Author: kewagner

Kristina Wagner and Matthew Kellogg

In this soundscape, users are invited to play a MIDI keyboard. The game takes this input and detects whether it is major or minor, pitch changes, and more. Those changes are made a part of the landscape the player explores in real time.

For example, when the user starts playing in minor, the landscape turns dark, the textures change to snow and the weather gets worse (the clouds increase and the sky darkens). By contrast, when major is played, the landscape turns into a three dimensional version of the Windows XP “Bliss” wallpaper, with bright grass and and blue sky.

Please feel free to download Windows version of the game. Regrettably, we don’t have a Mac version or a 3D printable MIDI keyboard. However, in a regular computer keyboard, the keys

ASDFGHJKL map to

BCDEFGABC and the the row above maps to the corresponding sharps and flats.

 

Mood board:

We’re looking to restyle our game with the low-poly aesthetic. Although, I’m considering keeping the landscape itself higher fi, but adding low-poly elements (like the trees) to help cement that aesthetic. And also because the realism we’ve attempted to achieve with the trees makes it fairly evident there are really only 4 trees…

Really well lit — makes it look almost like 2D animation rather than 3D.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hxbvo

“Game designer who I want to be when I grow up”
Unfortunately this post is somewhat inhibited by the fact that I don’t actually want to become a game designer, nor am I familiar with the work of any game designer at all. However, at an aesthetic level, I’m going to revert to my favorite game: Journey

In particular, I’ll focus on Jenova Chen / Chén Xīnghàn, the lead designer behind the game. Chen received his first degree in Computer Science in Shanghai then moved to California for their interactive media programme.
His intention at the time was to use the degree to get the kind of job he wanted back in China. At USC, he became inspired when he went to the Game Developers Conference, where he positively compared the games he had made in college with the student work present at the Independent Games Festival portion of the conference.

His first “important” game was Coud. Importantly, the goal of this game was to incite emotion in the player. (Cloud’s main character is a boy who’s mind flies around while he is trapped in a hospital bed — party based on Chen’s childhood history of hospitalization owing to asthma.) This was a student game. His game not funded by academia was Flower.

His thesis topic was flOw, and it deals with flow in a game: http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowing.htm which is a beautiful game. The goal is ultimately to evolve, but the character animation etc. is reminiscent of his most famous game, Journey.

TLDR; Chen presents himself as an “Expert in Emotional Game Design.” He is more interested in inciting emotions than any other aspect of gameplay.

Matt and Kristina

We’re creating a walking simulator where the acoustic input you provide the game with affects the environment you are exploring. We want the input to be a traditional instrument, like a guitar or a violin. Music is oft described as a semi-tangible representation of human emotion; this game will allow the experience to become more visceral. A sad piece of music may induce an emotion in you, but this game will take your emotional state and create an environment that responds to your condition. The world you are in is your mindspace.

Game references:

• Proteus — as a walking simulator where the environment changes+ use of sound
• Journey — as an awe-inspiring geography / aesthetic reference

This game could be played either personally, in a private space where it would create a meditative environment, or it could be played in installation format. The installation format would contain some kind of keyboard (for simple input most people can understand) but invites people to bring their own input. In an audience setting, you are bringing other players into your headspace and creating a shared experience from something inherently personal.

External references

• Vivaldi’s four seasons — place this in context with Proteus
• Tempescope, a weather display unit that emulates the weather outside in a small unit users keep inside. This idea taking something that’s supposed to be in one space and completely changing that space is demonstrated in this commercial enterprise.

 

I’d like to work outside the digital game and with the controller. I propose a simple walking simulator with a fixed environment (I have yet to decide what’s the game itself will be) with a simple rig to make an acoustic instrument into a controller for your game. The controller would consist of two microphones that you could easily mount on most instruments (and a means of transmitting this data to the computer – probably an Arduino setup), and different inputs would cause the character to walk, jump, run, or pick up an object. Through this interface novices would gradually gain confidence with their instrument as well as with the game.

I feel like a walking simulator is a place to experiment with this, because 2D arcade games require particular combinations and moves which can be time-specific, which my model would have a hard time dealing with. Right now I have no idea how I would get my controller to talk to Unity.

 

Game 1

Play <———————– (Game Files) 

PLAY  EXEC VERSION HERE <——————–

Characters

Plot Thought

I began writing a story that featured the player trying to convince a brother who had converted to a hermit’s lifestyle to come and have lunch. Eventually this morphed into having the characters be East and West Berlin, which are acting as satellite states The West (the USA, France, the UK, etc) and the Soviet Union respectively.

 

West Berlin

You play as West Berlin. West Berlin feels they are doing better than East Berlin and has visual evidence to back it up. West Berlin argues for nihilism as a means of defending himself against the arguments of East Berlin. West Berlin must convince East Berlin and everyone around him that West Berlin is superior to East Berlin, and hopes to reconcile the differences between them. This is analogous to the West trying to demonstrate that their capitalist society is better than the communist society by comparing and contrasting East and West Berlin during the Cold War. East Berliners understood this and would try to escape to the West.

