Atlantis 2: Beyond Atlantis by Cryo Interactive is a point and click game which uses mythologies from various cultures to create an awesome experience. All the puzzles are related to the cultures that they take place in, but because the player most likely is not very familiar with the mythologies of these older cultures, they must learn more about the culture by walking about, interacting with the environment, and by observing their surroundings.

The one puzzle in particular is one that I think is most clever, because it is a simple concept everyone can understand, with a twist. The puzzle takes place in past of the Yucatan, where the player is playing as an Aztec scout. In order to explore the bowels of a temple, the player is faced with a simple puzzle. -

Okay, so more of a statement, but okay, it's just simple math. Of course, the player does not know the number of the bat right off the bat (see what I did there?) However, after playing through for awhile, and getting acquainted with some of the Aztec Gods, the player travels to the land of the dead and meets this fellow.


You get to talk to the Bat God for awhile, and have the option to come back and talk to him whenever you please... so, surely you can ask him his number? No? Well, darn, I guess we are stuck. 

Back at the temple, if you look around it won't be long until you notice and look closer at the reliefs on the walls. 

Huh, so dots for numbers, that's not hard at all. And now that I think of it, that Bat had three dots on it's wing! Interesting, let us go tell the guard the answer that the Jaguars number is three times three, or nine to be exact!


Erm, yes, I know. How can I tell you the number! In this game, when asking questions or giving answers, a sort of dialog box filled with symbols appears, but when talking to this man, he only gives this command, there is no options to respond. Hmm, oh, whats this?


Ah, here is our chalkboard! A bit old school, but not a problem, now let us just peg in the number nine!

That doesn't look right... Oh, we're Aztec's here! If we look around some more we can see how the Aztec number system works, it's sort of like a tally system, but it's based on 20's, rather than our base 10 number system. So we know how to count up to five and all, but does the placement on the grid matter? Yes it does! From another plaque we can see how bars symbolize fives, and adding dots or more bars on top simply adds.


Interesting, so with a bar on bottom for five, with four dots on top, we can symbolize nine!


Finally! Man, learning a whole new number system sure takes a bit of getting used to, but hey, now we are done and ... oh no.


Now we need the Snake's number? So we have to find a Jaguar and count the number of spots or something? Oh wait, we know that number is nine, so nine by nine is... 81! There's only enough room for 80 dots on the board! What do you want me to do? 


Alright, so putting dots in the higher rows is kind of like saying what number is in the tens place, except we are using twenty instead of ten. So we'll need four dots for four times twenty on top, then add one dot on the bottom for our 81. Great! Finally, time for our prize...


Darn, there's still one more puzzle! And now we don't even have a nice guard to explain it to us. However, if you haven't picked up on the pattern, it seems like all the puzzles and plaques are connected. We started at 3 x 3 - then to 9 x 9, and the plaques illustrated the numbers 1 - 5, 19 - 21, and 39 - 41. We can go through the math and find out that this plaque reads 399, 400, 401. Those are some big numbers... something that would come in handy if we had to multiply 81 by itself... and what a fitting challenge for this room.  


Using the knowledge you gained previously, and no doubt with a pad of paper and a pen... You'll figure out how to transcribe 6,561 in Aztec! And we are finally presented with our reward... the piece to one of the final puzzles of this chapter of the game.


I like this puzzle the best because it's informative, it teaches the player about Aztec culture, and also how to think outside the box when completing puzzles in the game, but the player is presented with a clear question and with a straightforward process.

1. Wall Rider - Arm mounted mechanism that allows players to latch onto and travel along walls in straight lines
2. Bio Gun - An organic gun that has to eat to fire projectiles. Depending on its diet it has different abilities
3. Drill-Shot - A sort of glove like launcher that shoots out a drill on a chain, allowing players to latch onto walls or drill holes through them.
4. Remote Explosive Launcher - Gun that shoots out sticky, remote grenades to set traps and stuff
5. Gum Gun - A gun that shoots two strands of gum, you can use this to stick movable objects together
6. Reflector - A large mirror type object that is used to reflect enemy projectiles and lasers
7. Flame Catcher - A backpack devise that sucks fires for use later
8. Shrink / Grow Ray - A gun that resizes props
9. X-ray Goggles - A device that lets players see through walls / certain vision blockers
10. Gravity Core - A suit that allows the user to change gravity in a certain radius around themselves



For our final project for our programming class, we were challenged to develop a version of a classic 80's arcade game. After cajoling my teacher, I was allowed to remake Sinistar, an awesome game I only recently learned about, but love.

The graphics and sounds were state of the art back in 1982 when it first came out, but the style, game play, and sound still holds up excellently today! My partner, Dionisio Blanco, and I worked together to create this remake as best we could in the limited time frame we had. You can see a break-down of how we shared the work of the assignment on Dio's blog here

 And finally, you can download an EXE to play our version of Sinistar here!


Here's a trailer for the level I created for Ringling College of Art and Design's annual Sophomore Spinout game project! It took the entire year to create the car, it's racer, and the level, but it's finally done, at will be done in a couple of weeks. Hope you enjoy!


Now that our racing levels are chugging along nicely, it is time to think about how to get a player excited. I know one of my favorite arcade racing games growing up was Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64. It was extremely fun to play with friends, and very challenging too. In fact, I still have not beaten the game due to the difficulty of one of the final bosses.

I decided to see if it had a trailer, and lo and behold, it did! It's a fun-filled promotional trailer that shows off the key selling points of the game all with in-game footage and a classic British narrator. I'm not sure if we'd be able to get a narrator, but otherwise I feel like the trailer has a good pacing in the features it shows off, and with cuts timed with the narration. The trailer is mostly focused on the racing aspect and not the exploration aspect, which works well for my racing level. Just because the game and trailer are dated does not mean I can get some good information out of it. I'm so glad someone on youtube conserved this footage, it's amazing to look back at these things now that I know more about game design.
After creating a race car and making a track, we must make a HUD using Unreal Engine 4's HUD making software. Since my car is modeled off of a GAZ-69, I decided to start there, and took at look at the original dash of the GAZ-69

 

I love the rugged and neglected look, so I looked at other old war vehicles and found some awesome dials and knobs and stuff!





I loved this tachometer, and would love to incorporate something like it into my HUD. I also took some elements from other dials I thought looked cool, and tried to add some different functionality to them. I like the general layout I have at the moment, but I feel like it might get a big too cluttered. Therefore, once I start testing it in-game, I will tweak it, I'm thinking I could move the Gear indicator and incorporate it into the speedometer, saving space. I would do it in the style of the tachometer above, with the dials within dials it has for temperature and fuel levels. The weapons indicator would be a light up bulb that will reinforce the notion that the player is armed and ready when they pickup a power up.




Progress on the explosive barrel. Mostly worried about the mechanics at the moment. I created a barrel that floats in zero gravity for my space level, with a pulsing green light to make sure players notice! If it is hit lightly it will release a particle effect for a couple of seconds before exploding! Here's a little teaser of it in UE4.



Here's the code - As you can see there are four main groups. The first group is to make the barrels spin around and make them more exciting that static floating barrels. If they were not moving then maybe it would look like they were a glitch.

Then, there is the hit registration area, that listens for hits hard enough to initiate either a damaged or destroyed state. The damaged state fires off a particle and after a couple of seconds then initiates the destroyed function. This function shoots off an explosion particle, a radial force AND damage actor, and then terminates the blueprint.

I also added in an event to initate the damaged function whenever a coolant cell is damaged. Looking forward, this will allow the cells to interact with any kinds of damage, be it from a collision with a car, to other coolant cell explosions, or even weapon damage from the cars weapons.



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