MassDigi Game Challenge: April1-2, 2022 – TBD
Visit here for more information!
BIC Presents Event: March 31, 2022 – Pittsfield, MA
MassDigi’s Tim Loew will be a panelist at the Berkshire Innovation Center’s BIC Presents Event on emerging technologies and the metaverse. To register, please click here.
Made In MA at GDC Party: March 22, 2022 – San Francisco, CA
We’re back! Join us at our awesome annual meetup in SF! More info coming soon.
Vision Opportunity Now (VON3) Summit: January 24-26, 2022 – Virtual
Watch MassDigi’s Monty Sharma speak at VON3 on January 25. For tickets and more information on VON3, please click here.
“How to find and build a $100 million business” by Monty Sharma: January 22, 2022 – Virtual
Join MassDigi’s Monty Sharma for a WPI Wintersession talk entitled “How to find and build a $100 million business: What engineers and scientists need to know to have huge impact.” For more information, please click here.
XPBLOG: A robotics engineer’s introduction to Unity – 12/16/21
Despite being someone who has been interested in gaming as far back as I can remember, I had never had the opportunity to try and develop a video game until I was part of this internship. Pretty much all of my programming experience so far has been in relatively simplistic coding environments such as Eclipse and VSCode, and the only output was usually a text output or behavior in the physical realm. While there are similar themes in all coding environments, Unity would prove to be quite the new and interesting experience.
The first challenge that I had to face when using Unity for the first time was the complicated user interface. While I know my way around it now, practically at the end of the program, the sheer amount of buttons, scenes, and new terminology was more than multiple skims of the manual could prepare anyone for. In Fig. 1, instead of being presented with a central area for coding, like in Fig. 2, the user is presented with nothing more than the camera. Also, unlike in Fig. 2, where the user can get coding immediately, the user has to create a script somewhere under assets, which is an idea foreign to most programmers.
Figure 1: Unity’s new project screen, which is relatively complicated
Figure 2: Eclipse, a common IDE, which is simplistic
After getting a grasp on Unity’s UI, Unity began to feel natural. By this point, I had taught myself a bit of C# and had written a few basic functions. Despite this, I still found myself struggling with yet another roadblock: applying scripts. In Unity, there is a good number of ways to reference assets within code, such as through public variables (which allowed for dragging and dropping the assets into the script’s Inspector), which I discovered to be good for tasks like spawning a number of the same asset, or using a find command, which works best for quickly finding something static that already exists within the game scene. I would argue that at this point, any programmer would know the basics of how to use Unity, but in order to do something of any complexity, there are a few quirks that any user must deal with.
The largest of these so-called quirks is transforms. Someone new to Unity, like myself initially, assumed that all of the coordinates were relative to the world. However, this was not the case. This unfortunately led to a few issues in game, such as defining the maximum distance an enemy could move as a box around the enemy, but since it changed based on the enemy’s position, it always stayed in the middle of the box no matter where the enemy moved, effectively allowing it to go anywhere, as seen in Fig. 3. To fix this common issue, the best approach is to make it dependent on something which does not move, including putting it at the same level as the object which contains the script.
Figure 3: One of the pesky bugs who kept going offscreen
Another of these quirks are the Find methods, which I briefly mentioned earlier. In short, their role is to refer to specific game objects elsewhere in the script. Despite these functions having a role integral to just about any game, they can be difficult for new users to wrap their head around, like it was for me. The two different versions of the function are GameObject.Find(), which is used to look through ALL GameObjects that exist in the scene, and GameObject.transform.Find(), which returns the transform (not GameObject!) child of the searched object. This method can also use .parent to go to whatever it is nested in (it’s parent). The first method should be used to find something that exists many steps away and is unique, while the second method is best for items that exist nearby to the script, or within an object which has multiple instances. This is due to how the first method cannot handle repeats, and the second one handles them by going up and down the GameObject’s tree. Variables references in the inspector are a great way to completely mitigate this issue, but both of them have their own use cases.
Overall, I would say that I had a positive experience in Unity after climbing over a few hurdles that presented themselves to me in the beginning. Unity is luckily well documented, which allowed me to use new methods with ease. Also, since scripts are applied to assets very easily, making it possible to see the results of code very quickly, I was as fulfilled as, if not more than, what I get from Robotics projects; there are simply few things as joyful as seeing your code in action. In short, I have had a positive experience with this software which has further sparked my desire for game development, and has shown that it is, in fact, a possibility for my future. I hope that my next projects are as fun as this one.
By Philip Lund
GAME LAUNCH: Ice, ice, baby! Game on with Freezy Match – 12/10/21
Freezy Match, a free, fun and fast-pace matching game, is available for download now on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Fill penguin orders as they quickly slide across the ice; drag and drop colorful snow cone chunks onto their cones, or risk missing out on some valuable points! As time goes on, you’ll really start to see how hectic this tundra can get. Miss three penguins and you’re out!
