Eskimos



Gameplay 3

High Concept 3

Target Audience and Rating 3

Marketing Comparison 4

Animal Crossing 4

Harvest Moon 5

The Sims 6

Business 7

Schedule 7

Core Development Team 9

Budget 10

Game Mechanics 11

Title Screen 11

Menus 11

Button 11

Dropdown Box 12

Image 12

List Box 12

Slider Bar 12

Text Field 12

Villages 13

Generation 14

Time 15

Weather 15

Igloos 17

Resource Gathering 18

Villagers 20

Generation 20

Energy 21

Health 22

Attributes 23

Needs 23

Targets and Actions 24

Items 25

States 26

Bedding 28

Clothing 28

Fireplace 28

Grilling 29

Melting 29

Social Interaction 30

Friendship 33

AI 35

Yetis 37

Game Screen 38

Saving and Quitting 39

Controls 40

Tutorial 41

Content 43

Menu Flow 43

Play 44

Display 46

Audio 46

Credits 46

Time 47

Base Weather Types 47

Temperature Modifications 47

Wood 48

Fish 48

Snow 48

Food 48

Water 48

Villager Movement 49

Bedding 49

Clothing 49

Grillers 49

Melters 49

Targets and Actions 50

Self 50

Item 51

Igloo 52

Forest 52

Hut 52

Mine 53

Bedding 53

Fireplace 54

Griller 54

Melter 55

Villager 55

Event Sentences 59

Time 59

Subject 59

Predicate 59

Action 60

Yetis 60

Yeti View Distance Scales 60

User Interface Controls 61

Gathering Locations 61

Buildings 61

Scenery 61

Villagers 61

Yetis 61

Wood 62

Fish 62

Snow 62

Food 62

Water 62

Constant Furniture 63

Trophies 63

Bedding 63

Grillers 63

Melters 63

Art Resources 64

Models 64

Billboards 77

Sound Effects 82

User Interface 82

Villagers 82

Yetis 85

Environment 85

Music 86

Gameplay

Kisskimo, the village cupid, has appointed you, an ordinary everyday villager, to spread joy throughout your village. It is your mission to maintain as many friendships as possible with your fellow village members, and luckily you have been promised rewards for showing progress in this task. At first, it seems that it should be easy enough to be friendly with your neighbors, but soon you learn that they are not fond of sharing your friendship with others. Their jealousy runs deep into the village’s social network and you are only able to achieve your goal by spreading lies and manipulating your friends.

While you may be cold hearted enough to take advantage of others, you definitely don’t have much time to do so. There is so much to be done during the day in order to stay healthy, and without your health, there will be no one willing to talk to you. Constantly getting hungry and thirsty, you must cook above the fire at home, but what are you to cook? Only by gathering wood to start a fire and finding some fish to cook over it, can you satisfy your need for food. You probably also need to grab some snow for melting while you are out, but if you stay outside too long in a storm you might freeze. Perhaps you only fear the cold at first, but it’s the yetis that thrive in the wilderness that will truly scare you away.

Having once lived the simple Village life, it will take time to adjust to your new situation. You once worked to survive a single life and perhaps maintain a friendship here and there, but you must now support as many friends as possible in addition to yourself. You can only hope that the rewards you receive as you progress up the ranks of society will allow you to impress your friends with fancy presents and a fresher look of health on your face.

High Concept

Kisses is a social strategy game in which the user must persevere physically and flourish socially in a Village.

Target Audience and Rating

Kisses has a target audience of teenage males and females. Its focus on social interaction will help it appeal to both of the sexes. Similar to the target audience, Kisses has a target rating of “Teen” due to its potentially more mature implications.

Marketing Comparison

The market for socially oriented games has been steadily growing over recent years. There is still enormous room for expansion in the genre and many games are in development trying to take advantage of all the available ideas to incorporate. Kisses contains unique features that none of its competitors have, and these features also give Kisses deeper socially oriented game play than can be found in its competitors.

Animal Crossing

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Animal Crossing was released in Japan on the Nintendo64 as Animal Forest only to be later updated and released in the United States on the Nintendo Gamecube as Animal Crossing due to its success in Japan. The game also sold very well in the U.S. market. A second installment of Animal Crossing is supposedly in development at the time of this writing.

