Reflective Presentation - 6/5/15

What I have created this trimester

I wont lie, the first two projects that I worked on by myself this trimester weren't great. I honestly didn't feel good about the ideas and I found it really hard to get motivated to do them, especially considering I am not a great programmer and it would take me a lot longer to work on them. I think those two things factored together, the low amount of self esteem due to the ideas and also the inability to create them myself without putting in a lot of effort lead to the end product being quite bad. I feel like the final project is proof of that. As I believe I have shown, in the third project I put in a lot more effort and I felt a lot happier with my contributions, ideas, and leadership skills than I have in any project before. This was largely due to the pressure being a lot less serious due to having excellent programmers on my team. I found it easier to express my creativity when I had people who were able to back me up and confirm that my ideas were good and also to help drive them in ways that were possible to do in the time constraints.

What I have learned this trimester

This trimester I have learned a lot about design and a lot of other aspects of making a game. One thing I've learned

Making particle effects look nice is hard. I spent hours at the beginning of the third and second project messing with particles in the games and trying to make them look good. After a while they started turning out really good. (I think at least.) As you can see below, the smoke particles look pretty cool and I'm pretty proud of how they turned out.

3D modelling is another thing I've learned this term. I spent a fair amount of time going over 3ds max tutorials and although I have a lot to learn in that department I am far better with that program than I was before the term started which I think is a success.

Optimising a game is important. When I started this term I just assumed that optimisation wasn't important due to us creating small games. Boy was I wrong. Our game was lagging on highest graphics very early into the project due to the particle effects around the world. We had to go in and separately modify all particle generators around the world and make sure they weren't going to create spikes in fps.

Source control. This term I ventured from my safehaven that was GitHub and started using BitBucket which is far more complicated. Rather than using a single program to manage our repository we were using a couple. The programmers were using a particularly complicated one whilst I was stuck using SourceTree. More than once had object files or even the entire scene disappeared on me and I had to revert the game to a previous version to avoid losing somebody's work. I feel this is a very important thing to learn in this field of work.

Finally I learned not to get too attached to your work. Sure, be proud of it but also be aware that it may not help the game achieve its goal. If the goal of the game is trust, how exactly is adding a bunch of features to buildings to make them look prettier help the game? I spent a few hours working on how buildings looked and after a while I realised that when playing the game it looked very distracting and I felt like it would stop the player from experiencing the game how we wanted them to. (The trust mechanics would have been overshadowed.) Also, source control messes up and deletes things sometimes and you may have to redo things.

What I have learned about my own practice during this trimester.

One of the main things I've learned this trimester is that I work far better in a group than I do by myself. I enjoy leading a team and putting a product together, it's the kind of person I am. In a way, I am good at organising other people but not so good at organising myself. (Which I am working on.) I feel like in a way this is similar to how I am good at puzzles, but not creating puzzles. I feel like the final project was kind of like a puzzle, with lots of pieces missing and being created, and I slowly had to put it together as more pieces were appearing. I may not be the best at programming or able to create audio for the game, (although I did find a lot we were able to use,) I am able to bring these assets together to create a, (what I'd say is,) successful experience. (Although perhaps somewhat irrelevant to trust.)

I've also learned that spending far more time researching and thinking of ideas for games is a lot more important than I originally thought. If you really put the effort into thinking of a good idea, a lot of the other important things like self and team motivation, support and even more ideas will come naturally. It's easy to grow an idea from an idea that is already good.

Another thing I feel like I've learned is that time management is probably the most important aspect of games design. Setting up an effective time management chart for the project is very important even if you don't stick to it. It is good for everyone to have an understanding of how long tasks are going to take and also so they understand the scope of the project at hand.

The final primary thing I learned about design this term would be communication. Communication is key when collaborating with people, especially if they aren't in your class, (or in the real world, I suppose that'd be the same as not working at the same place.) The gantt chart is a very important aspect and making sure that everyone has access to the documentation, especially the design document, is essential. Next time I would make sure that our team has group meetings.

What I am going to do to improve next trimester.

Next trimester I am going to improve on everything.

I am going to be more organised, I will do this by creating a better schedule, at the moment my schedule is okay but it isn't very in depth and I've been very poor at making sure I follow it. I need to work out a system that will help me follow my schedule constantly.

I will be far more motivated. I will achieve this by making sure that I spent lots of time on my concepts for my games so that I am motivated to make them, and on the off chance that I'm unable to do this, I will find ways to make myself more motivated to complete tasks. I will treat it like it is my job rather than I am in a classroom.

I will get ahead of briefs and make sure that my work is mapped out properly so I know what needs doing and when. This goes for group work also and ties in with the gantt chart work I mentioned earlier.



I will improve on my attendance which I actually feel like I've succeeded in doing this term. I have successfully come to class about 95% of the time between half way through the trimester and now. I only missed one day. Unfortunately I haven't always been here on time which is largely due to the bus timetable, but I know that isn't an excuse and I need to get up earlier to compensate for potential traffic.

Where I fit on the grade scale overall.

Overall I feel like the first and second assignment were passes. They may not have been pretty but I feel the concepts I was going for were decent. I just think my execution could have been far, far better, but I did put some effort in. It's not like I sat around doing nothing during these days, I did work on these games and I worked quite hard too, I just didn't have any emotion behind it. No pun intended.

