Old School Runescape

Description

Old School Runescape is an MMORPG developed by Jagex. Originally created as Runescape, it was later split into two separate games, Runescape 3 and Old School Runescape, both receiving separate development teams over the years. While Old School Runescape was released in 2013 as a version of the 2007 game patch of Runescape, it has since received separate updates from the original, making it its own unique game, and adopting old mechanics rarely used in modern video games.

Link: https://oldschool.runescape.com/

Images taken from https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/

Gameplay – Elemental Tetrad

Despite being an MMORPG in 2023, the gameplay revolves primarily around point-and-click style gameplay, with little to no need to use the keyboard. As such, the game has received continual support and updates based around this core gameplay, limiting the number of mechanics that can truly be implemented into the game. However, despite these mechanics, the game still manages to retain its playerbase and appeal to them, partially due to nostalgia as one of the few easily accessible MMORPGs available back in the early 2000s, and due to original and engaging content still being released. The gameplay is hence kept simple, requiring only a mouse to be engaged, while still having deep mechanics and reactions required in harder activities such as combat to provide a rewarding experience for players skilled at the game.

Regarding the game style, Old School Runescape prioritizes exploration as its main mechanic, encouraging players to explore and discover the world, while providing numerous enemies to combat with, along with numerous skills to level up in this process of exploration. Currently, there are 26 different skills to train, allowing numerous ways of playing and different areas to focus on depending on one’s priorities. Combat serves as a significant part of the game, requiring players to adapt to and react accordingly using only their mouse. However, most of the game does not generally require significant reactions, or even attention to be paid to, allowing for more relaxing and less engaged gameplay. While this gameplay may seem limiting and unappealing, or too basic, its ease and simplicity can still be appealing to others.

Since Old School Runescape acts as an MMORPG, it also allows for player interaction and activities with each other, providing both cooperative gameplay with others, and combative gameplay with others as well. The inter-player interactions help to contribute to the experience through providing a community to share experiences with, and interact and bond with friends as well.

Story

Old School Runescape has no main storyline, instead containing around 150 quests, each separated into different questlines with their own stories and narratives. Additionally, events are continually held every year with new stories and lore, allowing players to be engaged into different storylines within the same game. While there may be a lack of an overarching main storyline, worldbuilding is still done through these various storylines, along with the interactions with other NPCs within the game.

Aesthetics

Old School Runescape is unique among other RPGs in aesthetics as well, in that it does not adopt modern graphics or utilize modern rendering techniques. Instead, it keeps its graphics extremely simple, to remain accessible on even the weakest PCs. This further separates it from its counterparts in other MMORPGs and RPGs, as it focuses less on these visuals to inspire and draw in players.

Lenses

Lens 29: The Lens of Chance

Combat in Old School Runescape is determined heavily around randomness. For each attack, a random roll is made, and the damage dealt or received is a random number between zero and the maximum possible damage. On the other hand, for gathering resource, there is a also a percentage chance of success required in order to obtain these resources. The majority of the game is played around these probabilities and random chances. For such gameplay, the appeal lies in the chance of the drop rates for rare items. These rare items vary in drop rates, ranging from low probabilities such as 1/100 to even 1/16000. Many players chase after these valuable drops due to the large appeal of receiving these unique items, along with the ability to enhance their game experience with these rare drops.

This randomness may not necessarily be a good thing though. After all, if too much randomness exists, the player may feel like they have no agency and control over the game, leading to frustration and unhappiness due to an inability to progress due to these limiting factors. The overreliance of randomness in gameplay can then lead to negative experiences, where players get stuck on certain sections due to luck rather than skill. For most of the game, the overall expected value of this randomness leads to no large variations in gameplay between players for certain activities. However, players may often remember certain events either fondly or unhappily depending on the randomness they faced, and outcome of their luck based on these events, be it obtaining their desired rare drops, or falling in combat due to undesirable luck.

Overall, luck and randomness does play a huge part in adding to the game experience. While it may be overbearing and frustrating at times, it also provides an enjoyable and rewarding gameplay experience for those who are able to obtain their rare items, thus serving as a double edged sword that provides memorable experiences to its players.

Lens 39: The Lens of Time

As an MMORPG, Old School Runescape can be seen as a game that never ends. Players often set their own goals, and accomplish them within their own times. However, regarding the time aspect, the game can be seen as very time consuming, and even monotonous at times. As there are 26 skills to level to the maximum level of 99, some players set out with the objectives of obtaining this maximum level. Others attempt to clear all of the quests. Both these paths can be very time consuming, as maximizing a skill level can range from 30 hours of in game time to up to over 100 hours of in game time.

As such, the gameplay can seem tedious and consuming, especially when attempting to achieve goals that require such extensive periods of time, and may hardly seem rewarding and even monotonous to others. This gameplay is somewhat mitigated by the extensive variety of activities to do, allowing players to either switch their current goals when getting burnt out, or focus only on the activities they find the most enjoyable. However, many may feel frustrated by the length of time required to make small progress, leaving players unsatisfied and burnt out, due to the lack of instant gratification and progress made. The large amount of time needed to be invested in making progress for certain sections of the game may frustrate players, and turn them away from enjoying the game, thus creating a limitation of the game, especially in attracting new players.

