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Universalism in Art

27 May 2012 by Rahil

I recently saw an elderly person perform stand-up comedy and it triggered the thought of universalism in art.

Humor from elderly people is almost always universal from my experience. Everyone probably has a humorous uncle that’s able to make the whole family laugh.

I personally wouldn’t ever want to create something targeted to a specific audience. For example, I wouldn’t want to create an movie based on a manga, which is likely targeted at the Japanese and Otaku population. I’d want to create a Miyazaki film. I don’t even think of anime when Miyazaki comes to mind. Yet, Miyazaki’s films possess many common characteristics of anime. Why? Because his work is universal; It’s able to reach to everyone.

This thought reminds me of when Jenova Chen mentioned wanting to create an experience that is as universal as Miyazaki.

Another example of universalism in art is Pokemon. Pokemon do not conform to any culture. They are creatures, quite different from real animals, having somewhat unique names (maybe they mean something in Japanese?). My mom doesn’t know anything about the show but when she hears “pikachu” in Ash’s pikachu’s voice, she associates it with the pokemon in her mind. That’s powerful. I believe the reason Pokemon was a success is because it is universal.

The same goes for many Disney films, and other things often revered by the public — The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, etc.

Universalism is achieved by avoiding references, cliches, and things that would limit the audience.

A digression
Hmm. Perhaps a method to create something universal is to figure out how to introduce something innovative to the broadest audience. Finding something specific in the world that you think is beautiful, and trying to show it to the world by making it more accessible.

Yeah. That sounds like the virtue of commercial art. Fine art doesn’t care for everyone else. It’s a little more pretentious.

I guess it’s a choice. Should one strive to create something universal (commercial) or not (fine)? I guess that’s up to the artist. Sometime’s it’s nice to have positive feedback from the public, instead of that 1% who actually understand the importance of those things in museums.

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RGBRGBRGB

31 March 2012 by Rahil

Play the game.

This is my entry Experimental Gameplay March 2012. The theme is economy. It is the result of developing a game without thinking about the core game mechanic first. It is a complete failure.

Controls:
Player 1/Player 2 – description

A/’ – Red
S/; – Green
D/L – Blue
F/K – hold and press RGB to direct military to retreat, halt, and attack
G/J – hold and press RGB to tell workers to get a specific resource (by default it auto-gathers)

Finger mapping:
Player 1, use right hand
Player 2, use left hand

Player 2′s controls mirrors Player 1

A/’ – index finger
S/; – middle finger
D/L – ring finger
F/K – little finger
G/J – little finger

How to play:
It’s just a simple real-time strategy game, except you play with a keyboard. Blue units gather resources, green do nothing as of now [supposed to research/upgrade], red can attack.

Other Notes:
As of now battles are sad due to lack of solid objects and pathfinding. Also, there is no win condition.

Post thoughts:

What was envisioned:
1000s of units, flocking, simple yet competitive gameplay (think Hokra), precise controls (think QWOP), color-collar workers (and a statement against classism), resource renewal (and a statement against resource consumption), map based off of image, able to upload map (MS paint is now a map editor!), large resolution to zoom in and out.

Why it didn’t work:
Decreasing the amount of player input increases the amount of AI programming. Competitive games require more balancing and tuning than non-competitive games. Multiplayer on the the same screen isn’t as fun because it lacks fog of war.

Also, I felt like crap while making this. It was forced. It just didn’t feel right.

Future:
I feel like a game could be created with these initial ideas, but I can’t bare to look at it again.

Leave a comment | Categories: Game Development, Games, Uncategorized | Tags: flashpunk, real-time strategy, rts

List of Game Ideas

15 March 2012 by Rahil

Somewhat experimental
Games based off of an input device:
iPad:
- Controlling an amoeba, heavy use of physics? Imagine flinging part of the amoeba outward to try to move it. Would have to play with it.

- The game of horse. One player creates the gesture, the second player must match it.

- When a player touches, a line connects each touch, allowing the player to create shapes. A simple game would be to let a variety of shaped objects fly by, and the goal would be for the player to try to accurately encapsulate the shape. Imagine a shape that has 10 vertices!

- A Mario Party / WarioWare like game. A bunch of mini games in which players compete or cooperate. Example game: drag the [single] coin to your corner. This may cause physical roughness. I haven’t played BUTTON, but it seems like I’m thinking of old ideas. =/

Games based off of feelings:
- A romantic game. I mean Wong Kar-Wai shit. Atmospheric. Poetic. Now with interactivity!
- A game that captures city loneliness. Hmm…

Games based off of a new game mechanic:
- A game in which you can move portions of an entire level, a room. When rooms are connected, the objects inside them can traverse through each room. Eh, difficult to explain in writing…

- 3D folding. See Fault Line by Nitrome for 2D version. Further thinking and exploration required.