That being said, I feel my final game I did far better and honestly I'd say I probably a distinction based on the effort I put in. Not a high distinction although I really did put that much effort in, unfortunately the game didn't represent trust correctly. I made mistakes but the good thing is I've learned from most if not all of them. I also feel like I did a really good job organising our group and keeping everyone on track by making sure people were motivated, knew what their jobs were and also bringing all the pieces together to make a pretty nice looking game. Overall I'd say my grade is a credit or a pass, somewhere in between. Although I did make up for a lot of mistakes I'd made in the first half of the term on the last project, that is still 2 projects where I could have done much better on.

Overall I'd say I deserve something between a pass and a credit just based on the effort I put into the last project and the others combined.

Thanks for reading / listening.

Understanding Psychological Principles - 6/5/15

A huge part of being a designer is understanding what gets people ticking. I feel like I have small natural understanding of this type of thing due to my experience in games in the past but I have a lot to learn about it, I know I'm not an expert in the slightest and this type of topic interests me greatly. I look forward to learning and researching more about it in the future. Below I'm going to list some of the things I've learned throughout this trimester through personal research and through experience.

Firstly I have realised that people feel far more immersed in a game when they feel like they have a sense of identity within the game. I tried to emulate this feeling in the first 2 games I created. I tried to word the text as if the player themselves were the actual character. Unfortunately this wasn't implemented very well due to time constraints, lack of motivation and also lack of forethought for the writing, but I am happy with the fact that I have recognized that and I am not the type of person to repeat the same mistakes more than once. (Twice sometimes.)

Something else I learned this term is that people really like to be in control. Humans, as a species, crave power. This can be seen in many of the game's playtest. People like to figure out all the controls before playing and people often get frustrated if they are forced to do something they don't want to. For example in Birdlife a lot of people were frustrated that they weren't able to exit the game or restart it, they had to die in-game before they were allowed to restart. I feel this is a really good example.

I learned this next one through research, but people really like to feel like they belong in a game. Of all playtests we did, around two thirds of people kept the bird alive if they were aware it was part of the game. This is to say we did not count playtests where the person didn't realise that the bird could be fed / kept alive. I feel like this shows that people, once they had found their "place" in the game, really grew fond of it and decided to play it as if they cared about it. Not many people simply led the bird onto a road or left it behind.

This final one I learned through research also and it makes a lot of sense. People react very well when they are excited about the game or given positive feedback. For example, in the third when we implemented the increase in saturation and colour when you eat. People seemed to really react well to that and I feel if we'd added more particle effects and other positive feedback, the game could have really hooked people's attentions.

Overall I've learned a lot about psychological principles this term through trial, error and online research and I will take and use most if not all of this in future projects.

Research games about trust and emotion - 6/5/15

I realise I should have blogged about this as I did the research, but at the time I was occupied with other things. Both times in fact. Fortunately these days we have a wonderful thing called "Internet history" which has allowed me to go back and open up the old links and refresh my memory.

The first lot of research I did was in regards to emotional games. What is an emotional game and how do I get someone to feel a certain way in a game? Sounds pretty easy at first, but upon further inspection I found it to be quite difficult. The emotions I picked for my game, (happiness and depression,) were ones I had decided on from the get-go. But how do I create that in a game? How do I express that honestly within the game?

Obviously as a gamer myself I went to my roots and played some games that provoked emotion. Here's a list of the games I played snippets of to help understand emotion within games a bit better:

The Wolf Among Us.
The Walking Dead Season 1.
Brothers.
Valiant Hearts.

Now some of the ways this affected the game is quite interesting. To start, I used The Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead's choice system and implemented that into the game. Of course, it wasn't nearly as polished as those game's version was and the choices you made didn't have as much impact, (although they did have quite a large impact in the first game,) in the game about emotion they had near to no effect. I felt like since it is such a common decision for people to have choices in their games, I felt like, almost satirically, it was going to be far more effective in the emotional game to have those choices mean nothing. Throughout the game you are constantly asked questions, "Are you a boy or a girl", "are you a nice person or a mean person", "what sickness do you contract" etc, etc. Only to get to the end of the game and have it sarcastically congratulate and then the screen goes black. I felt like since most gamers are so used to having their decisions mean something, if I used these correctly in my game I would be able to shock the player into a temporary feeling of  depressing awareness of their own mortality. This wasn't as effective as I had hoped but I feel that was part of my delivery and also due to how the game's writing was written. If I had put far more effort into the text I may have had a larger impact.

The way I had the game feel more happy at the beginning is I asked my wonderful audio engineer Francis to create a happy, upbeat track for the game. Here's the kind of music I wanted, the reference to Brothers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN4VAUWuKqE

Go to the time 25:50. That's the kind of music that was implemented into the game. Also at the time 39:30 you can hear very solemn music that is kind of eerie. This is the kind of music I wanted implemented at the end of the game, unfortunately I ran out of time to see this happen.

Valiant Hearts was interesting the way it drove you to appreciate the characters through cutscenes only. Originally I was going to have characters throughout the level that you'd interact with that would help drive your character's development and help you like the character more but since it was basically a 2 week assignment I left it out for the greater good.

