More Digestion Game WOrk

hey all,

I'm still hard at work on the digestion game. I've completed several of the improvements that I mentioned in the previous post, but of course there remains months of work, especially since the company promises their clients 10 hours of educational content. I've made some small steps towards reaching that goal, but a lot more design, and art, and of course programming work remains to be done.

In the mean time, please enjoy the video showing my progress in updating the game.

More to come next week.

Digestion Game Work

hey all,

So for the last week I have been hard at work going back to my game about the human digestive system. I've been mostly trying to fix the problems with the mouth level and small intestine level, such as the performance when lots of nutrients build up in the small intestines, or the complexity of the controls for the mouth, or the fact that food and food pieces seem to be able to go where ever they want to, even inside your tongue or brain sometimes.

The performance issues, in the small intestine level at least, are cleared up, I believe, but I am going to add back some of the features that I cut in order to test which ones were the real problem. For the mouth level, I am thinking of combining the epiglottis and tongue into one controller action, which will make swallowing food much easier. It will, however, remove some of the possibility of choking.

I've also redesigned the positioning of the epiglottis, larynx and esophagus to more closely match human anatomy. This also should reduce some of the possibility of choking, since I think it was a little too easy to choke before.

Part of the feedback I got from the interested company was that the basic levels did not have tutorials of any kind in them, so I am also at work on some flashing messages that will tell the player what the goal for each level is.

Fallout 4 Machinations

hey all,

I've been playing through Fallout 4 for several weeks now, and overall it is fun. I wanted to share some of my analysis so far, so please check out the video below.

In addition to observations I made in the video, there are level requirements for the abilities, so that a player cannot actually just invest 10 points in Luck, and then unlock the rank 10 Luck ability. Instead, the player might be forced to invest in other abilities until they reach level 40, for example, and then they might be allowed to invest in the rank 10 Luck ability, whatever it may be.

This acts as a kind of gating or even Stopping mechanism, preventing the game from becoming too easy too soon. These restrictions also create opportunities for the player to strategize about which attributes and which abilities to invest in, a form of long-term planning which increases player engagement.

Stay tuned for more analyses.

Digestion Game

hey all,
Below is a video of the digestion game that I made about a year ago. I've had a Skype meeting with a company that is interested in selling it to schools to use as an educational tool, after it has received a healthy dose of polish, of course.

So, in the next few days I hope to finish up following the node editor tutorial videos, and then take a look under the hood of my digestion game and see if I can make it run smoother, play in a more engaging way, and look nicer.

GDC

hey all,

GDC 2017 is over, and my oh my, how overwhelming, wonderful, boring, and fascinating it was. I've never been to San Francisco, so just that was pretty interesting for me. I was able to do a little sightseeing the day before GDC started, but after that I was in seminars and meetups almost the whole day every day after that. I have no idea how many people attended this year, but I read that in 2016 about 27,000 people attended, and it would not surprise me to know that around the same number did so this year.

I only went for the Educational pass, which although well worth it for the money, does severely limit what seminars you can attend. So, for the first two days, I participated in the Game Design Workshop, which was focused around working in small groups to design mechanics and themes for games. Really fun to finally work in a group, although I was lucky and most of the time my group was filled with great people from academia, the industry, and amateurs/hobbyists like myself.

The other days were spent running from room to room and building to building to attend the next seminar. In between those, I got to chat with random people and check out the expo, which featured games being developed by teams all around the world.

That's all for now, but expect more news soon.