Month: November 2016

Mike Rinaldi – The Second Mind cutscene sequence

For my final project, I want to add another cutscene / series of events in the town to my game The Second Mind.

Basically, the game is about AI, teaching, control. The main character is an AI, and you can control him whenever you want. the main mechanic is teaching the main character to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and more. In terms of control, the Narrator basically controls everything in the game (outside of AI Mode and player movement). And even then, you control the main character against his will.

The feelings that I would express would be empathy, futility and helplessness. Sometimes, the Narrator can control you against your will. It does not care for the sidequests where you help the townsfolk, so it intentionally tries to prevent you from doing them. For example, it would give you all ‘bad’ dialog options, and you would have to pick one. And for certain characters, you would need to talk to them in order to make them feel better. With the Narrator actively harming this, it creates the feelings of helplessness and longing, and you wish you could actually help the NPC by saying the right things, but you just can’t.

 

For this version, I added two cutscenes. The second one expresses the futility and empathy that I wanted to. You are tasked with keeping one of your friend’s hopes up, but the Narrator gets in the way of this (by giving you bad dialog options) and it causes a scene.

Players thought that one of the main themes was ‘lack of player control’. This is an overarching theme of the game, but I wanted people to feel the empathy more. Someone mentioned ‘the illusion of options’, and described the character as being an ‘accidental asshole’ because of the Narrator’s dialog choices. That same person did not like the fact that all of the dialog options were bad, and it’s ‘stripping control from the player’. That is intended, although the game needs to not be explicitly frustrating to play.

Most players did not use AI mode in dialog, even though you could (and it theoretically leads to better dialog answers). This is something I should explain better.

Many people laughed at either the actions and dialog of the Narrator, or the lack of choices that you had. The Narrator is supposed to be a funny character, but I think this might conflict with the feelings I want to evoke with this sequence. I’ll have to look into that more.

I had one playtest that went exactly how I wanted. My playtester laughed at some of the Narrator dialog, tried to use AI choices (especially when the Narrator prevented it), and verbally expressed their distress at being forced to say things that were bad to say. Emotions expressed were ‘sadness,  distress, anxiety’ and they wanted to ‘try to fix this poor man’s life’.  More people expressed this sadness at viewing bad dialog choices. I think this playtest went well, but I have to tweak a couple things.

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Final project First Play Test- Ilayda Hanci

My board game lets to show what you know about the opposite sex and is based on sexism. First, people divide into a guy’s team and a girls’ team. On each turn, a member of the other team asks the playing team the questions on the card. Players take turn on asking the questions. It is men vs. women in a challenge to answer 3 question categories. It is men vs. women in a challenge to answer 3 question categories.

Each team mixes all the cards and pick one each turn to ask, and each team moves one space by knowing the answer right.  When they pick one card from the deck, they either encounter to an “our facts” card, “our moves” card or “our lives” card. They move 1 space further by knowing the answer right. Each team has in total 1 minute to answer the questions after reading it out loud. If you don’t know how to answer you have 1 skipping choice. After that, you can’t skip any question, so think carefully and spend your time wisely.

The first team to capture all three prizes wins the battle.

Game Requirements:

  • Guy’s team of 3 people
  • Girls’ team of 3 people
  • One host person who keeps track of the time and moves the team’s pawns
  • Men Cards: 116 cards in total
  • Women Cards: 116 cards in total
  • 6 trophies

Materials:

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First design of the gameboard

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Mike – indie game show and tell

My Indie game is ‘Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger And The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist’ This game definitely falls into the ‘experimental’ category. It is very similar to The Stanley Parable, because it was made by the same developer. Also it’s meant to be  a similar experience.

 

 

This game embraces the fact that it’s a game, at multiple times during the story. This happens in The Stanley Parable as well. There is a narrator in this game also, and he guides you throughout the story.

Something I like about the game is that you find out the story at your own pace while playing the game. There are collectibles that you can find that will increase your understanding of the story, which is great. Overall, I feel this game is great at telling the story it does, and it’s pretty short and free, so you all should play it.

 

For my final project, I want to add another cutscene / series of events in the town to my game The Second Mind. I worked on this game for two months just because I had free time, and I really like the way it turned out so far. It’s just a demo right now and I plan on extending it later. I’m at a point where I would need to add more story, so I plan to do that with this project.

Basically, the game is about AI, teaching, control. The main character is an AI, and you can control him whenever you want. the main mechanic is teaching the main character to solve puzzles, defeat enemies, and more. In terms of control, the Narrator basically controls everything in the game (outside of AI Mode and player movement). And even then, you control the main character against his will.

The feelings that I would express would be empathy, futility and helplessness. Sometimes, the Narrator can control you against your will. It does not care for the sidequests where you help the townsfolk, so it intentionally tries to prevent you from doing them. For example, it would give you all ‘bad’ dialog options, and you would have to pick one. And for certain characters, you would need to talk to them in order to make them feel better. With the Narrator actively harming this, it creates the feelings of helplessness and longing, and you wish you could actually help the NPC by saying the right things, but you just can’t. Sometimes, life is like this as well. Sometimes, there are things you want to do, and something else is stopping you from doing so, whether it be another person, the laws, or even a mental disorder. But that doesn’t mean you stop trying.

