TCS110 – Experimental Games

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.

Creating this game has been a very frustrating experience for me. There were so many images in my mind that I could not execute due to my lack of Unity knowledge. However, the game I ended up creating felt like somewhat of an accomplishment when I watched a classmate play through it.

My game consisted of all of my alter egos, whom I have drawn on paper and on my computer. My game looked like a sketch book or a gallery space where they lived. The most challenging part of creating this game was getting the downloadable 3D objects. I would download 30 models only to find out that 4 actually work for my game. I also had to download the app called Archive Utility in order to unpack the rar files. Sometimes these models came with an entire package which consisted of a background or a floor.

Another challenge I came across was keeping everything organized. I started to misplace my items and importing them in random folders. I had 3 different materials folders, but these folders also held different textures and unresponsive files. This made it especially difficult for me to locate all of the textures I wanted to use in that exact moment. This stalled my process continuously.

For my next project, I want to be more intentional with all of my choices instead of practicing and improvising with what I knew, or what I felt was comfortable.

As someone aspired to work in the gaming industry, I challenged myself to use only my own models for this first project. I opened up a shrine I modeled before and started doing the UVs, but I quickly realize I don’t have enough time to do this in a week along other courses, so I settled on the auto UV feature for many parts of the mesh. The first screenshot is an optimized UV I created myself, and the second screenshot is an example of an auto-generated UV in Maya, which is not ideal, but usable.

I downloaded textures from textures.com, also created my own texture for the roof and the lamp in Substance Painter. I modified them in PS to made sure they are consistent in style.

To make the overall environment more natural, I added some default trees from unity assets, to give the sense of the shrine’s solitude in the woods.

Most of my previous works are rendered in Maya with Vray, mostly  aiming at achieving semi-photo-realistic characters(work-in-progress render above). I have no experience in creating optimized textures and models for a game(limited poly-count, resolution, cached simulations etc.). I was excited about learning in-depth optimization of models and textures in Unity(including caching and real-time simulations), but I realize the class’ main focus is on assessing interpretations of the gaming experience and designing experimental games that only touches the surface of the technical aspect. For me personally, the common mysterious and abstract designs of experimental games is a cover-up for the lack of technical/artistic skills or lazy game-making, but I do recognize most of these games are independent. For me, experimental games are like modern art, overly praised for the effort put into it. Although not exactly what I was expecting, the class offers experience in Unity, which I am looking forward to.

I’ve always had a strong interest in designing narrative environments and settings; I often draw or work on them in my spare time (and work time), and want to be in jobs like storyboarding or relevant fields. This was my first time creating a 3d game level, and though I was initially intimidated, I immediately felt a familiar sense of excitement from times in my childhood when I’d try to create board games or design cool environments. From the moment the assignment was given, I held an interest in the idea of having the player fall down what was supposedly an underground series of rooms and end up on an extremely high bridge (the fence model but really really big). Changing from a tall bridge amidst clouds with beaming sunlight and a blue sky to halloween trees was mainly because I wanted some tangible form of reward at the end (originally just a tree on the final platform), and also because I was in an October-ey mood.

One particular bit I noticed was interesting during my level creation process was the fact that it was almost entirely indoors, and relied heavily on alternating pure darkness with directional lights. This meant that when actually changing and playing the level, I’d constantly have to slide away a face of the current room I was working on to change the internal mechanisms, then often forget to slide it back and enter a room completely filled with sunlight.

In terms of player feedback, I was slightly surprised that Jesse actually was suspicious of the false green goal and looked down; until that point, I’d myself never actually seen what the “Hell” drop looked like looking down from the top. I’d even designed the fall distance to have a certain amount of pitch blackness staring at the wall before the red light gradually transitioned in. Overall, I was decently happy with my result despite the lack of technical knowledge; the main goal I had was seeing if I could establish a decent semblance of atmosphere. In the future, though, I’d definitely want to include sounds, as well as fix the random lighting that started to bleed through the walls as my level gained complexity beyond a single room.

Welcome to TCS110: Experimental Games. In this class we’ll be keeping a collective “Dev Log” at patrick-lemieux.com/pedagogy/17F_TCS110. Please register and begin posting! Your first post documenting Project 1: Environmental Storytelling is due Wednesday, October 11 at 11:59PM!

Remember on MacOS:
Full display screenshots are Command+Shift+3
Selection screenshots are Command+Shift+4
Window screenshots are Command+Shift+4+Space

On Windows 10:
Print Screen captures the full display to clipboard
You can also use the Snipping Tool

For animated .GIFs:
https://www.cockos.com/licecap/