Lens 42: The Lens of Simplicity / Complexity

As raised earlier, Old School Runescape can be seen as a very simple game. It stands as one of the few MMORPGs that does not demand or even necessitate the usage of a keyboard, where everything can be done with the use of a mouse. The gameplay may hence seem exceedingly simple, in contrast to its competitors, and may even dissuade players from joining due to its lack of complexity, being seen as monotonous and unengaging. The ease of gameplay may even restrict game development and design, as new content cannot be created easily, having to make new challenging mechanics while being limited to the scope of only allowing the player to overcome these difficulties with a mouse.

However, the game combats this lack of complexity by pushing difficulty in other ways. The more challenging portions of the game still test the player to overcome these difficulties. Instead of requiring quick reflexes, the game demands understanding of the game’s nuances and mechanics to overcome these challenges. Players still require experience and knowledge to clear the bosses of the game. Of course, reactions are still necessary, but the game rewards its players for being good, and having the knowledge to maximize their efficiency. These features allow Old School Runescape to act as a game that is easy to pick up, yet has enough nuances and depth behind to separate veterans from newbies.

Lens of Community

As Old School Runescape is an MMORPG, the sense of community is prevalent through having many activities to do in groups, either through cooperation, or through combatting each other. Notably, a sense of community is fostered through the way Old School Runescape proposes new content. The development team proposes new content to be released, leaving the community to vote on this content to decide if it should be added to the game, or if it would break the game balance, or lead to unfun mechanics. This creates unity within the community, and allows for players to feel bonded in constructing their own game together.

Conclusion

Overall, Old School Runescape acts as a very niche MMORPG, appealing to certain players while being boring and bland for others. Despite having outdated graphics and mechanics, it utilizes this niche to its advantage, creating a unique game with its own rustic charm, and allowing it to survive this long over the years.

Snapchat 👻

Snapchat is primarily a social media application, where people can send photos and videos in form of snaps directly to their friends or put it on their stories for all of their friends can see. They can also use the application to look at highlights, other people’s stories, and many other features. However, it also has an AR application called filters and lenses.

Snapchat Filters

Snapchat is unlike other AR apps, where most of them interact with the surroundings, but Snapchat interacts with your face and your surroundings. It was one of the first few apps to come up with interactive filters, then other social media applications soon caught on with this trend. Some filters or lenses can be as simple as just adding some colors or effects to the surroundings, while others can be a little more complex like swapping your face with your friend, or changing your appearance to look like a different gender. Snapchat also has a new scan feature that allows users to interact with their surroundings, such as solving a mathematics problem identifying a plant, or a car, and many more possibilities. The scan feature is relatively new compared to the filters and lenses and adds to the AR experience. Just the scan function is very similar to google lens, but what makes it different is the inclusion of filters and lenses, and the social media aspect.

Soon after this new feature, Snapchat also released Snap AR Lens Studio – where developers and artists can create new augmented reality experiences for users, and get to use their creativity.


Why do I like it?

It is simple and fun. It allows you to experiment with so many different filters, and users can create filters as well. The fun part about these filters is that they are very realistic. On top of that it is very easy to use. All you have to do is point it at your face, and it easily detects your face to put the filter on top of it. I also like the ‘explore’ option, which does not limit a user to a small number of filters. They also keep coming up with new filters, and ideas, and keep changing the default filters, so the users are not bored. The Scan feature, on the other hand, is like a visual search engine. It is very useful, quick, responsive, and easy to use. It is linked with the filters and lenses as well, for example, once a user points the camera at a face, the scan will suggest some face filters. It also has many different options to choose from, and the fact that all of these features are in one place makes it even better. Users can use it to find a product online, The feature is not limited to visual elements, it can also detect the music playing, which I think is very useful and fun.


Why is it engaging?

The filters are the most engaging aspect, as they allow you to play around and see how you would look in different ways. Some filters just enhance some facial features, while others add dog years, tongues, and things like that. They become more engaging as they add interactions. For example one of the most famous dog filters adds dog years and nose, and if you put your tongue out, it will do a dog tongue-swiping motion. Many other filters add interactions such as raising your eyebrows or smiling. The filters also detect faces on pets or screens, or anything that looks like a face.

The dog filter on pets

Another aspect that makes these filters engaging is that you get to share them with other people. You can send snaps to your friends or put them on your stories for more people to see. It creates something fun for people to do together. The scan feature is also engaging as it now suggests lenses or filters based on what the camera is pointed at. This makes it less tedious for users and allows them to explore new lenses easily.

What features are well done?

I think the filters look very realistic, and that is the part I believe is well done. For example, a guy can look exactly like a girl using some of these filters and it even fools some people. Finally, I think the fact that you can create filters is also a really good feature. Users get to showcase their creativity and some people also use it to market and increase publicity. The scan features are also built very well. For example, the find music feature allows users to identify any music playing in the background. It is very accurate and also gives links to the most popular music applications. The find a product feature is also really helpful, it also gives links to the Amazon page for users to directly buy it. Small details like providing these links, which make it easier for users and require the least effort from them, is a well thought-out aspect. The scan has other features such as finding a plant, or car or solving a math problem that are also very useful.