You can check out the game here:

https://teammike.itch.io/the-second-mind-demo

 

Artwork #3: Intervention on the Orange Line

Intervention on the Orange Line

This intervention-based artwork, as the title indicates, takes place entirely on the orange line. An even number of players, preferably 2-4, will split into even teams and travel 4 stops in opposite directions on the orange line, then back to Ruggles. At each individual stop, I will contact them through Facebook messenger and tell them to perform a specific action (e.g. Running up and down stairs, doing a cartwheel, dancing to music on your headphones) and send a video of the action to progress to the next stop. The team that returns to Ruggles first is the winner.

The inspiration behind this work came from AR based games such as The Jejune institute and Humans VS Zombies. What fascinated me about these works was the idea of a space being created where players could perform these unorthodox actions, and leading to players embracing the absurdity of the situation and becoming immersed. I grew to wonder just how far these games could go in getting people to leave their comfort zone and embrace the AR experience. Jejune managed to get complete strangers to run all around the San Francisco area, and while I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull off something of that scale, my curiosity was piqued. I decided to set my space in the realm of the Orange Line, as I had experimented with games involving the MBTA in the past, and it was a close enough space to campus where a large population of people congregated.

I knew a lot of people involved with theater here at Northeastern, so I thought I would be able to round up some participants relatively quickly. Alas, I had asked almost 100 people to help playtest my game, and all of them said no. Some of them even backed out after accepting to playtest when they heard what the rules were. I had already adjusted the scope multiple times to decrease the time commitment, as that was why some people refused in the first iteration, but there was not enough interest to collect documentation for this project. In hindsight, there were many aspects of testing I could have worked on to get better results. I could have realized that it was a tall order to get people to perform odd tasks in a public place for a long period of time, especially during a time of the year where everyone is swamped with work leading up to finals.  I also could have worked harder and started earlier on finding people willing to participate, I just didn’t think that so many people would turn down the game.

This attempt at an intervention was a failure. My problem was my scope was far too large for this project at this time in the year, even after the changes I made to make it more accessible to the student body. I was too staunch in my ways to change my idea to one that could be more feasible, and as a result, my time ran out and I had no willing participants. If there is a takeaway from this experience, it’s that I should be more flexible with my time and creative vision. If I take on a future project and some unforeseeable circumstances arise that affect its progress, I need to be adaptable regardless of how much it strays from my original vision. The priority is that the project’s message is clear and properly executed.

Indie Game – Salt and Sanctuary

Salt and Sanctuary

Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D action RPG by Ska Studios.

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This game is basically 2D Dark Souls mixed with some Castlevania. The reasons why I love this game are similar to the reasons I love Dark Souls. The combat is crunchy, the lore is mysterious, the level design is interconnecting and interacts with everything else. The atmosphere is also dark and washed out which I like a lot.

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Here is the trailer…

Indie Art/Game: Show & Tell

Abzu

Available here: http://www.abzugame.com

“ABZÛ is an epic descent into the depths of the sea, where players will explore beautifully rendered ocean environments with fluid swimming controls. The experience draws inspiration from the deep innate narrative that we all carry within our subconscious: the story of ABZÛ is a universal myth that resonates across cultures. The name references a concept from the oldest mythologies; it is the combination of the two ancient words AB, meaning ocean, and ZÛ, meaning to know. ABZÛ is the ocean of wisdom.”

The End of Us

(Has no correlation with The Last of Us)

Available here: http://www.the-end-of-us.com

This game portrays the idea of friendship and sacrifice, and does so in a unique and abstract way.

“As you grow and age and eventually start to fade alongside your friend, you come upon an asteroid belt that chips away at both of you. Your final (only?) choice in the game is who will take the fall, and who will have to suffer a solo existence after.”

Dark Echo

Available here:  http://www.darkechogame.com

In order to progress through the game, you must narrate the space using sound. As the game progresses, the rooms become more difficult to navigate, and other obstacles are thrown into the space. Can you make it out alive?

Indie Art Game Show & Tell: Disco Discomfort

Indie Show & Tell

Disco Discomfort

Gameplay Video:

 

Gameplay Description:

Have you ever gone out to do something and feared that everyone in the world would judge you for it? Well if you want a game that’s literally the digital manifestation of your anxious nightmares, this is the game for you! There is little in-world interaction in this game, as its more about the atmosphere than the actions you can perform, but it still is a unique player experience you can’t find anywhere else. Now available on GameJolt!

ACTION CHAIN

Rules:

  • Can have any number of players
  • Each player was given a paper with series of instructions written on
  • The Instructions  include: action 1 & action 2 & conditions for triggering the actions
  • For each player, he or she can choose to do either or both the actions, and they will get a reward at the end of each run according to which action they took, reward 1 for action 1, reward 2 for action 2.

