IT'S HERE

Windows Build has been RELEASED!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-p1pbyelSBhdTh0Sk9TeURteTA/view?usp=sharing

Play Hospital Trance TODAY!

Alla Fine

I'd like to say we made some last minute changes, but it was more like "last 8 hour changes". All day monday we were trapped in the library fixing up and tweaking all the bugs in our game. Unfortunately, we left a lot of things that we didn't get to fix until yesterday. We basically finished up the game and did not take any breaks until we were done.  A lot of our major things were done on the last day like the multiple endings and the levels of craziness. So, basically to summarize yesterday, we made: 1) endings 2) making this disappear/appear if you're crazy 3) added patient models 4) different dialogue endings depending on how crazy you are 4) light flickering (unfortunately its only obvious if you really pay attention and only works on the red lights) 5) adding in models to improve appearance. I probably missed something but we did so much I can't even remember. But I'm really proud of my self because of all the stuff I got done yesterday.


MAC build

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sz94l5h1ycck03r/Hospital%20Trance.zip?dl=0

EDIT: I accidently deleted the old link on the previous post


https://www.dropbox.com/s/azmqvsov4qwu4in/NEW%20TRAILER.mp4?dl=0

Et voila

Our Post-Mortem Report can be viewed at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvYNZPm9ShQS0VSZktGTG9uYUE/view?usp=sharing

Our trailer is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/azmqvsov4qwu4in/NEW%20TRAILER.mp4?dl=0.

And of course, our game (Mac OS) is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvYNZPm9ShQWmdWakZkVHROMzQ/view?usp=sharing (Alternatively, try https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvYNZPm9ShQUmNvcW51SnRlZDA/view?usp=sharing).

FIN

After 7 grueling hours spent in a lab with only a cookie to fuel us, Rabia and I fixed our game up nice for our final release! We playtested, killed bugs, put in our multiple endings, and had some laughs as we played through the ridiculous game that we made over the course of 3 months.

Would I do this again? 

Probably not.

 Game development is a pain. The only really good times came out of the creative development process, such as collaboratively coming up with spooky ideas, funny dialogues and interesting game endings. This realization makes me sad, since the sad truth is that we as computer programmers get the short end of the stick when it comes to game development. I imagine that in the real world, writers and creative directors have all the fun, while lowly computer programmers like myself get stuck with sleepless nights and stressful days as we tirelessly try to debug code like slaves, just so that we can make the creative team's vision (not our vision!) a reality. 

I don't want to be their slave! I regret pursuing computer science.  

Homestretch

Just a couple of days left until our final day...

Our second playtesting session didn't exactly pan out the way we hoped, and as a result, we've been working on ironing out any glitches or bugs left within the game. Adding sprites to the game (admittedly, verryy fun) that only appear when the player's insanity count reaches a certain point has also been a task carried out this week (with some finishing touches yet to be added).  I've been contributing to and editing our Post-Mortem report, and I plan on elaborating the ending scene I made last week as well.

Giving the people what they want

Currently writing this as I am waiting for all our game's assets to download onto my laptop. It has been AN HOUR.

The problems I tackled this week were inspired by our first playtest results. Player's wanted a game that was longer and more immersive, and the team agreed that best way that we could do that in the short amount of time that we were alloted is to have more dialogue, make keys harder to get to, and have some sort of backstory.

I focus on the technical side of things- getting the timer just right (in order to enhance gameplay), making keys harder to attain by making the player LOSE their doctor's coat whenever they answer the nurse's questions incorrectly (thus forcing the user to find a key elsewhere, or find another coat to put on).

That stuff is boring though. The coolest thing that I am working on right now (last minute, I know..) is what I think will really make our game cool and interesting; making the creepy things that Arafa and Rabia decorated the hospital with appear when the player's "Crazy" meter reaches it's peak.

Rabia and I also made a Satanic room in the hospital. That was fun

Showing True Colours

Now that were getting closer to the end of our game, were starting to implement the details and cool stuff! Today Tanya, Arafa and I met up to create the satanic room! We had a lot of fun decorating the room and letting our imagination speak for itself! We also created new dialogues for the nurses to intensify creepiness. And we made a crazy meter, this will depend on the choices you make on the game and it will also impact the ending of our game. I can't wait until we get to add more creepy stuff. This week I also implemented the main menu.

New 3D Models and addition of a bathroom

This week I've been searching for new 3D models to add to the game, mainly characters such as nurses and patients, as well as miscellaneous creepy objects (i.e. dark, old furniture). Also beginning to work on turning one of the rooms into a bathroom and using 3D models to make it look better. Helping out otherwise any way I can as well. Looking forward to seeing things come together, with characters beginning to talk and the endings being worked on.

