Author: violet_elder

Coming into this week, I had two big projects to finish and one 10-page paper to write. I had a whole thing typed up here, talking about being really sick, having the worst period pain of my entire life, pulling a bunch of all-nighters, feeling so fragile and close to breaking down that, when I went to Target for some final materials for my other project, I picked up some baby socks and a stuffed animal in the dollar section and just walked around holding them for an hour or so because they were soft and I needed some small soft thing to help me feel safe. I’m not sure I really want to write all that down in any more detail, because part of it feels like I’m trying to prove that how bad of a state I was in, maybe as some sort of an excuse, and I shouldn’t have to prove anything, nor am I really trying to make any excuses. I also had to cancel my appointment with my therapist this week, because I wanted to go to The Play’s The Thing, and my appointment was during the event, and it feels a little weird to talk about some of the serious things that happened this week in a dev log/blog post before I talk about them with my therapist. I’ll just say that I was in a really bad place, psychologically. That made working on this game kind of strange for me.

On the one hand, I wanted to get it “perfect,” I wanted to feel proud of it, I wanted to get the best grade possible on it. On the other hand, how ridiculous to be sacrificing my already really compromised mental well-being for the sake of a game about my mental well-being.

I’m not sure it’s appropriate to talk about this here, but a couple of my games have touched on how isolating mental illness can be, and how harmful that isolation can be, so, again, it feels a little ridiculous to be making games about isolation and the feeling that I can’t or shouldn’t talk about my mental illness, and then, in practice, to not talk about my mental illness. It’s more complicated than that, of course, and more personal, and ultimately I have to act in the way that feels right for me at any given moment, and sometimes that means not talking about my mental illness, but I have been working over the last few years on pushing myself to talk about it when it feels comfortable and healthy and safe to do so, and this is, to a certain extent, one of those times.

For the version of the game that was played in class and at the event, I changed and added a few things. There are more people, and different people. There are more speechbubbles. There are trees, and the sky and ground are different. There are benches that, when you collide with them, say one of two things: “We all love you so much,” or “It’s ok. You’re not the only one.” When I decided to add the benches, I was thinking about bench dedications in public parks. The plaques on those benches are so frequently messages to loved ones. They’re sweet and full of love. I don’t know that I want to explain further (because I don’t know that I’m in a good place to do so) the mental gymnastics that led me to want to include benches and their dedications in my game, beyond that I wanted to include messages of love and, in this case, messages of support.

For the version I publish next Friday, I might change a few more things, maybe adding in some animations, or more people and speechbubbles. I consider the version I turned in on Thursday to be the final, completed version, and the one I assume will be graded, but I’d like it to be more polished before I put it online. I would also like to polish and then publish several of my other games from this quarter.

Making the games from this class has been a great exercise in quiet exploration of a few topics I’ve been trying to work through lately, like reflections on my mental health as it stood this time last year, and recent attempts to feel comfortable asking for help when I need it. I’m excited to make more games, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone else’s this quarter.

Because of pure time limitation, I decided to just pursue “This Is Just A Normal, Run-Of-The-Mill Walking Simulator And Everything Is Fine,Don’t Worry About It.”

For prototype B, I made more illustrations of people and their speech bubbles (though I want to make significantly more for the final), and I replaced my initial “cobblestone” drawing with a more finished illustration, though this second version does create some distracting lines in the ground, so I may take another pass at it for the final. I also replaced the basic Unity water with Unity water “pro,” which creates more of a contrast between its realism and the lack thereof in the figures, walls, floor, and ceiling.

