Hippohippo

From youtube video comments, found today:

@dilendo97 A lot of ppl think gay is a word used for evil. >.> The world is becoming so retarded. Im not gay though staright. But, i dont get it.

(From this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CSrY8CoMLY)

Fire the canon

Trusted Colleagues!

So, here's a link to a build of the game I've been working up, with dummy assets. The idea is based on the VW Remix Road interactive ad. It's a  concept test. In the zip file that you can download, there's a mac-compatible version and a windows-compatible one. I hope it works, this time, Jon!

Some instructions:

This build allows you to push the keys a, b, and c when the corresponding placards approach you in the game. If you hit the key in time, the combo count goes up, and an object is added to the scenery...Jon, this is where the new layer of sound will be added in. If you miss a placard, however, the combo count goes back to zero, and the objects stop appearing. It's a very basic test--just to show you how the game will work.

At the moment, the biggest question (which Kate, my advisor, has put to me) is about the context of the game. I think originally I had planned for this game to be just visually and aurally stimulating, like Peggle. The reward was going to be just watching the space develop and get more interesting to look at. But I don't think that's enough, necessarily. So I'm asking you guys for ideas. What do you think this game could do narratively, or what could the reward be for correctly identifying something that comes towards you? 

At this point, Lahta and I are planning on all the placards (the things with letters on them, coming towards you) are going to have fruits on them, and you'll have to type the name of the fruit to "complete" that card and have it fly away (or show a funny picture, instead). The original intention was for it to be a game that helps ESL students ages 8 - 11 practice their vocabulary. 

So what do you think?

Simon & Lahta

How it all went down.

Check out this discussion of platforming game design. I think there's a lot of interesting information here about how the play experience in Jonathan Blow's Braid is constructed. It's a rather long video, to be sure, but it also contains a lot of discussion about animation. There are a lot of things in here I didn't notice when I played the game.

I finally feel like there's some real deep thinking about game design being done in public--books are not the only subject of deep textual analysis by the public. Let's open them doors!

Space + Environment Brief Assignment

We've been asked to write our own brief as an assignment for my program--that is, a description for an animation project we might receive as part of our course. It must be based on the idea of Space and Environment. Here's mine:


Animation & Interactive Media RMIT Concept Development 
PROJECT BRIEF:  Space + Environment Brief
Keywords: explore, discover, challenge, environment, evocation, environment, embedding, emergency, node, codification, creation, backdrop, layering, depth.

OBJECTIVE: 

The goal of this brief is to create an animation or interactive work that uses space and/or environment as its protagonistic element. A successful response to this brief will ask the user or viewer to think about the space in which the work exists while they are experiencing it. An unsuccessful response will 

MOTIVE: 

Exploring the ideas of space and environment in an animation or interactive has many functions. Space and environment can, among other things, be used as a means to:

a) Challenge the player or viewer by asking them to navigate or comprehend it as an obstacle or puzzle.

b) Give the player or viewer room to express themselves or be affected by the animation/interactive.

c) Organize a work by dividing it into different zones or distinguishable features.

d) Give the player or viewer a system or world in which the rest of the work exists, thus allowing them to decode certain elements.

e) Enable the player or viewer to create a structure in which the work exists.

f) Set the scene.

Making the space or environment in your work an integrated element allows that work to become a more completely unified idea. If your environment and the other elements in your animation/interactive are working together to enhance the user/viewer experience, they will both benefit many times over, and the world of your work will become more real and consistent/persistent.

MEANS:


Your animation may be any complete work which addresses the idea of space and environment as its primary or protagonist element. It may contain other elements apart from that space, but they can only be in service of the viewer experiencing the "world" or "structure" of the work. For example:


Consider the rpg flash game grOw, in which the user must cause an environment to evolve in steps by choosing the order in which they add elements. In this interactive, the environment is the protagonist, which the user is always watching, and the characters are merely devices which interact with the user-generated space. Another example of a game which does this successfully is This Is The Only Level.


The flash game Canabalt, on the other hand, would not be an example of an environment being a protagonist, since our focus is on a character who is, while very well integrated into his environment, separate from it and the most important element. One might argue that it is merely a matter of perspective. But there is a huge difference between a game in which the player is acting as a runner exploring a destroyed space, and one in which the player is acting as the city, causing the runner to react to it by cueing environments, as they must in games like Solopskier.


As far as animations which successfully use environment as a protagonist, be sure to have a look at Walk Smash Walk, or The Scale of the Universe.


There are a few requirements for your project:


1) If it is an animation, it needs to be at least 15 seconds in length, and the character needs to interact with the environment in some way.
2) If it is an interactive, the user must be able to change the environment in some way, however impermanent.
3) There must be at least one character and one environment/space. Consistent visual design between these two elements is one way in which you will be assessed.


You will be assessed based on:


1) The visual/idealogical consistency between your character and environment/space.
2) The degree to which you are able to make your environment your protagonist and main character.
3) The degree to which you are able to stretch the user/viewer's ideas about conventional environments. Surprise people!

MEDIA:


Submit the project to the server, or provide another means by which the lecturer can access your work.


Clearly, interactives and animations will use different media and different formats. Preferably, however, the viewing area for your animation should be 1280x720 resolution.


Submit with submission form by: __________.

