Apus: Global Game Jam 2018

Over the course of 48 hours, I worked on a team to create a digital game [Apus] for Micro Soft Windows. The game was created in the Unity software. There were three artists on the team: Jzak, lmsnow, and me. I also did sound for the game. Our coder was marchov, who had experience in C++ but not Unity. Erica Roy was an initial team member and contributed to the game idea, but was ill and had to leave the event.

Here are more specifics on the art. Jzak made icons, found the sun image, and space background. lmsnow made two asteroids, two planets, and  the title screen. I made the initial form of the figure of Apus (our title screen character), two planets, two asteroids, the browser icon, and the win screen.

Left: lmsnow's title screen. Right: The initial character I made.

Our most difficult thing to figure out was how to incorporate sound into the Unity engine, and tie it to a system of triggers. The music could easily be made by placing a single Audio Source gameobject in Unity, and attaching an audio clip to it. We had to type in the code itself to allow an array of audio clips to be attached to the Audio Source.

Beyond placing the title screen audio, most of my sound work involved watching videos of coding sound in Unity and combing through free audio clips online. Originally I had played on my Viola and made random sounds in the event space for the game. Eventually though I wasn't sleep deprived and thought to look for free audio clips online. From personal experience, I suggest using FreeSound.org.

How to Play screen

The game itself is simple, when planets charge up, send asteroids from them to another planet in need of that element. For instance, a planet that is too cold needs fire. There are also randomized events, such as a plague occurring on a life planet. We tested the game by playing it with various difficulties by changing the speed planets charged and the speed War and Plague events happened.

Spreading Life around the solar system.

Oh no, with technology war broke out.

I stopped the war with cold, but not the ice planet has plague.

Download the executable and play. Try to figure out all the ways you can save planets and win the game.

Global Game Jam 2018

Global Game Jam is an event to bring talented individuals within a community together to create a game based on an announced theme within 48 hours. I'm making this post while on a break, yet I've joined a team attempting to incorporate the theme [Transmission] into changing the states of planets in a solar system.

I'll post what the team managed to complete at the end of the jam. For now, here are some art assets I've made. For more information on the Global Game Jam, visit their website.

 
 

Making a Spellbook part 2

The first thing I did was begin writing on one of the back pages. That was a mistakes as I soon found out that it's much harder to clean up graphite lines on the lokta plant pages. The upper layer of fibers are scrapped away by the act of erasing, meaning clean ink lines aren't possible. With a 2H pencil it does not require much erasing, yet the lines will look poor anyway.

First drawing attempt in the book.

I rifled through the trash and found a piece of lokta paper that came with the journal. I took out several of my writing utensils and began scribbling marks on it. I found that a basic sharpie bled through too much. A sharpie pen however did not. My graphite pencils wrote, but shading looked blotchy from the paper's fibers. The same effect was caused by charcoal. Water bled through the paper easily, so water based painting would not work well. My V5 ink pen seemed to mark the best.
A break from art was needed, so I began to free write ideas for the page content. If erasing was so difficult, I would be using pens to turn the journal into a spellbook. Some sense of forethought and planning was needed. First I asked a Facebook D&D 5E community if they had any experiences or suggestions on making spellbooks. While waiting on response, I used Microsoft Word to write down a general outline and slowly filled in some basic content.

Testing calligraphy.

The person is just getting into D&D, so a book to narrow down early level spells could also have a practical use for them. The journal had about 92 pages but D&D had almost 79 (much larger) pages of spells. I decided it would be a beginner's spell book, and burrow cantrips and first level spells from the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Player's Hand Book. To help narrow the information down, I found a website called D&D-Spells.

Left: Concept Sketches Right: Practice page.

I used their best friend (they've had since middle school) as my insider to figure out what the recipient would like. My friend likes to make jokes, so they will most likely comment on the "wiki-how" type diagrams in the spells first. I still took the time to give a healthy amount of lore to tie in to both D&D and our real world, to keep the book versatile.

A magic language I invented.

 Part of the work came with creating a magic language to give a unique feel. I asked questions on a Facebook D&D community and go good answers. I had already made for a forum game a unique phonetic group, and decided to use that as the base. The phonetics were made with a mixture of Pictish, Ogham, Asomtavruli, and Attican Greek symbols as references. The alphabet was based off Welsh, yet random sounds like rh and ar were left out to keep it unique.

