The Crop Circle Warriors Sizzle Reel is on Youtube. It is just a portion of the episode 7 series with a 4k definition. The said demo reel is about 12 minutes long with the intro and the credits. The animation, will be edited if there is a streamer interested in the series. The sound effects and voices are just temporary, as the final voice and sound effects will be decided by the streamer. We don’t want to waste finalizing anything, if the streamer will just change a lot of things in the end.
The demo reel gives the type and feel of the Crop Circle Animation series.
Last December 10, 2018, I was one of the attendees who attended the free Masterclass for Unreal Engine (the software we use for our ‘Crop Circle Warriors’ mobile game) at the College of St. Benilde. The said class was from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. The master class was held by Chris Murphy, an evangelist for Epic Games and founder of Pub Games with over 10 years of experience with Unreal Engine.
Introductory Lessons on Unreal Engine
Project setup
Controller setup
Importing assets
Building materials
Creating character classes
Creating AI
Navigation
Blending animation
Spawning enemies
Maintaining game state and configuring in-game UI
Design principles
Blueprint debugging and performance optimization techniques.
All these techniques were used in our mobile game already.
Advanced Technical Art
Landscapes
Procedural foliage
Procedural spline tools
Particle effects
GPU particle effects
Material tesselation
material masking
world position effects
Screen space particle effects
Volumetric fog
The introductory lessons covered all the basics that are needed to create a simple 3D character that moves and followed by enemies in a small level. He taught us how to import animation assets, blending separate animations to create a new animation, create a basic state machine which dictates what animation will play depending on what button is pressed e.g. move forward, move backward, jump etc. All these techniques were used in our game already.
After the basics, we moved to the advanced part of the class which is technical art that covers shaders, visual effects, level creation tools like the use of spline to procedurally generate landscape paths and procedurally generate foliage. He also taught us the landscape tools and how to sculpt hills and cliffs.
The discussion on Landscapes, Procedural foilage (creating 3D plants easily), world position offset effects (how to manipulate objects in the overall landscape), volumetric fog (realistic fog that adapts to lights), were new to me and this knowledge can help us make our games much better. I will apply the new techniques I learned to the Crop Circle Warriors mobile game.
Unfortunately, I was not able to ask the questions I needed to ask due to the many participants in the auditorium who also had questions and took pictures with Mr. Murphy. Due to the same reason, I was not able to show the sample of our mobile to discuss the problems that I cannot solve by myself. They said they will be scheduling another Unreal Master Class soon, so maybe we will have another opportunity to show our game.
We were invited by Ms. Gwendelyn Abacano Foster last week to a seminar at the College of St. Benilde (CSB), featuring Mr. Ian Garner. Ian Garner works with Another Indie, an independent game publisher from China, that has published multiple critically acclaimed and commercially successful games such as Lost Castle. This was another opportunity for us to learn, especially publishing our game to China, which we don’t have any idea on how to go about it.
We also have a new contributor to the game – Faith Dimaranan. She’s a game development student at the Asia Pacific College. We really need someone, aside from Jap, with game knowledge and game logic to help us in other aspects of our mobile game. She is helping us in fixing the localization, achievements and optimizing the game.
Ms. Faith Dimaranan
Jap and Faith joined me at the seminar. We had trouble finding a parking space so we were a bit late when we got to the seminar. There were a few attendees, maybe about 20-30 people. Some were students and some developers. The topic was familiar, like finding a hook (selling point) of your game, and how to email publishers about your game. He also mentioned that developers should always attend events like ESGS and Gamecon because these are the places to get good feedback than having feedback from game testers. It is better to showcase your game to gamers and developers, because they have a better game sense, meaning they know what to look for in a game. He said that Google is not accessible to China, so we really need to have a local publisher in China to have our game published. We can email publishers directly and if our game catches their attention, they will publish it.
After the seminar, it was a good opportunity for us to show our game to Mr. Garner as well as to the other developers to get feedback. Unfortunately, a lot of people were having photo ops and were pitching their ideas as well. So we showed our games to 2 other people. Ian Christian Sevilla, who is a game developer, programmer and College Instructor at CSB. He also gave feedback last 2016 at ESGS. When he saw it he said it improved a lot, but he commented on the User Experience once again. He gave some feedback on fixing visuals for a better experience for the user. While playing, he commented that we fix the balance of the game. I thought he was referring to the balance of the playability of the characters. He meant the balance of the progression of the game. He said that the game should have a slow progression, we should teach the player what buttons to press first before making him fight monsters at once.
Mr. Ian Christian Sevilla (with backpack)
He gave us a link to how the Megaman game made players experience each ability at the start of the game.
Actually, it made sense, because he really had a hard time figuring the controls when he was playing the game. Faith and Jap immediately had ideas on how to fix this.
Kevin Brian Valmonte, a game developer, programmer and college instructor at CSB also tested our game. He said that the game looked good, and only needed to be polished. Instead of pressing a button to continue from a tutorial, why not just tap the screen to continue. He also said to fix the loading screen, there was a lot of dead space and we should remove the delay between screens. He also commented on the art, but that was just his preference and it wasn’t really that important.
We had good feedback here and Faith has volunteered on fixing the tutorial integration in the game. She is also optimizing the localization so it will be easier to add more languages later.
It is good that she has game programming knowledge and she figured out what part of the game needs to be fixed. We are now applying improvements from the feedback we gathered and Faith has committed to helping us optimize and polish the game.
Mr. Ian Garner
Miracle Animation Studios Inc. 