Animal Crossing focuses on controlling a single character in a village and owning a house. As the game progresses, the user can gain money referred to as Bells and use it to obtain new items, household decorations, and house expansions. The user’s interactions with other town members are fairly simplistic and focus on running errands and writing letters. Animal Crossing does make up for its lack of social depth with many side objectives consisting of collecting different types of items.

While Animal Crossing uses money to advance in society, Kisses focuses on relationship building. Kisses also has an in depth social network and functioning society, while on the other hand, computer controlled characters in Animal Crossing have little to no memory of anything, do not care about other interactions occurring in the village, and almost consistently remain standing in front of their houses. Kisses provides a much more believable experience due to all members of the village having to survive under the same conditions.

Harvest Moon

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Harvest Moon has established itself as a successful franchise with ten released titles. New installments of the Harvest Moon series are also currently in development at the time of this writing. The goal in harvest moon is split between creating a successful farm, and getting married. The social interactions consist mainly of giving gifts. Characters are given preset likes and dislikes that are used to determine responses to gifts.

While the social interactions in Harvest Moon may allow the user to reach a higher relationship status such as marriage than the top relationship status allowed in Kisses, Harvest Moon does not have the breadth of social options allowed in Kisses. In addition to the number of social options, the reactions of computer-controlled characters in Kisses are built upon the current state of the dynamic society. The second key difference between Harvest Moon and Kisses occurs between the farming system of Harvest Moon and the gathering system in Kisses. By farming in Harvest Moon, the sole result is gaining wealth, whereas gathering resources in Kisses is a process of maintaining a healthy life style, thus affecting all of the user’s relationships. The third key distinction is Kisses’ goal to balance one’s efforts across multiple relationships compared to focusing on only one person in Harvest Moon.

The Sims

[pic] [pic]

The Sims has grown to be one of the most recognizable games in the history of the industry. It has sold millions of copies and has shown to appeal to females slightly more than males. In addition to its initial release, it has been very successful with over five expansions and a massively multiplayer online game. Also, at the time of this writing, a true sequel to The Sims is under development.

The Sims focuses on watching over a family living in a neighborhood. The artificial intelligence controlling the family members is fairy simplistic and the user must often help them perform the chores of daily life. By getting jobs, a family is able to earn money to pay for food, bills, household items, and house expansions. The characters in The Sims also have the ability to build relationships with each other, but the characters themselves have little motivation to choose anyone as a mate based on anything besides astrological signs.

The main difference between Kisses and The Sims is the fact that in Kisses, the user has full control over a single character instead of just providing influences to the actions of multiple characters. Compared to The Sims in which the user is confined to the family’s house and can only invite neighbors to visit, Kisses also allows the user to leave his or her home and explore the surrounding world. Computer controlled neighbor characters in The Sims are not required to fulfill their needs and instead get to magically cheat their way through the, but the computer controlled characters in Kisses provide a more realistic experience to the user by actually playing by the same rules given to the user controlled character. The final key distinction is the in-depth social network found in Kisses that allows characters to remember events and actually talk about them and create paths of gossip in which information can travel.

Business

Schedule

The following schedule contains the first major milestones to be achieved in the development process.

Internal Engine Proof – Week 5 (9/29/2003 to 10/3/2003)

Description – The basic components of the game should be ready for use by the team. The modules that are covered in this milestone consist of Graphics, Sound, and Input.

Graphics:

The game should be able to render geometry. A Scene Graph class should be able to determine what objects are visible and make requests to the Rendering system to render the objects to the screen and in a self-decided order. The Rendering system needs to determine how to draw the objects according to an external description encapsulated in an FX-File object. The FX-File object needs to gather all the necessary rendering information from external FX files. The necessary rendering information consists of device render states, pixel and vertex shaders, textures, models and meshes, and any post-processing pixel shaders needed to render the object correctly.

The Scene Graph needs to gather object information about objects from the Object Manager module. The Object Manager module needs to provide the Scene Graph class with the position of any and all objects, as well as the object’s FX-File object.

