Month: April 2016

Movie Maker(Artwork 4 Final)

 

Game Requirements

Materials: 18 ID cards, 5 Role cards, coins, notebook, pen

Players: 5 players and 1 host


 

Rules

  • There are 6 different identities and there are 3 cards of each identity.

 

  • Screenshot (8)
  • Businessman: Gain 3 coins(active), block players gain coins from Stock(passive).

 

  • Screenshot (9)
  • Detective: Pay 3 coins to see the first two cards in the deck or pay 15 coins to see a player’s Role card(active), block assassination against you(passive, can achieve only once).

 

  • Screenshot (10)
  • Killer: Pay 5 coins to assassinate a player’s hidden identity after announcing the name of that identity(active). Assassination fails if your target doesn’t have that identity.

 

  • Screenshot (11)
  • Thief: Steal 2 coins from a player(active), block the Steal action(passive).

 

  • Screenshot (12)
  • Doctor: Pay 9 coins to revive 1 player(active), revive yourself once(passive).

 

  • Screenshot (13)
  • Singer: Player sings a song(at least 20 seconds) to gain 5 coins.

 

  • There are five Role cards: Leading Actor, Supporting Actor, two Villain cards and one Reversal.
  • Winning condition:
      1. The leading actor team captures all of the other players. (Happy end)
      2. The villains kill the leading actor. (Bad end)
      3. The reversal kills all the other players to win. (Reversal end)
  • Before the game starts, each player gets 1 Role card and 2 ID cards.
  • The role card is faced down so everyone knows only the role of him/herself. The Leading Actor card will face up. The leading actor and the supporting actor are in the same team. The two villains are in the opposite team. The reversal is on his/her own.
  • One of the ID cards is faced up and people can see each other’s SHOWN ID. This is just a superficial identity of each “actor” in the “movie” so it has only the passive ability of that character.  However, usually people have different sides. The second ID card is faced down and only the owner knows his/her HIDDEN ID. That means a businessman is actually a killer or a singer is actually a doctor,etc. Players can only take the active actions on the Face-down ID cards.
  • Each player also gets 2 coins as the start-up capitals.
  • The game starts with the leading actor and the players take turns to proceed the game. In each turn, that player can take only one Action among the actions on the ID cards and the three other actions below:
      1. Income: Gain 1 coin.
      2. Stock: Gain 2 coins.
      3. Smite: Pay 15 coins to kill one player. You have to smite someone when you have 20 coins.
  • All the actions on ID cards can be challenged.
  • Challenge: When you take one of the character actions – whether actively on your turn, or defensively in response to someone else’s action – that character’s action automatically succeeds unless an opponent challenges you. In this case, if you can’t (or don’t) reveal the appropriate character, your action fails and you lose 5 coins.
  • If your challenge against another player fails or you are challenged by another player successfully when you have no coin, you will be out of this game.
  • Also anyone is Smited or successfully assassinated will be out of the game.
  • The host is the director of this movie. He/she needs to record what happens and what people say that are interesting in a note book. This record will become the script of this movie. This is the key point of the whole game, and I’m sure that this movie will be very natural and interesting.

Playtest

Several playtests had been done before the game was finalized.

  1.  In the first playtest, every character has only 1 available ability. Also players only need to pay 9 coins to Smite another player. It worked however the game was a little bit boring and the Singer was too weak. Also the game ended very quickly because the villains could easily gain 9 coins and kill the leading actor.
  2.  In the second playtest, passive abilities had been added. Also the cost of Smite had increased to 15 thus the leading actor could live longer and had more potential.
  3. In the final playtest, character Doctor was added to the Role cards and had made the game more complicated and exciting.

Artist Statement

This is an Everyone-can-make-a-movie era. It sounds hilarious but it is true. I’m not sure about what is going on in the USA, however in China, a lot of famous singers, actors and authors have stepped into the movie area and become actors and directors.

MOST OF THEM TOTALLY SUCK.

All of their attentions and money have been paid on inviting famous actors who are terrible at acting. Of course they are good-looking and thus they have a huge market among young people. I cannot bear with those insipid story, terrible acting, boring jokes and rigid dialogues.  I always have this thought after watching those movies: If I have this amount of money, I can make a movie as well. Life is the most natural movie on this planet. Thus here comes the key  idea of this game: Everyone can make a movie and everyone can be part of a movie.