So as for the game about trust. So at first I thought this third assessment was going to be easy peasy. I thought I understood what trust was. Boy was I wrong. After actually thinking about the kind of game I'd actually create if I were to create a game about trust I was totally lost. After thinking about this a bit more I decided to do some research.

Firstly I looked at this: http://www.youthwork-practice.com/games/games-of-trust.html

Originally I didn't feel like applying real life games theory to a digital game would have quite the same effect but after reading through after some interesting discussions we had in class I realised quite the opposite.

In the source you will see some interest games like Nature Blind Touch where players make pairs whilst one is blind folded and led by the other player through a small forest to a particular tree wher they tocuh it and rub it. Then he is lead back to the starting point and the blind fold is taken off and the player tries to find the tree again. I thought this was a really interesting concept of trust as the blind folded person must trust the person leading him not to lead him anywhere dangerous etc.

Another one is similar, it's called Leading the Blind, as the title insinuates, 4 people lead a blind person through an obstacle course using ropes whilst the blindfolded person has to hope that they don't lead them into an obstacle. Very interesting concepts. After giving these things some thought I originally decided that the game would be two player. The very, very original idea for the game that I didn't even tell my team was going to be the game was 2 player and the chick was blind but could smell / see food only. Based on the game I just told you about I was thinking there could be obstacles, predators, holes and water around the world. Player 1 would be able to see the world but would not be able to see the food, so player 1 would have to give the chick directions of how to avoid obstacles whilst the chick tried to direct player 1 to the food. In the end the trust would come in when player 1 would eventually get the food and have to decide between sharing it and keeping it for themselves.

As far as non-trust mechanics go in our game, one mechanic I think solves a lot of issues we had was the large beam of light we had above food. I got this idea from the Borderlands series. Originally players were having huge issues finding food in the world as they had no idea what they were looking for, but since Borderlands is a popular series and a lot of people will associate a beam of light with "something they can use," this almost entirely fixed our issue of people not being able to find food in the world.

Here is the picture I originally used to describe to the group what I meant.

(Source: https://pregamelvlup.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/borderlands-2-loot-drops.jpg)

Overall I feel like I could have done more research towards trust for the actual final product but part of me wanted to stray away from the multiplayer concept of trust since that is using people's instincts to create trust rather than the actual game mechanics. It is only occurring to me now that there is really no difference between invoking the emotions through people and invoking them through mechanics because technically being able to do so is a mechanic in itself. 

I learned a lot from this final assessment and I feel like if I were tasked with creating a game about trust again, or in fact a game regarding emotions, critical thinking or anything of the like, I would do a far better job at communicating them due to my experiences here.

Why the trust mechanics in Birdlife didn't work - 6/5/15

In this blog I'm going to talk about the mechanics that were implemented in Birdlife that did not demonstrate trust the way we intended and also the thought process behind each of these mechanics.

I feel like the main mechanic of the game, taking care of the bird, is the most obvious mechanic. This mechanic was designed so that the player automatically feels attached to the chick and realises that it is obvious helpless and will rely on you for food. We placed food in front of the chick and the player was ideally supposed to realise that the reason it wasn't eating it was because it was too young. This in turn would help the player feel responsible for the chick and the trust between the player and the chick would kick in, making the player feel like the chick trusts them to feed it. I feel like the reason this didn't work was largely due to the feedback that we gave the player when feeding them. It wasn't very obvious when you were feeding the chick and when you were feeding yourself. I should have ensured that it was obvious by adding more particle effects, eating noises for the chick and your player and also perhaps adding an eating animation and feeding animation.

The chicks death in the game wasn't as impactful as I would have liked. The death of the chick was supposed to symbolise a sad moment for the player. I hoped that the player would feel remorse at the fact they let the chick die. Unfortunately, this wasn't very impactful because it was quite unclear when the bird died and a lot of the time because the player a) didn't have an attachment to the bird or b) didn't even know the bird existed to begin with. I feel this was largely due to the positioning of the chick and due to the fact that it was small and wasn't positioned correctly in front of the player at the beginning. Also, the player had no idea what to look for so perhaps having the chick on the main menu would've helped a lot. The chick was able to die in a few ways, getting attacked by crows, hit by cars or starvation. Starvation was not represented correctly as if it was hungry it was sad and if it wasn't it was happy. This is a very unclear way of representing hunger. Also, I feel the little worms above the chicks head wasn't very clear either, even when it did disappear after it was fed. It should also be mentioned that getting hit by a car wasn't clear either and it was also very inconsistent. It should definitely have been made clearer that the bird was hit by the car and also clearer that the cars were a threat to begin with as a lot of people weren't sure how the chick died. Also, when the chicked died it didn't fall over or anything which I think should have definitely happened.

Another mechanic in the game was calling the chick over to you. This mechanic is one of the few that somewhat worked as intended. Having the bird follow you around was designed to represent the bond between the bird and the chick. Once you feed it, the bird was able to follow you. It was not clear that this was the case however and a lot of people didn't have the bird following them at all. I way to represent this could have been instructions or even a cutscene at the beginning of the game that said something to the effect of, "A small bird that looks lonely has started following you, either feed it or leave it behind. It's up to you." It was also a big hassle to continue to call the bird over to you. For a while the chick followed you permanently but after realising this made feeding yourself hard we decided that chirping would call it to your current location which is where it'd stay until it was called again.