In addition to 3D rendering, the game engine should be able to draw text on the screen. The font, scale, position, and color of the text should be able to be specified and the text should draw correctly on the screen under all combinations of the above parameters.

Sound:

The Sound module should be able to load and play static sound effects files as well as streaming background music. The files formats supported are WAV and MP3. Positional audio cues should be in effect so that a far-away object’s sounds are not as loud as sound effects from an object that is visible. Sound from the left should be louder from the left speaker and vice-versa.

Input:

The Input module needs to be able to track all input received by the application. It should be able to report any keyboard and mouse input that is active at that time; for example, what buttons are currently pressed and the mouse position.

First Engine Proof – Week 10 (11/2/2003 to 11/7/2003)

Graphics:

By this time, the static and dynamic 3D geometry should be rendering correctly. A small set of special graphical effects should be implemented as well. These effects consist of bump-mapping, dynamic reflections, and water.

Animated models should be able to be loaded from X files. They should be able to be properly exported from a 3D modeling package. Different animations should be able to be blended together at run-time during transitions. The models should be rendered with the textures and materials specified in their X file.

The level terrain should be uniquely generated according to the village’s name. The geometry should be present. Texturing and lightning of the terrain are not required for this milestone.

Physics:

The game’s objects should be modeled with correct physics. Dynamic objects should be able to walk around the level without getting stuck. Dropped objects should not go through the floor.

AI:

The AI should be able to walk around the level and reach its destinations.

Objects:

The objects should be created, stay around during game-play and then be deleted at game over without crashing the game or causing memory leaks.

The player object should be controllable by the player.

First Playable – Week 14 (12/1/2003 to 12/5/2003)

Description - A playable demo of the game needs to be ready for this milestone. The player should be able to control his character and perform all the actions needed to beat the game. The AI should be functional so that it will react to the player’s actions and accept or refuse joint actions.

The level terrain should be automatically generated depending on the village’s name and it should always be unique. All of the areas need to be in an appropriate part of the map and the player should be able to reach them. The terrain should be textured with images representing snow, wood, stone, dirt, and ice. The lighting direction and color is to change depending on the time of day in the game.

The dynamic moving objects in the world should be able to be rendered correctly as specified in their FX file descriptions. Their order of drawing should be properly determined by the Scene Graph.

The game should be playable in all target platforms. Any graphic techniques not available on a particular machine should be detected and appropriate fallback techniques should be used.

Core Development Team

Producer:

Alex Van Berg

Technical Director:

Gilberto Rosado

Product Manager:

Lewis Mohr

Designer:

Ryan Juckett

Budget

The following information is an estimated budget of development costs for a one-year development cycle assuming that the producer and designer are not also programmers on the side.

|Name |Cost |Amount |Total |

|Producer Salary |$60,000/year |1 |$60,000 |

|Technical Director Salary |$60,000/year |1 |$60,000 |

|Programmer Salary |$50,000/year |1 |$50,000 |

|Designer Salary |$30,000/year |1 |$30,000 |

|Visual Studio .NET 2003 |$1079 |4 |$4316 |

|3DStudioMax 5.1 w/Character Studio |$3605 |1 |$3605 |

|Computer |$1500 |4 |$6000 |

Total: $213,921

Game Mechanics

Title Screen

When the game first starts, the title screen is displayed. The game logo is rendered sitting in the snow with music playing softly in the background. After a short amount of time, an Villager will trot in from the right side of the screen until he is in front of the logo. This animation will be making use of the 3D engine in real time. The character will then turn to face the camera, tilt its head to the side in a puzzling manner, make a short Villager sound, and trot off the left side of the screen.

A short bit after the character leaves the screen, the game will automatically transfer to the menu stage. The title screen can also be skipped before the animation finishes by pressing the escape key, space bar, enter key, left mouse button, or right mouse button.

Menus

The music from the title screen will continue to play in the menus without resetting, and if the menus are left idle for a long period of time (in any menu state), the game will return to the title screen. The transition to the title screen will also cause no interruption of the music. When transitioning back to the title screen, the current state of the menu system will be forgotten. This will result in always entering the menus at the same spot from the title screen, which is a more user-friendly action when the application is being shown to the public in a convention like setting.