The idea of making movie based on what people have done in game is inspired by the Dada movement. This movement asserts the concept of “anti-art” and “unintentional forms of art”. That is, the rigid forms and boring stories are killing audiences’ taste. Just like our daily life, things happen randomly and are sometimes out of expectation. The main guy don’t have to defeat all the enemies; the villains may succeed and take control of the world; reversals may happen at any time. Thus in this “movie” that people have made during the game, everything happens naturally and randomly. What proceeds the story is what a normal guy thinks and does at that moment. There is no need to have a rule in life and that’s why life is art.

Since this is not a video game, I didn’t draw much inspirations from the Avant-garde videogames book. However, based on the research on avant-garde paintings, I tried to paint the cards for the game in a more “Avant-garde” way. I’m not sure what I have painted is avant-garde since there is not such a definition for avant-garde art, yet I think it is a good approach. Also I’d love to put my game in the main-stream area in the avant-garde chart because it is a normal turn-base board game.

Textbased Game (Final)

 

Textbased Game (title still pending)

is a text based “adventure” game that takes place within a computer terminal that is stylised to be reminiscent of the terminals in Fallout.

Screenshot_2016-04-26-18-23-49

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the game, the player will get to learn about the person that they’re communicating with and eventually learn about themselves. Ultimately the goal is to create an emotion experience in which the players learn about their characters and the world their character exists in.

 

Early prototype video

 

Credit:

Programming and Visual Design: Anish Dhesikan

Writing and Visual Design: Grant Bickelhaupt

 

Artist Statement:

This game is my third digital game I’ve attempted and I went into it with fairly high hopes. What I got out of it was satisfying to say the least. Anish and I worked together on this game for this class so that we could use our time to work on a game that we’d like to take beyond a class. During the process we went through a series of prototypes, mostly dealing with the difficulty of elegantly building the game so that implementation of the writing and potential background effects can take place. The initial narrative is something that I’m not overly thrilled with, but it was a solid attempt and is something I intend to be heavily rewriting in the near future.

I’ve been interested in writing a game for a long time and my fascination with Artificial Intelligence, as well as with the concept of  the Singularity, have made me want to tackle the idea of an AI making its first steps to understanding humanity through the eyes of a machine. I think that in the modern context, with the rapidly developing “intelligence” of machines, it’s rapidly becoming a more and more relevant subject to explore.

Brenda Romero’s art played the largest role in inspiration for me. I wanted to create a game that, to people familiar with the topic, it’d be fairly recognisable to them, while to those not familiar with the subject, they might not realise it until the end. I was aiming to create a game where, like hers, the player will have to get to a major point in the game before they find out the truth behind their role. From then on, at least in the build I’m working on beyond the final one I showed in class, I want to continue the game past discovering the origins of your character and allow the player to decide how they interpret that information and how they want to let that affect their actions.

 

Download link – For mobile devices

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wz6rraw3x4o1vgi/AITextBasedGame.apk?dl=0

 

 

Mutual Assured Destruction

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Overview

My game is called “M.A.D.” which means Mutual Assured Destruction. It is a term being used during the Cold War as a game theory that if both country could guarantee to destroy the other one , they wouldn’t actually do it because of the counter-attack.


 

Game Instruction

There are three type of Field Cards, that each player can hold.

Field-Population

  • At the start of each turn, player draw a population card.
  • Each population card can provide functionality of 2 other building cards.

Field-Nuclear

  • Requires population to function.
  • Cost 1 gold per turn to maintain.
  • Has 2 nuclear power.
  • Cost 4 gold to buy.

Field-Factory

  • Requires population to function.
  • Generates 1 gold per turn.
  • Cost 2 gold to buy.

Start-Game

  • Each player 2 factory and 1 population when the game starts.

Phase-Population Growth

  • At the start of the turn, unless specified, player get a population card.
  • Once Population Growth is done, go to Resource Maintaining.

