Books I've Been Looking At

Here are two of the many books I have bought for both Unity and Coding.

The first book is called "Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4, All-in-One, Multi-Platform Game Development" - by Sue Blackman. I have found this book to be well structured, it's basically broken down in to two parts: the first part explains the overall logic involved when making games, which quickly gets you to the point where you can create simple game assets that can be built upon. The second part of the book walks you through the basics of a 'point and click' style first person game. In this part of the book I have found it extremely helpful looking at the state management scripts. What I have also found good with the parts that I have read in this book, is the easy to follow language used, which isn't too much to handle all at once, and it encourages the use of problem-solving skills, without it becoming too stressful or over-bearing, which is a vital part of scripting/ coding.

The second book (the latest book that I have bought), "Unity 4.x Game AI Programming" - by Aung Sithu Kyaw, Clifford Peters and Thet Naing Swe. This book specifically goes through "how to implement various AI Techniques in Unity3D by implementing the algorithm from scratch".

I have just started reading this book, and so far I have found it to be extremely useful and easy to follow. There are no big paragraphs of text, each bit of important information is written in a short and concise manner which makes it that much easier to follow. It also has extracts of code in the book which are simple to follow as well. 

Fingers crossed, with the help of the these two books (and the other 3 I have purchased on the topic of Unity and Coding), I hope to be able to learn a lot in the next coming weeks and months for our project, and they should be very helpful even past the deadline date for our project.

Item Concepts

So my task for over the weekend was to look at specific items that you would maybe find within a slaughter house, that we could use for our processing room. I started off with drawing three types of hooks that you would hang the bodies up on. I then moved on to hands restrained by cuffs, hung up in the air. I thought that maybe we could combine the two elements.

I was thinking of also looking at the pulley systems/ conveyor belts that would be used to move the bodies along. As well as this I was thinking of also studying the clothing worn by the people who work within those sorts of environments, for example wellies and gloves. Furthermore I will try and produce studies of instruments they may use within the slaughter process (which is going to be terribly gruesome to research!). 

Possible Idea

We looked at a interactive virtual scene of a battery hen farm and came up with an alternative idea. Instead of having the cages arranged in a maze like pattern we could have them arranged in a way more typical of factory farms which would draw more parallels to factory farms.


Link to interative scene:
http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/empathy/virtualbatterycage/#reference

Research

Found this link:

http://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/empathy/virtualbatterycage/#reference

Interactive 3d scene to show what its like for a battery chicken, you can drag around to see other chickens in the cage, gives a good sense of how cramped it is. We could use a similar scale maybe?


Also a factory farm moodboard

Research Videos

http://vimeo.com/73234721
Clip from film SAMSARA showing food production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LcoClM-tQk
Advert for free range eggs, puts the viewer in the battery hens position and is pretty creepy


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad3Thqzk4Q8
Cloud Atlas scene with the factory scene where the synthicant-clone people are being turned into food which is then fed back to the alive clones

http://youtu.be/qwnbQfjkdkU?t=1m29s
Scene from Doctor Who - Rise of the Cybermen where people are lead into the factory. Was thinking we could use a similar method for the slaughterhouse to avoid showing excessive gore but make it clear what is happening by using sound (screaming, mechanical noises like saws?) and leaving it up to the players imagination.

A few ideas and inspiration

This is a quick insight as to how we may approach the core game mechanics. It shows a bit of clarification as to the order in which we can approach certain tasks.

These next two are some inspiration images I put together.

This is a concept for how the enemy might look, but we shall look more into the design and stylisation.

Moodboards

These are some moodboards we had to further develop our ideas:

Day One! IDEAS.

Our ideas so far:

You are a young girl, who wakes up in a dark cage within a cell. It soon becomes clear that there are other prisoners there with you and that some have been there all of their lives. The result of all of you being there is that Alien beings want to farm the human population.

Short Notes we've Discussed:

- Sterile environment for the aliens.

- Obvious signs of torture on the victims.

- Light orbs that you can pick up to help light up your way - the ablilty to hide them if an alien comes near - Point light attached to a sphere object > HALO > adjust radius and intensity?

- Alien posters - Black humour - example, a person roasting themselves.

- Protagonist - Female, aged 16-20? Dressed in a hospital gown.

- Other prisoners dressed in hospital gowns.

- Simple gameplay, not too long.

- Cages with people in cell rooms - crammed in everywhere they can possibly fit.

- Male and Female prisoners - basic - motion capture for body movements - basic facial animations.

- Enemy Aliens wearing gas masks - polluted air, toxic for them to breathe.

- Start screen with the use of concept art - simple scene with text, maybe a demo of the gameplay.

- Possible need for save function or respawn points if the gameplay becomes too long.