- A two player game in which the players’ screens contradict each other (think Between by Jason Rohrer). The game could start out with the players’ screens matching (to condition the players what’s normal), then introduce differences. For example, the one player could be helping the other by feeding him cake, but on the other player’s screen it is shown as poison, and is only noticed through interaction.

- A game in which players play one at a time in order to create a story. Can even use an existing story making game. Hmmmm, I remember playing this on paper before…

- A slightly different idea. A game in which players play one at a time in order. The current player can see all of the past players actions. Each player goes through an avatar creation screen to create an avatar. The current player’s avatar interacts with a main character at some point in time, a memory. The choices the players make influence the main characters path. Will the players cause the main character to defeat the enemy, wonder aimlessly, or cause suicide? Players should be able to see past play-throughs of the game.

- A 2D game with multiple layers. The player must traverse the layers, complete actions within them, which combined, solves the puzzle.

- A game which uses microphone input to move a character around, which also emits sound waves. Think Metal Gear Solid. The player quietly says “up”, and the character moves up whilst emitting a small sound wave. A guard gets closer, the player panics and says “up” with a louder volume, the character moves up and emits an even larger sound wave. The sound wave mechanics can be explored. There could be items within the game that affect the sound waves in different ways: block it entirely, reduce the size, increase the size, rebound, invert. Could even make the game 3D. Devil Tuning Fork? So Pretty. Based off of an old prototype. Note to self: MAKE THIS HAPPEN. 2D, likely.

Non-experimental
Games that would be fun to make and play (party games?):
- A multiplayer game that requires the teamwork of 4 players. Each player has a certain occupation or skill.
- A one versus all multiplayer game. Any genre. For example, if it were a platformer, have 3 lakitus and one player

Games that are minutely different so that I can finish a game without killing myself:
- An auto-runner game, but in which you have to manipulate the obstacles

Games that could do well with a minimalist approach:
- The Settlers like game. Or make on that works.
- A real-time strategy game. A simplified Company of Heroes. Arena matches. 3 vs 3 units, 5 vs 5 units.

Games that express a statement:
- Occupy Wall Street – A game that simulate OWS. Top down, think Risk (board game), for each area of New York. The player can allocate protesters to each area. There would have been statistics for number of protesters, peacefulness, arrests, deaths, impact on the economy, etc. The main point was to show the player that peaceful protests do not work, only violence brings the attention of the public to make any useful change. Yeah, lame.

- Corporate Workplace – Eh, I had an idea, but this is overdone.

- Impact of Human Resource Consumption – Might make this for EGP 3/12. Mechanics should be similar to a Settlers game, or a god game, so it’ll be interesting enough to program.

Leave a comment | Categories: Game Development, Games, Uncategorized | Tags: artistic statement, creative process, feelings, game mechanic

My First Game Jam

24 October 2011 by Rahil

Here’s the story behind Can You Imagine Yourself as a Verbal Assassin?.

Well, not the whole story. I’ve divided the story into two parts as I was involved with two games, one with a team and one personal. The first story is about the development of my personal game. The second story is about my experience at the game jam and the development of the team game. I’ll start at the time the theme was given.

Jammers (I’m making this term up) were able to choose any posts by the Horse ebooks twitter account. No one knows the origin or reason for the account. It appears to be run by a program which grabs phrases from the internet and posts it every few hours. The results are interesting, as some phrases seem poetic.

Initially I was felt bummed out for having such a broad theme, but then some of the more thoughtful posts stuck out to me. “Will there be cars without drivers?”. I thought about some futuristic place where suddenly the protagonist realized there are cars without drivers. Where are they all going? What is their purpose? The second one that stuck out was “Can you imagine yourself as a verbal assassin?”. So I imagined. How can you be a verbal assassin? What dose that even mean? How do you kill with words? Is the theme implying that a verbal assassin is lesser than a normal assassin? Then somehow I got the idea that the assassin talks out loud, “move up, move up, move up, stab”. That’s going to ’cause problems with an assassination. People will hear the assassin. Then the vision of a Metal Gear type game came up, in which sound waves are displayed every time the character talks, and you must be careful so that the enemies cannot hear you. Most of these thoughts occurred within the first hour. It was the most exciting part. There was so much creativity brooding.