Phase-Resource Maintaining

  • Player discard the cards that does not have enough population to function. They can decide which ones to discard or trade, as long as they have their buildings functioning with enough population at the end of this stage.
  • Player gains 1 gold for each Factory they have, unless specified.
  • Player spends 1 gold for each Nuclear they have. If they can’t afford maintaining it, they have to discard or trade with other people to maintain it.
  • Once Resource Maintaining is done, player can go to attack phase.

Phase-Attack

  • On player’s turn, they can choose to attack another player if they have at least 1 nuclear power.
  • Once a player is attacked, the attacked player shuffle their field card face down, and let the attacking player pick certain amount of random cards equal to the attacking player’s nuclear power, and discard them.
  • Once that’s done, and if the attacked player still has any nuclear power, they can choose to immediately counter-attack the attacking player. The nuclear power counted for the counte- attack includes the cards that has just been discarded through the previous attack.
  • Therefore, the counter attack works like either all, or none.
  • Player can only attack once per turn. Once attack is done or skipped, go to Purchase.

Phase-Purchase

  • Player can buy field cards from the pile during this phase.
  • Since it’s the last phase, what they bought can’t be used immediately.

Special Phase- Trade

  • Player can trade and discuss with each other at ANY time.
  • They can trade any resource, including gold, population, factory, nuclear, and so on.

Event-Cards

  • At the end of each Round, an event card is revealed and played.
  • There are four type of events right now,  and more can be added in the future.
    • Nuclear Winter:
      • If any nuclear strike has been performed this round, place this card on the table, otherwise discard it.
      • Whenever a total of 3 Nuclear Winter have been placed, the game ends with no winner.
    • Non-Proliferation:
      • Players vote for this treaty.
      • If half or more players agreed, players discard all their Nuclear cards and get a full refund.
    • Economic-Crisis:
      • Field cards cost 100% more next round.
      • No Population growth next round.
    • Baby Boom
      • Place a Population card on the center of table.
      •  Players can bid on it with a starting price of 2 * Gold.

Condition – Defeat

  • Whenever a player has no field cards, that player is “defeated”.
  • The last player hasn’t been defeated wins the game.

Reflection of playtest

Usually the first player gets some advantage. However, if played with three or more people, the last several players are often united to play against the first player. Due to the trade rule, they can easily share their resource through this way.

During the playtest in class, similar things happened. Moreover, the Nuclear Winter really added something to the game. Once a player decides to attack, they need to consider a lot of things, such as “Will I be counter-attacked?”, “What if Nuclear Winter happens?”. And as intended, the first playtest ended with three nuclear winter played, which means the games ends with no winner.

There are also ways to improve the game. I could make event cards to reverse the order since next round, which decreases the first player’s advantage, as well as create some aspects of surprise in the game.


 

Artists Statement

My goal of making this game is to recall the days of the Cold War, and extend to the real world problem of Nuclear Weapons. Nuclear Weapon has first in the history allowed human beings to fully destroy a civilization. Nowadays more and more countries that failed to be recognized globally started to seek for nuclear power instead. Through this game, players could experience a similar decision making process of the countries involved, and understand the reason why it’s really challenging to maintain the world peace and keep the world from a Doomsday.

During the decision-making in the gameplay, there are several factors that I want players to take into consideration. The way they understand nuclear bomb is like a deterrent that reduce the chance of being chosen as a target. At the same time, if there are some target that they can attack without worry about being counter-attacked, they would attack them to establish more advantage. For players that are not leading the game, they are more likely to have some nuclear bombs to warn other player “Don’t touch me”, which is indeed the same strategy that some countries in real life have chosen.

The population is an important part of design. Since the factory provides gold, and gold can be used to buy factory, it’s basically an exponential growth. With population involved, the growth is pretty much limited because of the fact that players can only get one population per turn. Then the extra population gained from event “Baby Boom” might be important to make a big difference and is certainly something worth a competition.

Since everyone start with no nuclears, the first player to have nuclear bomb might put them into a situation that no one can resist their attack. It means that other player need to react to the first purchase of Nuclear Bomb, and probably also start buying Nuclears.

On the flip side, nuclears costs resource to maintain. Getting a nuclear bomb too early might deeply influence their efficiency of resource gathering. Furthermore, they need to consider the chance of getting a nuclear winter at the end of the round, which results in a no-win situation. There is no obvious best strategy. Anything happened can change one’s strategy set and put them into a different situation.