I’m still working on the sound of the game. I’m torn between leaving out the sound of footsteps entirely, or replacing Unity’s footstep sound with either the sound of a person walking through water, or loud, clacking, echo-ey footsteps. I’m going to try replacing the square walls of the “room” you’re in with a cylinder, but the effect will still be one of a manmade space. I’ve considered including the sound of water, getting louder the closer the “water” plane gets to the camera. I’ve considered adding in looping whispers with every person you collide with, so that there is eventually a layered mess of whispering (that might be interpreted as waves crashing or water flowing, if done right?). I’ve considered, given the bright colors, maybe finding some pleasant tonal sound for the footsteps, maybe a pleasant little background tune? Maybe, as the water approaches the camera, that pleasant background tune gets louder (and maybe more distorted), until it is incredibly loud and overwhelming?

Even though this was one of the first ideas I had for a game this quarter, I am not feeling particularly satisfied with it. I’m not sure why. Maybe I would prefer it being fully 3D. Maybe I can revisit this concept when I’ve
experimented more with Maya.

I’ve talked about the concept of the game with a couple people now, and have received a couple different interpretations. One person seemed to view it as a representation of anxiety. Another viewed the water as a potentially calming element. While I think the gameplay might be anxiety-inducing, the water does not represent anxiety to me – nor does it represent anything calming (or, at least, calming in a positive way).

All the figure illustrations are based on photos I’ve taken or figure drawings I’ve done in the past. Because I know not everyone I’ve taken photos of would be comfortable with their likeness being used in any way, a significant number of the figures are actually me. Given the way I push myself, the way I wish I put my needs before my work, and the way I so frequently don’t do that, it feels sort of fitting that there are multiples of me asking myself to complete tasks while I’m drowning.

In another class, I am revisiting a quarter-long design research project that I worked on a year and a half ago. The project was on the best way for men to participate in feminist spaces, on mansplaining, and on how to allow unprivileged parties to express their grievances freely without being forced to sugarcoat their complaints for the sake of the feelings of their privileged counterparts. I was really unsatisfied with the result. I made a video game for the final deliverable of that project. It feels a little strange to have been so unsatisfied with that video game project, to be revisiting it in a much different – but much more satisfying – way in another class, and then to not be particularly satisfied with a video game final project in this class.

Hopefully I can turn it into something I’m happier with by Tuesday, though. And if not, maybe I’ll revisit it in a year and a half, too.

Can you make out what is written in the speech bubbles? Some critiques I’ve received on prototype A have been about people being unable to read my handwriting – though, to be fair, that wasn’t really something I cared about for that initial prototype.

I’m still working between two final project ideas, one being the concept I pitched last week (“This Is Just A Normal, Run-Of-The-Mill Walking Simulator And Everything Is Fine, Don’t Worry About It”), and the other being a text-based game called “In My Friend Kari’s Car.” I think that, for prototype 2, I will also be creating 2 separate prototypes.

As I noted in class, “This Is Just A Normal, Run-Of-The-Mill Walking Simulator And Everything Is Fine, Don’t Worry About It” is a game in which you are drowning, and no one around you seems concerned by it. As you interact with the figures in your environment, they ask you questions (“why haven’t you called me?”), or request that you perform banal tasks (“can you run this to the post office for me?”), seemingly unaware of the rising water. For the second prototype, I think I’d like to experiment with sound, perhaps adding an increasing number of voices to the game, one new voice for every person you interact with. In the first prototype, the end screen features the sound of calmly rushing water.

The second game I made a prototype for was not one I mentioned in class. “In My Friend Kari’s Car” is a text-based game organized like a narrative with a frame story. The base narrative is that my friend Kari and I are going to Home Depot to get some plants. During the car ride, I reflect on a number of experiences from my going-on-five years at Davis. For various reasons related to my obsessive-compulsive disorder – the same reasons that make it very difficult for me to keep a diary – I was worried about addressing the topic, because I felt a need to somehow include literally every noteworthy experience from my college career. In the end, largely to resist this manifestation of my obsessive-compulsive disorder, I made the conscious decision to feel that it’s okay if the narrative told in “In My Friend Kari’s Car” is not exhaustive and all-encompassing. I left things out. I know that. That’s fine. Part of why I wanted to make this game was because I believe seeing your own experiences reflected in those of others is a powerful thing that can help you understand your experiences better, by placing them in a different context. I also thought it might be a helpful way to organize my own thoughts.

