Artwork #4: Experience

This is a short narrative game. I used Twine to create this.

This game is inspired by Dys4ia. When player reacts with one scene/page, system directs player to the next one. Also, there are some ‘dialogue’ in the game, which leads player understand the game without any game mechanics introduction.

There is no rules or goals for this game, player only needs to click on the button to interact with the system. Just like talking to a friend. In fact, it was designed for the player who feels bad. If player feels happy, they are not going to play this game, which means the game will just stop for them. If player feels bad, they will need to ‘choose’ the reasons that they feel bad. Then, the system will show some comforting and encouraging sentences with pictures to them.

The reason I designed this game is that, sometimes, when some people feel unhappy, they pretend to hide the emotions in their hearts instead of telling their friends, since they thought they don’t want to ruin their friends’ day. Actually, I am one of these people. I think if there’s someone could ask and comfort me will make me much more better. But it is also important for us to take the initiative to tell others our worries.

In the game, there were several options to choose for showing the reasons of ‘sad’, which they are final week, being sick, upset for no reason, and ‘don’t want to share.’ If the player chose final week, being sick, upset for no reason, 5 encouraging sentences will show up with aesthetic pictures. If the player chose ‘don’t want to share’, the system would ‘tell’ 2 jokes to the player, try to make them feel happy, even though it might be a SPEECHLESS funny.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pFpe4CMaoNbHK23zlp4qYHj6Ouhhmu6m/view?usp=share_link

(Please download the link to open.)

Artist’s Statement:

An important genre to me and for the history of gaming is the Shmup genre, or the Shoot ‘em up genre. One of the most well-known video games is Space Invaders, which is one of the first and earliest games in this genre, following in its footsteps comes Galaxian and eventually the more popular Galaga. This is usually where the common knowledge of the genre stops and I wanted to showcase what the history as well as what comes after, what the genre looks like now. I was inspired by how Andy Warhol was able to use appropriation and historical moments to both make art and share knowledge about the topic of art. Appropriation played a very large role in my artwork. This artwork was done in Unity, by switching scenes around once a certain part is reached. The artwork starts as Space Invaders, recreated in Unity, then switches to a recreation of Galaga using Assets from an asset bundle in the unity Asset store, after that it switches to a bullet hell boss, created using Danmokou, which is a bullet hell engine made within unity. This is all to show the evolution of the genre

Here are three videos showing parts from each portion of the art/game (I suggest muting the video since the sound did not record properly even though there was not much sound anyway, if sound is not muted there will be a loud buzzing sound):

Space Invader

Galaga

Danmokou (Touhou Clone)

Space Invaders artwork is recreated from Space Invaders

I used a tutorial from Zigurous on youtube: How to make Space Invaders in Unity (Complete Tutorial) ?? – YouTube

For Galaga the artwork is originally from galaga and recreated by Playniax

The Galaga Essentials from the unity asset store: Galaga Essentials | Systems | Unity Asset Store

Danmokou created by Bagoum: What is Danmokou? (bagoum.com)

Game Instructions (Targeted game experience)

Share images of you and your family featuring your pet over a long period of time. (in this case, my partner and his cat over a 10 year period)

Have the game master (in this case, me) distort the images such that only the pet is clear.

Shuffle the images!

Have the player(s) attempt to reorder the distorted images chronologically.

Finally, reveal the correct order to the player(s).

By Sophie Uldry

Artist’s Statement:

With this last created experimental game experience, I wanted to celebrate cats (and other pets) as family members. Through my journey of involving cats in my art, I have only grown to love and appreciate my cats and their various personalities all the more. I wanted to evoke in my targeted players the nostalgia of past experiences with cats, and share my love for cats with the players. The Family Timeline game I created uses various stages to accomplish this. This game was inspired by artworks created in the way of Appropriation, inspired by the Dada movement’s influence on appropriation, and artists who were inspired by the movement such as Andy Warhol and his borrowing and modifying (appropriating) readymade images of unique American icons. I take existing images, edit them, shuffle them, and use them as the medium for which to provide an experience of nostalgia. Firstly I acquired lots of images from the players, the images need to be scattered over a long period of time and include at least one person with the same cat throughout the years. I chose to make this targeted experience for my partner, so he and his parents looked through albums to find suitable images to share with me. This experience in itself is the biggest point of nostalgia, since it urges the players to look through albums of their past with their pets (in this case, cats). Afterwards, I took a handful of the images given to me and edited them such that the only clear aspect of the images is the cat in each one. Then I shuffled the edited images and asked that the players try to order them chronologically primarily using the cat as a point of reference. Ideally this would be done as a card game, with all of the photo edits laid out in front of the player such that they can clearly look at each of them at the same time. Unfortunately, my playtests were all conducted digitally in the format of a Google Form (available here) such that it was more easily available to the players who were not presently with me. This provided limitations in how I presented the images and how they were answered. I hope to reconduct playtests for this project over the next month to test different edits of images and different playing mediums, because I feel that the game held a lot of potential in portraying my desired messages of pets being a significant part of a family experience, and I can stand to improve this version further. I would also like to note that the form I am sharing is available for anyone to try to play, but obviously won’t accomplish the same results when played by people who both have no history with the pet in question, and did not have an opportunity to relive the nostalgia of searching through photo albums.

Below are the images I used in creating my experience ordered correctly. They are answer keys, please do not inspect if you wish to blindly try Family Timeline via the form shared above!

Artist’s Statement

For this artwork, I wanted to explore and experience and feelings surrounding trust. I play a variety of mainstream class-based team shooters and although I need to trust in my teammates, I feel this genre often conflates trust in one’s teammates with expectations on their performance and then surprise or disappointment, often resulting in a toxic play space. I wanted to design a game where both players are truly at the mercy of each other and (due to a limited amount of information provided to each) must work together to move forward.

As such I designed Halves of a Brain, an in-person party game with 2 players and a moderator / quiz grader. An audience is also encouraged! There is a Describer (left-brain) and a Drawer (right-brain), each with one half of a pop-quiz, each sitting in a chair back-to-back.  The Describer has the quiz questions and the Drawer has the quiz answers (but no idea what the question is). The brain analogy refers to how I like to imagine my brain cells communicate, turning memories lost deep in my mind into concepts and then into concrete answers. Similarly, the Describer must look at the answers and try to conceptualize this into an image that they will then describe how to draw to the Drawer. They must only describe how to draw lines and shapes and can’t use the word they are trying to describe or its synonyms. The Drawer must draw out this image and interpret it into an answer for the question. There are 5 questions and 15 minutes. Winning means getting a passing grade. The moderator/instructor can grade as they like with partial credit if they choose.

I was inspired by Yoko Ono’s cut piece, a performance which required the canvas (Yoko Ono) to trust others to participate safely and move the piece in a new direction. Both parties needed each other and there was an tension in the room as strangers needed to be trusted to participate without harming Yoko Ono. I was also inspired by the split information system used in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

The Describer must trust that the Drawer is interpreting their instructions correctly and guessing correctly and the Drawer must trust that the Designer is providing an accurate description and not leading them astray. The Drawer can’t move forward without the Describer and the Describer has no power to complete the quiz. This creates an interlocked relationship of trust and need that I wanted to explore.

Playtests

Quiz:

• Trivia Question: Which instrument is associated with Earl ‘Bud’ Powell?
  • Answer: Piano
• Trivia Question: In which branch of the arts is Katherine Dunham famous?
  • Answer: Ballet
• Trivia Question: Who had an interest in psychic phenomena and held séances in the White House?
  • Answer: Abraham Lincoln
• Trivia Question: In Swedish, a skvader is a rabbit with what unusual feature?
  • Answer: Wings
• Trivia Question: What color does gold leaf appear if you hold it up to the light?
  • Answer: Green

Caleb (Describer) and Thomas (Drawer)

Jarrett (Describer) and Jennifer (Drawer)

Notes

It took the groups around 2 minutes to complete each drawing with harder ones taking around 5 minutes. I originally has a 5 minute timer but extended it to 15 because 5 was way too short. It was interesting to notice that in the second playtest group, Jarrett opted not to draw what he was describing on his own end, but wrote what he was thinking before opting to just say it instead. The playtesters were laughing a lot and it was fun to see how they reacted to the answers at the end. The game is also very interesting to watch, seeing how in-sync the players are and watching them interpret what’s going on in their mind in real time. It’s definitely a game where users can swap roles and get a different experience.