What features can be improved and how?

I think the one thing that can be improved is face detection, which is not accurate all the time.

Inaccurate face detection

It is especially poor for people wearing glasses. A lot of the time if a person tries on a filter with glasses, it is not at the right position on the face. This excludes a portion of the users and does not give them the full experience. Another feature is the filter accuracy while the face moves. Especially make-up filters do not stay in the correct position if someone is speaking. This makes it look less realistic and so makes these types of filters less engaging and fun. The filters should be able to move with the movement of facial features. The scan feature is relatively new, but so far I have not encountered any problems. The only way it can be improved is by introducing more options for users, than the small limited ones available now.


Overall, Snapchat is a fun and engaging application, which makes use of Augmented Reality in various ways. It has many good features, giving its users an enjoyable user experience, with an easy-to-use and fun user interface.

References:

https://www.tekrevol.com/blogs/best-ar-apps-for-augmented-reality-is-the-future/

https://screenrant.com/snapchat-scan-ar-camera-app-feature-benefits-explained/#:~:text=The%20Scan%20feature%20allows%20users,something%20to%20start%20using%20Scan.

VR in Medical Training

Source: OSSOVR

Utilising VR for medical training is one area that caught my attention. Currently medical school is one of the costliest trainings costing more than SGD833,000 in the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. Compared to an engineering degree which cost SDG206,000.

What is Osso VR?

Osso VR is a start-up founded in 2016 that primarily develops a VR training platform for surgical process training in the medical field. The company’s goal is to provide surgical training to medical staff and students reducing the constraints and limitations such as cost, location, and time.

Osso VR utilises both the virtual reality element to construct a surgical room with the goal of providing an accurate surgical environment complete with tools and patients for medical personal to go test their surgical processes and skills without risking a real person’s life and without the need for cost of equipment and time to set up a surgical room. The company’s solution also integrated a metaverse aspect allowing other medical personnel to join the room and observe or assist the head surgeon allowing practice for the full surgical team and allowing onlookers to observe the process.

Why is it engaging?

Osso VR is engaging as not only does it simulate a medical environment to immerse the user into the setting, but it can be complete with medical tools found in a fully prepared surgical room which the user can interact with and a virtual patient the user can conduct surgery on with the provided medical tools. The solution also enables other members to join in the virtual environment where the users can interact with one another to involve the users in a group level surgical process.

The metaverse feature which allows different users to join the session allows for a new form of remote engagement by medical experts to guide students or trainees which further enhances the training experience through interpersonal engagement.

What features are well done?

The surgical tools introduce in the software are accurate to that of the surgical ward with great animations and illustrations of their operating process giving detail of the process that allows someone as unfamiliar to the surgical process such as myself to understand the process.

What features can be improved and how?

One main disadvantage of the solution is utilizing oculus hand controllers to tract hand movement and using the device to pick up and operate the various surgical tools which is inaccurate as the operating process of the tool is different in terms of ergonomics and interaction as compared to pressing buttons on the oculus controller.

A potential solution could be to integrate hand-tracking tools to track the hand gestures and hand movement to be recreated in the virtual environment which would familiarize the user on interacting with the surgical tools.

My Conclusion

Overall, the software is extremely creative providing outstanding interaction and engagement which allows the user to experience a close to real-world experience at a lower cost, less time required to set up, and accessibility as the user can access the training room from anywhere in the world with a good network. Additionally, this solution allows users to have certain engaging features such as assessments to allow evaluations without the need for a human evaluator and the process is easily repeatable even by one user himself. This tool will prove important to advancing the training in the medical industry and make the training more widely available and accessible.

AR, The New Driving Force

Eyelights in action

Introduction to EyeLights

Smartphones have brought us convenience and beneficial impacts, but it has also brought about fatal distractions. Research has shown that 1 out of 4 accidents is due to distractions on the phone while driving. Accidents also negatively affect the environment through the up to 75 million tonnes of C02 emitted by car repairs and car manufacturing. Until the introduction of EyeLights, which utilizes AR to display visualizations of information from a smartphone to prevent any unnecessary distractions from the road. Users are able to view information, such as their speed, arrows to signify the direction to take, indicators that notify that they are too close to another car in front of them as well as other features. As a motor enthusiast myself, I look forward to any technological advancements to better the experience of driving, which explains why EyeLights caught my attention. Though the display that EyeLights provide is nothing compared to Iron Man’s helmet, it still signals the start of the futuristic display design that may be used by future vehicles, which I am all for. Additionally, it makes use of commonly known design language to perform different actions to interact with the connected smartphone such as:

  • Turning on EyeLights: Hold button for 2 seconds
  • Pause/Resume music, receive/hang up calls: Press button once

This design would thus allow for a fuss-free onboarding of new users.