On a number of occasions, when a design class has asked me to brainstorm on a topic using a mindmap of some sort, I have been struck by the fact that the mindmaps I produce might be a pretty good visualization of how my OCD causes my mind to work. Even when I consciously decide not to be as thorough as I want to be in this sort of exercise, I end up with cluttered, extensive lists, where each branch of the mindmap has countless branches of its own. The diagram I drew to help me plan out “In My Friend Kari’s Car” resembled some of my mindmaps. Perhaps the game- (or, maybe more accurately, the narrative-) structure in itself could be a way to communicate something about my experience with mental illness, in addition to the content.

For prototype 2 of “In My Friend Kari’s Car,”  I would like to try making the controls mouse-based, rather than letter-based. I would like to make the display more visually engaging. I’ll also be editing the copy used in the game. Like “This Is Just A Normal, Run-Of-The-Mill Walking Simulator And Everything Is Fine, Don’t Worry About It,” I am interested in using sound to communicate the environment in the second prototype. The first prototype features “road ambiance,” used in hopes of communicating the experience of being inside “My Friend Kari’s Car,” but I am interested in fading in and out other relevant sounds, as the player reaches certain “pages” or passages from the narrative.

A friend who took this class last year told me sometime over the summer that I should follow Pippin Barr on twitter. His GAME IDEA’s are pretty incredible, almost always funny, and sometimes very sweet. (Here’s a link to a bunch of ’em. There’s a list of them on his website here, but the format is maybe a bit better on that first link.) Inspired by how short (but great) his game ideas were, I started a file on my phone of game ideas. They’re nowhere near as funny, and quite a few were written at 2 in the morning (and you can tell), but I have actually used it to document my early concepts for a lot of the games I’ve made for this class. When I mentioned during my pitch presentation that I was trying to decide on a concept from a list of 6, all 6 were from that game idea file.

Some of the ideas in that file are half-formed. Some of them are just dumb jokes. Some of them turned into games I was pretty happy with. In design, we’re often encouraged to experiment a lot with ideation, to write down ideas that have nothing to do with our project, to take a break and then return to the project fresh, to explore the ideas that seem unlikely or over-the-top. I have boxes full of post-it notes on which I (and my classmates) scribbled ideas during ideation sessions in classes I’ve taken over the last few years. Some of the ideas didn’t fit my concept, some fit perfectly, some were coincidentally exactly what I’d been thinking about already, some are dumb jokes or drawings left by friends in the class, and all of them were useful. In one of those classes, I ended up making a video game for my final project. It was called “Little Critters,” and it was a cutesy video game made in GameMaker Studio, designed to, in the words of two different people I interviewed in the course of the project, “trick people into agreeing with [me].” I remember that project, that I was so excited about, with a significant amount of regret. I don’t think I should have made a video game to address the problem I was researching. Maybe, somewhere in the hundreds of post-its and messy sketches, a better solution is hiding, or a piece of a better solution.

Am I going to make “game where everybody runs like they’re wearing a backpack?” Who knows. Is it a funny idea that I might remember years down the line and incorporate somehow into a future project? Again, who knows, but I’m glad I’ve got it written down somewhere.

Approaching this project with my design education behind me is a little complicated, because so many design classes emphasize experimentation, ideation, and multiple, unrelated prototypes, and the timing of this class doesn’t allow for that. Ideation sessions (the more I type that phrase out, the more it feels pretentious – I’m talking about brainstorming, but the design department seems to have an intense love affair going with the word “ideation” and it’s been used in pretty much every design class I’ve ever taken – many many times) are one of my favorite things in design classes. I love pulling out a big piece of paper and writing down some more thought-out concepts I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and also a bunch of gibberish that, if nothing else, can function as comic relief during more emotionally-draining projects.

