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Berry Chuckers

This game was designed and implemented during sprint week at Sheridan College. Sprint week is a one week period where students produce a full game within a given theme. Berry Chuckers is a team game that was based off a field sport my team and I invented and then termed "Zone" --  the theme for this spring week had been video game adaptations of sports.

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Our main design challenge was coming up with a physical game/sport in the first place. Eventually after my team discussed and tested different games based around dodgeball, I proposed a mechanic that later evolved into Zone, and its adaptation Berry Chuckers.

Designing Zone 

Zone is the physical game upon which Berry Chuckers is designed. 

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We knew we wanted to combine dodge ball with something similar to kick the can or bowling. This idea came from the shared human existential enjoyment derived from knocking down a pin (and we wanted to create a reward system for the player). 

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Originally, we experimented with a game set up where players could either guard their pin or run to the middle of the court to throw balls at the other teams pins. If your pin was knocked down you were out. However, when tested, the game felt slow and not as enjoyable as we would have liked. 

 

At this point, we made a small tweak to the game so that the player could remain in the game even after their pin was destroyed-- but the game still lagged on and became tedious.

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After more experimentation I threw out the idea to change the shape of the court to a circle and split the game into two rounds. In the first round Team A attacks and Team B defends, and in the second they switch.

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This version was significantly more successful: the pins were placed in a triangle in the middle of the circle with one player guarding each pin. The attackers could throw balls into the center of the circle to attempt to knock over the pins but could not enter the circle (the defenders zone). Each pin knocked over was worth 1 point. 

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We discovered that the game was actually unfair in favor of the starting team due to our points system (first to five points with at least a two point win over the other team). In order to eliminate this issue we decided that the winning team would be whichever had the most points at the end of four rounds, or in case of a tie, whichever won the majority of the games.

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From Zone to Berry chuckers

When transitioning from Zone to Berry Chuckers there were two initial ideas that were competing. Was the digital game going to have a more serious tone, or a lighter ton targeting a younger audience?

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In order to decide, me and another artist both came up with concepts for the game. She designed a version wherein the play would take place with jellies throwing berries on top of a cake and I designed a version with robots hurling energy at each other. You can see both concepts to the right. Spoiler alert, the group decided to go with the berry concept (to my salty tears).

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When transitioning to the digital realm, we changed the players play space from an open area to an enclosed space in order to ensure that balls (now berries) remained in play. This made the job of the defenders significantly harder. In order to counter balance this we gave each of the defenders the ability to construct a wall with which to block incoming berries.

My Contributions

In addition to helping with the design process of Zones game mechanics I was tasked with the following:

> Designing a 3D player model based off of a digital concept (Jelly) 

> Rigging the created 3D character

> Creating animations for all the 3D characters actions 

> Texturing and materializing Jelly 

> Exporting and importing the character into Unity

> Producing advertisement for Zone (see below)

Advertisement for Zone

Animating for Berry Chuckers

Animating Jelly for Berry Chuckers was a good experience. I enjoyed creating a character with such simple characteristics as it gave me more room to explore expression through motion. 

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I was inspired by the movement of snails when animating a walk cycle -- specifically, I wanted to exaggerate the motion they made while crawling: reaching forward with the lower front half of their body and pulling the rest  of their body behind.

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Animating the ball throw and toss was interesting, because I knew they both had to be readable and unique, but initially I wasn't sure how to achieve this. I attempted using a similar animation for both the throw and the toss except with the throw angled differently. This felt like a cheap cop out. In the end, I settled with having Jelly contract and then fire the ball out like a cannon for the throw. For the catch, Jelly tossed the ball by jumping up and pushing the ball off its head.  

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The jump was by far the most fun to animate because it really gave the character a defining sense of mass and shape (the jump involved lots of wobbling in the air). 

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