No matter what players choose, most of time they get into a situation that they have to attack, and nuclear winter happens. Then, more nuclear winter happens and the game ends with no winner. In real world, the overuse of nuclear weapon may result in a same outcome that nobody actually benefit from that act. It’s a situation that when everyone plays their best strategy to survive, it actually leads to the worst result.

According to Brian Schrank’s diagram defining the different types of avant-garde games, M.A.D. contains a certain flow and serves as a Complicit turn-based strategy board game. The intended situation of nuclear winter is also something political and happens all the time which aparts it from a traditional game.

The idea of the game is inspired from the Sept. 12 made by Gonzalo Frasca. In the game player plays the role in a real-life problem, and get to know where their situation is and make a statement based on that. The Avant-garde movement has plays a part in it, especially with the anti-war concept in some of the Dada artworks. Though Dadaism is often only considered as a react of WW1 happened in 1910s, it can still be applied to the time of the Cold Wars. Even today, nuclear is still served as a symbol of power, while most country has ignored the fact that, the more nuclear power exist in the world, the more unstable the world is.

 

 

 

Microaggressive Microgame Mania

IMG_2227

The project came from a simple premise: Microgames as Microaggressions. The point of a Microaggression is that, by itself, it appears benign. But then you face them in your life again and again. And when you finally have enough and shout back against the aggressor, onlookers believe that you’re merely overreacting over this small slight, and not the endless onslaught of injustice that they cannot or simply refuse to acknowledge.

Now, as a cisgender white male, I can’t say that I have personally experienced prejudiced aggression, micro or otherwise. The closest I’ve experienced was being told once that I don’t seem like “a gay kid.” Therefore, I researched the experiences of others that were posted online.

To simplify the actual making of the game, I appropriated an old piece of Nintendo software, WarioWare DIY, a DS game that allows players to make their own Microgames.

The primary problem working with DIY was how limited it was. For example, in “Don’t Touch My Antennae”, I wanted the player to be able to drag the alien across the stage in order to avoid the grabbing hands. However, I quickly discovered that DIY did not recognize that input. The only input the game allows you to work with a single tap, on either a particular object or the entire screen. I worked around this by placing 4 small objects on each corner of the screen, and had programed them so that, on being tapped, they would swap places on the screen with the alien. This created the illusion that the player was pressing these places to move, and as such escape the grabby hand.

FullSizeRender

Creating the music for each level was far easier than I anticipated; DIY’s music editor comes with a “Maestro,” which can generate a track for you by asking you the “feel” of the game, such as “frantic” and “sad”. I had the Maestro create the base music this way, and then I slightly altered them by changing the instruments used. Fittingly enough, I mostly used the UFO and Alien SFXs.

IMG_2236

After I created my microgames, I used DIY’s sister game, the DIY Showcase for the Nintendo Wii. Unlike DIY, games cannot be made in the Showcase, but they can be played. I figured that having players play with a TV would be a better way to present the game, rather than have people play it on the DS. I imported the games I made on the DS into the Wii, placed them on their own shelf. When I was ready to present my project, I had Showcase randomly shuffle through my games.

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There were two primary inspirations for my project. The first was Liz Ryerson’s Dys4ia. The idea for abstracting the real life experiences into a series of small playable vignettes came from her gameplay. The second inspiration came from Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s “Stop Telling Women To Smile” public art display from 2014. One of her posters, stating “Don’t Touch My Hair,” directly influenced one of my microgames. You know which one.

When I showed off my project in class, the first thing I noticed was how obtuse the “Don’t Touch” game was.  It was not very clear for the player to touch the stars to move around. Not only that, but because of how little variety there was in the games, it wasn’t very enjoyable to play.

Overall, I’m not sure how much I liked my project. The two things I would work on is increasing the variety of the game. The other is making it a more collaborative project by directly asking maligned people about their experiences and making each game with them, instead of just interpreting what I read online.

