Caleb

Game Overview

Follow the Line is a short minimalist art game where the player is tasked with a simple goal: to follow the line in front of them. Players will have to jump through platforms, avoid obstacles, and persist through unexpected divergences in order to follow this line.
Players will find that, upon reaching a certain point in the game, their path will repeat. This will continue to repeat until the player chooses to quit the game after a ‘Game Over,’ after which they will win the game.

Controls:
WASD to move
Spacebar to jump
Mouse to select UI options

Link to web-embed of game: https://cmnu.itch.io/follow-the-line
(Play in fullscreen mode for the best experience)

Artist’s Statement

I created this game with two main sources of inspiration in mind: another art game I’ve played in the past, Every day the same dream, and my own experiences with the education system growing up.
Every day the same dream is a game that takes place in a grayscale world that features the player’s avatar going through the same day over and over again, following the same routine each time: waking up, commuting to work, and then working in a cubicle for the rest of the day. Throughout the game, the player can choose to do various activities to interrupt this routine, such as going to work in their underwear, ditching their car on the way to work and reconnecting with nature, or visiting a graveyard with a homeless person. I won’t spoil the rest of the game here if you are interested in playing. The game takes between 10 and 20 minutes on average to complete and it is able to pack a lot of messages within this relatively short playtime.

When this project was assigned to us, I knew immediately that I wanted to do something similar to Every day the same dream, as it is one of my favorite art games. I took the cyclical nature of its gameplay loop and applied it to my own life with a similar cyclical experience that I paid a lot of attention to during my time in high school.

At that time, a lot of my life felt like it was going on a predetermined “path to success” that adults in my family would repeat to me ad infinitum, that many other children also hear: get good grades in school, go to a good college/university, get a good job. This was repeated as far back as I can remember, and every level of school felt like it all played back into this “path to success.” For example, at least in my own experiences, getting good grades in elementary school means getting put in harder programs in middle school which means getting put in an honors program in high school which makes a stronger college resume which makes for a stronger work resume. As an at-the-time 16ish year old, over half of my life at that point was about meeting goal points along this path, and reaching a goal just meant I was on-track to meet the next one. There was a time where I felt like this endless cycle would never be over. Obviously this cycle does eventually reach an end, as I am set to finally graduate next semester, but I wanted to create a game that captures this feeling that I used to have.

From this experience and with inspiration from Every day the same dream, I created this game, Follow the Line. Similar to my own childhood experiences, the player is tasked with simply following this line, or the “path.” Even through obstacles, the player must continue to follow this line. The player, in certain sections, is punished for moving off of this line. If the player ever falls off the line, they need to move forward anyway to get back on that line. At the end of it all, upon reaching what the player thinks is the end of the line, the line just keeps going and going. The mechanics of this line reflects those feelings I had in high school of feeling like I was repeating the same things over and over again for a goal that felt so far out of sight.

The win-state for this game is simply, upon getting a ‘Game Over,’ i.e. falling off the map, choosing to quit the game. This represents the idea of moving off of this path and creating one’s own ideal path forward in life, something that I was able to do through pursuing game development as a career (granted, it still fits along that “path to success,” but it was my choice to stay on it.) This isn’t to say that this “path to success” is objectively a wrong one, as there are really no wrong paths, but I wanted this game to reward going off of the intended path. Everyone has the right to choose what their path forward is, and while people can make suggestions about what that path can look like, no one should be able to make the choice of what path to follow besides the person following it.

Intervention Game: Attempting to Book a Club Room

This game, Attempting to Book a Club Room, is a scavenger hunt-esque game that takes place during a club meeting of the Northeastern University Game Development Club (NUGDC). In this game, a normal meeting is interrupted by an actor proclaiming that their current club room has been acquired by another club, and the NUGDC needs to find another club room utilizing Northeastern services.

Goal
The goal for the players is to find the final club room location for that week’s NUGDC meeting.

Requirements/Materials
– At least 3 actors (including the “game master”)
– Website handout (handout here, website here) and riddle poem (here) for two scenes of the game
– General script outline for the game (here) for GM and actors to follow
– Access to a starting room and Ryder rooms 143 and 207

Rules/Setup
There are no explicit rules for the game for the players to be aware of, as this experience is one that is suddenly put onto the players of the game. Each session should be led by a “game master” (GM) to help direct the players through each “scene” of the game. As this was designed to only be run at an NUGDC club meeting, this is the ideal place to run the game. However, choosing another starting location is possible. As the GM, the only rule for you to follow is to let the players do all the work but answer questions with appropriate clarity as players ask them.