I’m not positive what my point is, beyond that I’m really happy I started that game idea note on my phone, and I’m looking forward to continuing to add to it. I’ve started tweeting out “Davis gothic” sentences, little weird microfiction things about Davis, and it’s making me see the appeal of tweeting out game ideas, too, if they’re good or sad or funny enough.

Here are a few of my favorite Pippin Barr GAME IDEA tweets. These ones, also.

Also, apparently, there was a game jam where people were invited to make games based on his tweets!

I’m still debating a few ideas for the final game, but they’re all in the game idea note on my phone.

I like looking at things in games. I’m realizing that as I work through these projects and reflect on how I’ve approached games throughout my life.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Dream Logic is essentially a hide-and-seek game, because I had been approaching it as primarily something to look at, a space to navigate, a scene to explore. The noise-seeking element of the game was intended to create some sense of mystery, intrigue, or narrative, and to ensure that the player would (probably) touch the thing that would bring them to the next level, but I didn’t consider it as the crux of the gameplay in and of itself. I looked at it as simply something to listen to, something to experience, somewhat passively, like the rest of these (mostly) still scenes*.

When I was working on the second scene of the game, featuring the house, swing sets, and too-big stuffed foxes (yes, they were foxes), I changed elements from the code for the first scene one bit at a time to fit my new vision. At some point, I had changed almost all the elements I had intended to be different in this second scene – except for the fox. The disorienting repetition, the way that the organization of objects on the landscape doesn’t seem to make much sense, the fact that the layout changes with each visit to the spaces portrayed (including the one-off objects like the houses and the bed) all read to me as the kind of surreal, nonsensical layout of a dreamscape.

In case it hasn’t become clear, I find the idea of being a small figure in a larger, otherwise somewhat ordinary space very interesting. It puts the ordinary in a new context, makes it extraordinary, calls on the player to reinterpret normal objects they might encounter in the game as potentially magic or special. Why else would they be so big, and you so small? Something must be happening here.

Wandering around someone else’s room is a very intimate thing, and, by making the player tiny, a fly on the wall, the experience can almost become more intimate. You look more closely at little things, because you’re right up next to them. You can get into more spaces, see more detail.

I’m not sure if I will want to revisit the idea of being a small figure in a home or room in another project this quarter**, but I have always gotten a lot of enjoyment out of exploring a space with a lot of detail, with Easter eggs and narrative. A person’s physical environment can say a lot about them – or nothing at all. Right now, my room is full of boxes of old things, bags of old clothes. Some of them are going to be donated or reused, and others are just going to live with me now. Clean and dirty clothes are scattered all over the floor – or, what little is visible around the boxes. My desk is messy, practically unusable, with piles of fabric scraps and loose pins covering it. A tiny figure in my room might see barber sheers, old car keys, notes to myself that are written over and over because I still haven’t gotten around to them. Right now, those details of my physical environment can definitely tell a story, maybe more clearly than I would be willing to share verbally in certain contexts. If I do revisit this concept, though, I would like to include the suggestion of human presence. Maybe a coffee cup with steam still rising from it, or an open door and a barely-audible conversation happening in a nearby room. The light might change to imply the passing of time, some movement in this universe, or maybe music or a talk show plays from a radio somewhere in the room.

*The water in the second level animates.

**In another class I’m taking this quarter, one of my professors said that she thought being a designer or artist was often about having some idea in your head, and just working on it again and again until you’re satisfied, full-up on the idea, and can move on to the next one.

I debated whether to name this week’s game Chorus or Arietta for a while. On the one hand, you’re one square, a solo individual, and arias are solo pieces. On the other hand, if you so choose, you can encounter the songs of many other squares, many other individuals, creating a chorus. Did I want it to feel inherently a little lonesome, or did I want it to feel warmer right off the bat?