Where the chick was placed was below a nest in a tree, which sometimes gave off the impression that the chick was your chick and that was your home when in reality it was supposed to represent that the chick's previous home that it had fallen out of. This could have been made clear by having the nest slightly damaged or even showing the chick falling from the nest in a cutscene. A lot of people were trying to fly into the nest and land in it and others just straight up didn't notice it. This could have been fixed by placement of the nest.

One of the main mechanics of the game was leaving the area. When the chick dies or you feed it enough that it leaves the area you could fly through the fog and it would tell you something like, "You left the chick behind to fend for itself." or "The chick died and you left the area." This was designed to create clarity about what has happened in the game. Unfortunately this mechanic failed a lot of the time because most people weren't even aware that leaving the area would end the game. This could have been combated by explaining to the player in an instructions screen or adding some text in the game to tell the player that they needed to leave. That, or with visual indicators like an arrow or even making the fog look more obvious; like they can be passed.

Rewards and punishments for feeding the chick and feeding yourself were mechanics intended to give the player the motivation to decide between feeding the chick and feeding yourself. Ideally I wanted the player to feel like they could fly higher and faster for feeding themselves but also feel like they could run faster on the ground for feeding the chick. This feedback wasn't represented properly and honestly wouldn't really have helped the player want to decide between the chick and themselves anyway. Some ways we could have helped fix the feedback was by adding particles to the speed and flying powers and also by adding even more colour effects to the eating. This would have exaggerated the rewards and punishments for feeding yourself or the chick and the player would definitely have had an easier time understanding what they were supposed to do.

Overall I feel like some of the mechanics had a good foundation whilst others could and probably should have been removed or completely revamped. On the up side, I learned a lot from this project and I now feel like I have a much stronger understanding of the concept of trust and furthermore a better understanding of critically thinking about game mechanics before implementing them. Mechanics that are unnecessary should be culled whilst mechanics that help exaggerate the theme should be accentuated. I feel like if we had done this better the game would have met the brief far more consistently than it currently does, and I'm hoping that our team can come together during the holidays to work on making the game fit the brief even more than it currently does, and also to make the game even more polished and fun.

Thanks for reading.

How could we have delivered on the idea of trust better in Birdlife? - 5/5/15

Okay so overall I feel like we learned a lot in this project, especially about trust and what it means and how to represent it.

The game started off as a survival and game worked it's way towards being a self made story version. I think trust is a very hard thing to represent in a game and overall not many if any of the groups managed to nail their representation of trust. I think a lot of things factored into this, firstly I feel that the idea of trust was pretty open to interpretation at first. I mean think about it, trust can be the trust you feel between your family members, you can trust in someone to take care of you. But what really, I feel, threw most of the teams off is that we were told that for trust to exist you must first have a reason to betray. In the beginning we were not aware that this was a necessary part of the game so a lot of our ideas had to change drastically around the 2 week mark.

This isn't such a big deal though as a lot of the work we'd done was still entirely relevant to the game. For example the flying, most of the assets and the world we had put together. It really only threw off my ideas as the game had to change completely from the original idea of survival and trust between a bird, it's mate and their child to a game about finding a chick in the wilderness and having to protect it.

Mechanically I honestly believe most of what we'd have needed to accurately portray trust in a game was there. For example there were rewards for betraying the chick and benefits to helping it. We also changed the idea of having the chick as 'your' chick. In the end it was just a chick you stumble upon which helped stop the player from feeling obligated to help it. Some ways I feel that we fulfilled the brief using mechanics would be having the ability to betray the little bird by leaving it behind and just focusing on yourself. If you did this your screen would be more colourful and you'd be able to fly higher and eventually leave the area. You were 'somewhat' punished for this when the chick died because your screen would lose colour but you would also be able to leave the area. Alternatively, if you decided to feed the chick you would be able to run faster on the ground, and once it was fully grown it would fly away into the distance never to be seen again. After this your screen would turn colourful permanently and your bird would always cheep a happy face due to the happiness it felt for the chick. These are two different win conditions, so it was totally possible to win either way. The trust mechanics was also fulfilled by having the chick follow you around when you called it. This could lead the bird into hazards like enemy crows or into cars which would both kill the bird. The chick has to trust you not to lead it into enemies or cars, similar to how parents hold their children's hands when crossing the road in real life.

Some ways we could have tackled the issues that existed at the end of game, the primary issue being nobody knew what the hell they were doing is firstly; we could've just added instructions to the game. Something like, "You were just stopping down in the park to get something to eat and you notice a small chick. The chick looks like it has fallen out of the nest above it and looks hungry. After looking around you notice that there are no other birds around. Perhaps it's parents have abandoned it. It is probably going to die if you leave it. If you help it, you will feel good for doing something nice for the chick, but if you focus on yourself, you will become stronger from eating and be able to fly better and eventually move on to bigger and better places. The choice is yours."

Something like that, presented in a cinematic story-type way, would have done wonders for the final experience of the game. Sure, it kind of feels like a cop out when you take into account we were deliberately trying not to have text in the game, but in the end, what is more important? Having the player understand your intentions or a personal goal that you can see no other way of fixing? I feel like being stubborn in this situation is unwise.

