The Project

Our project is a turn-based game, reminiscent of Auto Chess, designed for two players. The gameplay will loop between two different states, Draft Round and Combat Round, until either player has emerged victorious.

During the Draft Round, the players will interact with their respective sides of the board simultaneously, placing characters they have drafted to combat eachother. Once the players are done drafting and placing, the Combat Round starts.

During the Combat Round, the placed teams will automatically battle each other in a random fashion, until either team is vanquished. Once a team has emerged victorious, the winning player is awarded a point on the scoreboard. Once a set amount of rounds has passed, the final score will determine the winner for the game.

This project is integrating the Microsoft PixelSense technology of a SUR40 device. Every single pixel of the device's screen contains tiny IR-sensors, not only capable of sensing touch, but capturing images as well. Playing your characters during the Setup Phase will involve placing actual physical cards on the screen, allowing them to be read, and then that data is sent to the game client to generate the appropriate characters. We wanted to do this, because most of us reminisce fondly on the Yu-Gi-Oh series, where cards placed in the game are animated, and interact with eachother, and the SUR40 device our way of getting to do that. We chose regular "Poker" cards, because making such generic and readily available cards would be a cool proof of concept. Another reason we wanted to do this was that we saw a previous project, Lumen, that made us go "Oooh, I want to do something similar!" We also looked for proofs of concept, and found it within Snow Surface, where they're also using Microsoft PixelSense. As for the graphics, we chose to use low-polygon models made by ourselves, with nice shaders. That is because modelling is a cumbersome task you either have to do yourself, or pay someone else to do it for you; low-polygon models are easier to do yourself. For the shaders, you can do a lot of cool things with advanced shaders, even on low-polygon models. Also, the SUR40 is not the best equipped device, so many polygons might have overworked it.

We've encountered a fair share of obstacles and challenges, and we've learned a few lessons from it.
The most glaring difficulty we've had is the fact that not only is the device almost 10 years old and outdate, the SUR40 as a concept is deprecated and no longer supported by the official people involved in its conception. Because of that, we had to rely on obscure references online, or by reverse engineering previous projects using the SUR40. It really teaches you to broaden your searches for helpful information, but perhaps we should've taken the hint and done something else instead. Heh.
Another difficulty we encountered was making the interaction interesting. We noticed that during our first demo presentation, people simply didn't find the interaction interesting or engaging. Naturally, the first demo was far from complete, but we thought that it would spark some more interest at that point either way. Maybe we should've had other people tried it earlier, and taken their lack of interest to note.
The last significant difficulty was understanding and successfully implementing Computer Vision, when none of us were praticularily adept at it. Using OpenCV sure helped, but it still wasn't easy. Next time, maybe don't dive head-first into unknown areas, at least not without a plan B.

Demo

Project Finished

Tags: -
03 Nov 2021
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The project is finished.

Character interaction implemented

Tags: Interaction, Controls, Touch, Gameplay Controls, Game Depth
02 Nov 2021
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Added game depth, by allowing users to interact with the characters directly.

TouchScript implemented

Tags: Interaction, Controls, Touch
01 Nov 2021
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Touch interaction implemented, using TouchScript asset.

Shield effect for defensive mode

Tags: Shaders, Model, Scripting, Texture, Blender
01 Nov 2021
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Added an effect for when characters are in defensive mode

Menus and other interactive elements constructed

Tags: UI, Game Flow Logic
28 Oct 2021
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Made many UI elements for navigating the game flow of the game, making the entirety of the programme accessible without special variables.

Card UI improvements and character stats

Tags: UI, Character Stats, Card Interaction
25 Oct 2021
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Update UI for card placement areas. Also create a panel for character descriptions. Last, make sure cards can be differentiated on the board by rotation.

Armor and Doctor characters finished

Tags: Art, Blender, Modeling, Animation, Procedural Materials
21 Oct 2021
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With the addition of these two characters, we have more of a finished roster!

General environment changes

Tags: Environment, Skybox, Modelling
15 Oct 2021
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Update environment giving it depth and texturing and a skybox for the background. Also add platforms for spawning and flags for each team.

Battlefield animated river and waterfall

Tags: Shaders, Graphics, Particles, Water
10 Oct 2021
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There is now a great big waterfall off the battlefield, with an animated river that leads to it.

Squishy character added

Tags: Character, Ray Marching, HLSL
30 Sep 2021
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Create new character using sphere tracing/ray marching into a signed distance field.

Card parsing works!

Tags: Computer Vision, Card Reading, Parsing, Networking
29 Sep 2021
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The data pipeline from SUR40 to Unity works now.

Game Design choices made

Tags: Game Design
24 Sep 2021
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Basic design such as gameloop and gameplay was determined and documented.

Projectiles added

Tags: Computer Graphics, Shaders, HLSL, Particle Systems
21 Sep 2021
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Adding projectiles to the three existing character models Witch, Colonel and Enigma.

Stage terrain improved

Tags: Art, Model, Blender, Upgrades
19 Sep 2021
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We added some assets to the stage terrain to make it more 'lively'.

Possible card detector prototyped

Tags: Computer Vision, Card Reading, Parsing, Prototype
16 Sep 2021
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An open source computer vision project was found, that might be possible to adapt to our purposes.

First characters completed

Tags: Art, Model, Blender, Texture, Animation
15 Sep 2021
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The three first characters for the project are now complete. We have the Witch, the Colonel and Enigma.

Stage terrain constructed

Tags: Art, Model, Blender
13 Sep 2021
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We needed a world environment for the gameplay to take place in, so we made one compliant with our chosen style.

General model style decided

Tags: Art, Model, Blender
6 Sep 2021
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Old resources came to be useful once more, with this character model. Not only is it a candidate model for the final product, but it also conveys the stylistic choices we're going for: Few polygons and simple shading.

A humble start

Tags: Concept Idea, Art, Game Design
3 Sep 2021
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Every project has to start somewhere, and this is the general gist of the idea, no matter which interesting graphics or interactions will be added later on.