Daydreaming and Nightworking

In response to the feedback we received from our playtesters from the last session, we've gotten around to legitimately fleshing out a story and setting for our game (amongst other things). For the most part, the gameplay itself is now fairly polished. The ending scenes we've planned out, however, are still a work-in-progress.

I managed to complete a beginning scene this past weekend (integrated with the main game) and I'm hoping to get one of the endings done by the end of tonight. (It's a pity I've run out of coffee.)

I'd like to think our future playtesters will enjoy the idea of dabbling in the occult. :)

Another week

Searched for nurse/nurse clothing art for the game, thinking of new dialogue scripts, focusing on end-game now. Team mates are very helpful and doing really well.

Getting Ready For New Endings

Yet another successful week! I spent a lot of time yesterday testing to make sure dialogue was working, I also had a lot of fun writing more dialogue for our other characters. Working doesn't feel so bad when you have great team mates. I always learn a lot from the other members in my group and we always have fun on the job. Other than writing dialogue I worked on our first ending. Hopefully the following week will be spent on making a new ending.

Demo Deux

It's been a hectic week for us all but we've prepared a report and future development plan based on the reception our game received last week. We've made some changes since last week, and a newer version of our game is available at:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6qhkx9m1co7oh11/AACr2tYdHXPz2LUcRy9cpvWza?dl=0.

Our Playtesting Report can be viewed at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvYNZPm9ShQZjhOaGg1NG1HYW8/view?usp=sharing.

Reviews were a success

Today, we had our alpha release...We had a pretty good response, we got 12 people to play our game and most of them gave positive feedback. The only thing that seemed to be a complaint was that it was difficult to find keys in our game and instructions were not clear. But these are things we intend to work on, we do intend on giving some instruction about controls and back story when our game is complete so hopefully when we have people to play test again they wont be confused!

KILL KILL KILL all bugs

Feeling very proud of myself this week because I fixed a bug by myself.

I was feeling very annoyed that the Dialogue package that I bought for $5.99 was giving me a strange,frustrating issue where it would get caught in an infinite loop at RANDOM TIMES. There seemed to be no pattern to this behavior. I was unsure of what to do. I wasn't going to scrap the Dialogue package since I spent my hard earned money on it, so I sent the creator of the asset an angry email instead.

Turns out the problem was my fault and I fixed it. YAY! (I also promptly emailed the asset creator back to apologize for my feistiness)

This boosted my confidence and encouraged me to develop more. I am currently working on how to kill nurses, and it's fun and exciting (and relatively easy). Hope it is done on time for the play testers!

Wowzers

What a week. I've been working on a couple more scripts for the nurse dialogue as well as being there to help Bavneet with his work if/when needed, and looking forward to being a part of the next playtesting process. Also, I have some sort of condition now which has not been diagnosed thanks to hospital wait times.. makes it hard to breathe :( but hopefully that will turn out well.

Hellooo Playtesters!

My immediate goal for the upcoming days is having a survey ready for the Playtesting Session this Tuesday. Making some refreshments for the session is another key goal I've set for myself. :) As a slightly more long-term goal, I've also begun research on how to incorporate the different endings we originally envisioned into the game. This seems a bit daunting, at this stage.

Alpha Release Presentation Done

This past week we managed to finish our game for the alpha release. So far, I have been impressed with the progress that we have made for our game. It is coming together well.

Before Tuesday, we plan on changing up our controls (making it so that clicking opens doors and picks up keys; right now clicking is used for picking up keys but the F key is used for opening doors). We also plan on changing how the keys will be obtained. Initially, our plan was to make it so that keys will only be found on the floor of the map, but going forward we are going to change it so that nurses can also give out keys.

When horror meets friends

This week has not been has busy as other weeks, feels like the boredom never ends. I bought some cool models for our game this week. The models I purchased were torture instruments people would have used in the medieval era to torture people with. I think adding these models would enhance the creepy aspect. Also this week we worked on the video, we shot the footage and couldn't help but laugh some times even horror genre can be funny too when working with friends :)

It's Here!!

Our game trailer is ready and can be viewed here https://www.dropbox.com/s/a9l1oba61ty13wf/Hospital%20Trance%20w%3A%20music.mp4?dl=0 :). A basic playable version of the game can be downloaded from here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2un0xmvmj6ny06i/AABLD1CqXUz8T8oy06TWKU_ma?dl=0.

Alpha release approaches

This past week I have worked on creating dialogue content for the game between the nurses and the player, as well as looking up more art to bring into the game, and generally testing the game. Close to doing the short gameplay capture as alpha release is near.