The full set of instructions for all players:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fcdjXhREyVXV6qMxaQKIBC_AZHPX5uUvUZUH2bAL8JI/edit?usp=sharing

For example:

Player 1 has a piece of paper written with:

Do: Clapping

Or: Run infront of the person and clap

When you see a stranger with brown hair

Player 2 has:

Do: Jump 10 times

Or: Go next to the person and clap with the person

When you see someone claps

So once someone started the action, the “chain” will start going, player 1 triggers the condition for player 2, and then player 3…

I started with the idea of making a game about people have no idea what they are doing but they have to achieve a goal to overcome the awkwardness. The two moves on each paper were always divided into two types, one is something you can do on your own like clapping, jumping, smashing the table, and the other move is always something you have to interact with another person.

Why I made the rules this way is because I want to test out how strong the barriers it would be to go to talk/interact/play with someone you may don’t know in order to get a reward in a game, it seems difficult to convince me to talk to a stranger to play with me, and I am curious what’s the reason or motivation for people to play with audiences. For example in the performance art, audiences always play an essential role, in this game I want to find out the what effects the playfulness in between players and audiences since they are all strangers to each other.

The ideal scenario would be this game take place in a “serious” scenario, such as a meeting, a class, a conversation, and something triggers the head of the chain, and suddenly the entire room goes chaos..However I’m not able to make this happened, so instead I just tweaked the rules a little to make it fit the scenario I can have for the playtest.

The playtest went well in general but something I forgot to cover brought some confusion. First of all is the rule for rewards, I didn’t make it specific when it comes to the rewards so I just announced “every time you do the action, you can get a reward.” Which brings a bit of chaos in the end.

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In the end nobody actually go straight up to a stranger and play with them, instead people tend to play with familiar people, which is not surprising, and I wrote the instructions intentionally vague so I can observe where the intervention takes place. For example, for some conditions, I wrote: when you see someone doing something cool, run around the person. I didn’t force that the person has to be a stranger, I want to see when players can cross the barriers to play with people they don’t know.

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In the end unfortunately I have to admit that I didn’t find things I expected to see, there are also a lot of details need to be improved in this piece.

Indie/Art Game Show & Tell

NIGHT IN THE WOODS 

Lost Constellation

 

final game idea dumping

I do not want to create a digital game, I don’t think. Mostly because I’m not particularly confident in my coding abilities, nor do I enjoy coding.

I’m not yet sure how it’ll become a game, but after we were prompted to create a game/experience that explores an underrepresented emotion, I was struck with the idea of using pages out of my old middle school diaries. I know this would lend itself to an intensely personal game, & I’m okay with that. I’m also very attracted to the idea of personal artifacts– much like a readymade or a fluxus kit.

I’m considering some sort of emotion twister– consider Robert Plutchik’s theory of eight basic emotions:

  • Fear → feeling afraid. Other words are terror (strong fear), shock, phobia
  • Anger → feeling angry. A stronger word for anger is rage.
  • Sadness → feeling sad. Other words are sorrow, grief (a stronger feeling, for example when someone has died) or depression (feeling sad for a long time). Some people think depression is a different emotion.
  • Joy → feeling happy. Other words are happiness, gladness.
  • Disgust → feeling something is wrong or dirty
  • Trust → a positive emotion; admiration is stronger; acceptance is weaker
  • Anticipation → in the sense of looking forward positively to something which is going to happen. Expectation is more neutral.
  • Surprise → how one feels when something unexpected happens

perhaps I could modify the game of Twister but also incorporate my diary entries–perhaps the player grabs a random page, reads it, decides what emotion is paramount on that page, & then does something based on that.

 

 

 

 

Indie Game: Show&Tell- Ilayda Hanci

Indie Game/ Show& Tell

The Wild Eight

Game Play Overview- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydp5sSTMhpE

Reveal Trailer- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6NrsPNBJ1Y

 I first saw the game in Game Jolt site which offers a large community of indie games for players around the world. The Wild Eight is an open-world survival game with an interesting storyline. An early alpha version was released through Game Jolt on May 23, 2016 and now you can order the full version online.

Gameplay

The game tells the story of eight people whose everyday lives are changed after a plane crash. They now find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere, deep in the forests of Alaska. While the survivors await rescue, their lives are threatened by a number of mysterious entities, unseen creatures and objects that definitely don’t belong in this world. And the deeper you go, the harder it gets to survive. Players will have to develop survival skills such as shelter building, and hunting in order to survive in this vast land.

In this game, there is no room for mistakes: if you went hunting but forgot to cut some wood for the fire before nightfall, you’re dead. If you didn’t have time to cook your meat, you might have to eat it raw — and if you don’t have medicine, you can die from food poisoning.

You can play The Wild Eight on your own, but the game fully opens up in co-op mode. Other players are your only backup — either by sharing resources or helping you out.

Pictures camp-no-logo-whjfjtw6

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