Dungeon_Alive: A traveler has found a mysterious place with guardians…

WASD to move

LMB to attack

P to restart the game

Artist Statement:

For our project, we were inspired by the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) by Jennifer Gradecki & Derek Curry from 2015 to 2021. We got inspiration from cheating and tricking the players, and we want to make the players feel more by playing through the game but not get to the point very soon. From the first, we were considering making a digital game about learning player’s behaviors. We would like to make a dungeon which could learn the player’s action and then give some different feedback to cheat or annoy the player. However, from that starting point to begin our project it is a little hard to consider what we want to express. Therefore, we stepped back to the concept of the name of our project – Dungeon “Alive.” We would like to make our players have a feeling that the dungeon is alive, so we switch the views from the player to the “enemies.” How would I react to the player’s behaviors in the condition I am one of the people in the dungeon. If that is not a game, I guess most of the people would react the same while a stranger is getting closer and closer to you and trying to attack you. Apparently, you will try to defend yourself and try to get away from that guy, which is the same as the people in the dungeon. The interesting point is while the players are playing through the game, they will find that their actions are unchangeable and which will completely change the game. Therefore, Dungeon Alive is a game where all of your actions, not just attacks, will affect the dungeon. Through our project, we would like to let people be aware that: It is human beings’ nature to long for power, however this power could also bring different feelings to others, and that could even totally change their lives…

What’s Special:

If you trying to get close to the guardians with the weapon, they will attack you due to self-defense.

If you trying to attack the guardians, they will fight you back. However, the guardians have different humanities, so some of them will fight you back by chasing you positively, but some of them will only stay on the spot.

We create a glitch room for the player who has killed lots of enemies. There’s a powerful weapon that the player can choose to use or not. The shape of a gun refers to the ultimate power. The player may abuse the power in the rest of the levels.

The enemies will run away from the player if the player kills an enemy with the gun. All of them can understand the power of the gun. Then, they lost the will to fight.

Artist Statement

For my final project, I wanted to do a game about planting trees and solving environmental problems. I grew up in rural New Hampshire, so I always took having a close relationship with nature for granted. Now, living in a city for most of the year, I find myself longing for that connection. With this game, I wanted to bring some of the wonders of nature to people who might not normally enjoy it, hopefully encouraging people to plant trees and help make their city or town more green. Another inspiration for this game is Atuel, a documentary game showcased at IndieCade 2022, which teaches the player about the Atuel River Valley in Argentina. Atuel is filled with stories from locals describing the deep spiritual connection they and their ancestors have with the river. While my game does not include stories such as this, I hope the mechanics and feeling of the world can help the player form a spiritual connection with nature. The name of my game at the moment is “Treedom” but that is subject to change. Treedom is a 2D platformer set in a forested environment. However, in this forest, something is off. The plants and animals are unhappy and some are even angry. The player navigates the world trying to fix these problems. The first enemy (and the only enemy right now, though I plan to continue this project and add more in the future) is an acorn. When they player strikes the acorn with his shovel (clicking mouse 1) the acorn is pushed into the ground and grows into a red tree. This tree is climbable and allows the player to navigate to places they could not have otherwise. Some other enemy/level ideas include a level where you enter a bee hive and have to calm down the hungry bees by collecting honey for them, another type of seed that grows into a tree you can wall jump off of, and a flock of birds you have to lead on their migration.  I am also in the process of outlining a story for the game that helps tie these events, ideas, and levels together to hopefully have my player go out and develop a relationship with nature.

Playtest 1

Notes from the first playtest

• Finalize models
• Jumping wasn’t working quite right
• The level needs more work to feel interesting
• The background feels really empty

Build of Game At First Playtest

(see class folder)

Current Build of the Game

Below is a quick clip of some gameplay from the current build which you can download below.