The user interacts with the menu system through a standard set of menu items. The functionality of the menu items will follow the standard functionality of similar items found in Microsoft Windows. All of the menu items are drawn on top of a blue background with snow falling down it.

Button

In general, each button will have a unique action that it performs. Some buttons might have the ability to transfer between different menus, while other buttons might have the ability to apply settings. The user can invoke the action of a button by clicking on its hit box. The hit box of a button is an invisible rectangle on the screen that is interacted with by the mouse cursor. The actual visual display of a button is made from a set of images. Different images can be displayed based on whether the mouse cursor is off the button, on the button, or on the button while being clicked. An additional image to display an inactive state is also used for some buttons. These different images will commonly be used to highlight a button when the mouse passes over it, and to show the button in a depressed state when it is being clicked.

Dropdown Box

A dropdown box will display a single line of text within a box corresponding to the actively selected item. A button with a down arrow on it will be to the right of the text. Moving the mouse over the text box or button will cause them to highlight, and clicking on either of them will open up the dropdown box. When in an opened state, the dropdown box will display a vertically scrollable list beneath the selected item. The list will contain all available items for selection including the selected item. If any items in the scrollable list or in the selected item box do not fit horizontally, the text will be appropriately cropped at the box’s border. Clicking on an item in the list will select it as the active item in the box, while clicking anywhere on the screen that is not part of the drop down list will close the list without making a new selection.

Image

Basic images are used purely for decoration.

List Box

A list box consists of a vertically scrollable list of elements. One element in the scrollable list can be selected and is displayed in a special highlighted form to reflect its state. The unselected elements in the list will be displayed in a normal state. When the mouse is over a normal element, it will highlight appropriately. Note that the highlight effect of rolling the mouse over an unselected element is not as intense or vibrant as the highlight effect that the currently selected element has. By clicking on an unselected element, it will become the new selected element in the list.

Slider Bar

Slider bars are used to choose a value that is clamped to a given range. The bar is displayed horizontally with a pointer placed on top of it. The horizontal position of the pointer along the bar represents the selected value. The left most position on the bar corresponds to the lowest value in the given value range. The right most position on the bar represents the highest value in the given value range. The bar positions between the left and right end represent a linear interpolation across the value range. To select a value, the user can click on a position of the bar causing the pointer to snap to that spot. If the mouse button is held down, the pointer will continue to follow it along the bar until the mouse button is released.

Text Field

A text field consists of a single line of text that can be edited by the user and is contained within a box. Moving the mouse over a text field will cause it to highlight, and clicking a text field will set it in focus. This results in a blinking cursor appearing at the end of any text that has currently been entered. When in focus, the user can type within the text field until removing it from focus by either clicking the mouse button on another area of the screen, by pressing the ENTER key, or by pressing the ESC key. If the entire line of text will not fit with in the borders of the entry box, the text will scroll appropriately. All text fields will also contain a maximum number of characters that can be entered in them.

Villages

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Each character has a home village that it lives in. Each village is inhabited by five male and five female Villagers including the user’s character. This means that if the user’s character is a male, then there will be four computer controlled male characters and five computer controlled female characters. If the user plays as a female, the numbers are reversed. The villages exist in a cold and snowy setting. The ground is mostly snow covered with a frozen pond in one section. Small rocks can be seen poking out of the snow in areas, and there is a very loose covering of ever greens that can be found. Each of the characters in the village owns an igloo where he or she keeps all of his or her possessions. The igloos have no doors and can be freely entered by anyone at almost all times. In addition to igloos, villages also contain an ice fishing hut, a forest, and snow mine.

Generation

Villages are generated based on their name. Every time a village with the same name is generated it will be exactly the same and every unique name will create a unique village.