A lot of suggestions were given to us on the final display night. One of the best suggestions I feel like we had was that the player could start off in a nest of its own with a dead chick of its own, perhaps of the same colour of your bird. This would help explain the overarching theme of the game and help the player understand a few things: what chicks look like, what they sound and act like, and also that they are able to die. It would give the player an understanding of mechanics without actually showing any text on the screen. Unfortunately this amazing advice came after the assignment was done but we're going to keep working on it over the holidays hopefully.

Overall, I feel like we did a lot of good work in regards to trust and the idea and mechanics were all there to make this game an amazing trust based game, but we didn't quite get there. There were some things we could have done to sort this out like adding text and showing player scenarios before they entered the world, and unfortunately we didn't have enough time to think of and add these things but they are things that I definitely feel that I've learned a lot from, not just from a personal standpoint but from a designers standpoint also.

I really, truly believe that the things I've learned in this project will carry over to all of my future projects and I'm really excited to look back on this project and feel like it has helped me become a better designer.

Thanks for reading.

Birdlife, Artist Statement - 5/5/15

The interpretation you have of my game is more important than what I intended. Ideally, you should play the game before reading this statement.

I am a 20 year old games designer with aspirations of working in the industry, either in games journalism or design. Games are something I have been passionate about since the first time I was allowed to play them, but I am very new to this whole ‘games creation’ process. I have to admit, this is the first game that I am truly proud of designing.

The inspiration for this game came from, more or less, my disdain with my former ideas and my frustration and the inability to think of one that I’d be happy with. I decided to resign myself to my trampoline until I could think of an idea, but after 20 minutes I still didn’t have one. I eventually gave up my attempt to focus my mind and let it wander. A bird wandered into my view, onto the tree above me. I lay there staring at it, “How much easier would life be for a bird compared to me,” I wondered, “Would it even be that much easier?” A few more moments passed. “If I were you, I’d flap my wings and fly into the distance and explore for the rest of my life… Is that something a bird would do?”

Then it struck me. This is my idea. I could use the concept of a bird’s life to represent trust within a game. From there, the game slowly evolved from a game about leaving your parents nest, finding a mate and then having and protecting chicks of your own to what it is now: a game about finding a lonely bird and deciding whether or not to sacrifice your food and probably your life to raise and protect it. Quite a leap, I know, but these changes were necessary for a number of reasons, ranging from time constraints to some mechanics being irrelevant to the overall goal: creating a game about trust.

At first, I felt like a mate would be essential to the goal of the project, and our team thought we’d have a mate in the game for the first 2 weeks of the project. The project changed drastically after a proper analysis of the term ‘trust’. What is trust, really? From there, what would genuinely help represent trust within our game? Firstly, if your character has a child then you are most likely going to feel obligated to protect it. Why would you feel otherwise? There is no real reason to betray the trust, and as I’ve learned, providing the ability to betray trust doesn’t always make sense. There must be some type of reason to do so. To help combat this lack of incentive, we decided that the best course of action was to remove the concept of family from the game. People will automatically pick their family in a game because it’s the right thing to do. Instead of having a baby bird in the game that you feel obligated to protect, we made it so that you simply stumble across this bird and have to decide by yourself whether or not it is worth sacrificing your potential as a bird to help this chick survive.

As for removing the mate from the game, that was largely a matter of re-scoping. We decided that the necessity of having a mate vs impact that it would have on the game wasn’t large enough to keep it in the game, especially when it would increase the amount of work we’d have to do. In our minds we’d rather spend more time on the important mechanics, like the chick, than overscope and end up not being able to create a game that represents trust accurately. After all, that is the goal. At times it has been hard to remember that the reason we’re creating this game is not to create a fun, mechanically sound game, but rather to emanate trust in the player through the gameplay. On this level, I feel this project has been successful. We maintained sight of overarching goal and have expressed trust in an accurate way.

Before we, (the designers,) began pitching and recruiting people for our project, we were given some constraints that would help us narrow down the type of game we were to create. These were specific to the audio of the game and the style of the game. The audio we were asked to inspire our music off of were: Ennio Morricone’s The Mission soundtrack, The Necks’ Drive By soundtrack, Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa I, Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna soundtrack and finally, Lamb’s Between Darkness and Wonder soundtrack. For our particular project we decided to go with Ennio Morricone’s The Mission soundtrack and our audio guys, Justin Vincent and Michael Pearse have delivered wonderfully on that. The music we have for this game sounds very inspired by this type of music and we are very proud to have such a successful attempt at this style of music implemented into the game. You will have heard that music in the game and it is my hope that you would feel the same. Ennio Morricone’s music was a great inspiration during the level design and gameplay discussions and definitely helped shaped the game.

On the graphics side of the spectrum, we had to pick between the 5 images you can see below, and then base our cosmetic design choices off of it. I picked the top right image, “HENRYSTUARTP.O.W”, as I felt it delivered on the geometric, cartoonish and low poly style environment that I had originally envisioned when the game was just a vision I had in my mind. As you’ve played the game I hope you can see the similarities between the picture and our own in-game style. The textures from this image are somewhat more detailed than what we have delivered in our game, but I still feel that the resemblance is clear and it is quite obvious that of the 5 pictures available, it is clearly the one we inspired our design off of.