I intend on getting more done during this coming week wherever needed, whether helping others with their tasks or working on my own smaller tasks, etc. Looking forward to the transition ahead.

The Game is Almost Ready for the Alpha Release

Over the past week my work consisted of redesigning the game's map. Instead of attempting to design every element of the map from scratch (which would have been more work than necessary), I got a package off of the Unity Asset Store that came with a bunch of prefabs. This made building the map much easier.

In order to design the map layout, however, I first had to figure out how multiple aspects of the game would play out, for instance:

• What characters will the player face when trying to escape the hospital? Where will these characters be located and how will they prevent the player from escaping? Where can the player move to on the map to avoid having to interact with these characters?
• What kind of map would be the most interesting? Obviously a map with one straight hallway would not interest the player. Being that the game takes place in a hospital, I made sure to put multiple rooms and even designed rooms that will eventually resemble operating theaters. (These rooms are empty right now but they will get filled with 3D models to better reflect a hospital later on in the development process.) 
• Where should the keys be located? I realized that I didn't want to put the keys out in the open because that would make it too easy for the player to find them, but at the same time I didn't want to put the keys in places that would be near impossible to find, as this would just frustrate the player.
• Given that the gameplay video for the alpha release has to be between 30- 60 seconds in length, I made sure to make the map big enough so that the time it took to beat the game was at least 60 seconds.

Going forward, we are almost done with the alpha release at the time of this writing. We just need to add a few more things such as dialogue and a timer. We will do this tomorrow. 

Dialogue Distress

As with most things in software development, if something seems like it is easy to implement, then it probably is not. Turns out that getting your players to speak with others in the game is one of those things.

A few crude attempts at figuring out how our player can interact with the nurses in the hospital fell flat, since I completely underestimated how complex dialogue is. As much as I hate having to rely on things others have made for use in Unity games, I swallowed my pride and purchased a dialogue system from the Asset store for a frugal $5.

One of the reasons why I do not like relying on pre-made assets is because its usually a pain to implement a general asset into your unique special snowflake of a game, and who wants to read Read Me's and installation guides? Ain't nobody go time for that.

Anyway, I got it to work after a day, but am now faced with annoying, smaller problems. How do I stop the first-person camera and movement when the player is in a conversation? How do I allow the player the choice of killing the nurse, instead of simply talking to her? How do I make the dialogue display prettier? I shall figure this all out tonight.

Words of the Week: Frustration and Anticipation

I wasn't able to pursue the addition of sound effects in our game last week, as originally planned. This was due to our group as a whole deciding it'd be best to push that task further ahead—not until the entire level/game map was ready—in order to avoid task redundancy (i.e. minimize the number of changes that needed to be made by a single person). In spite of this, I still encountered a great deal of task redundancy, unfortunately.

Our Unity project is enormous in size and pushing it to Git has not been feasible since the size of the file surpassed the maximum space allocated to our repository quite early on in the development of our game. A large portion of our project involves game objects and assets rather than scripts. Currently, our method of making changes to the project between group members involves one group member working on the project at one time. Once they are done making their changes, they upload the project file to Dropbox or Google Drive and share the link with the rest of the team. This procedure can lead to issues if multiple team members decide to work on the project simultaneously, leading to multiple versions of the project with both missing key functionality or features. This method has also lead to multiple versions of the project existing on our computers and it's quite possible for one team member to accidentally upload or send a download link to an older version of the project. As a result of this, I've had to make the same changes to our game multiple times, which has been frustrating. 

One task I performed this week was the reintroduction of sounds to signify the pick up of keys or opening of doors in-game. I was able to synch sound with key pick up without difficulty but synching sound with door opening has been slightly challenging. In this iteration of the game, doors that are opened now rotate in position, rather than disappear entirely, as was the case in our game prototype. Attempting to introduce code for sound to the door opening script interferes with the functioning of the door, however. During testing, I discovered doors will either not open at all, or their original position will be off.  For the time being, I've decided to leave out sound for door opening, although I definitely intend to revisit this issue before Tuesday of next week as I believe the sound will introduce more realism to the game. 