The mobile game was created during the fall 2021 MassDigi XP3 internship program by Andrew Lobasso, Ben Lipkin, Gaspare Spizzirri, Jordan Dube, Joseph Benson and Victoria Kelley.
Watch the trailer here and download Freezy Match today for iOS and Android!
GAME LAUNCH: Pounce your way to victory in Kitten Coliseum – 12/10/21
Kitten Coliseum, a free, fun action battler, is available for download now on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Play as an honorable cat fighting against hordes of the despicable, but tasty looking, mice from the Mice’s Republic of Swiss Cheese! Control your honorable steed, the Robot Vacuum – and drive, slash and pounce your way to victory!
The mobile game was created during the fall 2021 MassDigi XP3 internship program by Steve Kruger, Jian Liu, Annie Higgins, Margaret Patel and Matthew Peters.
Watch the trailer here and download Kitten Coliseum today for iOS and Android!
GAME LAUNCH: Eat your fill in Flytrapped! – 12/10/21
Flytrapped, a free, fun 2D platformer, is available for download now on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Follow a flytrap’s struggle to escape a treacherous lab filled with mutant plants, dangerous obstacles and (of course) flies! Eat, bite, and climb to make it out alive. Do you have what it takes to help rescue the fly-boy from impending doom?
The mobile game was created during the fall 2021 MassDigi XP3 internship program by Audrey Spencer, Giancarlo Spizzirri, Hyeongjun Kim, Kenny Venancio, Philip Lund, and Zihong Ren.
Watch the trailer here and download Flytrapped today for iOS and Android!
XPBLOG: Mood boards and how they inform the creative process – 11/24/21
When a designer identifies the core feeling that the game wants to give to the player, it is important to consider that all game elements serve to deliver that feeling. One of the most intuitive feeling games reveal to players is first and foremost visual. A game must have its unique artistic elements in it in order to bring players psychological satisfaction, such as the connection between art style and UI design in casual games, they tend to be cartoony with bright saturated colors. So, the elements of a well-integrated game need to match. These elements need to be matched between art styles such as color and texture and designs such as cartoon or realism to create a sense of harmony. However, the artist’s resources need to be abundant, both in quantity and quality in order to achieve this harmony. So, the bulk of our pre-planning stage uses mood boards to help us before we actually design.
Mood board is the key tool for improving and evolving our ideas throughout the design process. The benefits are obvious: it improves team members’ efficiency and guides a cohesive art generation process.
We began our journey by brainstorming potential game concepts. We created mind maps which generated two concepts we felt had potential.
The first game we tentatively called “Snail Mail”, which is a casual Endless Runner game. The second, also tentatively named, “Venus Flytrap” is an Endless Platform game.
After establishing the concepts to move forward with, we began the mood board phase.
The aesthetic we chose was retro futurism (’50s sci-fi) for “Snail Mail”
Because the feeling we brought to the player in this game was first and foremost crazy and fantastical, we chose a lot of products from the retro-future, such as retro nuclear-powered cars and community scenes. Because our game wants to provide a relaxed and lively palette.
We choose a lot of high-brightness and low saturation colors on our color palettes. In this way, we hope to bring players a relaxed and joyful experience of the game.
We established “Venus Flytrap” to be quirkier and more earth toned. The game’s design focuses on the jungle environment. So, for the mood boards, we tended to look for elements from nature, and we got a lot of pictures for our reference, including dark forests, exotic Venus flytraps, insects, and some carnivores.
Both “Snail Mail” and “Venus Flytrap” games were beginning to shape themselves into more concrete ideas we could present to other teams but our team was more eager to focus on the “Venus Flytrap” idea as we were able to find more reference pictures, ideas, and motivation from the team as we progressed.
From the elements of these pictures, we extract new color palettes, most of them are green and blue palettes with high grayscale. After that, we redesign all the elements to fit the overall game environment.
After that, our game gradually began to have a storyline, and according to us, the player character was a fly trap escaping from the lab and constantly needing to get food in order to survive. So, we started looking for pictures of abandoned greenhouses and laboratories to meet our design needs.
To make our design more believable, we took a lot of different species of Venus flytraps and designed them to be enemies in the game. For example, we liked a Venus flytrap of Cobra Lily and thought it looked like a boa constrictor that could swallow the main character. This design not only meets the overall environmental needs of our game but also improves the sense of harmony between game elements.
As we are moving forward to more environment and enemy resource research, more enemies that tend to affect the game mechanism are created.
The moss from the mood board inspired our team’s game designer of a “platform murderer”, which can kill the player’s character. In addition, we have many new designs to add to the game, all inspired by mood board.
To sum up, mood boards are the integration of our inspiration sources, and their establishment lays the foundation for our entire project. From the beginning to the middle of the game, we’re constantly adding new elements. In the browsing, constantly exercise our design thinking; Change, add, or remove elements of the game to nurture and grow into a mature product.
By Zihong Ren
