CS 108 - Game Study

I have been playing games since I was born. I learned how to play Chinese Chess at 3, video games at 6 and continue to discover new games around me. Game is an essential part that makes me who I am today. Therefore when I decided to choose one of the elective course, CS 108 - Game Study is my first choice, and the course even exceeds my expectation.

There are so much more purposes and types of games that I have never known before. For me, playing game is to have fun, challenge myself and earn the happiness of victory or the experience from defeat. After taking the course, I learn that some games are made so that we can understand each other, feel other people's feelings, have a environment that we can put ourselves into their position and then look at things in a different prospective.

Reading about games, watching videos about how game can benefit us help me understand more about the importance of game in our life. Then I learned about GameMaker, a software that can turn beautiful but simple ideas into a wonderful game easily. I enjoy spending my time to apply all the ideas I have had since I was a little kid to make my own games, played by my own rules.

Moreover, the final presentation helped to bring us together. I can learn what other people think about game, beautiful ideas my classmates have put into their games, and have a chance to show our game to the whole class. I feel proud making a game with my group, and the pride keeps growing when I presented it to the whole class, and take down comments, compliments, ideas I can add to. It is like creating my own world with piece by piece contributed by people around, and the feeling is wonderful.

Blog 8 - Dogfight

To do our final project, our group of four: Jeffrey Tran, Hoai Nguyen, Marlowe De Vera, and me Huy Nguyen work together to make an aircraft shooting game. Marlowe and Hoai are in charge of the art work, Jeffrey and I are in charge of programming and design. We came up with the ideas of different type of enemies and we have to do different mechanics for each one of them. For example for meteors, you cannot should down meteors, all you can do is to move out of their way. On another hand you cannot hide from heat-seeking missile as it always follows you, the only way to take down the missiles is to shoot them down before they reach you. I made the game so that if you cannot shoot all the missiles down then you are dead but Jeff thought it was too hard so he changed the gameplay: once you left the missiles behind, they never follow you.
We still need more work on the boss level and add several enemies to add the variety of mechanics to the game. One of the enemies I thought about is the shielded bomber. Its ability is to have shield on for several seconds and off for 1 second. If you shoot it while it is shielded, it will explode and kill the player, you have to time it right to shoot it right at the time the shield is down.
The boss should have all mechanics of meteors, missile and bomber. The boss' cannon will be shielded and we need to time to take it down, it the cannon is destroyed, it will be torn off and flying toward us. The boss also shoot random missiles at the player. Those are all the ideas and designs we have in mind, we will try to implement it and make the game better.

Ingress Game

Our professor just introduced us this new cool game called Ingress. The game runs on mobile platform and requires your GPS to locate your position. The game rule is simple, each historical or famous place in the real world is a portal in the game world. We need to deploy the portal to generate energy and gain territory from portals. All players are divided into two factions: the Enlightened and the Resistance. When you hack a portal, you can gain some items such as: resonators with levels to deploy and upgrade, gun to destroy other faction's portal, power cube to regain your XM. XM stands for Exotic Matter, is similar to your mana pool or energy. We need XM to spend for your actions, and while we are walking in real life with the game on, we gain more XM. If we have no XM, our scanner is disabled and could not locate our position so we had better store some power cubes to regain XM in some emergency. The game requires players in each faction to play together in a group, keep coming back to each portal site to recharge the resonators or we can use portal key signet to remotely recharge them. Each player is just a small part of a game, but working together as a faction building your resonators and turrets will easily help you gain more territory and energy to bring your chosen factor to victory.

