37 38 and 39 assignment

Client Brief

You work as an apprentice games designer for Epic games you have been introduced to the Unreal Development Kit (UDK). You have also been looking at some 3D animation tools such as Z Brush, 3D studio Max and Blender.

You have been asked to design a concept for a game.

Task 1) As the apprentice you have been asked to create a simple3D computer game for target age of 12+ age group. The task is to create 3 rooms or level game with interconnected levels. You can create a simple FPS or TPS based game or any genre which The first room is the largest and is set in an outside environment with landscaping and grass and some water features, such as stream(s) and/or a water fall. Create a Sun and trees and grass and give the feel of a large landscaped environment. Another room is inside or enclosed environment. The lighting in this environment should be limited to reflect this. The third room is the final level. Show screenshots of how this game was created and use appropriate text to explain the work you have done. Show the Kismet used and the properties of the individual aspects and why they are set the way they are set. Also in a paragraph discuss the game concept and how you came about coming up with the game idea.

Task 2) Once the Game has been created play test it and create a video of your gameplay explaining the game as you go.

Task 3) Get a friend to test your game and critically evaluate your game.

Unit 38 and 39 Assignment
Unit 37 Assignment

Unpacking the Code part One

UnPacking the Code...

As explained in my excellent post Phaser Games states a well designed Phaser game has game states.

These game states are separate JavaScript programs or files. These are shown in my example as preload, create and update. These name come from the original tutorial from Phasers.io own tutorial section. These are all loaded separately like this :-

<script src="js/preload.js"></script>
<script src="js/create.js"></script>
<script src="js/update.js"></script>

One of the main advantages or separating a game into separate sections is that we can have a reusable code sections that we can use elsewhere. Intelligent code design is about managing our code into logical sections. We could put all three together into one piece of code and it would perform the same function. However for larger games this get messy.

So lets think about a game that has multiple levels. Lets talk about how to design this using just the concept of game states!

So the preload section is all about loading up the sounds and the sprites ready to display them. Its like the RED in a traffic light sequence!

The Create is about the initial placement (physics ect..). The score is set to zero every thing is ready to go. Its like the AMBER in a traffic light.

The update is the game is playing we deal with animations, collision, score increasing dealing with damage and dying and ending the game or moving to next level. Its like the GREEN in a traffic light sequence!

So for One level we do preload then create and finally update.

So what do we do for 2 levels then ?

When its harder than you think bu the answer is this...

Preload

Create - level 1

Update  - level 1

Create - level 2

Update  - level 2

So you do a create and update for each level as well and you only usually need one preload. 

Ok this is all fairly basic coding really and also it is how I do code design and I am not saying this is the perfect way of doing this for large projects but... Its clean a it works for what we are looking at..

So the reality is you could have for a 2 level game code that looks like this ...

preload

GameOne

GameTwo

Menu

Win

Lose

GameOne and GameTwo have the basic setup of both create and update functions.

create: function() { },
update: function(){ },

Using these basic principles you can create a multileveled Phaser game!

Goto http://phaser.io/examples and find the code you want and then put it into the correct structure and voilà you are away.

Rapberry Pi as a Web game machine

The raspberry pi 3 @ £32 is an excellent budget computing solution for all manner of computing projects. So for my web based gaming module I use them with my students. So in this post I will show how to setup a Raspberry Pi 3 as a web gaming system!

Step One : get your self a Raspberry pi 3 a 16gb micro SD card. You also need a usb keyboard and mouse as well as a hdmi cable and hdmi monitor. If you just want an easier solution order the excellent starter kit sold by (www.modmypi.com).

Step Two : Download the latest Raspbian OS (stretch at the point of writing this blog) from the raspberry pie official website.

Step Three : Install the Raspbian OS to the micro SD card (no we don't use NOOBS but I suppose you could try to if you wanted). I use some software called etcher (https://etcher.io/) its free and is an easy to use image writer. You may also need to get a card reader as well for the SD card so you can write images to it.

Step Four : Setting up a raspbian OS. Ok so put the SD card in the Raspberry Pi 3 and turn it on and look at the monitor. Assuming everything is OK then you screen will look like this...

So its beginning to take shape now. Next you need to connect the Pi to the network, either wirelessly or wired. Depending on you situation, then test you connection by browsing the web using the pies default chromium browser.

Step Five : Web server installation. Now we come to the juicer part of the process. Use the Terminal icon (see below).

Type in the following commands (and press return at then end of each line to execute them).

sudo apt-get update

This updates/patches the raspbian to the latest patch version (its like a Microsoft patch but less annoying and controlling).

sudo apt-get install apache2 -y

This install the Apache web server. Then test it by opening up the chromium browser and put in localhost as the site you wish to browse.

Ok so now we are getting somewhere. Next we need PHP.

sudo apt-get install php7.0 -y

Step Five : Setting up Midori browser on the Pi. Midori used to be the default browser of choice on the Raspberry pi but it has recently been replaced by Chromium. However in  my experience (and at the time of writing this blog). Midori is the only PI browser capable of looking at Phaser games (on PI client system).

sudo apt-get install midori -y

Step Six : Phaser games and Engine setup. This is the easiest part!

I have written a blog about that, however there are some differences. I talk about WAMP in that post but here I talk about a Raspberry pi. I use both depending on the circumstances and I am getting more and more a fan of the pi since I wrote that post. We need to run some more commands

cd /var/www

sudo chown -R pi .

This changes the directory to www and sets the default user pi as the owner of this folder and subfolders. We have a subdirectory called html were all the files are stored. So look at my excellent post and have fun!

Link to my post about setting up the first phaser game!

In my next post I will discuss how we edit phaser games using the Pi.