Author: Sylvia Kosowski

 

Here’s my moodboard describing how I want various elements of my game to feel:

I also really like the rendering/lighting style of this animation, especially the way the characters are rendered.

Here’s a link to my in-progress production schedule.

Recently I’ve played Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story, games by Christine Love. I really enjoyed these games because they allow the reader to delve into complex stories by perusing through a surplus of textual documents (in Digital, the player is using an old computer navigating early internet chat boards, and in Analogue, the player is a detective accessing logs from a spaceship where everyone died.) The mysteries and connections between characters in these stories are revealed over time as the player delves deeper into the story. I really enjoy the way her stories unfold. Her work also examines compelling themes such as relationships, technology, and feminism.

She began making visual novels in high school, though according to Love, she never planned on getting into making games. She always thought she was going to be a writer. She was majoring in English literature in university and did mostly writing projects before Digital: A Love Story. She had been writing small visual novels (one a year) and had written a novel, but nothing had given her widespread recognition. She began working on Digital: A Love Story while in college, which became her first breakout success, but she thought of it as more of a writing project.  Love says she didn’t consider it a game until people started calling it a game. She began working on more interactive narratives and ultimately she dropped out of college in order to work on Analogue: A Hate Story. She’s now working on a new game Ladykiller in a Bind, which will be an erotic visual novel about social manipulation.

GameRanx Asks: A Developer Interview With Christine Love

http://loveconquersallgam.es/bio

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/christinelovegames/digital.htm

http://loveconquersallgam.es/post/2605257258/what-kind-of-year-has-it-been

Interview – Christine Love

Working Title: Path

Description: My game is a first-person 2D/3D hybrid game. The player is walking along a dark path, lit up by glowing orbs. The game incorporates ideas of the theory of relativity in that the player is able to speed up to speeds near the speed of light, enabling them to travel forward in time (a fast moving object measures time passing more slowly than a stationary object). Therefore, if the player chooses to move quickly, time will pass more quickly for their surroundings than for them. How this manifests in the game is that when the player is moving they will be able to see the evolution of a city in front of them over the span of many years. However, if the player remains moving at a normal pace, they are able to communicate using technology with a different (unseen) player who exists in the city that the player sees in front of them. If the player moves quickly, the NPC will age faster than the player. Therefore, the player has two major choices in the game. One is to travel fast in an attempt to reach the city/witness the visual beauty of its evolution. The second is to travel more slowly and perhaps never get to the city or see what happens to it, but in exchange be able to talk to the NPC from afar and develop a relationship with them.

Art/Research Statement: For this project, I want to continue exploring a theme I began exploring with my Renpy game (although the characters and story will be very different.) Namely, the theme of the player being able to satisfy their curiosity and gain knowledge, but in doing so hurting someone else. In this game, the player is able to see the evolution of the city over time by moving quickly. By moving quickly to a new point in time, they are also able to talk to the NPC player at future time and find out what happens to them. However, by satisfying their curiosity in this way, the player misses out on in-depth conversations with the NPC and doesn’t get to experience a strong relationship with the NPC.  What feels like seconds of fast movement to the player could be years for the NPC, so by moving quickly and accelerating the time frame the player is accelerating the NPC’s death. Therefore, the player is forced to decide whether they will satisfy their curiosity about the future or whether they forgo knowledge of the future in exchange for a strong bond with the NPC. Visually, the game will be a minimal 3D space. In the distance, the evolution of the city itself will likely be a 2D animation projected onto a plane. Therefore, visually I will be experimenting with combining 2D and 3D elements.

Mock Screenshot:

3 Game References:

Digital: A Love Story/Analogue: A Hate Story – I really enjoy the way dialogue and tone is conveyed in these games and would like to incorporate a similar tone in my own dialogue.

Transistor – A source of visual inspiration. The game takes place in a really visually nice city.

The Talos Principle: Game in which you play an AI set in a simulated world and you must figure out why a huge apocalypse of humanity happened. Specifically what inspired me in this game were these computer terminals that you come across throughout the worlds you explore. In these computer terminals, you can have conversations with a computer program inside them. In playing the game, I personally really looked forward to accessing these terminals and having these conversations, because the world is otherwise really empty and lonely. I was interested with playing with the ideas of lonely beauty of the world vs. isolated instances of dialogue as a savior from the loneliness of an empty world in my own game.

3-Non Game References:

Her – This film explores the relationship between a man and his operating system in a futuristic world where operating systems have really advanced humanoid AI. It serves as an inspiration point for this project because it explores the idea of a relationship built between a physical character (the player character in my game) and a character with no physical form (the NPC in my game, who exists in the world but is never seen by the player.)

Memento: Movie which explores fragmented storytelling. About a guy who suffers short term memory loss and is trying to find and kill the murderer of his wife. The narrative occurs backwards (scenes which happened most recently occur at the  beginning of the movie, and as the plot progresses the scenes we see are further back in time.) This serves as a source of inspiration for fragmented storytelling and playing with time in storytelling.