Knowing all of the decisions that went into creating the game, obviously the game plays differently to myself and the rest of our team than it does to other people who play it, which was obvious in all playtests that we set up. Still though, I feel the steady progression we made, from an early prototype about a bird that can fly around a map and chirp, to a game where you chirp to make a bird follow you, to what we have now, was quite successful, if not satisfying for us as a team. After the first playtest we received a lot of feedback, mostly negative, usually something along the lines of, “Hey, the flying is fun and the game looks nice, but I had no idea what I was doing.” This is largely due to the early decision I and the rest of the team agreed on; there would be no in-game text. As it turns out, this particular constraint caused a lot of headaches for our team and is likely the most painful design constraint I’ve ever set myself, but I feel I’m a better designer for it now than I was before. Some issues we had with this constraint was explaining how to play the game without explicitly giving the player instructions. Eventually we settled on having chirps that showed emotions. We also added a worm above the player’s head when they were hungry, and changed the colour of the screen when the player ate, making it more colourful and saturated. To add to this, we experimented with the different graphics that the bird would chirp and settled on love hearts and smiley faces, but originally we had traffic lights and even just plane happy and sad faces. These types of things that you have to think about when you give yourself constraints, I feel at least, are very healthy for you as a designer, and like I mentioned, I feel like a better designer for it.

Overall, this is probably the project I’ve worked on that I am proudest of, certainly the most successful as far as content and aesthetics go. It is probably the favourite of all of the idea’s that I’ve had and I feel like it successfully fulfilled the criteria we were constrained with. (Which was to create a game about trust.) The idea of trust is a very ambiguous one but with time and thought, we began to understand and develop our understanding of it, which helped us to create a better game. We were met with many challenges throughout this project, like collaborating with students and setting constraints that we didn’t necessarily need to for the greater good, but overall these challenges have hopefully changed us for the better and future games from us will be to an even higher quality. Fingers crossed.

Thank you for taking the time to read my artist statement and I sincerely hope the game resounded with you. 

Designing an efficient way to design a game - 4/5/15

The title is kind of funny but I do think it makes a lot of sense.

What is the best way to design a game?

To design anything?

After working on Birdlife, I feel like I've learned a ton of things and in this quick blog I'm going to go over them.

Firstly, I feel like I would've done communication within our group a lot better. I should have organised more group meetings among all group members and I should have caught up with graphic and audio designers more often. I also feel like having the group members come to an even earlier playtest of the game that we had would have done wonders for our sound effects and music. The graphic designers and audio designers didn't really have an understanding of what our game actually was until the last week, if that. Fortunately, this time, we got lucky and our sound effects and graphics were great.

Secondly, I feel like organisation of actual roles within our group could've helped us a lot. A lot of the time jobs weren't really designated. Sure we had, "animator," "audio" and things like that, but I found myself unsure of who was completing each individual task, for example I wanted to check on how the music was going and I had to scroll up through an old conversation with one of the audio guys to check if he had implied which of the two jobs, (sound effects and music,) he was going to complete himself. Little things like that could've been done far better.

Another thing I feel like I could've done better is really understanding what I wanted the game to be from an earlier stage. For the first 2 weeks I didn't really know what the hell the game was. I had the general gist but that really isn't enough when you're creating something.


I will be going over the project in far more detail in my larger postmortem this week. Get hyped.

Last Minute Design Decisions - 27/4/15

The first and most relevant decision I made in regards to this blog is not doing a blog due to time constraints and making other more important decisions that are relevant to the game.

WILL UPDATE AFTER THE GALLERY.

Thanks for reading.

Perfecting and Beautification - 20/4/15

This weekend I had lots of work. Which is good. I like money. It's cool. It also pays for things.

Oh, you mean relevant to the degree. Gotcha, well basically I spent a lot of time making the game look nice and adding lots of details to the world. I also added 4 corners to the map which has probably added about 40-50% extra content to the world. I feel like it looks pretty nice.

I added new buildings like a hospital and a parking lot. I also added a flat parking area, a large fountain area and increased the size of the dump. Aside from this I added lots of little details to the world and a few easter eggs.

The programmers worked on making the game easier to understand which I feel has been successful so far but we still have some work to do, but I'm stoked with the progress.

Speaking of, we found an interesting game that looks a lot like ours. Jim posted it on Facebook last night. Here's link to the video.

https://www.facebook.com/carlotta.tatti/videos/10205821203504955/

I will add some screenshots soon.

Fountain area.

Car park building and park.

Car park and hospital.

Thanks for reading.

PS:

Here's a link to a beta test of our game!
http://jacksoncoll.itch.io/birdlife-beta-test?secret=jfPIjhLvnrnw6iB7mb140SNGwI

And here's a link to the Google forms questionnaire:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-TZLWy4LpU6qpVby2E9h5FXcte5XgyxSC716A8TEZlE/viewform

The World of Birdlife - 13/4/15

This weekend I've been working hard to make sure our world looks and feels how we want it to. I don't want little details to distract the player from the overall experience. Adding lots of little things to the world to make it feel more natural, more real.

Little things like opening the lid of a trash can to littering the floor around it with trash.

To making a bus stop so that the street doesn't feel so empty.

To adding water to the bird baths around the city so that if a player inspected it would feel more genuine.

Even adding chimneys to the factory in the town.

As a designer, I know these things aren't necessarily crucial, but I know that as a player I always appreciate attention to detail. It does two things, adds immersion to the game, helping the player to enjoy the game far more than they could have without, and it also shows that you actually care about your craft. 