I didn’t spend very long on the game. Maybe 5 hours one day and 4 hours the next day. I got the core mechanics down the first day and threw in a story and level design the next day. Because I didn’t spend much time on it, I wanted it to just show the mechanic, the idea, in the comedic way. No polish. I could have added Metal Gear sounds, or even a parody of it. I’m sure if I polished it it would have been more fun for the jammers to play. But I guess after making my last game, I don’t care for polish. I only care for experimenting and art.

The game didn’t fly so well with the players. I should have reduced “move up” to “up”, as players got frustrated typing, or were just unable to touch type (that was painful to watch). “Move up” was in there because I had I planned to add other mechanics such as “say move up”/”whisper move up”/”yell something”/”stab up”/etc. I actually had a more difficult second level, but I correctly guessed that it would have frustrated the player so bad that they would never get to the ending. Ah well. Again, my game wasn’t meant to be popular or polished, it was meant to be experimental.

It was fun to see different personalities play. Some without patience. Some expecting more polish. Very few able to figure out they could move in any direction. I guess a simple fun platformer like MeatBoy is what they desired. Too bad this was not the game.

I guess that’s my personal gripe against game jams. It seems the most polished game (fully equipped with assets) would win. Even in Ludum Dare, this happens. I would personally strive for the most innovative badge, not the best game overall. Who cares for a non-creative polished 5 minute game?

Of course I didn’t win anything. Actually, I was surprised that the game I voted for won first from the judges. That game actually was unique, fit a craaazy theme, and was polished. Congrats to that guy. The other winners were simple polished games.

I still love the idea of my game and may go further with it. Using a microphone, the player could say “up” and the sound wave and character movement would depend on the player’s volume. A teammate mentioned maybe the sound waves could bounce off of the certain walls. That’d be awesome too. I’m reminded of Devil’s Tuning Fork. I think waves itself can be explored a lot more.

The Team Story.

Rewind back to the beginning, when the theme was given. All of the jammers started looking at the feeds on their Macbooks and Iphones, throwing out ideas. Teams were not chosen by an administrator. Jammers were just told to form teams within the first few hours, naturally. Veteran jammers, and anyone who came with a friend were already had a team. The stragglers just awkwardly gravitated toward another and it eventually worked out. There were a bunch of programmers, some musicians/sound folks, some illustrators, and everyone was essentially a game designer.

The team I got along with was awesome. Really great people with good taste and values, which was discussed at some random bar that served meatballs and potatoes, and later at Barcade. The discussion of art in games was really interesting. It’s nice to know that everyone agrees that Braid is a powerful statement, that Machinarium is cool, and that Gears of War is a teenage kid’s fantasy.

Moving along, the team consisted of me, an iOS programmer, a Processing programmer/sound engineer, and a game designer/artist/musician/asset master. Three programmers whom all used different languages. Perfect.

One of the ideas that the game designer pitched was about the horse tweet “Advantage”. The player needs an advantage over other players to win. A multiplayer game in which everyone is against a common enemy, yet compete against each other. It’s simultaneously cooperative and competitive. That was the main idea/mechanic. It could be applied to any kind of game. The first game that came to both of our minds was space invaders. It works, it’s fun, it’s easy to implement. So, he later pitches the idea to the other two, then we go to the drawing board, and bam, a game.

To win, one player must have x points more than the player with the second most points. Everyone loses when the enemies destroy the base.

We wanted the game to be four players, so the iOS developer was silently chosen as the main programmer. The other programmer planned to learn Objective-C/cocoas2d/box2d and help. The game designer/asset master created design documentation, raster graphic art, AND music (It was amazing how he just made Egyptian melodies. It even had basslines!). I sorta left the group, as I didn’t feel I’d be helpful programming in a framework I’m unfamiliar with within 48 hours.

From what I gathered, the iOS developer (who’s just started programming recently) had troubles using Box2d and wished he hadn’t used it at all as it was the cause of most of the problems. Without it, I’m sure he could have made the game. So in the end, the game was incomplete. I believe it would have won if it was complete. I think the team is going to finish it anyway. I’ll even look at it myself, to try iOS developemnt.

So the moral of the story is: If you plan to create a full game, use the framework you are most familiar with. Learning a new one (or one you are inexperienced with) within 48 hours is tough. Oh, and if you plan to win, make it simple, polished, and minutely creative.

Leave a comment | Categories: Game Development, Games, Personal, Uncategorized | Tags: horse ebooks