Flying Monkey Prototyping

Jeffrey and I continued to work on the game, to develop the background and gameplay. I had an idea about creating a jungle background with grass on the ground and huge trees covering the sun and sky and Jeffrey sent me this, not dark and sad as I expected but exciting and lively as a monkey game should look like. The game rules and controls are simple: using arrows to move around, space to shoot bananas, kill the giant spider and pick up the giant banana to win the game. We made the background scrolling so it looks like the monkey is flying around the jungle. We should make it the endless running game, but I was still working on how random monsters appear after launch so our game is really easy right now, the small spiders only need one shot to die, and the giant spider does not have any harmful mechanics that can kill the player, or surprise him/her. Even though it is just a simple game, we are proud that it is our first game. Jeffrey Tran as a Designer and I, Huy Nguyen, as a Programmer spent a lot of time and hard work to make this happen. The more I work with Gamemaker the more interesting I feel about this software, wonderful and easy to make, even for beginner. This first game is like our practice to make further better games. Here is the link to our game: download here.

Flying Monkey Game

Jeffrey and I are working together to make our first game. Both of us want to contribute as a programmer, however as artist is as important as programmer and I can't draw so Jeffrey agreed on the drawing job. In our first meeting, we talked about ideas, what we should do, what our game should be and I wanted to create a game about a monkey, because this year is a Monkey year. At first, I just want to create some random monkey climbing around in the jungle, avoiding danger and taking objectives. Then Jeffrey thought it would be great if we have a flying monkey riding a jet pack with a gun, shooting enemies with bananas so we came up with this game: Flying Monkey.
My role is to create interaction with all the characters, we planned to make it endless run and random spiders or snakes would appear and we have to avoid it or shoot it down, but I have not figure out how to create random stuff and endless room. Therefore for our first playable, I just made one simple game with five big black spider running around in a simple path, our monkey can shoot them down to pick up the giant banana and win the game. Here is the link to our first playable ever: link.
My main question is should I create a fence around the room, that limits our monkey's movement, I think that would be create, and easier to show that spider crawl up and down from there. We will develop the game more and more, and will come up with a better version of Flying Monkey soon.

Video Games Experience

On Monday March 7, 2016 Garrett and I played several games, but the three most impressive to me are "This is the only level", "The Beagles", and "Wizard Wizard." The common things between the three games are simple designs, jumping to avoid dangerous traps and using arrow buttons as main movement. "This is the only level" is really interesting, if I had not watched Garrett played it, I would have no ideas how to pass through the stages. There are different stages with different environments but the same objective: to go through the gate at the right corner. At each stage, there is one short line at the left corner as a hint to player how to pass the stage. The game shows us different ways to show one problem, and sometimes it requires an open-minded player to figure out new, out of the box thinking to reach the final stage (for example: refreshing the stage, reading the credits, etc). For "Wizard Wizard", this game is the most difficult among the three. We died more than fifty times that night just to pass seven stages. The game's mechanic is simple and often seen at most game: jumping around to avoid the saw and get the key, to reach the gate. The wizard can use double jump too so it makes him more flexible for going up and down levels. The last game is "The Beagles" where we need to go to different height levels to rescue all the beagles, if we miss one, we lose. To go to higher level, we have to use rope; to go to lower level, we can either jump straight down or use parachute if it is too high. We have to fight the doctors and pet controls by shooting owls at them; ropes, parachutes and owls are picked up along the way. All there games are fun to play and watch. Garrett played "This is the only level" first, and he has played it many times before, that makes him the expert to go through the level really fast and gives me the idea of how to pass it with an open thinking. New tricks and skills are easily to learn if you watch others play it first, so that you can make it your own and develop the tricks.

Monster's Kick

 My partner and I was just brainstorming ideas about making a fun game, I looked at his laptop's background and saw a Pokemon theme, so I came up with a game related to monster's duel. The rules are simple, in a 8x8 board field, players start at the corner, up to 4 players, move by rolling a dice to collect objectives: the small squares, battle if two monsters are next to each other, the one with higher number on the dice can kick the other monster back, a monster dies and is eliminated if it is kicked out of the board. With the objective, players can get powerful bonus such as: double damage, faster movement speed, forced knock back, plus one shield or move back to starting point.

