Steve's Blog

February 27, 2020 HFF Level Concept/Skill Breakdown Level: Medieval Playthrough Sources Referenced Human Fall Flat (No Commentary) (16/09/2017) Video #1 By: SpeedyAvatar Human Fall Flat - Full Playthrough w/ summit1g Video #2 By: summit1g Title: Automatic Game Progression Design through Analysis of Solution Features Source: E. Butler, E. Andersen, A. M. Smith, S. Gulwani, and Z. Popović, “Automatic Game Progression Design through Analysis of Solution Features,” 2015, pp. 2407–2416, doi: 10.1145/2702123.2702330. Overview I am looking into existing HFF levels to analyze the various small puzzle scenarios present in an attempt to breakdown what skills and/or concepts the player needs to understand or be able to act upon in order to complete them. The approach on how these are broken down was inspired by the the way procedural traces and n-grams are used in the above source by Butler et al. It is hoped that this approach to breaking down various puzzle scenarios in...

February 5, 2020 HFF LM-GM Analysis Thesis Project Title: Mapping learning and game mechanics for serious games analysis Source: S. Arnab et al., “Mapping learning and game mechanics for serious games analysis: Mapping learning and game mechanics,” British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 391–411, Mar. 2015, doi: 10.1111/bjet.12113. List of Game Mechanics The following is the list of game mechanics I observed in Human: Fall Flat according to the source above (with noting for those that are major factors, and those that are only really present in multiplayer): Behavioral Momentum Cooperation (*multiplayer only) Collaboration (*multiplayer only) Cascading Information (*multiplayer only) Resource Management (Major factor) Strategy/Planning (Major factor) Infinite Gameplay (offered by game somewhat, but major focus of developed system) Levels (Major factor) Pavlovian Interactions Feedback (major factor) Movement Design/Editing Simulate/Respo...

February 17, 2020 Neural Networks Youtube Videos on the Basics But what is a Neural Network? | Deep learning, chapter 1 Information #1 - Link By: 3Blue1Brown Neural Network Architectures Information #2 - Link By: Steve Brunton Notes I am following up on my original research into working with neural networks and machine learning. I started looking into the programming more before really looking into the full background of it, so I am going back to make sure I have a better understanding of the theory and concepts behind neural networks and machine learning. These sources I found seemed to be useful lectures to get a hold of the basic foundations for the concepts behind such ideas.

February 14, 2020 System.Random Methods C# and Unity Random Class (from Microsoft) Information - Link By: Microsoft General Methods Looked Into Random.Next This selects a random integer either between 0 and maximum value, or between two different designated values. Random.NextDouble This generates a random floating point value between 0.0 and 1.0. This is the main one I will be looking to use since I have a lot of parameters where floating point values make sense, however since it only returns values between 0.0 and 1.0 specifically, I will have to just use it as a random multiplication factor. Random.NextByte This requires an input of an array of bytes. It will then fill that array with random byte values. Why I am Investigating My thesis project uses a lot of random values with its focus on varied procedural content generation, but I want to control the randomness a bit more with the implementation of a seeding system. A tutorial I did a while back on cell...

February 12, 2020 Beginner Programming Creating a Character Stat System Accessing Variables in Our System Part 1 Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses Unity Learn Course - Beginner Programming Accessing Variables in Our System Part 1 Equipping Weapons They mostly just created the scriptable object, ItemPickUp_SO, for now so that the base of the EquipWeapon method would work. This method simply adds a designated amount to the character's base stats. Equipping Armor Here they created two separate enums within ItemPickUp_SO to define options for the types of items and options for the types of armor. These enums on the scriptable objects were actually very nice in the editor as they provided drop down lists easily accessible to the designer. The EquipArmor method in CharacterStats_SO used a switch statement, which goes well with enums. They however performed the same calculations with every single case (adding the different values to the player's resista...

February 12, 2020 Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses Creating a Character Stat System Damage, Leveling Up and Death Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses Unity Learn Course - Beginner Programming Damage, Leveling Up and Death Encapsulation and Item Pickups They cover encapsulation again just to explain why they use different access modifiers for different fields and methods within the scriptable objects they are creating to deal with the character's stats and items. Stat Increasers They covered methods that increased the stats of the character. They were pretty basic, where they added values to specific stats and checked if the value would go over the max value to set it directly to max if that was the case. Stat Reducers This was very similar to Stat Increasers methods, but with subtraction and checked if the value would go below 0. This made me realize there's a better way to do this where you check if a value would go below 0 BEFORE actua...

February 7, 2020 Unity Learn Tutorials Note: The AI tutorial require Unity Learn Premium to access Artificial Intelligence for Beginners Tutorial Series #1 - Link By: Penny de Byl Introduction to Optimization with Unity - 2019.3 Tutorial Series #2 - Link By: Unity Technologies Notes These were both tutorial series I saw on Unity Learn that I wanted to note specifically to check out later. The Optimization tutorial is a very small series, so I can look into that rather quickly, but the AI series is a 15+ hour comprehensive class so that will take a large commitment to fully cover. The AI series however is something I am interested in in general and even covers some topics I am specifically looking into at this time. Some of these topics include: Navigation Meshes, Crowd Simulation, State Machines, and Goal Driven Behavior. This would be very good to follow for my own personal interests as well as possibly being useful for some projects I am looking to work on.

February 6, 2020 Cursed Problems in Game Design GDC 2019 Talk GDC 2019: Cursed Problems in Game Design Video - Link By: GDC - Alex Jaffe (Riot Games) Notes Cursed Problem: an unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises Politics: competition through social negotiation, alliances, and manipulation The main skill here is identifying cursed problems so you know to avoid them or navigate them so you do not waste time on "solving" them. Examples from Talk: Hard or Cursed? No Man's Sky: Exploration game with millions of worlds Hard: This was evidenced by the game becoming successful after significant time updating the game, but it easy to see this was just a hard problem and not an impossible one. Diablo: Loot games with efficient trading Cursed: Many loot experiences are just incompatible with efficient marketplace trading systems because the loot experience relies on the random drops themselves feeling unique or special to t...

February 5, 2020 NavMesh Unity Tutorials Unity NavMesh Tutorial - Basics Tutorial #1 - Link By: Brackeys Navigation Mesh Basics | Unity AI Pathfinding (Part 1) | Table Flip Games Tutorial #2 - Link By: Table Flip Games Use Unity3D NavMeshAgent.Move to customize your navigation control Tutorial #3 - Link By: Jason Weimann Crowd Behaviours on a Dynamic Navmesh in Unity Part 1 Tutorial #4 - Link By: Holistic3d Notes I am looking to explore Unity's NavMesh to see what features it has to compare with A* Pathfinding, especially my setup I worked on specifically. I want to see the benefits it readily provides over A* as well as see if I can find any useful features that could be implemented in some way into A*. Tutorials 2 and 4 both are the beginning of series so they can be useful for exploring deeper into NavMesh. Jason Weimann in tutorial 3 is also generally a good source for exploring features more deeply at a more advanced level.