Download

(see class folder)

Tilesets/Art Used

https://anokolisa.itch.io/high-forest-assets-pack

https://pixelfrog-assets.itch.io/kings-and-pigs

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/pocketants/images/6/6b/Acorn_image.png/revision/latest?cb=20220915181253

After getting the prompt for the final project, I quickly realized that I wanted to make the game revolve around language. Despite being something people use every day to communicate with each other, language is not explored in games very often, and I wanted to see what themes I could explore with it. I quickly settled on a game paralleling the way the English Language has evolved over time. After refining my idea more, I eventually outlined a game like Risk where the territory contested by players also equates to words in the English dictionary.

My chief inspiration was an art video game discussed in class where the player rearranged words in a sentence to manipulate the rules of the game itself. I really loved the concept of playing with words and it definitely sent in the direction of my finished project. Another inspiration was the concept of appropriation that often came up during class. I really enjoy games that play with the rules and concepts of existing games and I felt like doing so would be a good starting off point.

My first step in creating the game was making the map. Because the game involved players fighting over the English language, I felt like an appropriate map would be one of Great Britain.

The concept of the game is that each player takes control of one of four language groups that have influenced the English language: Old Brittonic, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Frankish. Old Brittonic was a Celtic language and the first spoken in Britain. Anglo-Saxon was spoken by Germanic invaders who conquered and settled Great Britain during the Dark ages. Old Norse was spoken by Scandinavian conquerors who settled large parts of Britain before being repulsed by the Anglo-Saxons. Frankish was spoken by the Normans who conquered Britain and established England as we know it today. Frankish was a hybrid Germanic and Romance language spoken in modern day France. In each region on the map were symbols that each language had a word for. When a player takes a region, they place a small slip of paper with that has their language’s word for the symbol on the region. Every symbol and its corresponding cards were also given numbers to make gameplay easier.

After I finished the map, I began to collect words from the four languages into a google sheet. This proved to be by far the most challenging part of this project. While I could find comprehensive dictionaries translating to English of both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, Frankish and Old Brittonic proved more challenging. Fortunately for me, in the English language’s history, Frankish sort of won out, and a lot of English words come from that language. Brittonic, on the other hand, was incredibly challenging. Brittonic was the first language spoken and Britain, and was gradually erased by a revolving door of Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman-Frankish invasions. I was able to find some Brittonic words, but for the most part I had to delve into languages that evolved from it to fill out my list. For this I used Welsh and Breton, Welsh being the historical language of Wales and Breton being spoken in the French province of Brittany, which was settled by Britons pushed out of England by the Anglo-Saxons. Most of the words in these two languages are quite similar because of their common ancestry, but when the two disagreed I went for the Welsh word because I felt like the lack of French influence would make it better reflect Old Brittonic.

This is a good time to point out that I am not a professional linguist or a philologist (language historian). I tried my best, but my dictionaries are not perfect. Some other important factors to acknowledge are that during the time period these languages existed in, language was very decentralized and often changed region to region. Someone speaking Anglo-Saxon in one part of England was not necessarily speaking the same language as an Anglo-Saxon in another part. Also, while I’m pretty sure each word I found roughly translates to the symbols on the map, that doesn’t mean that the word precisely has that definition nor does it mean that there aren’t more precise words I could have used. That being said I was chiefly aiming for the appearance of old languages, and even if the dictionaries I assembled aren’t perfect, they still fill the purpose I needed them to.

After assembling the dictionary I began to piece together the physical game. I bought beads to be used as pieces, created the word cards, and printed out the map.

Because of all the research involved, I was only able to get my game together before the day where we presented, so it was also my first play test. Despite this the test went really well, but there were a few hiccups in the rules that needed to be sorted out on the go. Fortunately my group were super responsive and quick to give feedback one what could be improved. One great example was how in my original rules when one player attacks another and one has more pieces than another, the player with more pieces rolls more dice, just like in risk. However in my version the player with more dice adds the die together, which makes defending against much larger forces virtually impossible. The players quickly pointed this out early on so we changed the rule to the highest single die wins with tie going to the defender, which was the original rule from Risk.

I really enjoyed this project and I honestly think I might continue working on it. I already have some ideas on how to improve the game, such as making the map physically bigger and adding more regions, and it would be interesting to see how much I can polish it as a game.