Another key task I took on this week was the use of sound to build a mood and atmosphere within the game. This task certainly involved a level of creativity and I'll admit I had a hell lot of fun carrying this out. I decided to start the game off with soothing music that would lull the player into a false sense of calm, perhaps making them even think the game was of a different genre entirely (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WrongGenreSavvy ;) ). As the player proceeds onward, the game track transitions to something more suspenseful, yet still subtle. The sound continues to evolve as the player makes progress, and travels further along the map. Additionally, certain rooms or wards within the hospital have their own unique track. To achieve this, I employed the use of multiple audio sources referencing various tracks I was able to find in the Unity asset store. One point of concern was ensuring certain audio sources located farther away did not drown out audio sources nearby. This was challenging, and I discovered that fiddling around with the Priority levels and Volume rolloff of audio sources mitigated this effect. Although sound is now in place throughout the game, I'm still not entirely satisfied with the effects in place and would like to further hone and test as we continue development.    

I also attempted to reintroduce cursor effects (when the cursor changes based on the player's action) to the game this week but at this point in development this has been difficult to test due to there not yet being staff or patients for the player to attack. I do think a cursor change when the player opens a door is now unnecessary because doors are now opened via the 'F' key rather than clicking.   

At this point, I'd also like to add more models to the game to further enhance the look and feel of the hospital setting. These models may include furniture, wall hangings, signs, paintings, bathroom fixtures, etc. The use of audio reverb zones is also something that intrigues me and I look forward to potentially incorporating them into the game. Moreover, I'm excited to see the work Tanya will be doing to introduce interactive character dialog.

Polishing Up the Game

This week has been pretty hectic, we finally put up a map that we can work with. We also bought some models from the asset store to make our game really pop and look amazing. After Bavneet put the map in our game I've been adding models and making them look SEXY. I made all the objects spin, and added blood stains to the walls to make it creepier. Also now that midterms are out of the way I can work more on this game! I think for the up coming week what I need to learn is animations using unity, I found this really cool spider package on the asset store that comes with a lot of creepy animations -(I got it to work before but now I'm having some trouble with it again so I need to actually "re-learn" it). I thought it would add the aspect of creepy to have little critter crawlers running all over the place. I also learned how to apply textures to random objects. I found a "blood stain" texture in this package called "Medical Clothing Package" so I added blood stains to just about everything like beds and curtains and walls. I think my next goal other than animations is to intensify the aspect of "scary/creepy". :)

Went through some tissues, now ready to tackle the issues

Reading week was an awfully busy one for me, though it seems like it flew by. I had to prepare for my two midterms which are back to back on Monday, wrote a paper, and caught up on readings for several courses, which took up all of my time... I did however put some thought into some issues with the game that we'd discussed the week before, especially regarding the end of the game and some 'bonus' additions. While wanting to keep the game simple and stick to the fundamentals, a balance between extra, unique, and 'special' features to the game and these basics is needed. Beginning this week, I will put in more practical effort into the game itself and help out my group with any endgame and extra ideas, implementations, and so on. I will try to follow the schedule we set up in our write-up and perhaps change/go beyond that, where needed.

Development Process Planned Out

Over the reading week I decided it would be best to plan out the development process for the project and then get group feedback. This was done to ensure that everyone in the group was on the same page in regards to what we would like to see for the next presentation of our game. Also, this will help to avoid "integration hell" as we each will know what phase of the development process we will all be working on. (Each phase of the development process will be done in a sequence that we have agreed on.)

In terms of development, I'm going to be working on building the levels for our game (i.e. the actual level layout).

Mo' money less problems

My reading week did not involve any reading. I was assigned on a contract to make a website for someone, so that took up all my break time. It also took up precious time that I would have otherwise wanted to put towards our game. As excited as I am about this game and my group, Hospital Trance is not paying my bills, so I had to put it on the backburner. Staring Monday, all of my efforts will go towards our game, and I will start by tackling what I think is the most challenging task for our development - figuring out how to implement dialogue.

Combinatorics: Check.

My reading week mostly consisted of catching up missed readings and studying for my upcoming midterms. I can say I definitely acquired a lot of knowledge about combinatorics, since that it the first midterm I will have to face. But I also set some time apart for the fun stuff- working on the game! I found a lot of new models for out game to make it look more neater, and have been trying to implement a new idea of dressing up as a doctor! Hopefully I will be done with that soon :)

You may delay, but time will not

As usual, reading week has been spent attempting to tackle whatever task (read: obstacle) school—and life in general, unfortunately—has thrown at me. Much of this week was spent collaborating with my team members for an entirely different project, and with next week just right around the corner, I’m starting to feel immense stress anticipating how much I need to do within a span of a few days. I plan to ensure all relevant sound effects in our game are placed and near polished by tomorrow, and that the player’s cursor changes appropriately with the player’s actions in-game. Scouring the asset store and the web for more musical pieces to set up the perfect ambience for our game will definitely be more fun than anything else I need to do, however. ;) 

First Post!

Just testing out how this looks :)