All villages have a large square grid of terrain to exist in. When generating a village, the processes of finding the placement of objects and key landscape features on the grid are performed first. All of the igloos are placed within a circle of land at the center of the village map. The invisible circle that borders the legal igloo placement area has a radius of ten percent of the map width and is constant between all villages, but the placement of the igloos within the circle is not. Outside of the igloo circle, a frozen pond with an ice-fishing hut, a forest, and a snow mine need to be placed. These special locations are placed at a distance of thirty percent of the map width from the center of the igloo circle. Once one of the locations is displaced in a unique direction from the center of the igloo circle, the displacement directions of the other objects should result in a fairly even angular displacement between each displacement direction. For example, the displacement for the snow mine could be at one hundred degrees, the displacement for the forest could be at two hundred twenty degrees, and the displacement for the pond could be at three hundred forty degrees.

After all of the major village locations on the grid have been determined, the next step is to determine locations of minor objects on the grid. Minor objects consist of single trees, and small rocks.

For the third step of village generation, we start displacing the grid in the vertical direction. In this process, we can guarantee flat locations for object placement where they are needed, such as beneath igloos. We also generate the shape of the pond in this step and ensure that it encompasses the ice fishing hut. The final concern in this step is that the vertical displacement between each vertex on the grid has to be within a minimal threshold in order for the characters to be able to walk up the slope. The overall curvature created by the slopes between multiple connected vertices should also be a fairly smooth transition of height in order to maintain the illusion of snow.

The fourth step of village generation consists of setting the village borders. The village will end up being contained within steep walls of snow. These walls are generated by pushing vertices up to create very steep slopes around the edge of the map. It should also be attempted to not make the border of the map look like a square shape. In other words, the number of highly displaced vertices inwards from an edge vertex on the map should not be constant for every edge vertex.

The final step of village generation is to create information for five unique male and five unique female characters. These characters must have names that generate a unique facial feature set for each one. Character generation is discussed in the respective section of this document. These ten characters must then be individually assigned to an igloo in the igloo circle. When the user’s character is inserted into the village, we first need to check if any of the existing characters have exactly the same facial features as the user controlled character. If one of the characters has facial features that are exactly the same as the user controlled character’s facial features, the user-controlled character will replace the character in question. However, in the more common situation where the user-controlled character is not a duplicate of one of the existing characters, the user-controlled character will replace the first character of the same sex.

Time

The game world always stores the time and date of each village. Every day of every season functions under the same rules though. In other words, summer is just as cold as winter. The light source and light color vary throughout the day to reflect the rotation of the sun and moon. In the game world, time passes twenty four times as fast as it does in the real world. This means that one game world day passes in one real world hour, and one game world hour passes in two and a half real world minutes.

A single day is broken up into four logical sections that are referred to throughout this document. Each section has a distinct start and end that determine when it transfers from and to other sections. Values are often interpolated throughout the day and the key values to perform the interpolation on often refer to one of the day sections. When a value is linked to a section of the day in this manner, it is considered to be associated with the time exactly in the middle of the sections start and end.

Weather

The weather in the village is constantly changing and is represented by a weather condition, which is a combination of values that can easily be interpolated between. The weather at a given time of a given game world date should always be the same. A unique and constant weather condition can be calculated for every game world date and day section combination. The current weather condition during a given time of day is the result of linearly interpolating between the weather conditions corresponding to the previous and future day sections. Every weather condition consists of wind and a base weather type.

Wind

Wind is divided up into speed and direction. These two values are stored and interpolated between separately. Wind affects the physics in the game, and blows any snowfall at the appropriate speed and in the appropriate direction. Wind speed is also used to determine the perceived temperature by living creatures (the wind chill).

Wind speed values can range between 0 meters per second and 15 meters per second. Basic linear interpolation is used to interpolate between the speeds of sequential day sections.

Wind direction will never have any vertical component and thus only needs to be stored as an angle. When interpolating between angles of sequential day sections, the shortest path must be taken. This can almost be thought of as a very simple type of spherical linear interpolation.

Base Weather Types

A base weather type consists of a fixed combination of temperature, cloud coverage and snow fall that makes logical sense. There are four key base weather types that can be interpolated between to create an infinite number of unique base weather types. Each key type is assigned a corner of the unit square making a legal 2D coordinate range where (0 ................
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