This is a screenshot from the initial room of "States of Mind"

So I made this text game for my flash game development course. The assignment was to create a decision tree game, so I adapted some code I wrote for a dialog system into my new component model and turned it into a text adventure game. You play as a university student who has to go to classes while the occupy protests are going on. The protests are essentially irrelevant, though.  Mostly what you do is go onto your computer and do various things, like read the news or watch youtube videos or play video games, and by doing so you alter your state of mind, which changes how you see the world and what you can do within it.

The sole interesting thing in the game is the way it’s structured. While I was planning out the game I drew up a big flow chart with all the possible parts in the game. At first it was basically a cross shape- in the center was the computer, and branching out were the three rooms (bedroom, outside and school) of the four possible mind states (sober, angry, silly, and “bejeweled”). The only differences between the branches were the text descriptions, though. That wasn’t cool enough. I wanted to incorporate  some different ways to move between rooms in the different mind states. I was thinking about how hyperlinks work- they’re a lot like this kind of text adventure game. You click on a thing, and it leads you to another page. Different webpages have different ways of moving around them, though. I tried to make the way you move through the different mind states similar to how you move through the websites that caused your character to enter that mind state.

Youtube is a good example of this idea. When you watch a video on youtube it gives you a few recommended videos that are similar. Sometimes if you follow a thread of recommended videos you’ll end up back where you started. When I was writing the bedroom description of the silly mind state I included a few sentences wherein character was looking around at all their trinkets, reminiscing about the events that brought that trinket into their life, then having that anecdote remind them about another trinket, and so on and so forth. It seemed like a pretty interesting system, so I thought “why tell about this system when I could codify it?” That was the first interesting path I put into the game. When you look at mementos you get into a loop and can keep looking at mementos forever.

Bejeweled Blitz has a more linear structure to it. You start the game, you play it for one minute, then you start it over again (while you’re playing it, of course, there’s more breadth to it, but I didn’t model that). After your character in my game plays bejeweled and enters that particular mindset you are set onto a course that resembles Bejeweled Blitz. After you go to class and have a run-in with the professor you are transported directly back to your room, instead of having to walk back. It’s like a reset button. Get it?

The link structure of reading the news is a little harder to characterize. I figured there were essentially two ways of looking at it- either you start at a news article, which leads to more and more articles explaining related events and the history that led to those events, each of those articles spinning off into yet more articles, or you can think of the process as starting with all those myriad articles and filtering down into your understanding of the subject. Representing either of those processes in my game, however, would have taken a lot of work. Instead, I used the structure of the “angry” mind state to characterize the volatile nature of being mad at the world. When you push your way into the crowd of protesters you have the opportunity to either stop and examine your situation or take action. When you stop you lose progress, sometimes even to the point of sobering your mind state. The friend you meet and the people you can eavesdrop on in the crowd are goombas.

I don’t think this game turned out very well as a finished product. I don’t think there’s a great deal for the player to learn from it as a person, but I did learn something in the process of making it, and it gave me an opportunity to adapt that dialog system for my component model, which has already proven useful. Maybe someone will commiserate with it, or at least recognize the sway that computers have over our states of mind. It might be terribly interesting, but I think it has a least a little bit of truth and honesty in it, and those are things that this medium could use a bit more of.

Goal based games rely on being able to condense the myriad variables of a situation into a single value judgement- either a single bit (losing or winning a game) or an amount of progress. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, of course- the actions leading up to winning a game can be judged in quality and individual wins can build up into an overarching progress mechanic. This compression can be likened to a perspective projection- many points in 3d space can be compressed into 2d space by establishing a perspective, and by establishing a criteria for “winningness” you project the variables of the game into a comprehensible space.

My idea, then, is to create a game wherein the player is presented with a relatively small number of factors, from which they can extract more information than what is presented. It would be like seeing a painting that is painted using perspective techniques- the information hitting your eyes is all 2d, from which your mind extracts a perceived 3d space.

Screenshot from MFA Prep Course

The long anticipated web release of the “smoking coffee and drinking cigarettes” game is finally online for all to play! It was made by me and the indomitable John Bruneau!

