http://frictionalgames.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/problem-of-repetition.html

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- Decrease in Verisimilitude

What verisimilitude means is basically how real and truthful the fictional world feels. This does not mean how well it replicates the real world we live in, but how much a it feels like it represents an actual place.


For instance, if you feel like a conversation is really meaningful, and then later on find this same character reduced to mechanics, it will change the way you view your prior experience. It will be very hard to still feel the same sense of meaningfulness when looking back at the conversation.

The Cure

So how do we overcome these issues? I think there are a few things to keep in mind when designing that makes them a lot simpler to avoid:

• Not a approach the experience as a competition. The less goals we set up for the player the less likely we are to need to repeat things for the player or to make them repeat their own actions.
• Make sure that the story is understandable without the need of info dumps. If the player is required to have story related information repeated to them, then I would consider that bad narrative design. The story should emerge simply out of playing.
• Skip the notion that players need to learn a system. I think this is mainly historical baggage from how software works for more practical application, where mastery of the system is essential. Creation of narrative art does not have this requirement though, and I think we should instead make the player focus on the representations (graphics, sounds, etc) that the system provide.
• We must demand more of the player and give them more responsible. We must teach them them live in our virtual worlds instead of trying to beat our game systems. As most games reward players for combing the virtual world for goodies this is not the easiest of tasks though. Our goal must thus be to undo this and reward roleplaying instead.

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Showreel

Final

I got a much better framerate and video quality using fraps instead of camtasia.




To clarify what content is mine, as there was some confusion when I originally showed this I have listed the content I have made below.

*Terrain
*lighting
*building
*character model
*character texture
*character animation
*All scripted events
*edit of the walls inside the house to make them glow purple
*lever for the light switch

below is a list of content taken from the UDK:
(some static meshes from the UDK, I arranged them to fit the map)
*model of trees (however I painted them on to the terrain to create the forest
*statue in forest
*plants
*all sounds
*stairs in building
*red device in forest
*Textures (except for character texture)
*wires
*church
*pillar and rocks at start point

Presentation

Evaluation

This project has been a big leap forward for me, learning 2 3D software programs ( Maya and UDK editor) and integrating this with my knowledge of animation has given me the skills to produce a playable game that includes everything from sounds, character animation and scripting events to occur with player interaction that culminates in an immersive 3D world. This has given me a strong grounding to further explore immersion with more interaction between players and the story.

The most time consuming part of the project was discovering ways to overcome all the problems I encountered. At times there were issues that had obvious work around type "solutions", for example, looping segments in the UDK animation editor matinee prevented me from adding in additional animation sequences to play afterwards, taking the time to investigate the problem and find a better, quicker solution not only helped increase the quality of the game I made but will also streamline this process in the future.

Encountering problems leads to an increased knowledge of the software and eventually gave me more control over what I was doing. Another example of this was due to clipping in the UDK editor, caused by me playing around with the controls and not knowing what I was doing, it took me absolutely ages of reading up on UDK documentation to figure out what I had done, it turned out to be easily fixable. However just trying to solve a single problem led me to knowledge about configuring visibility of static meshes within the game as well as useful stream lining tips which I would have not otherwise encountered.

After some initial compatibility issues with introducing my animation sequences in to the UDK I had a working walk cycle, changing the direction that my character was facing to the direction he was walking in was solved by changing his rotation. Ideally I would have liked the direction of my character automated to face the direction he is walking in, making it quicker to control the walk path, this is something I will investigate further in the future.

Future development. A genre that I feel has a lot of potential (if executed correctly) A film/story that allows for interaction with the player, the difference between this and any other video game containing a story would be much more focus on the dialogue, narrative and visuals than a typical game which involves combat or quests which you spend the majority of your time going through to get short snippets of the story in the form of cut scenes.

The thought behind this is that there exists a large group of people that have no interest in shooting bad guys but do wish to immerse themselves in a story in a video game setting without the distraction of challenges. The deus ex series is a great example of this, the story and sound effects were great, but I can't remember how I got past the 20th group of people shooting at me.