Scene 1: Kariotis 110 (or other room)
The game starts in this initial location that starts with dialogue between the GM and the NEU Admin actor. The NEU Admin hands the GM the paper handout that lists the link for the website that contains a quick puzzle for the players to solve. Open up this website on a projector or some other way that is easily seen by all players. By following links on the website, there will be a table with room numbers and corresponding 5-letter combinations that represent different buildings on campus. The answer to the wordle (RYDER) will show the correct room by finding Ryder Hall in the website’s table.

Scene 2: Ryder 143
An actor should be placed at this location ahead of time playing the role as the Club President in the dialogue outline. After the dialogue is complete between the GM, Club President, and NEU Admin, the players will be handed the riddle poem that leads to the next room. The synopsis of the riddle’s answers are as follows:
1. The next club room is also in Ryder
2. The code for the room can be found by counting objects on the first floor of Ryder as specified by the riddle
3. The first number is the number of bathroom sets on the first floor, being 2
4. The second number is the number of courtyards in Ryder, being 0
5. The third number is the number of CAMD banners in the foyer of Ryder, being 7
6. The final club room will be in Ryder 207

Scene 3: Ryder 207
The game will then end upon reaching Ryder 207. This will include a debriefing about the game and what its purpose was (which I will talk more about in my artist statement). As this was a part of an NUGDC meeting, our club concluded with a short presentation on Games as an Art Form where I presented on some of the things I’ve learned so far in this class (slides here if you’re curious).

Artist’s Statement

The inspiration for this game started with seeing the Uncle Roy All Around You game and the Men in Grey intervention piece. In Uncle Roy, players were asked to explore a large city, both in-real-life and virtually, in order to find the office of an “Uncle Roy.” In Men in Grey, people on a vulnerable internet connection were shown their current internet activity through a screen on suitcases by passing men in grey suits. There was one aspect in each of these that I really wanted to replicate for my own piece: in Uncle Roy, the idea of going on a large-scale adventure that requires a player to get on their feet, and in Men in Grey, the idea of unexpectedly taking people out of a place of comfort. I combined these two ideas into the general concept of this game: to suddenly whisk people on an adventure that would take unsuspecting players around campus on the hunt for a specific location.

With this general idea in mind, I had two problems. I wanted to make this game purposeful in that it conveys some kind of message, and I wanted some kind of consent to play from my players without giving them any kind of hints that they would be playing the game. As I am an eboard member of the NUGDC, I participate in weekly meetings about proceeding club meetings and activities, and during one such meeting, we realized we had an opening one week and needed something to fill it with. I saw this as an opportunity to run such a game during the club meeting, as everyone attending is always expecting to participate in some kind of game-related activity. Seeing as the club meeting would be the ideal setting for this game, I also wanted the message of the game to be something club-relevant. I thought back to some of the problems I’ve encountered as an eboard member of the NUGDC, and remembered one that was very prolific at the start of the semester, being the difficulties getting an adequately-sized club room.

Newfound inspiration in mind, I began to develop the game around the idea that the players would be jumping from club room to club room, trying to find one to hold the meeting while getting kicked out of ones they would find for reasons beyond their control. I knew that I wanted some relatively easy puzzles to be the way that they would find each subsequent room after the first, but as I needed to fit the game into the club meeting’s allotted time and still have time for a presentation afterward, I also needed to make them easy enough to not spend a whole lot of time on. I had a tough time coming up with puzzles that related to my design, so I broadened the purpose of the game to including some general dissatisfactory aspects of NEU that I’ve noticed over the years. Specifically, I took inspiration from some of the archaic websites (at least by today’s standards) that sometimes didn’t even work that I would need to use in order to do things like book rooms for certain events. I decided to represent this in the game by having increasingly-archaic ways of “generating” new club rooms for players to find, being a very minimal website and a delivered letter in the form of a riddle written in cursive.

Just having the puzzles and game progression wasn’t enough, though, and my game still had one major unaddressed issue: I couldn’t run this by myself. There were multiple interactions that would only make sense if I had other people playing as actors to represent different voices in this narrative I was constructing. So, I enlisted the help of two other eboard members to play the role of a strict and punctual NEU admin, and a club president that is also caught in this mess trying to find a club room for their club. With the dialogue outline written, the puzzles designed, and the progression for the game detailed, this game turned into a very fun experience for everyone involved.