Limited (Final)

Artist Statement:

My objective in making this game was to draw attention to the real world problem of consuming resources without first diligently seeking to understand the negative effects that can occur. Humans have a great need for energy to power our lives, and this need is only increasing. To supply ourselves with the energy we need, we often use resources in a way that either causes harm to our environment or causes the resources to run out. In either case, our use of the resource is limited, either by the amount available or by the deleterious cost using it brings. Oil may be plentiful for the time being, but eventually it will run out. Pollution of our environment ruins our air and the ecosystem that we need to survive. Both facts should constrain our use of certain resources.

However, the drive to use resources that are limited is primarily motivated by financial greed. Alternate, longer lasting and less limited or unlimited methods of obtaining resources could be developed, but it is much more financially lucrative to exploit the more readily available, but limited and potentially harmful resources. If this is the path humans follow, then our futures are not especially bright. This is the narrative my game follows.

Most of my inspiration for making this game comes from the anti-war artworks created by many of the Dada artists. Dada primarily started as a reaction to World War I and it was known for its mockery of materialism. I felt that while war is still a large issue today, it is not what it was when Dada began. Instead, we are faced with other very big issues, issues of which greater awareness is needed. This is why I chose the topic of resource consumption. Our reliance on fossil fuels has gone on far too long and the environmental effects have become apparent everywhere.

Conceptual art was a major theme in Dada. In fact, the idea of creating aesthetically pleasing art was sometimes even mocked. This is why I kept the graphics very simple and representational, as opposed to intricate, pleasing designs. It is purposefully designed to support the message of the artwork as a whole, rather than being visually pleasing as an individual part. Hans Arp made use of chance when creating his art, so I made use of chance as well in the generation of the “worlds” that the player encounters in my game. The number of trees, resource points, and their locations are all random. Not only does this keep there from being any two games that are the same, but it also examines the different situations that can occur when chance takes the generation of a “world” to an extreme. I also liked the idea of the world not being a handcrafted place because the real world is also far from being handcrafted.

A final inspiration I would like to mention is Brenda Romero’s game Train. In this game, the player is not informed of what end state they are actually working towards accomplishing, but are merely given instructions on how to reach the end state. Upon reaching the end state, the players realize they are loading train cars and shipping people to Auschwitz. I thought that this method for revealing the game’s message would work well in my game as well. So, in my game I kept my instructions brief and the player (without any explanations before hand) should not understand that they are ruining the world until it is too late.

 

Game Overview:

The game is designed so you really cannot win, unless you do not actually interact with it, which of course is acceptable. When the player starts the game, they receive a small help tip that tells them to place “Rigs” on “Resources points.”

Start

They click “ok” and can then fully see the generated world, which should include a moderately populated forest and a handful of resources points. If the player was to observe the forest and just watch for a moment, they would notice that the trees spread and the forest thickens. There are two “counters” at the top of the screen. The first shows the amount of money the player has available to them, which they can spend on “Rigs.” The second counter is labeled “customers,” but its representation is deeper than just a “customer.” The player will receive more money for each customer that they have, but this number can go up or down. For the purpose of the game, you are the only producer of energy in the area that your customers exist in, so they will always buy from you. They are also affected by any damage you might cause to the environment. So, if the customer counter starts to drop, your customers are not simply going to another energy provider, they are dying.

The player can pick between two Rig types, a large and a small. The difference is a simple distraction for the player. I liked the idea that a player might think they could optimize how they extract resources to make more profit, but really they will always reach the same ending. The player can place the Rigs on the resources points, and when placed or “built” the Rigs start returning money, which is shown graphically with a puff of cash coming from each Rig as it generates revenue. While placing a Rig, the player can accidentally, (or on purpose) destroy trees, because any trees that the Rig collides with on its way to being built will be destroyed.

Over time, every Rig placed will start to produce pollution. This pollution gets larger and spreads across the map as the game progresses. The pollution kills any trees it comes in contact with and there is nothing the player can do to reverse its effects. The damage is permanent, just as it is in real life.

ContaminationStart

Notes:

In play-tests, the game was well received. The majority of the people who played the game were in our class, so they all had prior knowledge of what my game was about. This made it hard to test if the game was doing well in terms of only revealing its message once the player had already ruined the world.

I had two play-tests with people outside of our class, both of them thought the game was interesting. One suggestion I got was to make it more obvious that the trees were trees, which is something I had been thinking about improving as well. In both playtests, the response I got when the players understood what they were doing was “Oh no!” and “What the heck is that crap?!”.