Click here to play it!

Assorted thoughts on the game follow.

Raison d’être

The games that you see, that is, the games that have big budgets and marketing, the games that represent gaming in the media, are predominantly if not exclusively escapist fantasies. I realized at some point, however, that the fantasies that are being sold are no longer relevant to me. I am fairly comfortable with my amount of agency, and don’t feel the need for power fantasies. I have come to terms with the unfair world, and don’t feel the allure of competitive, meritocratic fantasies. I have taken a high school level psychology class and find the Skinnerian mechanics at work in almost every game insulting. What I was, though, was stressed out and antisocial. I didn’t want to have to save the world or bone hot elves, I just wanted to chill out in a clean and quiet place, drink some coffee, smoke some cigarettes, and not be bothered by anyone annoying. But drinking too much coffee can make you jittery and nervous, smoking will kill you, and avoiding annoying people is just out of the question, so I made a game about it instead.

Works

While I was working on it, I heard about the Works gallery member show. If you’re a member of Works you can put a piece in, so I did it. John and I teamed up and we made the initial prototype of the game. He did the graphics and provided the machine. I did the coding. The name MFA Prep course was his idea. I think it’s farther from my initial idea than I would have liked, but it made the game very funny to a lot of people, so I think it was a net positive. Names are very important in art.

“Game”

I have a strained relationship with the word “game.” On the one hand MFA Prep Course is a game because it is made in flash, and you play it on a computer, and you can interact with it, and c’mon, just look at it. On the other hand, it has no goal or challenge, no win or lose conditions, no progress. It has a score, but the only reason for it to exist is to drive people who want it to be a game crazy.  ”What is a game” is becoming the new “what is art” and it is just as frustrating and pointless. I want someone to make a good word for these things, because they are what I want to make. “Toy” describes the structure of the interactivity well, but is infantilizing. “Non-game” is not enough in common parlance, and feels a bit lacking, although its the term I lean towards. “Notgame” is a word coined by Michael Samyn to tangle the entire history of computer art in his scruffy eyebrows.

Secrets

• The right hand can also be controlled using the arrows and shift key. This is to allow you to play the game with a game pad, in galleries for instance.
• You can smoke up to three cigarettes at a time.
• If you click while moving your hand left and holding a cigarette, you will flick it away.
• There’s a slight delay between when you do something and when a sound happens. I think this is a bug in flash, although it could be that my sound files are not cut right. If anyone has any insight on this let me know!
• You can blow on your coffee by holding it in the right spot near your mouth.

A dog wearing sunglasses

Here are some of the cool flash projects I did in art101b:

“Portrait of a Terrible Conversation”

“Do you wnat toseeywkmr?o”

“Google Image Portrait Generator“

The overabundant technology of GDC left me feeling blown out and eschatological, so I made interactive art on paper.

Apple Puzzle

Bite into the apple and spit out the pieces again and again until only the core is left.
Solve pieces.

Orange Puzzle

Peel and eat orange.
Solve rind.

Spinning

This is a searching game.
Find the spinningest object in the room.
High score board.

Critique a Toy

Find a toy and critique it. These subjects are off-limits:
-its uselessness
-its isolating nature
-its creativity stifling
-its disconnect from reality
-its gender policing
-its reinforcement of the status quo
-its class exclusivity

Think like a child and only answer the following question: Is It Fun?

Other thoughts, thanks to the wise old man who mutilated games and received computer hardware advice from his dead friends in visions and talked to me but I selfishly pretended to ignore because I wanted to make art:

-The game .exe is a self contained program that does not stretch beyond its own walls.
-Machine code is like route directions- what is the equivalent as a map? (this I tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a game, but I have not given up)

Lessons Learned at GDC: If someone has made art that you never would have considered to make, it means they have ideas that you have never thought of, and it is your duty, as a person who values ideas, to learn them, even if at first they don’t seem worth your time.

a cat making a funny tongue motion

I finally participated in Klik of the Month again.  Here are the fruits of my labor.

