is a strategy RPG based in Unity, with a hex-based grid system. Alongside this, I will be creating a strategy board game that will be connecting to the Unity game, likely through an arduino. The idea is that there will be an idea for the two… Continue reading Snyder’s Revised Concept