Game Studio - Reflective Journal

Week 1:

Our team has welcomed a new member giving us a total of 6 members, 3 programmers and 3 artists. Our project still has the same goal of creating a visually appealing platformer, with some yet to be decided mechanics. Currently our build has seen no major changes as we are still finalizing our choices but i have started putting together a document so we can finally move in a proper direction. 

Week 2:

We have struggled with finalizing decisions for a large portion of our development time and saw a lot of unsteady progress throughout the first trimester. I made a document meant to better showcase each members ideas for the project, covering everything from gameplay focus to story beats. 

We all completed this document separately and discussed our ideas during our meeting. Together we chose mechanics and story elements we liked most and discussed further what our project build would ultimately showcase. 

Our Build will consist of a tutorial like beginning with jumping challenges and some enemies to engage with. We plan to have some simple puzzles and ultimately end with a boss fight against Pegasus, the winged horse. This level will start the player at the foot of the mountain or emerging from the forest. The player will have access to their abilities, and they will climb a mountain and explore caves springs before facing the final boss. The boss fight itself will have two stages. One atop the mountain, and the second half in a large cavern below. 

I also discussed the idea of changing the player's animation style to sprite sheets. I find the animation of bones to be tedious and unsatisfying to view. Our team has decided to give it a go, and i've begun some test animations. 

This is an Idle animation with only subtle changes to the chest and head to animate the characters breathing. 

Week 3:

I've finished most of the player animations. Idle, Running, Jumping/Falling, and Wall-sliding. 

 

We received feedback and were told to work on games feel as it came off as clunky. This also refers to the animations, particularly when transforming. I was asked to prepare a controller for the sprites sheets so we could better see the differences or any advantages to the switch. 

Week 4:

This Week I finished the Sprite Sheet Animations, adding a Hit, Death, and Dash animations. The Dash animation allowed me to better understand the Sprite Library feature and should be useful for the attack animations later. 

I began work on enemy sprites and animations. Enemy sprites are using bones and some extra sprites. I've chosen to animate them as such because its faster and was apart of my original pitch that enemies would look like puppets. While we are no longer going for such exact look, it still works fine. 

I've finished animating the boar enemy and have finished the sprites for a flying harpy enemy. The harpy uses extra sprites for its wings to allow for a more pleasing flapping effect. 

In today's class we showed off the new build and given feedback about changes to animations that could give them more weight and reduce their floaty effect. Adding "Juice" like kicking up dust and adjusting the timing might allow for better feel. I'm going to work on having more frames for our jumps and adding an animation for our wall climb. 

Its apparent that switching to a whole new animation style is both unnecessary and beyond my abilities. I'll be now working to fix and better transition our current animations attempting to use sprite libraries to add the needed substance currently missing from the rigged animations. This method can be seen in mobile titles where animations often switch out parts to create "rotating" effect. With enough time I should be able to make some plausible animations that allow for interesting effects and transformations. 

Week 6:

- Sprite Libraries

- Wing Dash

Week 7:

- Attack Animation

- Apollo Animation

3118GFS - Ross Hay - s5176168 - Assignment Critical Analysis

Fallout 4's Synthetic Persons: Representation Of Social And Technological Contemporary Issues - A Critical Analysis by Ross Hay

Fallout is a series known for its unique and immersive setting in an alternate post-war America, home to mutants, robots, and not least of all humans. Its fourth main title installment, Fallout 4, covers many contemporary issues and among them is the discussion of synthetic life, or Synth as they are referred to in game. A Synth is a robotic humanoid most commonly referred to in today's media as an 'Android' or even a 'Replicant' in the case of those familiar with Blade Runner (1982). Fallout 4's presentation of synthetic life, through the use of real-world inspirations, how it interacts with the player, and how its major factions view them, leads to subtle and very deep take on today's contemporary issues of Social Justice and Technological concerns.

Part 1: Real World Contemporary Issues.

The modern world has a strong belief in social justice and to the rights, equalities, and representation of today's people. There is so much belief in these values that we begin to see further development in the rights afforded to creatures outside of humanity, such a livestock and native or even invasive species. The common factor between both humanity and other animal species is that both are undeniably living creatures, and therefore given rights to fair treatment and protection, allowing them to thrive or escape the threat of extinction, especially when such threat is brought upon by human activities.

