Higher Elevation

---Foreword---
Blue House Games is heavily involved in the local gaming community. More that just enjoying the participation, what we learn from our time with local digital and tabletop games clubs influences and inspires us. Due to this sentiment, we thought it would follow with the spirit of our blog that we shared the perspective of some of these organizations, and what we learned with them.


Who are we?
"We" are the Carleton Ravens, similar to another sports team, except we represent our school across North America competing in League of Legends. I'm Jungroan "Jezie" Lin. I used to play somewhat professionally, but have since allowed the game to take a backseat to my studies. This blog series does not serve the purpose about giving deep insight into the game itself, nor into the individuals on the team; much of that information is already easily accessible. Instead it will take one person's perspective on how a League of Legends team can hope to "elevate its game", from each stage of proficiency on to the next.

Preface
The team was built off of the "legacy" from the previous year; an early exit in the Collegiate Starleague (CSL) playoffs and not much promise as far as talent nor commitment goes. Going into the 2014-2015 year, I had taken a personal hiatus from the game after dedicated 30 hour weeks to it as a freshman in university and saw this as an opportunity to enjoy myself with the game some more alongside good company. After an incredibly poorly organized tryout process, our team was finally formed, mostly at the discretion of myself and my top lane player.

"Scraps"
That's what we were - not much different from grabbing a random collection of 5 players from the playground to form a team to compete in a fairly competitive collegiate league, most of the teams comprised of players with at the very least, familiarity with each other. We did hold the edge of having some professional experience, alongside a lot of untapped potential. That word "potential" is really a piece of garbage though. One of my basketball coaches in early high school preached to me "hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard". I understood that we wouldn't necessarily have the level of hard work needed to be a top tier team, but hoped to circumvent this problem by employing my own macro mastery of the game alongside designating conservative roles for my teammates.

Acceleration
And, we elevated our game as a team as such. Players were taught a very elementary standard of macro play, directed to generally take the most conservative route as individuals and follow shot-calling down to the letter. In one of our earliest matches against York (IIRC), we employed a 4v1 top-lane strategy that I had learned from one of my scrimmages against team Dignitas way back when. We used a composition of Jinx, Warwick, Xin, and some other champs I can't quite remember with the purpose of destroying structures at a rapid rate. We were able to get to the inhibitor turret before 5 minutes had even passed on the clock. Using this global gold lead alongside funneled farm and kills to our ADC, we used this objective based composition to quickly end the game, moving together as one cohesive unit that honestly looked LCS ready. While matches to follow didn't always employ such a volatile strategy, our opponents (generally fully-diamond composed) struggled to keep pace with us once we transitioned into the midgame and were constantly lagging behind our rotations.

Stagnation
So imagine, you're a mid-tier team with a washed up pro player and some talent, barely getting a couple hours of practice on a good week. Naturally, you're going to hit a roadblock; ours happened to come by the name of McMaster. They had a talented midlaner and really no weak points across the board. While League of Legends may have started out being more comparable to basketball, it has slowly crept towards becoming more like hockey. What I mean by this is one player has a much lower capacity to single-handedly carry a game, and you are instead limited by the weakest link on the team. Every NHL player can handle the puck reasonably, skate fairly quickly, and is a threat to shoot. Sometimes in the NBA, a highly valued player (all-star level even) such as Rajon Rondo shoots 30% from the free throw line and can't hit a 3-pointer to save his life. For myself, I was extremely frustrated in the bottom lane, feeling that I was consistently better than the enemy ADC but being limited to playing a farming game with my partner.

Towards Excellence
We failed to qualify for the NACC through CSL, and looked towards our next tournament. Leading up to it I had personally duo queued over 30 games with our support but things weren't quite clicking. I understood that the meta had shifted from what it was half a year ago, when essentially games were decided by who had a slightly better mid laner; it had become a derivative of the team's collective skill and effort instead. We decided that we needed a change-up in the roster and decided to move forward with a different support. Our recruitment was on the basis of skill, and each player since has been individually putting forth time to hone one's own skills. The team is re-initiating its approach to the game. All of us are working to become better friends with one another first, then sharpening our own talents to bring to the table, where we will hopefully make one last bid for the NACC. Now we also bring with ourselves the breadth of experience from the first run and are ready to take that knowledge with us into hopefully a new age. Eating 250 chicken nuggets among the team wasn't part of the plan, but who's going to say no to a 50 dollar feast?

Singleton Pattern for Unity + Update on Battle Engine

This post is a short description of the Singleton design pattern, and a brief update on the state of the Unity project.

The Dreaming Man: Neo-Hwarangs, Protagonist, Scene One

Source image taken from Naver for artist of men
dressed as Hwarangs. (Jake dropped out, so we
no longer have an artist)

Neo-Hwarangs

A large focus and inspiration behind this was the idea of a technologically advanced, "neo" version of the old Korean high caste the Hwarangs. Ergo, they are a large part of The Dreaming Man.

In the game's story, the people in South Korea who had enough money to be able to hole away and survive the nuclear apocalypse eventually emerged, and had the supplies to carry on their generation. In the modern timeline of the game, 200 years after the end of the world, the descendents of these people have taken residence in the former "Jinju Castle", in the very southern part former Korea on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

In their time, they have travelled across the pacific to discover technology in the US that wasn't present before the war, and they have taken it back to create fusion-cell motorcycles for quick travel through the many concrete ruins of former Korea. The residents of Jinju Castle have dubbed the people with money and social power who ride these bikes, "Neo-Hwarangs".