As I usually do when I don’t have any ideas coming into a game jam, I grabbed random assets from the internet (space ghetto is my go to place) and program whatever comes to mind. I suppose it’s an attempt to get some kind of equivalent to “automatic writing” for digital game creation. It’s still a very conscious and logical process (for programming it might have to be?) but the results end up seeming somewhat subconscious, even if it’s largely a hoax.

I divided my time into two, one hour for gathering non-interactive resources, and the second hour for making the interactions.

NON INTERACTIVE PART

I grabbed the images from space ghetto.  Images on space ghetto can be separated into a few categories: Porn, gore, and art make up perhaps 70% of the content on average, with cute, funny, cool, and weird images making up the rest of it. The exact ratios vary with the psychological weather, and whether someone is dedicating their day to posting gross stuff. Porn and gore I decided weren’t appropriate to put on a place as respectable as glorious trainwrecks for some reason, and I felt bad about appropriating the art, since I didn’t know anything about its context. I found a lot of images of cute dogs and cats that I snatched up, and some good animated gifs after I remembered that those can be imported straight into game maker.

It’s important, when choosing images, to get ones where the focus isn’t occluded by anything. Bad pictures often make the best fodder for assets- having the focus of the picture so front and center is fairly dull compositionally. Cropping out the background is fairly quick when you get into the flow and aren’t being particularly anal about it. The gif of the trees was a totally sweet find since it already had the background alpha’d out.

In art 101b (flash) I played a bit with layering music on top of each other. The result was cacophonous and disorienting, but mesmerizing. With headphones, especially, your mind will latch onto the threads for moments a time, and you’ll create patterns that aren’t there, as the mind is wont to do. In  that one I mashed up Ke$ha, Cibo Matto, some music from Space Funeral that I can’t remember, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, I think. This time I started with “Battle Against Clown” from the Akira Soundtrack, then I mixed in the Space Jam remix from Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (which I wrestled with- I didn’t want it to become ‘lol random’ but it fit so well), and then topped it all off with “Rubies” by Destroyer. Terrifying, Comical, and Pretentious. There was a lot of blank space since the Space Jam remix was twice as long as the others, so I duplicated and reversed the Akira song, and placed it at the end of the forward facing song. Rubies I reversed and played simultaneously with the forwards song.

The music I wasn’t as happy with-  this particular mix didn’t work out so well, I feel, and I didn’t include the panning and volume modulation that the flash project did, but playing the forwards and reverse tracks on top of each other is really interesting. Dan Bejar’s burbles are very recognizable even backwards.

INTERACTIVE PART

The pug, being the most unique and most square asset, was the protagonist. As I was finding assets I decided that they would be spaceships. My first thought was to make them like paper cutouts in a diorama, and to make an easy faux “shadow” effect by darkening and squishing their sprites (which you can see on the dog, I never took it out- that weird line that follows him around).

Making these images that come from different sources work together visually is an incredibly difficult and involved process, and giving them a setting like that would help immensely with the visual unity. Unfortunately, when it came time to actually start coding, I didn’t have any ideas for how to make an interesting interactive work based on a diorama, so I went with spaceships instead, and threw visual unity out the window.

I thought, as I was programming this, that I needed a plan for what to make before I made it. Now I’m not so sure. I didn’t try winging it as hard as I could have. That’s my next goal. Wing it and don’t rely on tired game tropes. Spaceships! How cliche. I’m embarrassed with myself, honestly.

The rules grew pretty much like you’d expect- it was an effort to expend the assets I created in the first section. First I made a dog that could fly around. The trees and Hunter S Thompson (I think that’s who that is in the background) pretty much only served the purpose of showing you that you were moving. Then the circular fractal became a mothership and launched box cats. Then the  trees needed a reason to exist, because I hate having objects that cannot be interacted with,  so they were given a precious natural resource, “leaf” that the box cats were to mine and bring back to the mothership. The dog can also eat leaf and go fast.