Once more into the brief.

Yay for concept art! (As seen left). Made by Karis. Pretty, non?

So I'm currently working through finishing my Time+Perspective brief, which is the Granny Squibb game I'm making with Karis and with lot of guidance from her partner on coding in Javascript. This is the first time I'm actually programming something or creating a game with the help of other people. There are three major problems we're working through right now:

1) Unity has trouble displaying transparency in movies when they're being used as textures, as it converts everything to Ogg Theora, which does not support alpha channels. So we're basically trying to "green screen" the movie in virtual space, and creating a shader which detects all the pink pixels in an object and makes them transparent.

2) I'm having trouble rotating things around a specified axis. Unity likes to rotate things around world space, so it makes it difficult to rotate things, specifically on a certain axis with respect to certain objects.

3) We still have a lot of art assets to work on, and as might be predicted, sound is not even beginning to be thunk about.

If I were to do this project again, I think I would have counted my eggs differently. I don't think I had very much time considering the amount of work I was doing on other briefs, so I don't think I could have done a whole lot better in terms of time management. And I'm working in a relatively new program with a relatively new language, so I don't think that's the best condition for taking on a project that's larger than any you've done before, and I don't think there's much I could have done to prepare coding-wise. One thing I should have monitored more carefully while doing the project, however, was the way I was labelling things I was putting in the project, and the way I was assuming unity could do the things stated above. Let's deal with these individually, and then I'm going back to work doublequick:

1) I labelled everything from the beginning as a "test" or "dummy" asset, and now I'm not really sure what the difference is between a dummy object and a real one. I think I should probably think about what my workflow is on this in the future.

2) I should have checked on the transparency issue before assuming and reassuring Karis that it could be done easily, as now it's crunch time and we've designed the assets in a way that assumes it's possible. Had I checked and learned how difficult it might have been, we might have just been able to design the assets in the exact shape they needed to be, eliminating the need for transparency. Also, I think we might have been able to make this game in flash, which would have saved time, and I should have checked that earlier. I did want to learn javascript, though...

Did I mention Karis' partner, James, is my savior? Back to church with me.

Re-entry into planet Valve.

Let's talk:

1. Portal 2 Review: 8/10.
2. The game Karis and I are making.
3. Conclusions drawn from 1 & 2.

1.

So, this weekend, just before and just after going on my Easter camping trip in the Otways (brr), I played the new "oh my gosh I can't wait for it" game in my life, Portal 2. I've just completed it. It's certainly an epic, certainly a mythic cycle, and certainly a higher-quality production than the original. The voice acting has dramatically improved (even though the first game was light-years ahead of every other game I'd played in that department), thanks to the addition of mammoth talents J.K. Simmons and Stephen Merchant the scale has increased dramatically with minimal stretch-marks. That is, the original game took me about 3 hours to complete, and this one took about 7. The difficulty level was satisfying--still the same Portal-brand puzzles which are uncrackable until a moment of inspiration hits. I think the pacing suffered a bit in the beginning, but it's probably a result of people attempting to address the problem of players that are new to the world of the game.

ALL THIS: And yet I am unsatisfied! I found the "essence" of the game unchanged from the previous game, and the Source Engine...well, it's just not the shiny new pair of shoes it was when Half Life 2 came out. It still looks nice, but feels kind of clumsy. It's a "you can't walk there, so forget about it" kind of game much of the time, a feeling which the original Portal somehow avoided by making you feel like you could walk into more objects. Oh, and one more thing--yes, it's significantly higher quality than the original, but the original was something like 30% the size, if I remember correctly. I think the point of my mentioning that is that it represents a change I've seen in Valve products lately. Perhaps they're under new management--but they seem more focused on comedy and a kind of cartoonish realism than the "rawness" that worked really well for Half Life 2. Maybe it just feels like there's less risk-taking going on in their games, lately.

2. 

Tomorrow is crunch day for coding the lemonade-stand game that Karis and I are making. I'm going to be using Javascript and Unity to make a 2d game with assets that Karis is making. We're going for a paper cutout/giant Terry Gilliamesque head aesthetic. Hopefully it should all be done by Wednesday, provided Karis and James (a Javascript mastermind) and I can overcome any and all technical obstacles presented by my not having much practice with Javascript.





3.

While preparing to make this (my first collaborative project where I'm going to be doing the majority of the coding, it's likely), I've been doing a lot of thinking about how the game is going to be not only completed, but worth the time of other people. While I do respect the many majabillions of brain cells being used to create absorbing content at flash game mills like Kongregate and Newgrounds, at the moment I'm more interested in how it's going to be different from all that, which I fear it will not be. Frankly, ice tea stands aren't  the new kid on the block in terms of video game genres, and we're not going to be trying to break the bank graphically. I think we'll chiefly be reaching into the future in the areas of unified graphic design (centered around a single idea) and platform. And this is just the first version of a game that will probably need to be reconsidered a lot of different ways and re-engineered to be fun before it's ready to be used by Granny Squibb. Ya dig(g)?

Scary stuff.

Computerized Evolution! Isn't this kind of an obvious precursor to the human race being overrun by superintelligent robots? It's like the video they show you about how the computers ever got so intelligent. Also, we shouldn't be shooting robots just to see how they react. That seems like a bad idea.