Rosa Carbo-Mascarell

On the 10th of September our professors kindly let us invite non-Brunel students onto campus to try our games. With that extra pressure of completing something presentable for outside eyes, us masters bonded over tight deadlines and development sprints. Hours before the doors opened we were pinched over last minute bug fixes, keyboards clacking as we polished gameplay.

The event was busy, guests traveled from as far as Canterbury and Cambridge to play our games. (Thank you!) We were overwhelmed by the interest and we welcomed everyone with drinks, cookies and controllers. With only three hours in which to play games and so many playtesters, not everyone got to play all the games. However everyone seemed satisfied with what they got out of the day and we ended the event with some celebratory drinks at the pub.

Thank you Ashley for the picture!

My notebook is filled with notes. Some of the biggest observations was my gross underestimation of the time it would take to play the game. While originally I was expecting it to take 10 or so minutes, the reality of it was closer to 40 minutes. It was a similar mistake to the one we did during Meeting. A puzzle that would take 1 minute to complete for us designers would take 20 for two completely new players. In this game, the time difference was greatly to do with the amount of content in the game (people spent an average of half a minute looking at things, then rechecking them for the number code for the safe). However what took the most time was the fact that the key was accidentally really well hidden. While it took up a quarter of the screen, everyone seemed to overlook it to the point that I would have to interfere in every game session at around the 30 minute mark. It was an interesting optical illusion and while funny to a lot of players, it will have to change.

Some things that worried me before playtesting day were settled. My game has a strange navigation system that might be more intuitive for tablets but on PC might seem a bit esoteric. However the instructions were clear to almost all players and after two minutes they could control the device with ease. To be absolutely sure, I might add an extra line of text to go with the current animations.

While I like everything being diegetic, it will also be easier to include a system that makes it clearer what objects can and can't be interacted with as some players would resort to clicking on everything. This might not need to be the case in the tablet version but for PC, the platform on which it is being graded, it will make interactions smoother. Also, I will have to add in the option to read handwriting as typed text as some players had difficulties with a few words.

The overall feedback was fantastic! After finishing the game I would ask my playtesters: "What do you think happened?" What a relief it was to hear them relate back to me what I was trying to say! Everyone understood my main point while reacting differently to it, the more observant players would go deeper into the story, others caught the references to surrealists and romantics. One of the playtesters, Adam, put it wonderfully: There are many layers to the story. Not everyone will explore the deepest layer but everyone got the overarching concept.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to play my game:

Your feedback is helping me greatly in polishing up this game. And apologies to those that wished to play but where cut short by the time. Drop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to send you the prototype.

With so much to do, us masters are living 24/7 in the labs while we all finish up our games. Wish us luck!

The quick rundown: The paper has been sent to various of my very kind friends and family for proofreading. Thank you everyone who gave me feedback! I owe you a beverage for taking the time to read a very lengthy essay and put in the brainpower to criticise an academic text. After standing so close to my writing, getting fresh eyes has been very encouraging. I can safely say the paper is a couple of days off from being ready.

Most of the month of August has been spent creating the ludic sketch. No matter how short I've tried to make it, a game takes its time and getting it all done in 6 weeks is proving a challenge. The most time consuming factor has been the content but, as it is a game based on environmental exploration, content is everything. I'm not very happy with the art but with how little time I have it is going to have to wait. But all is going well and I should be going into testing next week. Which brings me to...

On the 10th of September we are holding a playtesting day at Brunel University London. This is all thanks to our very kind tutors who let us open the labs to guests. Setting myself such a harsh deadline has been tough but productive. The game definitely needs to be of a good enough quality by then.

And with that, I'm delving right back to work.

The story and the mechanics of the game are there, both birthed out of each other and capture the requirements I outlined the month before. Even some of the ideas that arose from that one afternoon on a Barcelona balcony made it's way into the game. I spent some time placing the story in various settings and observing how it changed however I ended up going with what made the most thematic connections, with a setting that represented from all perspectives what I will be trying to say.

I'm thinking these two images, by the same Caspar David Friedrich, when placed next to each other. And Sylvia Plath's "Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can, I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night." I'm thinking Anna Karenina, her mind consuming itself indoors. Le Corbusier calling homes "machines for living" and Will Self's spiritual exultations in the classroom and on walks. Yes, I am being vague on purpose because nothing will show it better than the game (if all goes well).

After the walk, I set off to test the core mechanics. Nine lines of code later and I had a rhythmic walk that made use of parallax and the technicalities of a tablet. Some digital brushstrokes later I had a sky (shown below) and some mountains which move to the rhythm of the tablet. Watching it come together in one satisfying afternoon is getting me all excited to get this game done and out there.

But there is still a lot to plan until then. Like for example the placement of the story in the environment. Something I have been working on through the help of post it notes and markers, and of course by making friends play it through like a text-based adventure game. The shape of the house has changed so much while placing the story in it. Everything from the objects to the style of the architecture is becoming a metaphor for the characters and the mechanics.

Over the course of the next week I will be working on re-drafting the first version of the essay. Maybe it's because I've been in the same room for so long while writing, it's been a really slow process. I'll be printing out the essay and writing by hand this week in hopes it might help loosen up that creativity. Onwards!

The late 1950's film industry saw a revolution in their medium through names like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. The primary distinction from their anterior maestros is that these filmmakers had studied their crafts at universities. They understood their semiotics and aesthetics and this strengthened their script concepts and filmic frame. It lead to innovation. It is my belief that we have reached a similar point in the games industry.

This Wednesday, Tim Phillips and I tubed and trained our way from Brunel University to Brighton. It wouldn't be my first time at Develop: Brighton, a game developer conference where indies dress up like their triangle-breasted characters, academics mentor visiting students, and Peter Molyneux makes ghostly strolls on his phone. Though slightly sleep deprived from days of working on our dissertations, we jumped from stand to stand, playing games and debating the state of the industry with developers and fans.

