Rules of the Game

11 May (Monday)
In the morning company meeting, we were introduced to three new staff, and the shacho talked about the importance of communication within the company, amongst other things. The meeting lasted only 15 minutes.

A.M. Game Design - Action Games continued (Trainer: Hattori-san) Our morning lesson continues with our look at essential component of action games, particularly the game rules. There are two kinds of objectives or goals in a typical action game: immediate (low-level enemies) and final objectives (final boss). The challenges to the player come in the form of enemies and stages (layout of the stage, as well as traps). The game designer's dilemma is how to gradually increase the difficulty level of the game while keeping the game attractive, fun and non-stressful for the player. This is even harder to achieve with 3D games compared to 2D.

To maintain an entertaining tempo, there has to be tension and release, using non-game events (e.g. cut scenes) or mini-games to provide a break and give the player time to prepare for the next challenge. Hints and rewards can also keep the player motivated to continue playing, and when the gameplay gets boring, a change of direction will help keep things fresh.

The secret of good game design turns out to be "omotenashi", which our translator (Stephen from England) couldn't really explain since it's some Japanese concept. A search on the web yields the meaning - "an atmosphere of hospitality and welcome". I guess this means "the customer comes first" and we have to always put the player's point of view first and foremost while designing games.

P.M. Game Visual 2 - Visual Arts Pipeline for HDK 2 (Trainer: Kawashima-san)
In the afternoon, we learnt more about the Home Tools, this time how to export Animated Models. I managed to get my scene up and looking decent, but unfortunately there was no way to make a screen capture. Please forgive the poor quality iPhone photos instead.

You can't tell from the photos, but the two smaller metallic
spheres are rotating around the giant glass sphere.
The water surface also has an animated normal map.

The Home engine provides very neat visuals, including ambient occlusion light maps, real-time shadow maps, normal mapping, water shader with fresnel reflection and fogging, and a nice soft bloom filter. Standard materials include pre-lighted, glass, skin, emissive and water shaders.

There doesn't seem to be any parameter to control glossiness (specular power, eccentricity, rolloff... etc). Perhap we are expected to manually achieve that using a combination of normal map and specular map, which is entirely possible and actually closer to how reality works. However, this method is not intuitive and more cumbersome for the artist.

As a side note, we increasingly have to rely on self-learning, since our trainers are not necessarily experts in the field they are lecturing on, and often don't know how to answer our questions on more advanced topics satisfactorily. Sounds like another institution you know? :P