Both of those responses made me pretty happy because to me it meant that the realization that they had messed something up came all at once, and too late.

GameOver

Download zipped game:

Mac – LimitedMac

PC – LimitedPC

Window Talk (Final)

Artists Statement:

My goal for this game was to emulate  a snippet in the life a person that is observing a situation from the outside in. They are a child looking in on a situation that is familiar to themselves from their bedroom window.

I wanted to explore the ideas of sympathy and pain. The child is looking in on a situation that they remember going through and is unsure of how to follow suit. They do not know the stranger that lies in the room across the yard from them.

It was deeply inspired by some of the games we talked about in class. Depression Quest and The Path helped inspire this game. I wanted to explore narrative as game and also tell a story poetically. I wanted to test the boundaries of what is a game and what isn’t a game.  Depression Quest stood out to me because of its simple game play, it inspired me to attempt to do a text based game.

I hope to be able to add more chapters to this game as I progress in my game design career. This completes only one chapter in a story that will continue to bloom.

If I were to place it on Schrank’s avant garde table: I would say my game falls somewhere in the middle of Radical Political,The game allowed players some interaction, but most of it was an experience and it was all about the game and its story.

Documentation:

I had multiple people play this small twine game. I received multiple reactions. The game is simple and straightforward. It provides moments for choices but ultimately it is a chapter that will unfold later. Some argued that it wasn’t a game because of its lack of interaction, some enjoyed the poetic verses, some just stared at the screen and mumbled some words.

The Game: 

(I will email you the game, as it won’t allow me to post it here)

Do not try to open in Google Drive. (It will appear as just text, we want it to look like an actual game). Instead download to your computer and open using a browser. This has been tested with Google chrome and should work for Firefox as well.

No Sleep

Introduction

Download

No Sleep is a game about Insomnia, and the thoughts and feelings that run through your head when you can’t sleep. It is based on my own personal battle with Insomnia, and my own personal feelings. Each level and element in the game is based off of a thought I had while trying to fall asleep.

But before you give the game a try, I want to mention everyone that helped me with this game.

  • The music in this game is courtesy of sol.theory.
  • The basic art in the game is by a group of artists on OpenGameArt.
  • The bell sound effect in the game is from marcelofg55 on OpenGameArt.
  • The pictures used throughout the game are from some of my friends on face book. Thanks to Nicole, Ping-Pong, and the Tank.

Now onto the game itself. The game is very simple to play. You use the left and right keys to move around within the game. You can press the space bar to jump, and the up arrow to interact with objects and people.

The goal of the game is to play it.

Documentation

*I would recommend playing first as some of the content is spoiled below*

Since the game is digital, there was no physical photos of the documentation. However, here are some of the notes that I gathered from watching people play.

  • In the shifted room (the room where all blocks are displaced from their physical body), player continuously tries to jump on the fake block.
  • The player keeps asking me if the shifted room is bugged. All I respond with is no.
  • Player tried to jump into pit and started to figure out shifted room.

From these notes I shifted a few of the blocks in the room to make it more likely for the player to accidentally fall onto the safe blocks after missing the real block.

  • In the suicide room (the room where you can only progress by falling), players keep trying to find a way out.
  • No one ever completed the waiting task and unlocked the achievement for it.

I thought about adding a secret escape from this room, but I felt it would detract from the meaning, so I let players keep killing themselves here. However through my own play testing I found that if you are fast enough you can use the door before you far fall enough down. I didn’t remove this because I felt it still fit with the depression theme (if you can get out before you sink deep into it, you are still safe).

  • Players really like the strobe room.
  • Every single player on their first try in the room turned the switch on and then off. No one left it on until their second time in the room. Not really sure what this tells me, but I found it interesting.

After gathering this data I tried a version where you couldn’t leave the room unless the strobe was still on. People figured it out pretty quick, but I removed this in the final version.

  • Player is having a lot of fun in the straight room (room where the floor disappears behind you). He is trying to get rid of as much floor as possible.

This was a really fun moment to watch as he really was very engaged with it, and seemed to instantly grasp how the room functioned.

