barrettand

Artist’s Statement

When coming up with an idea for a final project, I knew I wanted to do something digital, but I couldn’t think of a unique enough concept that would be feasible in the time I had with the skills I possessed. I eventually narrowed it down to either a game that utilizes cheat codes, or a game that used music input for controls. I decided on using the cheat code idea as that was the most developed of the two. As I started work on the project, I wonder what narrative possibilities there could be for this type of game and how I could spin the gameplay around such a narrative. QA testing was a quick idea stemming from my experiences on co-op and in other projects, so I tweaked the idea to make it a story about a newly hired QA tester dealing with a poorly made, unfinished product. Thus, the concept of It’s A Feature was born.

Inspiration for this project came from a combination of personal experience, previous works and material from this class. The material that I believe is related to this project is the Dada movement, which had a series of works that turned their respective media on their heads, while also focusing on the audience experience. My game is made to serve as a statement on the frustrations of QA and Bug Fixing, so I intentionally made it as tedious and inefficient as possible. However, I still wanted the game to feel like a game, with a goal and unique gameplay  that maintained the line of challenging and entertaining, similar to how Dadaists maintained some tropes of their media while keeping up their avant-garde style, so I made sure not to go to overboard and provide sufficient tutorial in the console UI for players on any end of the learning curve. The reason I chose a developer’s console format for this game stemmed from my frequent playing and streaming of Garry’s Mod on PC. In GMod, players use a developer’s console to enter cheats such as flight, no collisions, killing all other players, launching nukes, among many other surreal features. I figured the console would be a simple enough format for gamers and designers like me and my classmates to pick up on, and sure enough, they managed to pick up on the system with very little assistance. Non-gaming inclined players might take a bit longer to grasp the system, but that’s why the tutorial is so descriptive.

Playtesting for this game occurred over several instances in two different classes. Overall, the game was very successful in bringing about intense frustration in the player, as the first couple of playtesters swore and screamed many times over the course of the game. Despite the frustration, they still said the game was fun and I had a clear and well-executed message.  One complaint some playtesters had was that some of the UI needed to be tweaked in early iterations, specifically in the mock developer console, in order ton make the experience a little more realistic (i. e. Getting rid of inefficient buttons that could be replaced with a key press, and switching around some key commands to pertain to certain), but that was easily fixed in the more recent iteration.

Documentation:

Click below for .exe file:

its_a_feature

This Class’s Effect On Me

The materials offered in this course on Dadaism, Kaprow Happenings, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, The Institute etc. focused a great deal on Human Experience, and they seem to have had a great effect on me during the course. All of my major projects had something to do with re-experiencing events with a modified perspective, and managed to cover various mediums of artwork instead of just the digital games I had become accustomed to working with.

My First Project took a simple, everyday action, eating a meal, and turned it into a music theory experience. It brought to light how little we think about mundane actions, and the psychological presence of music all around us. I found it to be a fascinating score, despite it’s non-game feel, and it opened up my prior inhibitions about any other experimental works in the class.

My Second Project, a more game-like one, doubled as an analysis of vernacular and tradition in gaming communities as well as a creative mod of a popular title. It helped me realize the hidden depths possible in a game that appropriated so many assets and mechanics, so long as they are executed properly and well-explained in any write-ups.

My Third Project, while a failure, was still ambitious in its concept and did manage to teach me something about development and human behavior. It was an ambitious guidance system that tried to drag people out of their comfort zone in public, as this class had done to me a couple of times. However, I didn’t manage my scope hard enough, and I didn’t take into account people’s willingness for public performance, and I couldn’t garner support for a playtest. Now, I have learned from that mistake and used the lesson learned in other projects this semester.

My Fourth Project is gone into detail above, and it was subjectively one of my better works this semester. I think I have greatly grown as a designer thanks to this course, with the materials, assignments, and other activities providing many new ideas to expand my scope for brainstorming and developing concepts. I am grateful for all the offerings this course had to help me grow and prepare for the field of game design, and hopefully I can continue to apply this acquired skills in future courses/assignments/projects/positions.

Thank you and good night.

Fighting games are some of the most competitive games out there, as such, there are a bunch of implicit rules in place in order to keep the competition fair and exclusive to “pros”. What I mean by that is that these rules require an intense understanding of the game’s mechanics, and any player that is trying to learn the ropes is ostracized. One of these rules involves the action of “Spamming”, or repeatedly using a strong move to gain an advantage instead of utilizing combos or other tools. Spamming is looked down upon in numerous fighting game communities, but nowhere is it more widely used than in the Street Fighter series. That’s where the idea for this project stemmed. I looked at the game “Street Fighter II”, arguably the most well-known of the series, and thought: “What would happen if all you could fight with was projectiles?” So, I recreated the code as best as I could and left only projectile attacks for the players. I made only one hit be the win condition for the project because the projectiles consistently collide and destroy each other as they do in the real game, and having to repeatedly hit the opponent without colliding with another projectile could get a bit tedious.

From the start, I wanted to do a digital project for this assignment, so my first theorized approach to appropriation was taking assets from a previously made game and reusing them in a different context, similar to Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds”. I remembered seeing a play-through of the indie game “DiveKick”, a fighting game where all you could do was jump and kick and one hit was all it took to win, and I wondered how I could do something similar in a way that fit the theme of the assignment. I knew that limiting to a physical attack would be too obvious for this project, I needed to limit gameplay to a move that isn’t supposed to be used every 5 seconds. Projectiles came to me pretty quickly, and I knew Street Fighter would be relatively easy to recreate in a Unity Engine, and I completed the first prototype in about 2 days.

Play-testing for this project occurred over two sessions. For the first session in a class, I had the two players sit down and read the instructions before playing. They appeared to have fun during the session, though they were a bit confused by the controls the first couple of rounds they played. They got the hang of it, and reception was overall positive saying how they enjoyed the fact that the only move you could do was projectiles. Of course, the two were not avid fighting game players, so how effective it would be on more experienced players was still up in the air. The second session was with two more “hardcore” fighting game players, I explained the rules and they began play. They too caught on to the controls quickly, and got very competitive over it, yelling expletives at each other and hastily trying to be the fastest button pushers. It reminded me of a real competition for Super Smash Brothers I’d participate in during my Freshman year. Overall, I think it captured the idea behind my project quite well, as the players were able to have fun despite the constant spamming. There was no elitism over “the right way to play”, there was just two players trying to win, and that’s all competition’s supposed to be about.

Documentation: