Internship :
Complex Games Inc.
In the last semester of this year, I did my internship. If possible, I wanted to go abroad. Thanks to Marinka Copier, the head of our department, I have been able to go to Complex Games inc. This company is located in Winnipeg, Canada.
Links
Complex Games Inc. website
Emud website
- the game I worked on during my internship
My blog
- my blog focuses more on my stay in Winnipeg and not really on my work at Complex Games. Besides blog posts,
there are also some movies and pictures I have taking during my stay. There was only one weekend I didn't go
anywhere. And this was because I had blisters on my feet from the weekend before :)
The company
Complex Games is a small company that feels like a tight family. Within the Winnipeg area, the company has established a good reputation. Not only on the business side, but also for the game industry in general. Noah, the head of the company, is involved in a couple of Manitoba media related boards and the company members educate local youth by either teaching or appearing at schools as guest speakers.
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My responsibilities at the company
I wanted to focus on game design and Noah gave me the opportunity. Because it is difficult to have a fulltime game design role as an intern, I also did some other things like prototyping, programming, level design, audio searching and implementing it. Near the end of my internship, I set up the complete second world : I implemented the art, made all the interactive parts interactive, stitched all the parts of the world together, added all the dialogue options, made sure rewards and events were recorded for the players in the underlying database.
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Emüd
Emüd is the tiltle of the game I worked on. Emüd is a play of words, the umlaut on the u is intentional so you will read the word as ‘E-mood’. This is because Emüd is a game that is being used as a research tool by researchers who observe children that have cancer. The game is used to monitor the emotional state of these children. Although this doesn't sound thrilling as the base for a game, this part is not obtrusive. The game is an MMO, so the children will be occupied with playing the game rather than feeling that they are being monitored. Every now and then, the game asks in what for emotional statement the player is. The players can communicate with each other by being creative in the game world. They can make drawings, music and stories that can be judged by other players. Being creative is necessary to receive some form of currency that enables the players to play mini games. When the mini games are executed successfully, the player can explore more of the world and progress in the game.
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Mini games
The mini games needed to be based on the idea of transporting energy. Another important thing was that these games couldn't have game over conditions. The player can drop out when he wants and try as many times as he likes, but he can't lose. Three of my concepts would be picked out and I needed to create prototypes. The titles for the mini games mentioned below, are the concept titles and not the official titles for the mini games.
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Tesla
This idea came to me when observing tesla orbs. In the game, you need to lead a connected stream of energy from one point to another. The only thing you can do is move the orbs. The orbs connect based on the distance between each other. If one orb is too close, it might prevent you from connecting to one you might need to be able to finish the game.
Tesla : concept | prototype | final - Click to enlarge
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Spinners
This game originated from the idea of passing something by using a set of rotating items, which are called ‘spinners’ here. In this case, the objects that need to be passed are energy orbs. If an energy orb is connected to a spinner, the spinner will rotate. If a spinner hasn't got an energy orb, the spinner will not rotate. The goal of the game is to get all spinners rotating. The action you can do here, is making an energy orb available or unavailable for transfer. The transfer will only happen if one of the neighbouring spinner's arms is lining up properly.
You can create bunch of different levels as the game is set up in such a way that the spinners can have (in theory) unlimited arms.
Spinners : concept | prototype | final - Click to enlarge
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Pushers
Probably one of the most obvious ways of transporting something : conveyor belts. The funny thing is, however, that my idea originated from an industrial setting, while the game artist made it into game that uses water.
The one thing you can do in this game : activate a pusher. Activating a pusher pushes a raft that carries a gem on another current or into a slot. The goal of the game is to have a gem in every slot in the level.
Pushers : concept | prototype | final - Click to enlarge
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Fighting game
At one point during development, I needed to create a fighting game that would work somewhat like Pokémon. My challenge here was that the player could only have 7 different creatures in total. It didn’t have the massive creature roster as Pokémon. There were 14 types in total (7 types of your creatures and 7 counterparts).
I set up the relation between types, created a damage equation and made some moves. I needed to design just one more thing : the balance between the attacks. Why would you chose one attack over the other and how do you avoid a player to constantly spam the strongest attack ? But unfortunately, at that point, it turned out the client didn't really wanted this fighting mechanic in the game. So this work had been done for nothing.
But that didn't matter. It was interesting and a good exercise for me to design this type of game.
Fighting game prototype
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Decorruption
With the fighting game cancelled, there needed to be a new game. At first, I tried to squeeze in a more action oriented game, as this game would occur more often than the mini games. But the game needed to be in the same line as the other games. So more puzzle like.
The game was going to be used to purify evil creatures, which made me think of the transmutation circles that are being used in the manga and animae Fullmetal Alchemist.
In this game, you need to free the corrupted nodes. You can do so by placing two stones of the same colour as the corrupted node on the empty nodes that are connected with the corrupted node. And a corrupted node can't have empty nodes around it if you want to decorrupt it. The twist here is that the stones you used for decorrupting, are being locked in the nodes.
Contrary to the previously mentioned mini games, it is possible for a player to get stuck here and lose the game.
An interesting design challenge here, was to create a game that was fun to play with a single colour and multiple colours. The single colour situations are probably nor that exciting, but they do show a player how the game works.
Decorruption : prototype | final - Click to enlarge
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Putting together the 2nd world
Like I said above, near the end of the internship, I put the second world together. At first this seemed daunting because I needed to stitch everything together by using local code, server code, a database and an in-house created scripting language. But the main programmer of the game was setting behind me, so whenever I came across a problem, it was easy to ask questions. And if I recall correctly, he always knew the answers right away.
Get a taste of Emüd's second world - Click to enlarge
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