After drawing out the board and placing the objective randomly, my partner and I started to try it out. I try to get as many objectives as possible and quickly move to the center of the board, my partner did the same and he luckily got double damage which is too powerful, he rolled 4 which becomes 8 after the bonus and I only got 3; I got knocked back 5 tiles and out of board. After the quick game, we figured out that the double damage bonus was just too powerful to exist, so we change it to double knock back (only double the difference).

Then I got home and played it with my cousin several games, I luckily got the double movement bonus and picked up all the bonus before my cousin even get anything. And with the huge resource, he definitely has no chance to stay on the board. So we came up with the new layout for the board, which places one free bonus near each players, and more environmental tiles: river and mountain. Players cannot go through the river and got slow down by the mountain, which they have to pay two points on the dice to move 1 tile, these effects are not affected by the knock back.

With a nearly complete game, I came to class on Wednesday to play with my classmate, figured out this should be fun when it is all fair and square. However, even we picked up all the objective, we are all smart enough to stay in the middle of the board, which makes it very difficult for either of us to knock the other out. Therefore I think with two players, each players can control two monsters, and therefore they can do combo move, combo attack with make the game more fun and fast.

The Resistance Session Report

Last week, our 6-person group played a game named "The Resistance" where we have to do 5 missions together but two of us are spies. Each mission, we sent out the number of people according to the number in the mission track circles: 2, 3, 4, 3, and 4. Successful missions are missions where we got all the "Success Mission Card", failed missions are the ones that we got one or more "Fail Mission Card."

We started to play, the card with the fist, and a blue star inside a square above is the leader card. Our leader would read a prompt so that the two spies would know each other but our four real resistances would not.

First mission, required two people, our leader proposed the guy in the middle, sitting opposite of me, and her to go on the first mission. We all agreed, because it was just the first one, and no one would risk to get revealed with a 50-50 chance. Like we expected, our first one was successful.

The second mission, we need to choose 3 people, two other guys in the left and right, sitting opposite, and me were chosen. We failed this one with one fail mission card.

The third mission, required 4 people, the guy on the left with white T-shirt and me got left out. This mission ended up failing too by one fail mission card. This is our first time playing this game, we as the resistances did not how to divide our team properly to get the spies, so we have to gamble our play through the fourth mission which requires three people.

In the fourth mission, I proposed to choose our leader, the guy in the middle, sitting opposite, and the girl sitting on my right to go. It turned out that it was a successful mission and I was all positive that all three of them were our guys, resistance, because the spy only need to fail this one and they won. So I continued propose three of them and me to go to the last one (I am a resistance for sure).

However, we got all approve vote (we should get two reject vote from two spies if they wanted to win, or one or two reject votes from two resistances that were left out). We go on with the final mission and it turned out to be failed, our leader is one of the spies, she just wanted to play to the fifth and did not fail the fourth mission.

This game is really hard to play as a resistance, it only required one fail card to fail the whole thing, but if we continue to play it more often, I think we will figure out how to do it properly. It was really fun, wonderful social experience from all the playing and talking.

Arcade Games

At first, it was really hard for me to choose any games to play. I rarely come to arcade center and play game, as I remember I came there less than 10 times therefore all the games seem strange and not familiar at all. I looked at all the games' title and suddenly found one of my favorite childhood game: Tetris. Then, it took me five minutes to figure out how to start the game, there are three buttons on the left corner, and I need to click "Insert coin" for credit, choose "Player 1" to play for my turn. All the shapes and rules are the same, but at first I did not know how to rotate the shape, only move it right and left. I had to try every single button on my keyboard to figure out which one is used to rotate, and it turns out to be the "Control" button.

The original hardware has one big circle button to change the shape, and one control stick to move the shape right or left. The PC emulator uses arrow buttons on the keyboard for left, right movement and "Control" button for shape changing. We can also press down to make the shape go down faster. It was a little bit hard at first, but when I get used to it, all things seems simple and familiar like the game I played when I was a little boy. I am not a good Tetris player but always have fun playing it.