The factional conflict between the skeleton women and giant adonis men was included to provide a sense of dynamism and tension in the game world- every character in the world has their own place and their own story to tell. Also when they collide they produce kitten bullets for the dog ship- the only source of kitten bullets in the game.  If you blow up the spawners you can get the factions to fight against the mothership.

If the mothership gets too much leaf it gets big and swallows the world or something. At this point I was just painting by numbers, really. Game needs antagonist, losing condition, winning condition. You can kill the mothership with cat bullets by shooting it. The game will crash afterwards and I didn’t fix it. Ostensibly you could get the cats to mine all the leaf and deforest the world. That would be really a drag, huh? The box cat spaceships make you slow but they can’t kill you because dying in games is for chumps. If you stop on the center of the mothership where the cats come out though you’re kinda hosed. You don’t recover health very fast.

CONCLUSION

Then I named it “rainbow dogs or something, i don’t know” because I didn’t have a name for it. It was uploading really slowly so I got bored and started thinking. One of my pet peeves is when people start their artist statement for a game with “most games are like this, but my game is like this” and that’s exactly how Ian Bogost started his A Slow Year book so I transcribed that first paragraph into the description of my game. Someone though my game was about the Atari VCS. It’s funny because most art games are about nostalgia and/or not doing anything, but my art game is about dog spaceships. Then I added Karawane, because if my game had words it would be dada poetry, then I dropped a little hint of Tuna Fish Sandwich Piece I think it’s called, for some fluxus cred. Games is fluxus recontextualized.

BONUS CONTENT

Here are the images that didn’t make it into the game!

Kelsey’s Games

It should go without saying that these games look much, much better when they’re actually in motion, and better even still when you’re playing them. They lose a lot of their charm when they’re in a static form like this. If it’s at all possible you should play them, at least the ones that look most interesting, to get a complete feel for the game (especially Kelsey’s “Other People”- it looks very unimpressive from the screenshot, but playing it is really a trip- it was one of the first games he made for the game dev club and I totally forgot about how striking it was until I played it again just now).

Also, time scale is important here. Many of these games were made in the span of 48 hours (Emagtra, Your House Is Wet), or 2-4 hours (I Love you But You Kiss Like a Girl, A Normal RPG, You Decide, Lick the Pinapple), so naturally they aren’t going to be as polished as games that have been in development for months to years.

When we focus exclusively on making novel interactions at breakneck speed, and have a bit of a framework built up to help us out, we should see some pretty startling results.

Playable Versions:

Cygnus the Cutie (flash)

Apocalypse Snow (flash)

I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl (Game Maker- requires windows)

A Normal RPG (requires windows)

You Decide (Game Maker- requires windows)

Time Snipers (Windows)

Time Snipers (Mac (untested- I don’t own a mac, so if this doesn’t work I’m sorry :X))

Today I presented what I have done so far in the budget crisis game.  I’ve been working on the interface, mostly, because I had a cool idea for how to manage the inventory, and that worked so well that it spun out into a philosophy for the entire user interface.   Two of the main things I am interested in are making games that people who do not play video games will appreciate, and designing games from scratch, as opposed to creating minor genetic evolutions of existing games and calling it “innovation”. Because of these, I have no particular need for the established canon of interaction that precedes  me, unless it serves my purposes.

To the first end, in the effort of making the game interface as accessible as possible, I decided to couch it in physical metaphors. Instead of displaying the inventory as  a grid of icons representing different objects, I gave the player a view into their backpack, and made the mouse control their hand.  When they move the hand over the object, the hand opens as if they were about to grab it, and when they click to drag it their hand closes around the object.  Their other hand then moves away from holding the backpack to anticipate grabbing, and using, the object.

I really like this way of having the entire arm visible as you’re using it- it creates a super tactile response as you’re swinging your arm around and picking up items, it feels less abstracted than a cursor, less macabre than a disembodied hand, and looks hilarious.  I initially had a caricatured head, eyes or mouth wide open, with an accepting hand, come in from the right to show represent the act of reading or eating (there used to be sodas in the backpack as well), but it seemed too much like the heads belonged to someone else, and that you were giving the item away.

