To test player and NPC interactions, we are obviously going to need an NPC.
However, simply using one of the Half Life 2 NPC characters for our own will not be sufficient for our needs, as our testers may have preconceptions of that NPC if they have played HL2 before. The solution is obvious: we must make our own NPC.
Building an NPC from the ground up will be extremely time consuming, and making it fit into the visual style of HL2 would be difficult, so the best way to go is to take an existing NPC and modify it to match our NPC design.
The first step is to choose which NPC is best suited for this modification, and the method of choosing the NPC is discussed here.
Week 7, Meeting 1:
Date: 23/03/2010
Time: 12:00pm until 12:45pm
Staff present: Claire Brierley, Amanda Dewhurst
Location: C2 – 04a
Items addressed:
i. Pitch Presentation.
ii. Feedback.
iii. Test Ideas.
Since Easter is a three-week break with no chance for formal meetings and probably quite infrequent team communication, we should all focus our research towards things to add to the level, NPC and testing*, as well as uploading any outstanding work. Following are the guidlines to refer to:
i. All notes & research work must contain appropriate citations (or inferences as a last resort).
For example: If adding zombies will make our level scarier, why? Who has proven this previously?
ii. All notes & research work is to be delivered in a team meeting once the break is over.
iii. Any pieces completed during the break (ie. Source Analyses, Character Studies) can be uploaded to the blog as they are finished as usual.
iv. Tag all Easter work with the 'Easter' tag in place of a week number.
v. Outstanding pieces such as the Zevran Character Study and the Half-Life Models report are also to be posted during this break, so that everyone is up to date upon our return.
vi. Have fun and be productive! Big brother is watching you!
*things such as 'Why are military uniforms intimidating?', 'Why are office clothes conformist?' and 'What is the effect of teleporting an alien squid into New York City?'
Week 6, Meeting 1:
Date: 16/03/2010
Time: 12:00pm until 12:45pm
Staff present: Claire Brierley, Amanda Dewhurst
Location: C2 – 04a
Items addressed:
i. Design Document, Pitch and Plan.
ii. Feedback.
iii. 'Dry Run' Presentation.
Players in Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning demonstrate distances in MMORPGs."E. Hall's 'The Silent Language’ is an interesting source describing the myriad aspects of culture. While the book is probably required reading for anthropologists, I at first struggled to find meaning within it as relating to games design. Nonetheless riveting, it was only as I approached chapter ten, ‘Space Speaks’, which discusses from a Western point of view how distance affects communication. Within a three-dimensional space such as our level, this is integral."