EyeLights’ experience

It presents a high level of engagement as users are able to view the extra layer of virtual information to make decisions in real life, such as making the turn when EyeLights display an arrow to turn the corner. On top of that, users are able to interact with supported functions of the connected smartphone device, such as activating the voice assistant or displaying the map.

However, this would mean that the UI design of the visualization layer has to be iconic enough such that users would understand what the different symbols represent. The reason is because different countries might adopt different road signs and symbols that EyeLights might not have considered (EyeLights is based in France). This could lead to the unintended effect of confusing the new user and might cause a fatal accident.

Therefore, an improvement would be to present tooltips for first-time users to understand all the visual icons of EyeLights so that the visual icons would rather help them than be a distraction. An even better improvement would be to support functions based on the location the user is driving in so that visual cues of EyeLights compliments the road system of the location.

Overall, though some improvements can be made to EyeLights for a more enhanced experience for motorists, it still serves as an effective AR application that could disrupt how road information could be visualized to users, which would soon include car drivers too.

Citations

Impact. EyeLights | Affichage tête haute Moto. (n.d.). Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://eye-lights.com/en/pages/notre-impact

Mamun. (2022, May 30). Eyelights Eyeride motorcycle helmet user guide. Manuals+. Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://manuals.plus/eyelights/eyeride-motorcycle-helmet-manual#axzz7qtvC27l0

Rimworld

Rimworld is a colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. It was initially released as a Kickstarter crowdfunding project in 2013 and was officially released in 2018.

Lens of the elemental Tetrad

Mechanics & Story
The sole controllable characters are the colonists. A colonist come with a set of skills. The player can assign a colonist task priority as well as directly order the colonists to perform a certain task, which can be useful especially during an enemy ambush.
Apart from skills, a colonist has many other properties such as health, mood, characteristics, beliefs, and more. The properties models the various aspects of a colonist and reflects how he/she interact with his/her surroundings. The player need to monitor the statuses of colonists, try to fulfill their needs and allocate tasks to the colonists based on their skills.

With colonists, the player can interact with all the other objects/systems in Rimworld, e.g. combats, animals, factions, ideologies, etc. Apart from the huge information of from the systems, the player also needs to deal with the external events generated by the AI storyteller. The storyteller will analyze the player’s situation and send different events to the colony. , some are good and some are bad. Medicines as gift from a friendly neighbouring colony can be helpful, whereby an eclicpse can disable all the solar panels, leading to power shortage.

In Rimworld, there is neither traditional 5-stage story nor heros calling for freedom and justice. There are imperfect colonists who wish to survive, imperfect players who make decisions, and the storyteller, a blackbox who seems to control everything beyond the colony. The story in Rimworld is about everyday struggle against the hash environment and unpredicable future, and most of the story is written by the player himself.

When You Realise Your Strategy In A Video Game Is Doomed

Aesthetics

Since Rimworld is emphasising on AI-storytelling, its graphics are mainly abstract icons. They are simple and distinctive, which makes it easier for the player to identify the many icons on the scene.

Technology

Unity is the main engine to build Rimworld. However, Rimworld uses its own object handlers to deal with its thousands of objects. Based on a post in 2015, the only Unity component Rimworld uses is sound emitter.

Lens of Flow & Lens of Problem Solving

The game starts with three survivors from a crashed space liner landing on the rim of the known world. The tutorial at the start of the game will teach the player about the basic actions. The initial resources, e.g. food, medicine, will run out quickly. So there is an initial push for the player to build the colony until it is self-sustained.

The challenge of games in Rimworld is gradually growing. In the default storyteller mode, the size of raids is proportional to the wealth of the colony. The richer the colony gets, the more powerful the enemy will be. This mechanic punish the players who throw all their resources into building and trading, while never build any defenses. Here is another example: as the player develops technology and unlocks new facilities for production, he/she needs to plan wisely to reduce the travel time from one site to another. More problems will arise. e.g. There may be a lack of manpower since number of production sites increases; if the colony primarily relies on automatic turrets as means of defence, it will be vulnerable to raids when the electricity system fails.

The ultimate goal is to launch an spaceship and escape from the colony. There are several means to achieve that, with which the most common and easist one is to build the spaceship in the colony. Building the spaceship requires a lot of materials/components which requires some time to find/craft. Once the spaceship is built, the player could activate the spaceship, which can only be launched after 15 days. In this period, the raids will take place more frequently, which means less time for colonists to recover from wounds and less time to repair the walls and turrets. Thus, before activating the spaceship, the player needs to do a lot of preparation: build defence smartly, update the equipments and weapons of the colonists, and keep the wealth of the colony at a reasonable amount.

Lens of The World & Lens of Freedom

The story of Rimworld takes place in the rim of known world. This leads to great diversity of human conditions. The player could interact with factions with much higher/lower technologies. A single combat can includes bows, swords, rifles and miniguns.

The modeling of colonists makes the game feel authentic. For example, the needs of colonists would grow along with the increase of wealth. Also, a colonist will constantly obsearve his/her situation and decide what they feel at the moment. If their mood is low, he/her is prone to a mental break. A colonist within a mental break no longer accept player’s commands, and will look for a way to release their feelings.

