Ominous – A.I. Video Game Programming Team Updates

Welp. Today’s the day you guys. To all who has been through this adventure with us, thank you. We had fun building this game for our UCF course project and we learn so much, especially being our first video game we’ve ever created. It received so many positive reviews but was still far from perfect. We gained a lot of insight and criticism that helped us improved our game as we went through the numerous iterations.

For the sake of the class, it’s finished but to us, it’s not and with this new-founded friendship, we all planned on working together still after this semester ends. We all feel like there will always be more to add to this game and it who knows, maybe it’ll end up as a fun hobby or a full-time job.

Regardless, thank you Dr. Carbone for this opportunity and thank you to the team and all those who has helped us, whether it was play testing or just advice in general.

For those who are new to our site and posts, a quick recap:

Our game is called Ominous, where you play as a ninja in a 2D pixel side scrolling platformer that relies heavily on stealthiness. Your goal is to sneak your way pasts the various guards to reach the end of the level. Our game uses A.I. to grant the enemies the ability to listen and look for you, thus you must make use of the environment to hide out of sight and your ninja skills to sneak your way without being heard. If push comes to shove, you can perform your assassinations in order to kill your enemies and continue your progression. This game is meant to be brutally hard but that what makes it fun 😉.

Located below is our game proposal presentation and a link to our final game:

https://knightsucfedu39751-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/salamshakur_knights_ucf_edu/ET4utgFJDAZJgaykXuGdjQIBsvrFzm413JEqMbipU_HV3A?e=aSeeaF

https://magesoftware.itch.io/ominous

Sincerely,

Team 4 🙂

OK guys! Here we are, towards the ending of our project. This post marks the requirement necessary for this course regarding having updates of our game.

We. Are. Almost. Done!

We are so happy and proud of what we’ve done so far. Everything that we wanted to add is now in our game. It is extremely close to the final playable. I say extremely close because any tweaks after this are more cosmetics & optimizations. At this point, we have uploaded 3 different builds that anyway who has access can test: A windows build, a MacOS build, and a Linux build.

That’s right baby, we targeted all 3 platforms! To be honest, I wanted to do a PS4 & Xbox build as well 😜.

We hope that at this point of our game and testing phase, that you all enjoy it and to provide to us as many constructive feedback as you can. The team has put so much time and effort on this game, knowing this is our first time every doing any sort of video game developing, that we have plans in the near future to make this an actual public video game that people around the world can download and enjoy.

Currently, it is very short, hosting just 3 levels but each level is insanely hard and we wanted to make it as so for a reason. Our game is to promote being cautious rather than run in guns blazing (or in this case sword blazing). This brings into play unique level designs and choices.

We will continue these posts as we fine-tune this game, but as of right now, we just wanted to say thank you for joining us along the ride!

After creating our first demo, we realized we still have a lot to take care of. We still need more enemies (so far we only have one “alive”, the orc), we needed to allow enemies to have different orientations, different animations, more advanced A.I. logic, more levels, sound, music, better user interface, more menus, and fine tuned ninja abilities….

…Yeah, we going to need more coffee. Way more.

But nevertheless, we are hyped. Super excited and ready to learn more and code up what will be the greatest game of all time. Seriously.

No really, seriously man, why aren’t you taking me so serious?!

Today’s the day! Well, not the day, but a day. The day we get to show off our hard work into an actual playable demo! Today is exciting and we’ve been dedicating hours on end into creating something that would soon resemble our final product. Thanks to the team, we were able to present enemies detecting the player if heard or seen, have our player run around and use its abilities via button inputs (and external controllers such as an Xbox controller😉).

And might I also say, the level design and U.I. was gorgeous! Overall the professor and the class enjoyed our demo. At one point, someone literally handed us an Xbox controller to test our game while presenting. Just straight up threw us one. It was awesome and it was the first time seeing our game run on a controller other than the keyboard.

Afterwards, we were bombarded by questions and quite a lot of constructive criticism from the professor which we took into heart and help fine tune our demo and overall game. I call this a success, now onto the rest of development!

So at this point, we continue our development, delegating specific tasks to each other dependent upon our roles. I, for example, is in charge of creating our enemies, and giving them artificial intelligence using unity built in ray cast data structure to simulate seeing in front of you and listening from behind. In addition I am tasked in handling many other features of the enemy, such as its animations, sounds, movements, code, and more. As well as, creating the game manager that will foresee the game and make decisions based upon certain events and store overall information about each level.

Just as I have a dedicated role, Joel is also in charge of creating the player which would be the ninja. He is also in charged of the player’s animation, movement, button controls, and abilities.

Sebastian is in charge of the user interface, the menus such as main menu and settings, the screen overlays such as game over and pause screen, and setting the theme of the game.

Where as, Calvin is the actual level designer, using the assets we created to meticulously place the enemies in the right place, the stage design and platforms, the sounds and music and finally making our game idea come to life.

From this point on it’s constant researching, coding, debugging, play testing, fine tuning and coffee drinking.

Rinse and repeat.

So good news and bad news. Good news, we’re basically done with our presentation. We have all what we needed to say on there, however. Bad news, we have no name. How did we make it this far without a name? We don’t know.

However, what we do know is that this game is gonna be interesting to create. Development will be no easy task but as we talked more and more about the game and taking baby steps to getting a finished product, our excitement only grows.

