Homework 6

Two Games

So a game I really like is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. One game I didn't like was Quest 64.

Paper Mario: TTYD

Story: In this game, the player plays as Mario and friends as they traverse the not so familiar land that surrounds the port city of Rougeport. Unlike the Mushroom kingdom, with it's colorful and friendly creatures, Rougeport harbors many a ship hands and has a dirtier look and feel to it, much like a port city back in the colonial era would look like. Our hero Mario was invited to come to the location by none other than Princess Peach herself, and once again she has gotten herself into trouble. It is up to Mario and friends that he meets along the way to explore this new world, and look for Peach while also uncovering the many secrets that the land has to offer. Not all is smooth sailing as Mario faces fierce enemies in all new landscapes and locations.

That is the basic jist of the game. Now, I'm no writer, but I feel like the story description alone would get people to play the game. I had played the previous title in this franchise, Paper Mario 64, and it instantly became my favorite game at that time. The sequel, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door went above and beyond what the first one did, and it then made it's way to my favorite game of all time, even to this very day.

Mechanics: In Paper Mario: TTYD, the player can explore an overworld, solving puzzles and advancing in locations, but when Mario meets an enemy, the scene is switched into a turn based battle, where Mario and company, and enemies take turns attacking. There are a plethera of moves, and items that can be used in combat, and even in the overworld that help Mario and the gang overcome obstacles on their journey.

Tech: This game was made for the Nintendo Game Cube, and although it didn't do anything crazy hardware wise due to the limitations of the GameCube, the graphics update was enough to make it seem different than it's predecessor.

Art: The art in the Paper Mario games is fascinating. It is a 3D game when you are in the overworld, but everyone in the game is 2D, which makes for a pretty cool effect, allowing Mario to take the shape of a paper airplane, boat, etc. Different areas of the world have different color pallets that help give the game life.

Balance

Paper Mario is balanced due to the fact that there are levels and that the enemies get exponentially stronger as the player advances further into the game. As Mario increases his level, one can choose to upgrade his HP, his resource bar, or his number of equipable abilities. Choosing one of the three will mean you have less of the other 2, so the player can choose their play style to a point. The higher level you are, the lower amount of experience points weaker enemies will give you, eventually not giving any at all, maybe as an incentive to not grind the same area over and over to get over leveled.

Levels alone wont cut it either, in combat, the player must know an enemies strengths and weaknesses in order to minimize damage taken, as HP is crucial in the later stages of the game. There is also a thing called "action commands" that a player can perform in combat to deal a bit of extra damage or mitigate some of it. This requires precise inputs at precise times.

The only unbalanced thing is that you can "build" Mario in such a way that he does an absurd amount of damage if you have 5hp or less, which is easy to get to. If you raise one of his stats and nothing else, you'll be almost unstoppable, the only thing that can stop you is if you don't input an action command correctly, which I guess sort of balances things out.

Interest Curve

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is regarded as one of the best Mario games made by Nintendo, and there is a reason why. It follows the same formula that was very successful by its predecessor and simply builds on top of what is already proven to work. The franchise broke away from the Super Mario 64 mold and added strategy like the Mario RPG series did. An interesting art style and a story that is very well crafted bite into the player and drag him/her into a wonderful story driven game that has very solid gameplay to boot. Paper Mario is a title that everyone should play.

Emergent Properties

This game offers little variation, as you are playing as Mario, there is already a molded cut as to what you should expect to be playing as. Players can deviate their "builds" a little, by choosing their preferred companions most of the times as well as their stats. The multitude of enemies that you will be fighting keep things fresh and the different locations keep things interesting.

Summary

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is my favorite game of all time. It built off of it's successful predecessor on the N64 and the gameplay and storyline that this game has to offer is among the best Nintendo has crafted. I highly recommend playing it at least once, as well as the first one.

Quest 64

Story: I have no idea. Literally it's that confusing. The player is thrown into the world and that's it. I've never been able to advance far enough into the game because of how confusing and how badly made the game is. I'm going to just write about the negatives, as they seem to heavily outnumber the positives, hopefully I hit most of the points that need to be covered.

Mechanics: You can move around in the game and travel through many areas. In each area are enemies that you need to battle. Once close enough you are thrown into a ring with the beast, and you have to defeat it. The ring constantly grows smaller until you are basically touching the beasts. The only problem is, they never tell you how to attack. You have a staff that I'm assuming you can use to attack, but I was never able to figure out how to do so. The N64 has 9 buttons on it, and I couldn't figure out how to attack...

Tech: This is probably it''s only saving grace. I recall this game having fairly decent graphics for the N64, it reminded me of Super Mario 64 or something similar, with its many polygons and limited colors, but it looked nice and fit the aesthetic.

Art: See above.

That's basically the game. You are thrown into the world, are not thought how to fight, and are expected to continue onward like that. I feel like maybe a fight where an AI teaches you to fight, or maybe even signs to read how to fight would help out. The game was so poorly made for the novice player that I feel many lost interest like I did.

Homework 5

Since our game will be dealing with a lot of AI moving about that the player can interact with, I've created an AI character with a hit-box that follows a set path on a level, and if the player encounters the enemy, the player is then transported to a battle screen.

As one can see in the picture above, the AI character is simply a sphere at this point, and it has attached to it a hit-box. On event collision, a new level opens and the player is transported there.


As for the pathing that the AI takes, that's a little more complicated. On begin play, reference the path algorithm pawn, and cast it to the AI described above. Now that we have our pawn and pathing, set the AI path to a node location and move the AI there. This moves the character to its first desired location. The blueprint for this can be seen in the top portion of the image below.

In order to move the AI to the next desired location, we need an event tick that is attached to an if statement that checks if the AI pawn has reached it's location, and has stopped. To check this we need to get the move status of our actor and compare it to a boolean we created that is set to true. We use a != boolean comparison to return true or false back into the if statement for the event tick. If the pawn has stopped, we set the current node that the AI is at, and then we reference the next node that is attached to the current node. The current node becomes the next node and so on and so forth. Last;y, we get the AI to move to the next node, and this repeats over and over, making the AI move about the map. All of the code for this section can be seen in the lower half of the image above.

HUDs

Class Participation 4

I've designed and Drawn two basic HUDs that may fit into our game. There are 5 aspects to my HUDs.

1) Hit Points (Red) : The amount of health a player has
2) Resource (Blue) : Mana or something that can be used for abilities
3) Stamina (Green) : Allows the player to perform sprints, long jumps, etc.
4) Light (Yellow) : Allows the player to perform special attacks/Spells with the use of this
5) Current Items : What the player is holding in his/her hands

This is a standard HUD that displays the player's HP bar and Resource bars along the top of the screen. I've added items held by the player in the center. This layout is meant to crowd all of the information available to the player in one area. This looks nice, but it's very bland, so there is a trade-off.

This is a custom HUD that displays the player's HP and Light resources on the bottom left along with their left hand item. It also displays their right hand item along with their Resource bar and Stamina on the bottom right. At the top center is a Compass bar that helps the player get his/her bearings.