The modeling of objects is also disclosed to the player. When some status of an object changes, the player can expect to find the object’s properties related to the status change and the external force that causes the change. For example, fire can spread on wooden wall blocks because the flammability of the wooden wall is high.

The colony is at a distance from any authorities in the universe, and the player is on his/her own. This setting leads to the fact that, the game does provide evil (and profitable) options like having slaves, harvasting organs, and producing addictive drugs. In an developed society, these are obviously inhumane or immoral actions. But in the context of Rimworld, survival is the toppest priority. Plus, the game does not judge between good and evil, and the player is free to choose his/her ways of developing the colony.

Conclusion

All in all, the complex yet interesting modeling of the world, the uncertainty of the next moment and the freedom of actions make Rimworld one of the most addictive game I have ever played.

Teamfight Tactics

Intro

Teamfight Tactics (TFT) is an auto battler game developed and published by Riot Game as a spinoff of League of Legend (LoL), the globally well-known MOBA game released by Riot Game. The game is played by eight players who build a team by drafting and deploying with a revolving roster of LoL champions to fight each other. During each round, two players are matched randomly and battle with one another with the team they construct. The one who is the last standing last play is regarded as the only winner in this game. The game released as a LoL game mode for Microsoft Windows and macOS in June 2019 and as a standalone game for Android and IOS in March 2020, featuring cross-platform play between them.

Intro video of Teamfight Tactics

Click here for browsing Official website

Lens #9: The lens of Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics:

  • Round-based, auto battler game, playing with computer-controlled enemies.
  • Diverse game modes with exciting mechanics (e.g., Normal, Ranked, Hyper Roll, and Doble up).
  • 50+ champions are taken from LoL universe as units with unique skills and sharing traits.
  • Over 20 types of synergies are activated by construct a team with one or multiple units with the same traits.
  • 50+ items can be equipped on each unit to provide unique effect.
  • 100+ Hextech Augments randomly assigned in each game, bringing various buffs.
Unit cheat sheet

Aesthetics:

  • The aesthetics components mainly consist of tactician skins, arena skins, and units.
  • Tactician skins and Arena skins have various themes along with unique movement, and sound effect. Some may also have unique attack effect and quotes.
  • Each unit has its own concept art and in-game character art. The concept art appearing in the unit shop, is a detailed, concise, informative image, which interpret trait of the unit. The in-game character art is chiefly made up of skill effect, death action, and celebration for victory.
Tactician skin: Chibi Firecracker Jinx

Story:

  • TFT has different theme in each season and every theme all has a main story background behind it, which is shared with LoL.
  • For example, the theme in S6 is called Gizmos & Gadgets, which has the story telling love and hate between a couple of sisters, Vi and Jinx.

Technology:

  • Same as LoL, TFT has a very low minimum hardware requirement to access the game.
  • TFT features cross-platform play between Android and IOS for its mobile version.

Len #41: Skill vs Chance

  • The way to get the units in this game is through purchasing at unit shop (randomly provide 5 units), picking up in Carousel round (A shared pool where players will be able to choose the unit equipped with item in an ordered arranged from the last place to the first place), loot drops by beating bot-controlled in-game enemies in some particular rounds. In this case the units and item are gained by chance and luck. However, relying solely on luck cannot guarantee you win. Making a good use of the chance, working out proper strategies in time is the winning formula in this game.
  • In TFT, Flexibility is what make a person a good player. Given that the unit assigned to a player is totally random, the players may be unlikely to built up the team as their plan at first. Thus, players need to shift in thinking, establishing a team centering around the units which players already have.  
  • In TFT, you will get passive income for free each round, which will be influenced by win streak, lose streak and interest. For the “ever-victorious general”, they will be given more gold as a regard. For the one who is in lose streak, likewise, they will be given more income per round as compensation. Besides saving money is also important in this game. The amount of interest you get is related to every 10 gold you have up until 50. In TFT, gold is the primary resource, so how to make maximum use of gold, how to earn golds based on the basic of econ in this game is the key skill need to be mastered by players.
The gold amount and

Lens #1: Emotion

  • I feel quite excited every time I refresh the shop, because I need to pay 2 golds for refreshing, which is like a gamble. Your golds may or may not bring something back.
  • Also, during the fighting, I am not able to know the next rival I will be up against. The uncertainty brings a lot of emotions beyond excitement.
  • Due to the difficulty to be a winner, the pleasure, excitement, and sense of achievement are all beyond words when I was the last standing player.
Carousel round

Lens #27: Time

  • The average time for one game is around 45mins. Since the mechanic, winner stands to the end, every player wants to stay in gameplay longer. No one will be bored about the longer gameplay time, conversely, players will feel more excited when it is closing the end of a game.
  • TFT gives players 15secs buffer time between each fight. Players must make a quick decision of whether to buy XP or reroll the shop and how to position units in this short period of time, which makes the game more exciting.