Paintings by Kandinsky – I really like Kandinsky’s art, and was thinking of making the “city” in my game be kind of inspired by abstract/expressionistic styles (i.e. it would look like a city but it’s movement/animation would be more influenced by abstract motions of color rather than specific city functions).

My first idea is to create a generative environment that the player simultaneously explores and creates. Depending on how the player moves through the environment, the environment might spawn in a different way. For example, if the player was casually strolling at a slow pace, the environment that is created might be something like a peaceful forest. If the player started running the peaceful environment would deteriorate and be replaced with something else (i.e. the forest would die and be replaced by rocks or something.)

My second idea is to also explore the idea of player actions affecting environment but with already existing environments rather than generative environments. This would probably be easier and less intensive to create since we wouldn’t have to generate a ton of objects dynamically. There would be several different environments and depending on how the player moves through the space they would see a different environment around them. Perhaps there could be things that the player could do in the space off one environment which would affeet things in the second environment but in a different way. (For example, suppose the player saw a forest environment when they were walking and a rocky wasteland when they were running. Suppose the player knocked down a tree in the first environment. In the second environment, perhaps a ridge of rocks would appear in the same place as the knocked down tree was in the first environment.

Here are the renpy builds.

I’ve also included a zip file of the original renpy project just in case the build doesn’t work.

The windows build should definitely work.

 

The Not Games article makes a good point, and I agree that more developers should explore different genres of games. However, I found what they were saying to be a bit over-the-top, i.e. “Despite a few noble attempts, overall, videogames are empty systems that only serve the purpose of wasting time.” This might be because the presentation was written in 2010, but I feel like a lot of what they are complaining about is already changing. There are a lot of indie games and even Triple A titles nowadays which seem to be exploring a lot of the ideas that the Not Games authors were urging people to explore. Obviously there is still a lot of shovelware and generic first person shooters being released, but in the recent years there have been many new explorations into other types of games, making the article seem a bit dated.

Also I find statements such as “videogames are not games” seem to be kind of used for shock value. The authors claim that because we obsess over video games and spend hours on them they have become more engaging than other non-video “games.” But this isn’t exactly true. The authors mention Chess and Go as actual “games” in contrast to video games, yet some people do devote their lives to learning all the in’s and outs of these games and becoming champions at them. In trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering, this obsession and devotion is also apparent. The same goes for physical games such as sports, and the process of becoming athletes. In these cases, these individuals “obsess” over and devote hours to their respective games of choice just as video gamers devote hours to their video games of choice. Also, some video games and some video-gamers  don’t devote hours to playing games. Some people like to play quick 5-10 minute games which may or may not have replay-value, or mobile games, which also are generally very quick to play at a time. So, since there are non-videogamers who devote a lot of time to video games, and videogamers who don’t devote a lot of time to videogames, I don’t really think their distinction between “non-videogames” and “videogames” is really that accurate. There are a lot more blurred distinctions than the authors would make it seem.

Click to play!

 

 

Relatively recently I played a game called Papers Please. The idea of the game is you play as an immigration inspector for the fictional country of Arstotzka. The border is heavily guarded and entry into the country follows very specific rules due to post-war tensions. The player must inspect the documents that would-be immigrants present at the gate and verify that the information is correct and that the documents provided are sufficient to allow access into the country. The rules for which immigrants are permitted entry change due to changes in the political situation of the game’s storyline. Overall, as the game progresses and tensions rise, more and more paperwork is necessary to allow an immigrant into the country. Over the course of the game, a rebel group approaches the player asking for help. The player is also faced with a variety of other moral dilemmas including whether to let in individuals who have insufficient papers but some sort of dramatic personal backstory. The player themselves is underpaid and gets disciplined for mistakes, working to support a family with very little wage. The game has 20 different endings depending on how you choose to perform your duties.

One of the qualities that made this game such an interesting experience for me was that I found a strange sense of fun in the monotony of checking the immigration papers. While some might find this kind of gameplay tedious, I found it strangely calm and relaxing. Repetition and tedium is often seen as being something that should be avoided in games to prevent the player from getting bored or feeling unrewarded (i.e. repetitive grinding to get to level up a character without advancing the plot, etc.) However, repetition really worked to tell the story and set the tone of Papers Please. I guess because I’m a person who likes to organize things, something about the gameplay of repetitively checking and verifying these immigration papers was really fun to me. However, this sense of fun I got from the game directly conflicted with my tendency to want to resist the system. I thought it was interesting that I was enjoying the repetitive game mechanic (and therefore enjoying my job as an immigration inspector) so much, and yet the story I wanted for my playthrough was to align myself with the rebels and overthrow the government. By playing the game I was placed in an uneasy state in which I had to reconcile my enjoyment of the game’s mechanics with my dissatisfaction with the fictional Arstotzkan government, because I was having fun doing something that that government was forcing me to do.