Design

Outside of the general documentation from play tests, I figured I would put some of the emotions/feelings that led to elements in the game.

  • The suicide room is (obviously) based on depression. The fact that you can wait it out in that room is based on the fact that life gets better (I didn’t want it to be all dark).
  • The different jems you unlock by completing different challenges are based on 4 different feelings, each linked to a colour. Green is life (or positivity), black is death (or negativity), blue is calm, and red is chaos. Each jems challenge to unlock it is linked to its colour.
  • All of the voice clips in the game are in Japanese, and read off by google translate. They are then distorted and pitch shifted way down. I did this to try and represent the nonsense thoughts and feelings that do have an origin, but you can’t seem to place them. Since  I know a little Japanese, I can sometimes make out a bit which helps reinforce it (at least for me).
  • The images used in the art gallery are all from my life, and represent passing memories, friends, and feelings throughout my life.

Artist Statement

This game was obviously very inspired by my insomnia, but that was far from the only influence. The largest influence outside of myself was the game LSD: Dream emulator. The game was based on the dreams of the designer and has a similar nonsense/confusing aesthetic to mine. I also was heavily inspired by the art style of the game and used a similar style myself.

Within our class I was most inspired by the Yes Men. They push their views because they believe their is a lack of understanding or complacency in the world. They try to make people understand things, that they would never understand on their own. That is what I tired to do with this game as well. Many people that I have talked to about my insomnia have responded with things like, “Oh yeah I pulled an all nighter, it was kinda cool.” I hate this remark, because people don’t understand how much not sleeping sucks. Especially when it’s all the time, not just a one off all nighter. While I’m not sure how well I portrayed that feeling through the game, it was still an outlet for some of my feelings on the topic, and it made me feel a lot better after making it.

Schrank Chart

I feel like No Sleep falls under the category of Radical Formal, or reflexive. It falls under this category as there are no (intended) underlying political motives. I wanted to play with the form of video games, and the concept of discontinuous mechanics through the lens of insomnia. There is no agenda trying to be pushed, just a love and exploration of the medium. If I was to place it on Schranks chart, I would place it  between Rom Check Fail and Cory Arcangel.

Support (Final)

Artist Statement:

The concept of my game Support was to be a game that could simulate a conversation with a loved one who was experiencing depression. The inspiration from this game came from games talked about in class/readings that focused on real issues, like September 12th or the McDonald’s Videogame, but primarily Depression Quest. I liked how the game put people in the shoes of a person going through life with Depression, and especially liked how the more depressed the player was, more options would become unclickable but still remain visible. I wanted to make a game where the player’s choices aren’t restricted, but they want to consider what they’re going to say since they aren’t sure how their loved one will react. I wanted to evoke feelings of concern and care, but also uneasiness and uncertainty.

If I were to put the game on the Schrank Avant-Garde diagram I would put it in the upper right hand side of the Emancipation square. I feel the game is decently political in it’s subject matter, while also allowing players to control the narrative through their actions to a degree. The game  was more formal than radical, as the player did have control and weren’t just witnessing the game happening around them. But it did somewhat restrict their options to what was provided.

Documentation:

Game: I was going to put in pictures of the game being played but I instead am going to send the game itself. HTML files are not allowed to be posted on the blog so I shall email it after this is published.

The first playtest went smoothly. The player thought the intro I had written provided good context and they felt that it did a good job of putting them in the position of being the significant other. I saw that they were taking their time with decisions and weighing the potential outcomes, which made me very happy as that was an experience I really wanted players to have. When he finished I asked what he was feeling while playing. He said he felt bad/concern and was also worried when he felt like there was no good option, which was decently often. The game made him think of love, depression, not wanting to leave this special person, but also felt a bit uncomfortable. He didn’t have much criticism, except for the fact that there were some typo. This session was very satisfying to me as not only did he enjoy the game but all the goals I wanted to reach were hit. After that I fixed up the typos and added in more observations of the loved one to go along with what they are saying. My other playtests went smoothly as well, with the players all feeling the uneasiness and concern I wanted to be achieved. I thought about making the game a bit longer, but the playtesters that I had play the game felt what I wanted them to experience, so I left it as is. Over the summer I may go back in and work on this project a bit more, and maybe make it span over multiples days.