Lens #96: Friendship

  • TFT shares the same friendship system with LoL which means we can join a game with our friends in LoL and enjoy fighting against your friends and in-game communication with friends.
  • TFT published a new game mode called Double up last year, in which players join the game as a team of two, so that we can not only compete with friends but also cooperate with them. In Double up, a team member can send the units and items he has to the other one, and also support the other one after he beats his enemy.
Game mode: Double up

Fallout: New Vegas

https://fallout.bethesda.net/en/games/fallout-new-vegas

Fallout: New Vegas is a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda Softworks. It is the fourth major installment in the Fallout series. The game is released in 2010. Players take control of a character known as the courier who was ambushed and robbed of a very important package while doing his job. He was rescued and in the town of GoodSprings where he proceeds to start his journey in the Mojave Wasteland, where he will take part in the conflicts between warring factions to seize control of New Vegas, the prosperous city where all the focus is.

Lens of Curiosity

Imagine a world where atomic technology led to a Great War in the year 2077 where nuclear weapons were used without hesitation. The result is a global nuclear apocalypse in the whole wide world where radiation becomes a part of life. Greenery is no more and the world is just a desert. And yet, in this world void of life, humans still continue with their lives, some just waiting for death to come, others looking forward to the joys of life. Some even aspire to rise to the top. In a world where technology ruined it, there are abundance of stories happening in the wasteland, waiting for you to unfold. And your decisions affect what happens next in the story. You can choose to help them, you can choose to not help them, you might even choose to attack them. The action that you choose affects the rest of the story and the lives of the people in the Mojave Wasteland.

Lens of Endogenous Value

In post-apocalyptic nuclear world, technology has regressed significantly, the only exception being weapons. The concept of economy and government doesn’t even exist, only factions exercising their own political ideals onto other people. In all of these chaos, no coins or bank notes can be minted out. In exchange, the people of the Mojave Desert decided to use bottle caps from their favorite drink, Sunset Sarsaparilla as their currency. Similar to other role-playing games where money is a driving factor to getting up grades, Fallout: New Vegas uses caps as the currency for all purchases in the game. Whether it is through getting that new gun, better armor, or to bribe someone to do a favor for you, caps are really important to survive in the World. Most quests that you do will reward you in caps, and at times certain choices are influenced by your greed and desire to get more caps. You may choose to kill an ally in the process just to steal his caps for your own use. In a world where nothing much holds of value, and nothing is safe with you for always, caps are a heavy influence on what you do in the game.

Lens of Problem Solving

As an RPG game, there are an abundance of quests for you to complete in Fallout: New Vegas. Some quests might ask you to help eliminate some monsters in a nearby cave. Others will ask you to help them find a culprit for a murder. You will have different options to solve these options, and there might even be solutions that are unknown to the player. The problems come in many forms, you might need to talk out a conflict, steal and important document from an enemy, or walk into their base and kill them all. In each situation you solve a problem that you have through your own choice. Yet the method of solving the problem can arise to a different problem in the future, and that is what makes the game very interesting to play.

Lens of Action

The main action in Fallout: New Vegas is combat, where you can use guns, energy guns, melee weapons or even bombs to fight. In general it is similar to an FPS where you have to aim your gun or swing your blade to damage opponents. Fallout: New Vegas also offers another combat option where you use V.A.T.S. aka Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System which allows players to freeze combat and specifically target six different limbs at the cost of Action Points. The damage calculation in Fallout: New Vegas is unique in the sense that damage is mainly counted to 6 different body parts: head, two arms, body, two legs. This leads to interesting decisions such as if the opponent has a high speed that can close the gap to you quickly, you might consider damaging his legs first to slow him down. The same effects apply to you as well, if you step on a mine you will blow off both your legs and limp until you find a doctor. As survival is difficult in the game, strategic planning of action is important as resources are scarce as well.

Lens of Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics

The mechanics of the game is the leveling up of the character and investing skill points and perks in the character system. Players have a choice of choosing their attributes into Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. These attributes will in turn affect the skills of the following: Weapons, Explosives, Guns, Melee Weapon, Unarmed, Barter, Lockpick, Medicine, Repair, Science, Sneak, Speech Survival, where the player will gain skill points after levelling up to invest into these skills. Additionally players gain perk points where they can spend to gain special perks that grant additional abilities. The mass amount of perks available and choice of the skill points to invest in ensures that no two Fallout: New Vegas experiences are the same. Aside from the levelling and character system, Fallout: New Vegas introduces the karma and reputation system which results to different encounters depending on the actions you have done in the past. If you mass murder innocents in another town you will gain bad karma and other town people might attack you on sight. Yet if you have benefitted this particular town they might turn a blind sight as you have a good reputation with the town. The karma and reputation system further adds to experience where your every action affects the gameplay.

Story

The beauty of the story of Fallout: New Vegas is that there is no fixed persona of the character. Unlike other RPG’s where the character has a personality and certain choices doesn’t fit into the story, the courier in Fallout: New Vegas is shot twice in the head before the beginning of the story and hence is having amnesia. Thus, the player can make their choices without being restricted by the setting. The story itself is very unique as the world is devoid of life, in the sense that there’s no war and no prosperity going on. There is a little hint of conflict going on but the overall feeling is an eerie sense of peace. In a world where most of the population has died, the survivors do not really have a direction of what to do in life. In a place where there’s no hope, the protagonist can seek to leave it as it is, seize the opportunity to take advantage and seize or control, or help make life better for others.