I ended up settling on Arietta because I wanted to give the player the choice to add accompaniment to their solo. They only form a chorus if they want to.

An idea I was not able to act on but would like to incorporate into the game if I revisit it later was that, at the end, instead of playing the audio for a specific piano piece (a royalty free piece by Kevin MacLeod called “Avec Soin”), players would hear specifically the notes they chose to hit, in the order that they hit them, but at a set – and perhaps a bit faster – pace. If you hit all the cubes, you hear all the cubes. If you hit some, or hit them in a particular order, you would hear their notes in that order. And, if you did not hit any of them, you would reach the end and hear silence.

For a while, I intended to organize the squares so that they would create a song according to more traditional interpretations of what a song is. After talking about it during critique, however, I realized that they do create a song – it’s just a bit of an experimental piece, and that’s okay.

What does the song at the end mean? Maybe it is a win scenario. Maybe it is your prize. Maybe it is a reflection of your gameplay, or an invitation for you to reflect on your experience. Maybe you lost (no matter how you went through the game). Maybe it is a memorial. Maybe it has no meaning. Maybe it is the whole point of the game, the main part, the star, and you can only get there by experiencing this long pathway with all these squares in the way.

One of my critique partners noted that, because you’re touching all these other squares, and they’re making noise, but you’re not, it almost makes it feel like there’s something wrong with you, like you’re touching all these squares to try to figure out what’s wrong with you, and maybe to fix it.

Another comment made during critique brought up the idea that, after a while, you do start to make noise. Perhaps, when you’ve hit enough cubes, you start to sing too?

I think this game held a couple different meanings for me at different points in its development. Sometimes it felt like a calming experience made simply for the sake of being calming. Sometimes it felt like it was about meeting new people and hearing their experiences. Sometimes it felt like it was about making people around you happy by touching their lives somehow. Most of the time, it felt like it was about asking for help.

The end screen of Arietta reads “If you go it alone, you cannot make anything.” This is largely influenced by the final interpretation listed above, but may apply to any number of interpretations, I think.

An interesting part of the critique for me was watching how people maneuvered around the space. Of all the people who critiqued and played my game, only one tried to go down before going up. All but one felt the need to touch every square. The outlier touched a few, and then went straight through to the end. Only one person looped back down to hit squares they had already touched, changing the arrangement of the notes that they heard as they played. A few people started out avoiding the squares, and then touched one to find out what would happen. Almost every player hit the squares in the same order.

The individual notes, by the way, are from this project by the University of Iowa’s Electronic Music Studio. The color scheme is inspired by Papergirls, which I’m only two books into, but this palette has been influencing a lot of my work since I got the first book a month or two ago.

Obsessions are unwanted, intrusive thoughts, images or urges that trigger intensely distressing feelings. Compulsions are behaviors an individual engages in to attempt to get rid of the obsessions and/or decrease his or her distress.

The above is a quote from this page from the International OCD Foundation’s website.

I had a number of ideas of how this week’s project might go. Two of them were about OCD, and one was about being a woman in the workplace/classroom. I think many forms of digital media have great potential for conveying elements of mental illness that may be difficult to explain verbally. However, unfortunately, most media representations of the disorder treat it either as a personality quirk (neatness, tidiness, timeliness), or as a punchline (see: Monk). For an example of the first treatment, see pretty much any TV show, or movie, or book. I’m sure you’ll hear someone who likes highlighting their neat and tidy schedule say they’re “so OCD” at some point. Using “OCD” to describe someone who’s organized is a part of the cultural vocabulary at this point. It’s rarely used maliciously in that context, but the effect is still harmful in that it perpetuates the deep misunderstanding of a serious mental illness, within a culture that already so frequently dismisses mental health.

Below is another quote from the IOCDF.