With the ever-rising milestones of technology, artificial intelligence has also seen great advancements. As recent as the last couple of years, artificial intelligence has managed to carry out exceptional displays of complex behaviors and shown great compacity for further self-learning. These advancements bring to question, just how far off is artificial intelligence from being considered or even accepted as a living entity, and whether or not it will be afforded the same rights as that of a human person.

Additionally, trust in Artificial Intelligence remains to be earned. Technology requires both faith in the technology and its creator, with the latter first building its reputation as a result of their productions. Three characteristics can be analyzed in order to assess a technology's trustworthiness. (1) the performance of the technology, (2) its process/attributes, and (3) its purpose (Cutter Business Technology Journal, 2018). However, technology's ability to replace the workforce can result in affected persons losing their jobs and therefore showing distain and becoming distrustful of such technology. 

In the case of the Synths from Fallout, players are told early on that The Institute isn't a trustworthy faction, and that their synths are very dangerous, being almost indistinguishable from a human person. The synths are used primarily as a military force and to kidnap and replace persons across the commonwealth, leading to distrust and fear amongst the populous. The Brotherhood would go as far as to destroy the synths, viewing them as too great a weapon and a threat to humanity as a whole.

Part 2: The Player's Interactions 

Throughout the game, players will encounter three types of Synth, generation 1, 2, and 3s. The most common of these types are the generation 1's, which act as generic enemies for player to fight, and are viewed by the majority of people in Fallout 4's Commonwealth as no more than humanoid robots showing no clear signs of free will or emotion. 

Generation 2s offer an interesting take as they have the likeness of a generation 1, appearing more robotic by appearance, but have memories installed into their brains from a living human being, making them a strong case for a 'living' being as their behavior and personality are a continuation of the being their memories originated from.

Unlike the imported memories of the Gen 2's, Generation 3 Synths are the final and most controversial of the Institute's creations. Both built and programmed to be indistinguishable from humans, Gen 3s are used to intercept and replace people across the wasteland, acting as spies and sleeper agents to spread the Institutes control.

Part 4: Factions Views and the Railroad's Shortcomings

Fallout 4's factions each hold unique perspectives on the synths and their impact on the commonwealth. Among these factions are the Brotherhood and Institute, both of whom view synths as powerful weapons that have the potential to completely control the wasteland. The brotherhood's reasoning boils down to their view of technology and how humanity will end up destroying themselves again, as seen with the nuclear end to the Great war. The Institute on the other hand, are the creators and masterminds behind the synthetic threat, and use them to kidnap individuals and slowly eliminate the irradiated and impure remains of humanity. On the smaller end of the conflict, The Minute Men and Railroad hold less power than their army sized rivals, but both offer their own views on the synth dilemma, The Railroad in particular creating their faction around the goal of helping the synths escape their enslavement by The Institute. 

The Railroad comes from a similarly named real world inspiration known as the "Underground Railroad", a group that helped over 30,000 people to escape slavery through underground railway systems under America in the 19th century (Historica Minutes, 2010). Like their post-apocalyptic counterparts, the Underground Railroad used discrete routes, code words, and call signs to move affected people to safety.

While the rescue of slaves is in itself a noble action, Fallout's Railroad fails to capture the same sentiment on account of their use of mind wipes to give rescued synths a new identity. This idea most likely refers to the possible providing of a new identity to an escaped slave in order to better evade capture by becoming officially a new person, one not associated with their enslaved past. Where this fails is the Railroads contradictory ideology of viewing Synths as sentient persons while reducing them to only their machine body by erasing their memories and personality, essentially killing the original and birthing a new person into an empty shell. 

Concluding Thoughts:

Fallout 4 has given players the opportunity to explore and exercise their own perspectives through a role play experience inspires players to engage in discussions and to come to their own conclusions on AI and synthetic life. The real-world parallels serve to ground the experience and allow players to better sympathize with these groups all while remaining neutral to allow players to decide for themselves and not undermine the achievements of their inspirations. 

Refs

Sources found through Wikipedia's references (--):

- (49) Historica Minutes, July 6, 2010 - Underground Railroad (archive.org)\

- Keng Siau and Weiyu Wang, Cutter Business Technology Journal, 2018 - Building-Trust-in-Artificial-Intelligence-Machine-Learning-and-Robotics.pdf (researchgate.net)