The numbers were made up specifically for this spellbook gift. I played with a few ideas, but settled on each number up to 5, having an equal number of lines in their symbol. Once I reached 5, the symbols were too cluttered, so I flipped 2 to make it 6 and continued the process from there. I used a dot for zero because unlike the whole numbers in the sequence, it has no line. One cannot draw zero lines. The grammatical structure was initially meant to be like Basque, for it is the most unique make ups of the European languages. I only kept the articles being suffixes for the sentence subject; I made up rules for everything else.

I slowly pieced together information after the fact, not the most efficient manner to be honest, on what lore could support this magical language existing. I got lucky, when I saw that many the language mixed came into contact on Anatolia. The Celtic (pictich/ ogham) borrowings could have come from Galatia, the Asomtavruli possibly from Armenia or Georgia, and the Greek style from anywhere. They weren't perfect copies, so it could simply have been mixed before or over time. For the weird grammar, I found that one of the groups that could have used this fictitious language [the Lukka] were part of the mysterious Sea People.

A spell page for Fire Mote.

To finalize the language for later spell names, I put what I want their name in English was into two translators: Google Translate's Finnish, and FreeLang's Nahuatl translator. I would get as close to a translate as possible, then mix the words, and match the phonetics with the alphabet I created. For spells I would then type into my search engine various words for their International Phonetic Alphabet, so my friend would know how to pronounce the crazy word I made up.

I only used the cantrips, due to a lack of pages, but each of the 27 level 0 spells in the Dungeons and Dragons Player's Hand Book, averaged at two pages within the journal. The reason is because they had a definition, some flavor text, and elaborated with diagrams on the spell components: verbal, somatic, material.

Lore pages on the power of magic words.

21/71 of the pages were my made up lore. The majority of it expanded on the Player's Hand Book about where magic comes from and how it is manipulated. I kept the idea of the Weave of magic, and even measuring spell durations in terms of rounds to help give synergy between spell flavor text and game mechanics. Each spell has considerable thought put in. As an example, somatic components for Conjuration spells require hand gestures, Evocation more powerful full body movements, and Abjuration simple sigil tracing in the air.

It has been a worthwhile project for me to undertake. The book has a unique feel in terms of content and material. I also spent a large amount of time creating it and am anxious to see their reaction. Remember, this whole ordeal started when they joked I should get them a spell book for their birthday.

They'll appreciate this.

Making a Spellbook

I'm going to start working on a special present for a friend. They joked that I should give them a spell book for their birthday. By January 22, 2017 I want to have a book full of spells and other such things in it. The journal itself was bought at Barnes and Noble for 10 USD. The books is apparently handcrafted in Nepal and made of lokta plant, with a hemp cover. I got it because the pages have a unique look and feel to them, which will help give the aged tome effect. I'm still working out how best to format the book, but I will give an update on my progress next week.

Update on Experiment

While I have not tested it with a larger group, on Saturday 16 December 2017, I tried my new setting. I sat down with a friend of mine and did a usability test. We played through four hours of content. The content was simply them picking a direction and doing Survival rolls to avoid being lost, while interacting with random events I rolled.

Each hex is 1 square mile/ 1.6 kilometers.

They managed to explore a fair bit of the map, which I placed into a map making program known as Hexographer later. Next session I will update as we go rather than afterwards. The person testing the setting purposefully tried strange things in order to derail or ruin the game. The setting is meant to have a high degree of improvisation on my part, except for random event and encounter tables, so it helped with the test.

Once the holiday season is over I should be able to wrangle people together for more Dungeons and Dragons play sessions. For now there is not much I can do with everyone being busy. That is all for this week's post. Enjoy the holidays.

Experimenting

Getting players to gather on a regular schedule is a frustrating act, both for the Game Master (GM) and the players. It may seem innocuous, but gathering 3 or more people into a single room is difficult as everyone has responsibilities away from the game table. I have been looking into a style of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) known as West Marches.

The style is called that because the setting it was run in was the West Marches setting. The general idea behind the campaign is to make up for the inability for players to always meet up. West Marches style is far more player driven than GM driven. Rather than the GM makes everything and sit down to lead the players down a story arc, the players decide where they want to go and a GM agrees to make content for that spot.