Most people have obsessive thoughts and/or compulsive behaviors at some point in their lives, but that does not mean that we all have “some OCD.” In order for a diagnosis of obsessive compulsive disorder to be made, this cycle of obsessions and compulsions becomes so extreme that it consumes a lot of time and gets in the way of important activities that the person values.

My game is not a whole and complete representation of OCD. It is, however, a representation of one way in which it might manifest. I hoped to show how certain manifestations of the disorder can be overwhelming, can feel unending, and I used small type, starting in the top corner of the window (to allow for as many “what ifs” as possible to be shown at a time), and increasing speed (to create a sense of urgency, and to show more and more and more – never-ending – “what ifs”) to work towards this goal.

A few elements of the phrasing I chose were meant to reflect certain things about OCD. For example, some of the potential scenarios may seem ridiculous, even laughable. They are! To someone without OCD. However, to someone with OCD, they are very real possibilities, and they are possibilities that their disorder is essentially forcing them to think about without pause. Phrases like “and it’s all my fault” or “and I could have stopped it” were included at the end of the “what ifs” because one way the disorder can manifest is hyper-responsibility, making the person with the illness feel responsible for things they do not reasonably have any control over.

This game was, as might be clear, very personal to me. It is likely impossible to convey the experience of mental illness with perfect accuracy, because everyone experiences every situation differently, but it can be rewarding to approach an estimation of even a small part of an impactful/highly personal experience.

You start out on a table. You are small, maybe metaphorically, definitely literally. You know this because, well, you’re on a table. And you’re standing in front of a giant rose, at least a couple times your size.

I love art that depicts something intimate and personal, slice-of-life stuff. I love walking around and looking at things, piecing information or narrative together as I go. I love seeing ordinary objects altered in a way that makes them extraordinary, puts them in a new context (like Claes Oldenburg but also like Chibi-Robo!). I also (like many artists) love controlling how people interpret my work, but I know full well at this point that it’s pretty much impossible to do that. Davis’ design program teaches us how to guide the viewer, how to give your work the best chance of being understood the way you intended it to be, but purely visual work is inherently up for interpretation. I struggled for a while to decide exactly how and where I wanted to limit the player’s movement in Narrative. I wanted to make sure people saw the letter, the chocolate, the cake that is much more visible from the table than it is from the floor. But I also wanted players to be able to explore more than this one surface, to be able to peer into connecting rooms and hallways. But if they could get off the table, unless I cranked up the jump height and totally changed the tone of the game, they had no way to get back up and see something they missed.

Ultimately, I decided to embrace – and lean even farther into – the fact that, no matter what, I ultimately could not control what the player was going to do. This decision influenced many of the decisions that followed in the design of the game. I added more narrative elements on the floor and connecting rooms, so that, even if someone immediately jumped off the table, they could still formulate some kind of story from their surroundings. The story would change depending on what objects they focused on and what objects they ignored or missed, but the story was going to change, anyway, from person to person, even if they were restricted to the tabletop. Some people might read into the cake, some might find more meaning in the mug. I can’t control the backgrounds they’re bringing into my game. I can design a game that gives my own interpretation a fighting chance, but that interpretation is still my own, and the design decisions I make that, to me, clearly point towards Interpretation A are built on my own experiences, my own baggage that I’m bringing to the gameplay. Someone else could look at those same design decisions and see a neon sign pointing directly at Interpretation B. There’s no way to wholly control the interpretation of any piece of visual art, so I leaned into that fact. You walk slowly, painfully far away from things you might want to examine, and you have time to reflect on what you’ve seen. To fully examine certain objects, you have to walk around them, really taking them in. What you choose to dedicate time to determines your experience of the game. I could say something here about that mirroring the experience of life, but I don’t really want to spend the rest of my life cringing. I will say, however, that the idea that you can’t control how people will think of your work (or you) is an idea I’ve been engaging with a lot lately. It can make you feel powerless, and it can also be embraced and help you make peace with yourself and your “image,” at least a little bit.