Source image for potential
design of spears wielded
by the Neo-Hwarangs.

Traditional swords. This is a source image taken from Naver
for the swords wielded by the Neo-Hwarang faction.

The design for these characters includes an iconic pistol and sword combination, with spears as a cavalry weapon on their motorcycles. They wear tight-fitting versions of the outfits in the source image provided, with the symbol "花" on them.

Scene One

At the beginning of the game the player meets two of such people: Kang, and Kim Junsu. To summarize, they are scouting the region around where the protagonist lives, and they see his home and decide to check in. Kang likes the protagonist's wife, and decides to take her with him. This is to mirror the fact that the protagonist's girlfriend leaves him in the very first scene, and is intended to show that his premonitions are not random.

Kim Junsu – Kim is young and ambitious, and he has been travelling with Kang for a while now. Kang is tall and big, while Kim is tall and lean. He hopes to learn a thing or two from travelling with Kang, and is wary to object to something Kang says.

Kang – Kang is the leader of the group, and earned the position through his skill, strength and size. He is leading a scouting mission past this farm, and lacking just enough morals, he decides to take the pretty wife that he finds in the dreaming man’s farmstead.

Protagonist

The protagonist of the game is a fairly average white male living in Japan. Source images are myself and Matt, who are average white males (kek). At the beginning of the game his girlfriend breaks up with him, and henceforth an analogue of her exists in his nightly dreams.

ㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡㅡ
Things in the immediate scope:
- Write up more dialogue for the actual scene itself to give to Matt to put in the game.

Essence of Glory Faction Concept : Aehrenthal Federation

The Aehrenthal Republic was a collection of blue collar manufacturing worlds on the edge of Empire space. Upset that they rarely received more than raw materials and production quotas for their tax dollars, the system level leadership of the soon to be Aehrenthal systems lobbied for greater autonomy and a lessening of the tax burden. The Empire, overextended, and with a bloated administration decided to grant the Aehrenthal systems a unified leader who would only answer to the Emperor. Intended as a symbolic gesture to placate the systems while maintaining control, the newly crowned King Aehrenthal (for whom the systems are now named) quickly dissolved his post, replacing it with an elected cabinet which he presided over. Aehrenthal created a democratic system under the pretext of liberty and giving people a say in their governance but imperial historians cast it as a move to provoke the Imperium in to a war that Aehrenthal knew he could win and with it win the independence of his new nation.

The war was surprisingly short with the highly organized industrial might of the new republic out doing the overly bureaucratic system of the empire which put eldest sons at the heads of factories rather than those qualified or educated. In battle the republic's troops (mostly drafted factory workers) usually proved to not have the stomach for protracted fights, creating the need for more nationalistic and inspiring social programs and incentives. The soldier class quickly developed in to one of the most influential and prestigious groups in the Republic with politicians commonly wearing their military uniforms rather than civilian dress.

The new mobilized society combined with their industrial prowess made short work of the outmoded Imperial navy, but the militarism of their war of independence never truly subsided, due in part because the war has never truly ended, with the border territories erupting in constant skirmishes but also because there has been little political will to tone down the military rhetoric.

The intent of this faction in the game is to highlight the problems of emerging democracies especially when faced with such aggressive neighbors. Taking hints of Starship Troopers in to a revolutionary France type of society where they are not only facing internal problems but also a massive outer enemy, the Republic faces a lot of difficult choices for itself and how it should interact with the other nations in the game.

From a writing standpoint it's interesting because of not only the political what ifs but also the personal ones within the society that'll be explored later. In the current build the writing is slightly rigid from a character perspective, it's difficult to have a lot of diversity (in terms of character background) in the imperial factions because of the nature of their society. In the Republic faction we'll see not only more diverse character backgrounds but also more diverse political beliefs that will play in to the greater story of the Republic.


       

More story updates

This week I finally managed to get a hold of the full version of the VN toolkit, probably going to have some fun with it with some side projects. This version has a few more quality of life features, like not having to type in all the variables you're going to use, and instead select them from a dropdown box.

Anyways, this week our characters take a day away from studying tactics and visit the bar... although to learn from experienced veterans. Don't mind the scene in the back, placeholders are a nice thing to have.

Unity and toolkit troubles, and more knowledge

Unity is great for many things, but this past week there has been some shortcomings with the platform. 

So I started looking into the code for the VN toolkit a bit to see what we can throw in there, and what we can gut out. For the most part, it's a fairly well structured piece of software with areas where we can eventually start molding to form something suitable for this game. This is fine and dandy, although there's not much documentation in the code, it's easy enough to navigate and modify. Edit some parts of the GUI here and there, change some colour schemes, etc. However, it seems that the built in code editor for unity has other plans.

What? how can there be so many issues with areas that weren't even touched? Well after a while looking around, it seems that the built in editor MonoDevelop doesn't support any version of C# higher than 3.5, which is what the toolkit is built on. 

It seems that the original developers were also not pleased with Unity's editor, and probably decided to use a third party editor. Doesn't seem too unreasonable, but Unity is an engine where anybody, even someone without much coding experience can make a game; so it's not too unreasonable to say their platform for writing code is outdated.

Anyways, looks like the toolkit will need to be edited some other time. For now though, here is a new scene with our friends once again studying, in a bigger library this time. Perhaps they will learn a bit more about actual tactics, and *ahem* mechanics pertaining to what they're doing.

Here is Tarah dispensing some knowledge, while we look to make some more progress next week.