Ryan Cooke-Ward's Portfolio

News, everyone! Now that all of the boring paperwork is out of the way, it's finally time for Game Development to begin! This means that the blog will be significantly more active (Very sorry for the big delay between posts) To kick things off, the name of the proposed game has been settled as Adstus Fabrica: 21 days to save the guild! As such, the old placeholder name of You Must Construct Additional Assets has gone, but the domain for the blog remains the same. And then, a little bit of teaser art! From someone who is very bad at art, so please do excuse the crummy concept art, but it is worth mentioning it is still WIP and a whitebox teaser! Just to prove that stuff is finally happening! This Friday will be our first architecture lesson where I will start piecing the core mechanics of the game together before I start with any levels, but it's going to be great for sure!

As a part of our university course, we have been tasked on an employability report in order to research and explore the (hopefully) future career of our choice. This includes things like experience, skills, and where to look for these kinds of jobs. The very first task given was to choose a specialisation. To begin with, during this course, I was very interested in 3D modelling. Unfortunately, I don’t have a creative nor artistic bone in my body, and this became apparent when I was modelling for the sake of modelling without any kind of submission or guidelines. So I turned to the other side of the course, programming. We have been taught to use Blueprints as opposed to C++ or C#, something that I am very grateful for as it served as a beginners stepping stone into the wonderful world of coding. Being able to click, drag, and piece together blueprint nodes like a puzzle made learning very easy! And a part of the project I chose for submission also used the Unreal Motion Grap...

Quick blog post time! So basically uni is starting to swing into full work again, unfortunately I am not. Mixture between a flu and also just feeling rather unmotivated this year has meant I have fallen a little bit behind. Currently, there are a few upcoming interim deadlines, and whilst we do not have to submit anything for these, doing so only hurts our chances of passing the course. And it's almost all paperwork. So much paperwork. Lots of boring documents to fill out here 'n there, and not really a great deal of time for working on the blog. Or, rather, nothing interesting enough for a blog. Fortunately though, I do have something I can talk about! Games City Festival! It's been going on for several years now at Hockley, Nottingham, the creative arts district of the city. Last year I was a volunteer but because I live on the other side of derby, getting in was a pain, so this year I've instead gone sheerly as a visitor, and went to go see a few devs and games...

Today we were trying to cement the idea of our abstract, and I have a clearer idea of what exactly it is I am trying to create. It won't be long until we start working on the games design document, and I am eager to see how wrong I was! The Elevator Pitch We were encouraged to use an iterative method when we came up with our small pitch of our game, to write a first draft, critically analyse it and re-write it with these critiques in mind. Unfortunately, I have been toying with this idea long before the academic year started again, and I found it somewhat difficult to 'critique' and a lot of what I re-wrote was a rewording of the same idea, it didn't seem to build on ideas or cut much out. "The player has recently taken over as manager of the towns crafting guild which has for many years been used by adventurers and royalty alike. Using various crafting skills to progress the quality of the items they craft, the player must create a myriad of items fit for...

I feel as though perhaps our Architecture lecturer has this small sadistic spot in trying to make students fear and panic. If I had a pound for every time he mentioned how little time we have, I could repay my student debt. Some of it may well be true but 7 months for one level shouldn't really be a problem. Or, for the proposed idea I have, it shouldn't be a problem. Maybe this means that  I'm not gonna hit high marks or the criteria to begin with? I should really catch him and talk about my plans with him just to make sure. What I have to talk about today is something I honestly expected to see in our AV lessons, not our coding lessons. Two pieces of software that are all about creating character meshes so that you don't have to. The first of which, is called "MakeHuman," an open source software developed with 12 years of body topology research by a group called the MakeHuman Team. So, I mean, I guess these are just industry people who have spent a lot o...

So now that I have outlined a lot of what I am looking for, I will give a very brief recap on systems I plan to use to create the game I want. Overview The player will play a managerial role in a fantasy town on the losing end of a war, faced with severe debt that they X amount of days to pay back or lose the game. I choose town over a small shop because it would allow me to take a Recettear style of management where I can allow the player to forage for items, send adventurers to return with items, and also buy and sell to neighboring towns and give the game its own sense of an economy. This can also include city building aspects, as well as a few RPG aspects, that will keep the game different through various playthroughs. The idea was spurred by my tutor who suggested researching Roguelike games, such as Rimworld, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, that are principally the same each time through, but what the player encounters and their strategy either willingly chances throu...

This is the last stop of sub genre for my inspiration, there being a few golden games that I want to mention that I thoroughly enjoyed and will most likely draw inspiration from. HunieCam Studio (Huniepot, PC, 2016) Up first, HunieCam Studio. Yes, seriously. This game is somewhat controversial but I trust that people reading this blog are mature enough to be able to handle cartoon cleavage and naughty words. Let's get the sexy out of the way now so we can talk mechanics. HunieCam Studio, 2016 Ignore the fan service as best you can. Somewhat unlike the previous game they created, this game had unexpectedly devolved into a clicking game. Personally, I found nothing wrong with that at all. The aim here is to make as much money as you possibly can at the end of the month without going bankrupt on a daily payroll system. So as with previously mentioned games, the objective is short term but requires proper management to get the best score you can without failing. And at the ...