Thesis Games, Synesthesia, and Surprise Changes

The semester has started, and the first two weeks were a little weird. The first week was a little uneventful. We mostly just met the new instructors, and talked about the plan for our thesis games. First weeks tend to be a little mundane.

However, as a cohort we spoke at length about our thesis games. We were free to pitch our final design docs from last semester's game design class, or anything else we wanted to pitch. But everyone had to pitch, alone or on a team, and a team could consist of up to five people. Pretty simple. This would eventually lead into Bob, Roger, Craig, and Mark deciding on which games would be prototyped for the industry panel night in four weeks, where our thesis games would be decided upon. Or at least this was the plan we had been told for a semester.

I thought about pitching The Next Dragon, my game design final, but after considering the animation and modeling requirements, I came to the conclusion that it just wouldn't be feasible. I really like that game design idea, but with our current artist constraints (meaning we have two artists our of 25 people) it was better left un-pitched. Jason K came up to me shortly after I decided this and pitched a basic synesthesia idea that combined the grinding mechanic of Sonic Adventure 2 with a rhythm game mechanic of grinding on strings. I love music games, and this type of game, while the artistic theme is incredibly important, it's not super asset intensive. We brainstormed a bit, and came up with some ways to expand the game, but it just wasn't clicking completely for me. I loved it, but it needed something more.

Meet Vinyl, the game where the player's avatar is the needle of a record, and the player grinds the grooves of the vinyl, controlling the speed and balance, both affecting the sound of the music. I played a ton of music games, such as Sound Shapes, Dyad, Beat Hazard, and Audiosurf, and took meticulous notes on what I liked and what I didn't. Then I spent many sleepless nights working on the design in my head, until the Saturday before the pitch (which was on Tuesday), I finally had that "A-ha" moment.

Not that a-ha.

For Christmas my girlfriend got me a nice audio setup with a turntable, something I've been wanting to get into for long time. I started to look up just how records work and why I like the sound better. That led into discovering how the vinyl literally transcribes the analog sound wave on the record, and  how records create stereo sound, among other things. This served as the inspiration for our newly reborn, Phoeinx-like game: Vinyl. I immediately wrote a bunch of design down on mine and Jason's Google doc and then texted Jason. After we discussed some of the finer details, I got to work on our pitch. See the presentation below (unfortunately the awesome, rave-like glow effect I put on every piece of text and image didn't translate):

My biggest concern with all of the music games I played over the weekend was that most of the mechanics didn't act as any sort of metaphor for the music I was experiencing. So my design question was: how can I create a music game that uses the mechanics as a metaphor for music creation or experience? I decided to get pretty literal, and eventually made the player the needle of a record player, where the player is actually creating music by expressing the sound waves on a vinyl record. It also happened to match up with the grinding mechanic that Jason wanted to use (and looked really cool). Sometimes it's kind of amazing when things work out so well. Whether that was due to a lot of hard work or a little luck, I don't mind either way.

So we gave our pitch, and got some feedback. I knew things were looking good when I had multiple people come up to me after the pitch and express their desire to work on our game. But it wasn't up to us right? The powers-that-be are going to choose our games, right? Turns out no, not this semester. 

It seems many people in the previous cohort just didn't care about their thesis games, and the games suffered for it. This cohort they're changing things up. We are now deciding what games we prototype, and then they'll decide which games continue on to be made into our thesis games, whether that be two or five of them. The rules right now are as follows: each prototype must be made by at least five people and no more than 12. This gives us a maximum of five games being prototyped out and presented at the industry panel (since we have 25 people in the cohort). Other than that, there are no rules. Of the 21 game ideas presented to the class, we have to pick at least five. This is really tough, as they were all really good ideas.

Fortunately, Jason and I were lucky enough to have people sign on to our game almost immediately. As of right now, we have something like eight people wanting to make it, with a few others I know of interested if their games fall through. Tomorrow is the cut-off day, but it seems very promising that we'll, at the very least get to prototype our game for the next three weeks, and I'm very excited.

There's something amazing about having an idea, being incredibly excited about it, working hard on it, and then having a bunch of people follow that idea and make it their own. I'm thrilled to have something I played a major part in creating get so much support.

Next time: (hopefully) prototyping our game and new challenges.

The End of the Beginning (or the First Semester of a Grad Program)

I realize today that my final first semester blog post never made it to the posting machine, which is what I call my computer. A large reason this never happened was that I spent a bunch of time writing a game design document for a game I'm calling The Next Dragon. You can check out the game design document in Google Docs here. For reading inspiration, it's a first person fighting game based on the cheesy theme of 70's and 80's Kung Fu movies. See Sho'nuff (he's pretty great):

I'm going to go ahead and embed the pdf version below. I can't vouch for the usability or quality of Slideshare in regards to pdf's, but if you're lazy and don't want to follow the link, here you go:

And just in case you're a real glutton for punishment, you can go read my thesis paper for the above design document. It's mostly about spatial presence and immersion, and how that can be enhanced using diegetic and meta-perception user interface elements. Read it here; it's a fun read.

So, the burning question on everyone's mind must be: how did Goobles end? Unfortunately Unity has some terrible version control issues that were a problem. We spent a great deal of time merging code together. It started to feel towards the end that we were learning how to wrangle Unity with a team of this size, but we were hurting for a bit there. I did my best to figure out how to handle version control, and with my efforts combined with a couple of the engineers we were able to handle it well enough. Overall we eventually got everything working together and produced a very fun game. Probably the best prototype I was a part of this semester. Check out a screen of the final product:

This was an odd project. With so many producers it felt at times we were scrambling to find things to do. With three of us, the third producer lagged behind somewhat. He initially started out very helpful but then failed to make a move to be involved with the prototype. I blame myself somewhat for this, as I could have done more to try to include him. In my mind, if he wanted to be busy and helpful he would have. On the other hand, if I would have just assigned him more tasks he might have done them. I was caught off guard by a fellow producer failing to meet my expectations. In the future, I would attempt to massage the issue a little bit and work on including people who feel excluded. Overall though, great project with a great result.

After the semester was over, I had a nice three week break where I worked on a game for a competition from Ubisoft. The theme was "Space: The Untamed Beast." It had various requirements such as being a third-person game where the character was always in view and having three types of hostile enemies. Winners of the competition get to intern at Ubisoft for a couple months and make their game. This is an amazing opportunity. Unfortunately, I was only able to drum up three other people for my team. The EAE program had to have a mini-competition to pick which game would be submitted to the actual competition and by the time I found the people I wanted to work with, most everyone was on a team already.So my team ended up being myself, Triston, Yang, and Yuntao, which is four people for a possible eight person team, with no artist. We were starting in a hole, that's for sure.

How did it go? Eh, alright. We spent a lot of time working on our design, and I think we hit on a dynamite idea. Unfortunately, a couple of us had plans to leave Salt Lake for the break, and we just didn't get the prototype done. We decided to pitch anyway, mostly on the strength of our idea alone, and it turned out like this:

I don't want to spend too much time on it, but the idea was that the player was the spirit of a star who was trying to create her own solar system right after the big bang. The player would control an avatar, the star spirit, who would go around and collect the free-floating resources and create planets with them. Once the planets were created, the player would send them in motion around the star. I think it has a ton of potential, but we just didn't get there with our prototype. That's okay. I learned a lot from the brainstorming sessions, and this idea isn't going away.

Next time I'll discuss the first couple of weeks of my second semester (and that should be a much quicker post).