Aesthetics

Despite the game being released in 2010, the game does a really good job of portraying a desert wasteland with the dark and bland colors. Though the models of the characters aren’t really intricate, they are shaped well enough to portray their sunken and hallowed faces. Though the vibrant city of New Vegas does not seem to be the paradise of opportunity that it was portrayed as. It seemed more like the only town where entertainment is available and thus people flocked there. Other than that the feel of the game was very well done. The soundtrack using oldies from the 50s and 60s is a good compliment to the ‘wasted’ feel of the desert

Technology

The game was made using Gamebryo system which developers can combine and extend libraries to modify the engine for a particular game. Gamebryo uses C++ programming language.

Conclusion

Though Fallout: New Vegas’s combat system isn’t the best experience compared to other FPS games, it’s unique storyline, intriguing quests and interesting character development system makes it a very memorable RPG game to play that incorporates a lot of the game design principles. Though the game itself is old and the graphics cannot be compared to the newer generation now, it’s story and enjoyment are still one of the best the RPG genre has to offer.

League of Legends

Description

League of Legends (LoL) is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video game developed and published by Riot Games. The game contains many game modes, maps, the team size match-up can be 1-versus-1 to 5-versus-5, very customizable to fit your favor, number of friends. Every player can choose one champion from the ever-expanding roster of LoL champions to play in each match, each with unique appearance and playstyle. The game is available on PCs.

Link to game’s website: https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/

Link to game play demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lcwPhtvOj0

Lens #9: The lens of Elemental Tetrad

Mechanics:

  • Team-based, customizable team size MOBA game (the most common is 5-versus-5) with various game modes (Blind, Draft, Rank, One for All, ARAM, URF).
  • Extensive champions, item choices with unique skills, effects in the game.
  • Various character interactions, counters, strategies available for players to discover, master, have fun with teammates.

Aesthetics:

  • The main aesthetics components are character skins concept art, map art, in-game character art.
  • The concept art of character skins has expressions, details of than in-game character art, but have the same human-based, clean, tidy, colorful style of art.
  • In-game characters is designed beautifully based on concept arts, but simpler and comes with beautiful unique ability animation, appearance based on skins.
  • Character skins has various theme, comes with wide range of colors, patterns, which is very visually appealing.
  • The game includes some fantastic famous music aesthetics created by Riots Games, also published as music video.
Concept are of a character in game

Story:

  • Riots have a story behind all characters and even a map of Runeterra (LoL world map) so all characters have relations with each other tightly.
  • They bring all characters from different regions to compete in this arena as a team.
  • They bring their characters beyond of their original story to make music video or bring their original story to a film series to advertise LoL beautiful world, characters, skins.
Reason film of Riots describing story of League of Legends characters

Technology:

  • LoL have a very low hardware minimum requirements to make the game accessible to a wide range of audience.

Lens #1: The Lens of Emotion

  • Leagues of Legends makes me feel very excited when waiting for game searching, very happy, cheerful, amusing and addictive to the gameplay, animation, game flow, stressful when it is a close game. But this only happens in the ideal case.
  • There are so many cases when you face much stronger players or your team plays too bad, blames allies, trolls, abandons the games. This makes a very frustrated, disappointed emotion for other players.
  • Emotion is better when I play with friends, forming a full team, we can communicate better, encourage each other when losing, share the happiness when winning a close game.

Lens #4: The Lens of Surprise

  • Players/Teams can surprise each other by strategically setting up to kill enemies. This can happen because a player cannot have vision of the whole map, and enemies can appear suddenly from bushes, walls, lanes and with their skills.
Walls setup in a part of LoL Map
  • The game supports player to make surprise like these with such map design and they also continue to add more map and character interactions.
  • The player is sometimes surprised with a new game mode where everything is different, this is also partly based on player’s idea/suggestion.
  • But sometimes, surprise comes from bugs, strange interactions in the game, which is not intended. Links of YouTube channel that keeps revealing LoL bugs after every update: https://www.youtube.com/c/Vandiril

Lens #32: The Lens of Goals

  • The optimal goal of this game for every team is to destroy enemy Nexus. But of course, enemy team will try to defend it.
Nexus in League of Legends
  • These results in many small goals/ big goals that your team must achieve before winning the game. List of goals includes getting gold by killing minions, enemies, destroy turrets, inhibitors, eating important objectives around the map. All of these are to help to make you stronger to kill enemy team and destroy the Nexus.
  • There is a good balance between short- and long-term goals throughout the game so sometimes the game ends so early but sometimes very late. And this all depends on the decision of players (character choices, playstyles, strategies). I think the goals of this game is very concise, balanced, entertaining for all players.