I liked the arm so much that I decided to use it as much as I could.  The only place I can’t use it at the moment is as you’re walking around the campus, and if I can think of a better way of showing that part of the game that would allow for physical metaphors I will definitely switch to it.

If I am going to use existing game tropes at all I intend to have them to fit in with the vision of the game, intellectually and practically. I am going to be taking elements from the survival horror genre for this game, but I have no desire to make a survival horror game, that is, I don’t want to make a game about zombies or rogue A.Is or creepy little girl draculas. Hopefully what I will end up with is a game that is about surviving, and is about fear, but that isn’t a survival horror game.  I want to pluck the baby up out of the bathwater, as it were.

The Source So Far (.zip)

Playable Version

Very minor update today, since I spent most of my time working on homework. I used a bunch of the code from the editor to update the game itself, now it’s an actual playable kind of thing!

The source code so far (.zip)

The playable game

The game grid is on the left, the selection bar is on the right.  Hit Space to switch between the two selection modes.  When the bar says “p” you are choosing a problem to work on, when it says “i” you are choosing a shape to use as a brush. Click on the down arrow at the bottom of the selection bar to make the list appear / scroll in the list (I don’t know why it doesn’t show them automatically, this is one of those little quirks that you can get used to if you’re the only one using it, but obviously I’ll have to fix it before I send it out ) The number in the upper right is your “score” for the problem.  You get points by putting shapes inside the goal area, and you lose points by putting shapes outside the goal area.

Playing it, I was a little surprised with how plays.  I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect in regards to difficulty.  I found that a lot of the problems were way to easy, but a few of them were surprisingly hard. They’re very prone to me remembering how I made them, since they’re just a collection of stamps, but one or two I legitimately had to think about, so I think the game has some potential as an actually compelling activity.

The game development club has started doing monthly meetups for the Glorious Trainwrecks Klik of the Month, which I went to today.

Klik of the Month is a monthly game jam where you try to get a game finished in 2 hours using any tools possible.  The games tend to range from experimental to weird to parody to shitty.  Our club tends to focus on that last one when advertising the event- to a lot of people the main draw is seeing who can make the most terrible game.  These events are also one of the only way that we can get anyone to make games.

I won the last game development competition by default, and the trend has been for a declining number of games for the competitions.  The Tower Defense challenge had a solid 7 entries, then the Collaborative Challenge had only 4, and the Facebook challenge had only 2.  The Collaborative and Facebook challenges were at least a bit difficult for people to make games for- the former required the participants to partner up with students from Cogswell and the latter required a game on Facebook.  The most recent competition, however, had no restraints of form, just a few words as themes.

I would imagine people are intimidated by the prospect of developing a game.  Many don’t have any previous experience, and no one sane wants to pile any more work onto their plate for an extracurricular that isn’t worth any credit.  The prospect of being able to make a game with no pretension of quality and only a 2 hour, one day commitment is understandably alluring. I want to assuage people’s fears of game development- to tell them that it isn’t beyond their work potential, but truth be told making reasonable quality games is, in fact, a lot of work! And I don’t want to bring down the quality of games by encouraging people to submit their trainwrecks games.  Trainwrecks are better than nothing, but I know that we’re capable of better. Maybe if we use klik of the month type events for prototyping and encourage people to continue building on the games that they make during that.

I’m going to be the president of the game development club next semester. I think this lack of participation is one of the most heinous problems of the club as it stands, but I have no idea how to solve it.  I’ve heard that some artists have been having problems getting into groups with programmers, so making more social networking events will help. We’ve done icebreakers in the past, and I always thought they were dorky but they might actually serve a purpose.  Especially if we get some experienced game designers working on them.

P.S. this is the game I made for Klik of the Month.  I didn’t have any ideas going into it (I had one but I forgot it :/) so I grabbed some images from spaceghetto and started making a shooter.  But since regular shooters are lame I experimented with different ramifications for getting hit. Procedural art has fantastic potential for beauty, I really should experiment with it more seriously (protip: keep your initial gun, zoom out evenly by hitting both the beer enemies and the superman enemies, then click and drag around in the empty area below the enemies).