East Berlin

East Berlin is poorer than West Berlin and aspires to have certain attributes of his neighbor. When asked a questioned, he will always give an official answer rather than what he necessarily thinks. East Berlin has an existential crisis — theoretically, he lives in the ideal world but practically he sees that it has made his situation worse than West Berlin’s. He begins confused as to why he’s living the life he’s living and eventually will try to escape through the wall to join West Berlin.

About how I chose to portray the characters — I took images that were representative of East and West Berlin and cut holes in the walls so you could “see” one character. The emotion is projected through stance/position rather than facial features.

 

Game 2

Mainly for laughs, here’s the dropped-halfway-through version I was working on before. Includes some awkward cuts owing to interim scenes not being written and/or illustrated. My solemn advice is not to play it. Yaaaaaaay.

Play

Response to the Readings

A Reaction to Not Games

I’ve mentioned before that I come from a context without video games. As such, I might wonder if I have a point of view more similar to the average person than the majority of people in this class, at least regarding video games.

And, I was under the impression that video games are one of the few mediums where art and games are actually interleaved in the mainstream player’s repertoire. My few interactions with regular games – for the sake of avoiding biases, my friends outside of SOA who are gamers – are contained in a culture where worlds can be beautiful in a way a “traditional” artist might not understand and where it is important to reflect on the role you and others played in your game. (Understandably, this emphasis is more or less unique to interactive media where the person interacting can change the course of the book. Take a book, for example. A book written in first person reads like a diary, third person is a story you’re removed from, and second person feels unnatural.) Because video game players are already forced to consider the consequences of their actions, they are more likely to engage with the game in a reflective, artistic sense naturally / for their own enjoyment, automatically making indie games more popular than possibly indie music, for example. (Most people I know don’t analyze novels for fun, with some notable exceptions…) Ergo, the continued mantra of Not Games caught me a little by surprise.  It would seem to me that the boundaries of games are pushed further than other media. I suppose they are still not pushed far enough, and this is what Harvey % Samyn intended to get across.

Notes on How walking simulators allow us to touch other worlds

“[We discussed] games that are not about challenge, but about poking around inside some developer-made structure to see how it works, what secret it contains.”

Secret boxes vs walking simulators: Is a game about secret boxes actually a secret box game? Walkthroughs and their increased power for purpose in artistic worlds.

Notes on to What Happened Here? Talk on Environmental Storytelling

Excellent definition: a game (1) constrains and guides player movement through physical properties and ecology (2) Uses player reference to communicate simulation boundaries and affordances (3) Reinforces and shapes player identity and (4) Provides narrative context.

Environmental storytelling is not defined as a game in these slides because the last two defining features of games have essentially been eliminated.

Use of White space in a game – every player is going to bring his own views, experience and frame of reference to the scene, and come to different conclusions. Therefore, environmental storytelling “Invites interpretation of situations and meaning according to players’ views and experience.”

I’m probably the only person in this class who doesn’t actually play games regularly. Or, you know, ever. I took this class because I’m interesting in experimenting with educational games / using gaming constructs for other purposes. As such, I’m going to have to keep going back to the same couple of games I’ve played through completely: 5 nights at Freddie’s, Ib, Korra, Smash, and Journey. And now, Gone Home and the other assignments for this class. And because we’ve already discussed Journey in class, I’m instead going to focus on the other games (experimentally less interesting).

Ib

Ib falls into the category of scary/horror, which I wouldn’t usually touch with a five foot pole. Ib is made with RPG maker. You are a young girl named Ib who is taken to a formal fine art museum for her birthday. You end up along in the museum at night (although ify you complete the game alive you may possibly discover that is was your imagination, or any one of a number of different endings.) You have to try to survive the night, and you can choose who to help at what time – which determines who becomes your friend, who survives, and what situation you survive in.

The story is reasonably classic. The wide variety of endings is a great feature, if not original. But let me address one of the criticisms the game endures: the game looks like this:

Note the MS Paint style spray paint on the walls that don’t reflect perspective in any way shape or form.

Or this hand-drawn, awkwardly colored version of the protagonist (which is featured throughout the game). These graphics seem off-putting or unprofessional compared to other games. I recall when I played the first time I arrived at a certain stage in the game where you arrive in an area with the antagonist at this point in the game, Mary. The space is designed to look like it’s been constructed  by a child, and the childish graphics add to the vibe in a really frightening way. From that point on, the game takes a “Clown of your nightmares” twist and anything that formerly appeared juvenile now seems doubly frightening, especially in contrast to the pixel art the barebones playable blocks of the game are constructed in, which is always perfectly geometric.

On the flip side, this game has such vastly different endings that you want to play the game over and over again until you find them all. In some cases it is evident when a certain action triggered a sequence of events. The choice you have to make are never clean-cut moral choices. The game might tell you that someone will die regardless of what you do, should you continue without them and try to save yourself? Then that person might be absent from most of the game and show up much, much later, usually altered in some way. This makes you reflect on your choices, as they cannot necessarily be blamed on circumstance.