Documentation

Game Description

Number of Players: 2

Materials:

• 3 tennis balls
• 3 cardboard boxes, each of varying sizes, with holes cut into the bottom
  • The smallest box has 3 holes, the medium-sized box has 4 holes, and the largest box has 5 holes
  • The medium and large boxes also contain openings in the middle of each wall where the wall meets the bottom

Rules:

• Determine which player will start the game holding the box and which player will start the game throwing the tennis balls into the box.
• The player starting the game holding the box must take the smallest box.
• The throwing player and the box-holding player stand 6 feet apart from each other.
  • Both players must keep their feet firmly planted in place until they switch roles or the thrower misses a ball.
• The throwing player will throw each ball one at a time into the box.
  • Balls that miss the box entirely can be retrieved and rethrown.
• The player holding the box must attempt to balance each ball inside of the box such that each ball is in the box at the same time.
• The round is over once each ball is thrown.
  • If all 3 balls are not in the box, the players will switch roles and repeat. If the goal is not met within 6 rounds (each player plays both roles 3 times), both players lose.
  • If all 3 balls are balanced in the box, the players repeat the above with the box of the next largest size.

Goal:

The game is won when the players have successfully balanced 3 balls at once in each of the available boxes.

Artist’s Statement:

This game was inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s use of a urinal in his piece, Fountain (1917). Duchamp’s idea to use an object that many people see every day as an art piece while commenting on its original purpose inspired me to do the same with the stipulation that I only use items that I could find in my room. This design restraint was implemented for two main reasons. The first of which was to emulate Duchamp’s appropriation of an every-day object into a work of art, or in my case, a game. The second was to minimize the costs of producing a game.

My apartment room is a fairly small one, and in order to neatly organize all of my belongings, I have a lot of storage containers and boxes lying around with various items inside of them. This game was inspired by two that were sitting right beside each other: a box for an Instant Pot, and a crate container with multiple holes on each of its sides. I thought about how often smaller objects fell out of the holes on each side of the container and what good a container was if it couldn’t contain things. I then thought about turning that idea into a game with my very busted-up Instant Pot cardboard box. The box was fairly used-up, and if it ever got to the point where it could no longer fulfill its purpose of being a container, I wanted to use this game as a way to give it new purpose. In the game, the tennis balls act as the item to be stored, and the player holding the box signifies the attempt to hold onto that box’s purpose while turning it into a fun cooperative game.

Score:

Sit down with an instrument
Pick a song you would like to play with your instrument
Prepare to play an audio recording of your song
Remove yourself from the noise of the outside world such that you hear the instrument as little as possible when played
Prepare to play the instrument correctly as you have done before
Play your song to completion while listening to your recording

Artist Statement:

“Maestro for a Moment” was created with two pieces of inspiration in mind. The first form of inspiration is a passive desire of mine that I’ve had for a while: to learn to play the piano. I call it “passive” because, while I think the idea of being able to play the piano well is a fun one, I actually don’t care enough about it to put in the multiple years of effort it would take to learn it on a professional level. In my mind, it has always been restricted to passing an open piano at a mall, an airport, or even the Curry Student Center, and just thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

The second inspiration was David Tudor who was known for composing indeterminate pieces, such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) and Music of Changes (1951). An indeterminate music piece is one that introduces some level of chance to the musical score so that creates an indeterminable outcome, one that is unique to each performance of the piece. I thought this was fascinating due to how it changes the fundamental idea of a musical performance. When one thinks of a concert, they typically think of a musician practicing a set of instructions, the musical score, to produce some kind of expected outcome, the song. David Tudor entertained the thought of changing that formula to produce an unexpected outcome rather than an expected one; from instructed input and expected output to instructed input and unexpected output.

With these two things in mind, I constructed this score to evoke a feeling into the person performing it: that they can play an instrument they don’t actually know how to play. I did this through playing with that formula of performance much like the way David Tudor did, except I reversed the changes he made to it. Instead of an instructed input with an unexpected output, this score displays an uninstructed input with an expected output. The uninstructed input is the user’s ability (or lack thereof) to play the instrument “correctly.” What “play[ing] the instrument correctly” really means is to just play the instrument in a way that feels correct to the user. Whether or not that is actually correct doesn’t matter, because by removing their ability to hear the music they are physically playing and replacing it with a recording of the song they actually want to play (the expected output), they feel like they are producing the music with their instrument that they are listening to.

While not intended to be so, some participants took to making this into a performative piece instead of a personal one by wanting to record the actual music they created with their instrument to play it back for themselves and others. This doesn’t fall in-line with the feeling I wanted to evoke in this score, so I didn’t want to enforce this instruction. However, because this is supposed to be a personal score, I would encourage anyone wanting to play this score to do whatever they wish with what they create.