This style of play can have up to fifty people because they are not playing at the same table together. It is instead fifty people who are in communication with each other to find party members and GMs to do content with. Sometimes rules like, "you can't play with the same person more than twice in a row," are put in place to prevent cliques from forming and to ensure everyone can get a party formed.

What I want to borrow from this style for my collection of friends is the ability to meet in varied groups and sizes. The idea is simply trying to overcome the inability for all 9 of us to meet up every two weeks. I posed the idea to our group chat to see who will agree to it. The idea is rough at the moment: we have the same setting, short sessions, build lore as we go, don't over power players, players understand house rules will alter between GMs, and so on.

If this doesn't work, I might just make a simple murder dungeon or combat zone players can jump in on at any point. I don't see any reason why we should all cease playing entirely, nor the various people who want to be GMs should not just try with one-offs first. I probably would have been a better GM had I tried a one-off rather than jumping into a grand campaign without any grasp of the rules. I doubt there will be any play before Christmas, but hopefully we I can get a consensus from people before January.

Festivals

Considering how the holiday season is here, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about using festivals and other forms of celebration in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). Let's consider why festivals are important to us in real life, why they are important to the non player character (NPCs) in D&D, why they are important to the players and their characters, and where these various ideas transfer.

The Dungeon Master's Guide first mentions festivals in terms in relation to gods. Specifically in most D&D worlds people are polytheistic and festivals can be for various gods, often occurring at temples. (Mearls, 10). It makes sense too as many festivals and holidays in our own world have religious origins or at least aspects. In a practical sense too, a Game Master (G.M.)/ Dungeon Master (D.M.) can just say a celebration is happening at the temple of the God it's about.

If you use a calendar for a campaign, festivals can be a way to help track parts of the year. Older cultures would track the winter solstice, modern American culture tracks Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Institutions such as school will give time off for people specifically to allow them to engage in these holidays. I know from personal experience the same goes for Mardi Gras in Louisiana.

Some towns might celebrate a festival more than others as well, or it might just be a regional celebration. Do not be hesitant to draw off of real world celebrations or even copy them for your campaign. I know for my Abrana setting I made a rough outline of a festival like Carnival in Venice. I also knew that the people in the burghs outside the city celebrated the end of the harvest.

A major point about festivals are why people celebrate them. You do not have to give a detailed backstory on the history of a festival, but some insight into its nature will help give life to your setting. Let us make up a rough outline for a festival. To be fun about it we will base the festival around drinking; we will draw loosely from Oktoberfest and St. Patrick's Day.

If we want a religious aspect of it we can ascribe it to a God of Revelry like Dionysus,  or have it be a celebration of an event in the past. The celebration can have reenactments, sermons, or subtle symbols. E.G. if the festival is honoring a past war won, then have drinks with the colors of the nation's flag and a mass mock battle for players to compete in for prizes.

That is another thing, leave options for your players to participate in the celebration if they want to. Some players like to carouse and others do not. One thing you could do for the hypothetical festival we are using, make the players do a drinking contest. The players place bets and roll constitution saving throws against each other and N.P.C.s. After each round increase the difficulty class. The winner gets all the items/ currency betted. You can even have the event be considered illegal in the particular town the party is in, so they then need to escape from a police raid after the contest. I am certain you will have players trying to steal from the bet pile before leaving.

The general idea is creating a theme for the players to interact with in some way. People are not going to want to hear about a fun festival; they want to see it. Also as stated, some players do not like to spend time in towns even if there is a festival occurring. That is the reason why you should not spend too much time outlining the backstory of a celebration. Highlighting certain key features is all you will need to set a scene, "You all arrive at the village and see bushels of wheat layered on numerous carts. In the center of the town peasants string lanterns up on cheap hemp rope. A cleric is standing in the center of town placing purple and yellow paint on their face with an expensive robe and scythe placed to the side. Children run around a maypole and the tavern is hurriedly rolling extra barrels out to tap."

If the party wants to ask people locals about the festival they can. The locals might not even know why they celebrate a festival, it is just tradition. Try asking people at random why we celebrate St. Patrick's day. Very few know the history, but many enjoy the celebration all the same.

That is all for this week, thanks for reading.

Work Cited

Mearls, Mike, James Crawford, et. al. Dungeon Master's Guide. U.S.A.: Wizard's of the Coast. LLC, December 2014. Print.