Technical Discussion March 22 2012

Club Announcements

• It was announced that the club website is being updated
  • Any members who want to get there project on the site can let Jordan or one of the executives know, or add it themselves
  • Members were reminded to add/update website profiles if they had not already done so
• reminded members that were not present at the last meeting of the Unity game collection project proposed by Eric Raue at last weeks meeting

Diegetic Interfaces

• Diegetic Interfaces are user interfaces that are a part of the game world
• The topic was suggested by Perry because Unity 3D's default user interface system is very inefficient
• The most well known classical example of diegetic interfaces is the watch from golden eye
• Dead Space was also mentioned because it had interfaces integrated into the environment
• Discussed the idea of a game that reveals the goal through the environment
  • the game Journey reveals the goal as a distant object on the horizon that your character moves toward
  • Journey is also interesting in the sense that there is multi-player but communication is limited
  • random players are automatically joined to your game
  • the player can only talk to players using a wordless shout
• Discussed some games that had no traditional HUD
  • Games like Mirror's edge have no HUD
• Discussed the idea of the objects in a players inventory orbiting the character
  • the character could slow the orbit to select an object
  • apparently this was used in a monkey island game
  • several older 2D games, like secret of mana, used a ring-like interface
  • with a large number of items this could become ineffective without sorting
  • someone raised the idea of the knapsack problem, a classical inventory sorting problem