![]() I did consider restricting the camera angles but unless I heavily restricted them the player would always be able to see some of the apartment. Looking back into an almost entirely empty apartment would look quite strange though. I also removed all of the furniture apart from a single rug. I wanted to keep people focused on the window so I anchored them in that spot. I also decided to only allow the player to look around (ie. I had my player verb … my only player verb: toggle lights. And maybe, just maybe, if both of us knew Morse Code (I don’t) or could at least recognise and find a guide (that I could do) then we could communicate. I could turn my lights off and on though. I can’t hold up a sign, no one could read it through the rain. If it’s a rainy night how would I try and communicate with someone in the building opposite me that I didn’t know. Where possible I like to put myself in the player avatar’s shoes to work out what they would do. In the midst of a pandemic, while still working full time, and while trying to make sure the trimester closed out smoothly for my students and my team …. Trying to create a game with a shared world for 200 people would be ambitious enough at the best of times. Keeping the interactions simpleĪs I started detailing out the rest of the game I was very adamant about keeping the interactions simple. I had my rainy window, the next step was to work out what the player could and would do. I learned how to do something I had never done before and I understand how the pieces fit together and how I might use them in future. For me that’s the mark of a great tutorial. I can understand what the code is doing and why. But after the tutorials it all made sense. The gaps in my shader knowledge were simply too large. The techniques and solutions used in the tutorials were not ones I could have come to on my own. The effect was exactly what I was wanting and the tutorials were excellent. I started some research on it and was very fortunate early on to find these video tutorials from The Art of Code. I also knew that while I can make basic shaders and I knew that given time I can make ones with some complexity I also knew that this was many many levels above anything I had tried to make before. I knew that I wanted a window with rain running down it and I knew I would need a shader to do it. The next step was to make sure the player had a rainy window worthy of their attention. I had the core of my idea, a shared world where every player was focussed on their own window onto a rainy street at night. I worked out I could have a shared world with around 200 people in it. And I ran the numbers to work out the worst case bandwidth usage. I was familiar enough with databases that I understood how to do that from a technical point of view. Which gave rise to the idea of maybe … maybe … I could have multiple people be in this world at the same time, each in their own apartment, isolated but also connected. I also wanted there to be an interaction with other people. I didn’t want the player to leave the apartment and I wanted to keep their eyes largely fixed on the window so whatever they did had to be through that window. I knew it would be at night, it would be raining and a core aspect would be looking out the window. The drops slowly rolling down the window making all the lights flare when they intersect. At night, and particularly on a rainy night, it’s incredibly peaceful to lookout and just watch the street through the rain on the window. My main windows look out onto an intersection. That description of watching rain drops on the window immediately conjured up for me a memory of one of my favourite things about where I live. The prompt words helped a lot with idea generation particularly ‘ambedo’ and in particular this part of the definition “A kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details-raindrops skittering down a window. The hard part is picking one idea and developing it into an interesting concept that is achievable within the time constraints. Thinking of ideas is never the hard part. And as for what I’ll be talking about? I’m going to talk through how I came up with the idea and how I designed and built the key systems. The game, Through my window, doesn’t have any tasks for the player to complete there isn’t anywhere for them to go or to be there’s just a street on a rainy night and a window to watch it through. So what did I make and what am I going to talk about? I made an MMO … an MMO Screensaver. ![]()
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