Lens #33: The Lens of Rules

  • For main mode of games, there are so many basic rules like: you will be hit by the enemy turret if you attack enemy inside turret range, … These small rules make the game more interesting.
  • Riots Games is also adding more rules for players with every new character, map objective introduced, which keeps players’ attention towards the game.
  • As mentioned above, the game also has many other game modes, where some rules are changed. This is introduced to cater for all players’ favors.
  • All the rules in the game is prone to change, to keep it interesting for all players. But for new players, these systems of rules take so much time to familiarize with them.
One For All mode where a team shares the same character

Lens #37: The Lens of Fairness

  • Theoretically, every team has the same chance of winning because of the same rosters of champions and number of members. However, there might be some factors affecting this.
  • Players from higher rank comes to lower rank (which is called smuff in LoL) to dominate other players. This is due to attitude of players.
  • Players takes advantage of tools, bugs and too strong characters in the game to win the game easier.
  • LoL tries to fix these with their frequent patches to fix bugs and balance characters in games. However, the fairness between 2 patches is still not guaranteed. But it is good news that Riots Games is still attempted to ensure the fairness of the game.
A description of League of Legends Patch

Conclusion

Although the game still has many bugs, problems, Riots Games still listening to players’ feedback, developing and improving the game. League of Legends has been and will be a successful MOBA game with its player community spread around the world.

AR application analysis – IKEA Place

How Ikea is using augmented reality - Digiday

What is it?

IKEA Place is an AR application developed by IKEA. It allows the user to browse and place furniture from IKEA into the environment, enabling users to design and preview how the furniture would look like in their house.

Why do I like it?

The app is relative easy to use, the gestures used to place, rotate, and enlarge/minimize the furniture are intuitive. There was a large pool of furniture to choose from and it was generally a fun experience.

Why is it engaging?

The app has a clean and minimalistic interface with an inconspicuous HUD which could be hidden. This heightened the immersive experience of the user by minimising distractions.

The furniture models are well made with great lighting. While it may feel somewhat out of place depending on the lighting conditions of the surroundings, the picturesque models made the experience pleasing to the eye.

What features are well done?

The AI seems to be able to recognize people and automatically crop the AR furniture to so they are never blocking people. This is useful when users want to see how their new set-up will look with people in the frame.

The app has a feature which allow the user to search for similar options in IKEA by taking a photo of a piece of existing furniture. I see this as a very helpful feature when the user wish to buy or replace furniture which fits the existing theme of the room.

What features can be improved and how?

The application is currently only available on iOS. It is possible that this is a deliberate design decision since iOS users are more well-verse with hand gestures compared to android users, since iOS has many more built-in functions that are accessed using hand gestures.

However, due to the minimalistic interface, the app can feel confusing to first time users or users who do not use the app often. There are no labels to what each button does or how to make adjustments to the furniture.

The app can be improved by adding an accessible tutorial button to show users a short demo of what they are able to do with the app.

Functionality wise, the AI is ineffective in recognizing existing furniture, often resulting in the AR models overlapping with actual furniture. Currently the app works best when used in an empty room.

There are 2 possible features that may be very useful for the user. One is for the user to select and remove existing furniture so that they can design on an empty canvas without having to clear the room physically. Another is for the user to save the designed layout. The app does not have a built-in save feature, so users need to painstakingly take screenshots of their design if they want to show them to others.

Decentraland: 3D virtual world platform

Decentraland is a 3D virtual world platform supported by blockchain where users can purchase products with real money. It becomes live to the public in February 2020 and is one of the early players in the metaverse field. Decentraland is essentially in a form of a web browser game. The transactions could be about virtual land, avatar wearables, or even digital art pieces as NFTs via the MANA cryptocurrency.

Why is it engaging & What features are well done

It adopts a simple and familiar form of interaction through web browsers, whereas the concept of metaverse is new and appeals to people’s curiosity. The design of the scenes also uses bright colours and simple art style which is friendly and inviting.

In addition, there is a high degree of freedom of editing the avatar in terms of body, face, hair, top, bottom, shoes, and accessories, which gives users a strong sense of participation and realism.

However, in my opinion, the idea of trading various types of NFTs is the main attraction of Decentraland. Its financial value as a means of investment is what engages people. For example, a plot of land is sold for 2.4 million recently. This is more significant than its technical and artistic value as a game.

What features can be improved and how?

The graphics lags too much for normal users without advanced setup. For me, I am using my laptop with GTX1060, running the game on chrome and ethernet, and I literally cannot move around. A continuous move on the mouse is reflected as one frame change after 10 seconds. Basic tasks like navigating myself or even responding to pop-up windows are impossible. This is also why I could not say more about which features are well-done, because I did not get to experience any. It could be that my hardware standard is too low, so I watched some review videos like the one below, but as the commentator suggests, the motion is not smooth either.

In addition, even if the animation is smooth, the 3D visuals are too rough for a metaverse application positioned at its standard. The silhouette lines do not look refined, and the art style is not that aesthetically appealing which reduces the passion to purchase any wearables for the avatar, really. This might work for a normal 3D game, but for a world-class metaverse platform, it could do better.

Creating Wearables | Decentraland

In conclusion, I think Decentraland has a great concept and has the advantage of starting early in this field of metaverse. It is already gaining popularity and making remarkable progress. However, it needs to work on its animation and graphics to attract more people.