21/3/16 - Character Write Up

NAME: Mr. Wiggles.
AGE: Two weeks
SEX: Male
RACE: Bug
ETHNICITY:  Blue
LIKES: Food
DISLIKES: Being squished
ORIGIN: Mr. Wiggles was one of many offspring from Momma Georgina. The biggest baddest bug Lady of the land. She lives in an apartment between floor 5 and 6. She laid so many eggs in summer, all of the babies ready to fight for survival. Alas, despite their willingness, only Mr. Wiggles survived.

His harrowing adventure begun when Momma Georgina was squished which has given him a long term hatred of being squished. The babies ran in frenzy. All of them ran to the newly created hole, all but Mr. Wiggles who ran the other way. He chewed into the wall and started to wander the tunnels beyond his comfy crawl space. A long week passed. He gnawed through the wall and found himself in a lot of amazing smelling boxed with little bits of sauce and cheese. This is where our story starts...

18/3/16 - Wolf Among Us

The choices I made in Wolf Among Us definitely felt like they were meaningful because I was so invested in pleasing the characters I like such as Snow White. Within the game there were times where I could have dealt a lot more damage to certain characters but I chose to show mercy. I found that I had to make my decisions swiftly more often than not seeing as they were timed. It seems as though Domsch was right in saying games "are associated much more with breathtaking speedy action than with prolonged contemplation."

I found myself growing attached to snow and caring about what she thought because the main character Bigby cared for her in his gruff way. Over the course of the game I think he's getting more gentle with Snow. Whether it be because of the increasingly unfortunate circumstances, or the continuation of being kind to her, I'm not certain. My choices of dialogue in conversations between Bigby and Snow made me feel like the guiding hand of their relationship. It feels like if I were not playing, Bigby would be accidentally offensive.

The choice to spare characters from more pain than need be made me feel like an important feature of Bigby. The player seems to act as his conscious. I also get the impression that whatever I tell Bigby to say dictates how his relationships go. I can sabotage him if I so choose. Perhaps I could play the game from other characters perspectives. How would Mr Crane or Snow White play as Bigby's conscious? What would they want to happen differently to how I had it happen? Ultimately this game made my choices feel important, but brings attention to others feelings.

14/3/16 - Modelling the Bottle

I've started modelling the fanta bottle. Originally I was going to wing it and model from memory. Lauren mentioned referenced so I pulled some up online and made free image planes to work with. I also have a fanta bottle in reality to reference.

11/3/16 - Character

I thought about drawing a cricket inspired face for the character. I also like the idea of fanta glowing in the bug~

11/3/16 - Prince of Persia and Ludus

In "Prince of Persia The Sands of Time" I found the story nodes such as when you got to a certain point in the mission like a new room to be helpful but also broke the flow of the game. In particular I found that the forced camera angles in the rooms were very distracting and took me out of the experience because I felt as though I was fighting the game for merely being able to see.

 

This game is very ludic because I found myself playing "to win, to beat the game, and story is mostly a lure into the game world."* Every room presented a puzzle that I had to complete to progress the story without any choice over how my character felt about the situation or whether he wanted to do it any other way. This is a very guided path that goes well from node to node. Albeit, as mentioned before, the flow of the game is very interrupted by repeating animations of things like the character putting away his sword or drinking water. These animations don't really add to the character and only take control away from the player and time. Sure, there's the story of him doing these actions - but it is not worth the removal of control. 

Camera angles were also largely taken away from the players control when the camera locked on a wall. This is odd considering that originally the player is presented with control over the camera angles using the mouse. Giving someone something only to take it away soon after with no explanation is confusing at best.

Overall, I think the game gets in the way of itself too much in terms of mechanics. The story is there, and in saying that the story isn't great. The puzzles serve the purpose of conveying distance covered, but the fighting with enemies feels tedious. If more control was granted to the player this could be a more successful game. 

* From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative by Marie-Laure Ryan

10/3/16 - Character Design for Cinematic

I went away and did some work on three eyed concepts.

Ethan and I still prefer the two eyed variations.

I drew some very rough poses of the insect in different angles so that there's some more 3D understanding of the shapes.

7/3/16 - Character Design

Our group has decided on a bug design of mine to test out moving forward with. Ethan has been suggesting making the bug quite blue like a jewel to contrast with the Fanta Funta. I'm gonna go home and play with incorporating three eyes as well. We'll see where this goes in time. 

4/3/16 - Never Alone

"Never Alone" tells the story of Nuna and her fox well by means of 2D platforming combined with informational videos about Inuit culture. The videos are helpful in detailing why the game is like it is, for instance why you can weather fierce blizzards with your caribou clothing. Some would find that videos to be distracting from the game play, so the option to not watch the videos until after you've played is there. This choice of how you get information from the game is effective because more people can enjoy it on both an education and purely game play orientated level.

A major theme in the game is building a sense of community and companionship, represented through Nuna's interaction with the fox and even the spirits of nature. This relationship with the village is embedded narrative because it is "pre-generated narrative content that exists prior to a player's interaction with the game." But does this means the entire game has an embedded narrative, or is there an emergent narrative?

Perhaps throwing the bola counts as a form of emergent narrative in that one can throw the bola as many times as you choose. There's also moments where the game breaks and the keys lag or don't work as they should which creates a narrative of Nuna making a poor decision. 

In short I found this game pretty cool educationally but the coding wasn't fantastic. Many things went wrong that made the game not awfully playable which led me to eventually stopping. But hey, in that there's a story of a girl that is lost forever. But is she truly lost when she has her wolf companion?

Cinematic - Concept 3/3/16

Today I've been working on making bug concepts for our cinematic animation. I'm going for variation in the designs so there's a wide range to pick from both in shape and colour.