What we also do know, is that this is a hardcore dark themed ominous game. Did you get that? That word I so clearly bolded and italicize for you? Yeah. That. That word, it just sounds so badass.

Ominous. I won’t lie, as soon as we all found that word (while looking up http://www.thesaurus.com for synonyms relating to our theme) we all fell in love with it. It just fitted our theme so perfectly. Funny note though, we wanted to originally call it:

Ominous: Curse of the Bunny

Bunny? Yes, bunny. It’s essentially an easter egg relating to Joel’s response to a discussion the professor had posted on throwing out some game ideas during the beginning of our course. You see…

Joel had this amazing idea of having a bunny…that constantly eats and in order to not explode from having ate too much, you must poop it out.

Yeah, i’ll end it there. 10/10 IGN best game idea right there.

Anyway as of now, our official name is: Ominous

As time moves forward, we come closer and closer to our first presentation within our class. This presentation would serve as an introduction of our game to the rest of the class. So you know the deal, go big or go home! We want to wow our crowd. We want to make this game of ours as highly anticipated as can be.

So we got straight to work, combining all of our efforts, designs and ideas into something presentable (and professional). We wanted to speak more about the game in greater detailed, these including:

• Having to avoid detection and staying alive in order to win the game
• Using the shadows and objects to stay hidden
• Our inspirations
• Development using Unity, Windows 10, and Linux
• Our ninja abilities: attack, sneak, running, and jumping
• Our enemies: orcs and zombies
• Our enemy A.I.: sound and vision detection
• The assets we will use: Unity, finalgatestudios, and freesound
• Controller mapping
• Our user interface
• Our level design
• Our roles
• And finally our goals

Now that we have a general idea, we need to bring it into reality with the help of….you guessed it, assets! This is quite obvious, that’s not problem. The problem is where to find assets and good ones too. Which brings us to our next big part of development, the researching. Since this is a UCF course project, the professor allowed us to use any assets we can find. However, even with this freedom, we wanted to use assets that were royalty free so that maybe after we’re done with this project, we’ll upload it to Steam and what not. Who knows, but the choice is ours and thus scouring the web we did!

One of the first places we looked at was the unity store. However our theme for this game was to be a pixel 2D side scrolling platformer. We chose this because one, we love pixel art and working with 2D in a linear fashion seems to be the easiest route for us to learn Unity (as we were all knew) and have a working project in due time. We would loved to progress further in 3D but maybe after our course ends.

Now going back to where I left off, the unity asset store, while nice, doesn’t really have the assets we were looking for that could fit our player aka ninja and enemies. There wasn’t much pixelated sprite-sheets that we can use to give our player and enemies that retro look, and the ones that do costs money. And we are not about that life right now, college already got our pockets drained as is. Eventually, we had a breakthrough, as we found some sprite sheets that we liked for our ninja, behold!

This was perfect! It was exactly what we were looking for and better yet, this company also has enemy assets of the same type! It was like killing two birds with one stone.

In addition, we also came across a wonderful site that provides free sounds and musics that we can use as our assets within our video game!

Behold! (For the second time…): https://freesound.org/

Now…I am sorry but I must behold you one last time as on top of all this, we found our level assets!

I guess Unity assets wasn’t as bad as we thought 😛

So as we progress further into our new ninja idea, we each push forth ideas for game mechanics and level design. I, personally, took inspiration from a popular Nintendo Switch game known as Mark of the Ninja. In this game, you play as a ninja sneaking his away around guards, hiding in the shadows and assassinating his targets. We all loved the idea of having to use the level design, as well as, objects to stay hidden around the enemies, only appearing when the right opportunity to kill approaches. From this, our game started to grow. We know that we’ll need a ninja player, an enemy or enemies, dark themed levels to bring about menacing tones and creepy musical tones. I mean, a stealthy ninja on the loose murdering others isn’t really something you would see in a cheerful game now would you?

So guys… terrible news…. we have decided to scrap our Magic the Gathering idea. 😔 I know, so sad. However, this turned out to be good on our end because we all wanted to do something much more crazy and fun. Only once in our UCF educational path, would we get to all be able to work together and create something as fun and unique as a video game! So that being said, we have decided to scrap the idea into something more fun with a sense of freedom for us to explore new concepts and express our thoughts without the constraints of a board game logic. Thus a stealth like ninja assassin game was born!

P.S. A name has not been made as yet.

To get used to the rules and game-play of Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalker, we all decided to meet up at Cool Stuff Games Inc. and play a round with some buddies. As we play along, we also decided to take 360 degrees pictures of the game pieces in order to convert them into a 3D model. However, this turned out to not be possible due to the lack of a cuda-enabled GPU on my laptop. Thus the 3D modeling had to put on pause for now. But we still had fun!

Hello everyone, and welcome to our very first post for our video game class! We are UCF students currently enrolled in CAP4053 and this site was created to show our growth over time as we venture into the world of video game development alongside myself, Abdool Shakur, and the rest of team: Joel Mora, Sebastian Rodriguez, and Calvin Sands.

Today we focused solely on picking out an idea for our video game. Currently, in this stage, we all considered creating a 3D strategy board game similar to the Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalker board game. Our goal was to recreate this game-play in a 3D dimensional world, playing against a CPU or even another player.