Little things like this also make the overall experience feel more rewarding for myself. I really enjoy looking at a world I've put together and feeling proud that it came from my mind.

Of course, I could not have done this without my amazing team of programmers, audio students, graphic designers and animators/modelers, they have all done an amazing job and without them this game would be nothing, but as a group we've created something I feel all of us can be happy with. 

Now, the question is, how do we polish it enough so that the message we're trying to deliver is powerful. That is what we will likely be focusing on in the coming weeks and I'm looking forward to it.

Thanks for reading.

Potential! - 5/4/15

This weekend I worked on quite a few things as well as working on Saturday and Friday. I was also really strapped for time due to some personal reasons that I won't go in to, but I feel I did a lot work this weekend regardless and for that I am proud of myself.

Firstly I went ahead and got temporary sounds for the game just in case our audio dudes for some reason are unable deliver. I have sounds for many different chirps, a few enemies and a few bits and bobs also. Definitely enough to work with if things don't go to plan.

I also worked more on 3DS Max and I created a very simple door for my game. Actually, it's more of a cube and circle, but I made it in 3DS Max and I watched a little bit of a tutorial. Either way, here's a picture of the door in-game.

It didn't need to be anything special due to the style of graphics we're going for. (Geometry and very simple.) I feel it gets the job done. I, at least, can tell that that is indeed a door with a shadow behind it.

I also started putting the actual level together rather than just using the greybox we were originally using. (As beautiful as it was.) This weekend I just focused on setting out the layout of the town. Obviously it will be more appealing when it is finished, for now it's just mainly about getting everything in the places they need to be so that I can go in and replace and update each piece/area as more content is delivered. Ideally, this will be completed by the beginning of next week but worst-case scenario as our gantt chart suggests should be the end of next week.

Other than that, I really didn't have much time to do anything else this weekend, didn't even have an opportunity to play any games aside from 1 or 2 tetris games. You know when someone says that they had a sad, frantic weekend.

Thanks for reading.

The role of a designer - 26/3/2015

So with all of this group stuff going on, recently I've started to wonder about what my role would be on an actual team. I know it involves theorising ideas, putting things together and roles like that, but if I were to join an actual team, what would I be tasked with, and more importantly, which roles would I prefer to do?

I personally feel like I really understand people. I understand what people want, and I've always been good at critically analysing why people like games and why they don't. Even before I considered games design or programming, I always felt like I had a deeper understanding of my fellow gamer's mindsets.

As far as scripting goes, I have a lot to learn but I essentially "get it". If I need to do something, I can learn how, and once I've done it once I never have to learn it again because I keep all of my scripts. But for this project we have 2 programmers, so that's not really an issue.

As far as art goes, not really my forte but I am going to be teaching myself 3DS Max in my spare time to compensate, and I'm also learning Gimp and Photoshop more and more every day.

Another thing I feel I am good at is setting out a level. With assets available to me I feel I am quite good at putting a level together and making it feel like a real game, which is good I suppose. 

Audio wise, I usually head to royalty free music/sound effect sites and grab from there or I contact artists directly and ask if I have permission to use their material in my games. That being said, I actually used to play piano so if I got my hands on a keyboard and was able to export music from the keyboard to my computer I feel I could actually put together a few simple tracks for a game. So the potential is there.

The only real thing I would have an issue with design wise is art, but like I mentioned I am totally willing to learn how to put models and art together. I suppose animation ties in with this but I am yet to actually try my hand at animation. Perhaps I'll give it a go this weekend. 

That being said, I am having trouble finding motivation on the weekends, usually I have the most motivation during weeknights from Tuesday to Thursday. I believe this is because I get home from class feeling pumped up with an idea or something.

Anyway, just felt like venting, hence the during-the-week blog rather than the usual weekend blog.

Thanks for reading, sorry for the lack of humour.

Knock knock.

My game idea was inspired by a magpie in a tree, you heard me - 22/3/15

It's not funny, I'm serious.

So there I was, hopelessly waiting for some epiphany-like game idea to reveal itself to me, but nothing came to mind. How do I think of a game that implements trust in an interesting way as well as being inspiring for me personally to make? Lots of ideas came to my head, but none that were at all relevant to the term trust.

"God damn it." I thought, "Why is trust such a complicated thing to put in a game?

"Well," my creepy split-personality other half retorted, "it wouldn't be much of a degree if you didn't actually have to think outside the box."

"Good point," I said, "but shut up."

After continuing like this for a good 15 minutes, I eventually retired to my trampoline where I'd spend the next hour staring at the trees and the sky above me. After some more questionable and irrelevant ideas, I eventually allowed my mind to wander. My eyes wandered across the nearest tree. I noticed a magpie had landed on a branch and had started to make a nest.

"I wish I were a bird so that I could just fly away.. but.. perhaps that's not something you'd even want if you were a bird.." I remember thinking.

5 birds sitting on a tree branch.

Retrieved from:

http://everythingbirdsonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/birds-of-paradise.jpg

"I suppose you'd have a mate? I don't imagine you'd want to leave him behind." I thought again, rudely assuming that the magpie was a woman.

Boom

"There's my idea!" I thought aloud. Diving off the trampoline and tripping over on the way to my room, within 30 seconds I had already began writing down my idea for the game which turned out to be the game I now call Birdlife. I will write a blog about what the game is about in the future but for now, all you need to know is that it is a survival game that involves finding a mate and protecting your kids in a 3D, third person environment.

So in essence, my idea came from staring at a magpie and wondering about whether or not it would want to fly away into the distance. To me, that's a pretty cool way to find inspiration and this is definitely the idea I've had this term that I am happiest with. I really hope the game turns out well.

A literal angry bird.

Retrieved from:

http://www.amusingtime.com/images/03/funny-face-of-a-bird-4.jpg

Thanks for reading and I hope you can appreciate the humorous overtone of the blog. If not, please forward your complaint to: jacksoncoll@live.com and I will respond to you there with a sarcastic remark and a picture of my cat.

Also, here's a video of a Magpie making R2D2 noises:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0T_4MO_v0o

Brainstorming and how to find inspiration - 28/2/15

So for the most recent game we've been tasked with creating, we are supposed to guide a player through an emotional journey, from one emotion to another. I've finally settled on an idea and I feel like it's the best one I've had in a while largely because of the inspiration behind it. Originally I was thinking far too literal in regards to the emotions rather than thinking of something I could use my own experiences and feelings to create.

The original idea was to create a game where the player would jog along a field in a race. The player would be very slow whilst the NPC characters also in the race would pass him. This would cause the player to feel frustrated, which was the idea for the first emotion. Towards the end of the game as the player warmed up their character, they would eventually gain up enough speed to sprint back past all of the people who had earlier caused frustration, which would hopefully have the player feeling satisfied.

After the realisation that this idea is probably the worst idea ever proposed in the history of games design, (literally ever,) I decided to throw it off the table and think of something new. After around 30 minutes of painful brainstorming, I started to get frustrated that I couldn't think of an idea. Ironically, being frustrated was the thing that inspired the new idea for my game. I'm proud of this fact because I used my own feelings as inspiration for something creative. It's a nice feeling.

Emotional Rollercoaster. 

Retrieved from:

http://journeyofadreamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/emotionalrollercoaster.jpg

Essentially, in the ideal final version of my game I hope to have a small emotional experience that guides a player through the feelings of happiness, motivation and serenity all the way through to sadness, depression and morbidity. The overall gameplay involved is a character walking along a white passageway through his or her life. As the character walks, they are asked questions about their character and are given options about what the character should do in certain situations. Somewhat like that of Fallout's early game, where you are given a quiz that will help define what kind of player you are. The difference being that this is largely the core mechanic in this game.

Fallout 3 Gameplay

Retrieved from: Unknown

The goal is the player feeling an emotional attachment to their character and that they are leading their character down the right path in their life. It should feel like they are building up to something greater. Unfortunately, there is a catch, once you get to the end of the game, the character dies and the screen abruptly turns black. That is not to say the game ends, it just enters what I'm going to refer to as a state of limbo; an everlasting black screen and the player must exit the whole window to exit the game. I can't think of any examples of this happening in games so I am hopeful that this will have some sort of effect on the player. Time will tell.

This "state of limbo" is being implemented to be compliment the idea that every decision they have made during the game is completely irrelevant, and in turn, so is life. Not to say this is what I personally believe, but it is what I wish to represent in my game. Maybe I'm not the nicest developer for attempting to inflict depression on my participants, but I think I'll get over it, besides, the idea is more for them to feel the way their character would, rather than think about their own eminent death.

Anyway, that's all I have to say this week. Cheers cobba.

Emotion and how to represent it in a video game - 23/2/15

So for week 3, we are to devise a pitch about a game with the intent of creating emotion within the player. The idea of creating an emotion within a player is an interesting one and it got me thinking about a number of, (what I believe at least are,) interesting ideas for games. Upon further inspection of these ideas I realized that they would be extremely difficult to represent within an actual game.

Fortunately I've had a lot of inspiration to work with lately as I've been having a lot of extremely vivid dreams that invoked powerful emotions within me. On the unfortunate end of the spectrum, these dreams have all been particularly morbid. One of such alleged dreams involved me accepting my imminent death via 1000 foot tidal wave whilst another was finding out one of my family members had died, without knowing which one. Another particularly horrific dream I experienced last night involved me watching two very close friends die right before my eyes and then finding out that another 2 people I cared about were next to go, (whilst I slowly died myself.)

Tidal wave.

Retrieved from:

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/068/6/c/ultimate_tidal_wave_by_ironmaster99-d3baf3k.jpg

Upon explaining these dreams to people I trust, I found that merely explaining these dreams to people with words was not enough to accurately convey the feelings I felt during the dream. This was interesting to me. If I may echo the words of a wise friend: "Dreams are always like that - they cause feelings too which add to the terror - you can't relive the way you felt during your dream just by [explaining] it."

This particular quote really got me thinking. If I am truly unable to accurately portray my emotions with words, (which I would say is one of the things I am best at,) then I am going to have to think very hard to articulate it in a way that does it justice in an interactive form. I am currently still brainstorming ideas for this game and even with the extensive pool of, (albeit negative,) inspiration, I am still having trouble thinking of an interesting concept for a game.

My next blog will hopefully be filled with all of the wonderful ideas I've come up with. Stay tuned.