We must have played every game at the expo when Tim collapsed on a bean bag. I had just been talking animatedly with the masters students at the National Film and Television School and my mind was sparking with excitement, frustrations and ideas. In that pause Tim and I shared a thought:

The most innovative game designs are coming out of universities. The boundaries of games were pushed that day by people like Mata and Elwin of SassyBot, Paul Dillon of Cupboard Games and the various students of the National Film and Television School. They have games that break our understanding of agency, transform storytelling or go Dali and take you on an experience on the development of an egg.

We are at the game industry's European New Wave where the Henry Jenkin's and the Janet Murray's guide the university student's design decisions and expressive journeys. Through a deep understanding of theory, these developers strengthen their craft. It is no wonder to me that they are coming out of universities.

Underneath the burnt shadow of the long-gone Brighton Pier, I watched in wonder as Tim Phillips transformed a traditional hack-and-slash mechanic into a piece-together-narrative, Quantum Leap game in the style ofHitchcock's Rear Window. It is minds like these, minds that understand the theory, who will have the basis with which to break the factory mould of the games industry. University students are going to change games.

Three hours ago master visualiser Atahan circled a Kinect around me as I watched a 3D replica of myself form on screen. He opened me up in blender and turned me into quicksilver and silk, marble and glass. Below are a few of the renders that Atahan quickly did to show me the program, including the one render where I become custard!

It's way past midnight now but I've turned the excitement of playing with your own face into a crash course on the blender software. The image above is the fruit of some of my playing.

Six hours a day, five days a week from now until September is the rough schedule for dissertation work. While most of it has been spent making the most of opportunities outside the course, it's time to focus on what I came here to do. It's dissertation time.

Days have been spent writing on windows, drawing clouds of thoughts that would combine into storms of ideas. I've been trying to find a string that would tie together the research I've been doing over the course of this academic year. This includes fields such as architecture, geography and games design, writers from Henri Lefebvre to Henry Jenkins, games like Gone Home or Year Walk, environmental storytelling, immersion, navigation, urban narratives and of course my sweetheart: psychogeography.

A little snippet of what I plan to do:

Walking is a practice that has gone beyond the mechanics of bodily movement. It is endowed in meaning, critical and aesthetic, environmental and personal. In 1790, Wordsworth and Jones began a 2000 mile journey through the European continent. The hypnotic rhythm of walking stunned them with fatigue and raised them to a plane of transcendence (Self, 2015). Walking to the early British psychogeographers was a route to spirituality in a disenchanted world. The nineteenth century flaneur, a leisurely observer of urban space, would end up immersing themselves into the intoxicating past of the city (Benjamin, 1939) similar to the ‘deambulation’ practices of Surrealists who would walk to reach a state of hypnosis (Basset, 2007). This immersion into the landscape allowed for the excavations of hidden secrets and exploration of spatial patterns. The exploration of landscapes was used politically by the Situationists International (Sadler, 1999) and as a window into an occult mysticism of the city by British psychogeographers (Coverley, 2010).

Like the Situationists International, geographers like Michel de Certeau (1988) use the immersion invoked in walking to read cities. Walking is a spatial trajectory that allows the exploration of hidden stories, embedded in the landscape. Early writings followed the spatial pursuit of a secret. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Man of the Crowd (1840), the writer followed the nightly wanderings of a man through London. Throughout the voyage, in which the author falls deeper into the hypnosis of insomnia and the rhythms of the walk, Poe takes a psychological anonyme. He abandons his identity so he can reattach himself to that of the vagabonding stranger and at the same time assume the position of Walter Benjamin’s archaeologist, collector and flaneur. In his alienated position, the flaneur can excavate the hidden secrets of nighttime London.

At the heart of the ‘derive’, or ‘drift’, is a ‘playful-constructive behaviour’ (Debord, 1958). Playful walking represented a fight against the boredom of the modernist city and the delusions of control (Chtcheglov, 1953). It aims to excite the body and the senses through the sudden changes in ambiance in an attitude of resistance against functionality. The practice is often considered an ‘elaborate game’ by geographers (Bassett, 2007: p.401). One that draws a player's attention to the stories of the environment.

The steam store has seen a sudden appropriation of the term “walking simulator” used on games such as Year Walk (Simogo, 2013), Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), Dear Esther (The Chinese Room,2012), The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2011) and Life is Strange (Dontnod, 2015). Even games from before the term was coined such as Myst (Cyan, 1993) have been tagged as a walking simulator. This projectis a literary analysis into the patterns of these games, arguing that at the core of their design is the psychogeographic derive.

This project will concentrate on Year Walk and Gone Home as two examples of walking simulators. Year Walk has been chosen for its critical acclaim (Unity, 2013; BAFTA, 2014) as well as its strong references to psychogeographic practices. Gone Home has been chosen for the writers extended experience with the game as well as its use as a point of reference for other walking simulators. It will identify the similarities between walking simulators and derives by comparing these two games, formally and aesthetically, to psychogeographic practices. Through the use of a gameplay log, it will identify the games goals and mechanics as well as their use of environmental storytelling and ludic experience.

It thus argues that an understanding of psychogeography, its practice and reading, can help create more immersive environmental storytelling games such as walking simulators.

I'm aiming to have the essay come in conjunction with a game demo. What the game is going to be is still a bit up in the clouds. To brainstorm I've been walking down the route of Valencian rondalles, les falles and various other local traditions. I think it's time I put my home city on my map of games.

Spring in London is the season of picnics, rooftop networking and plenty of opportunities. Us Brunelians have dived straight into it.

A team of masters students have started a game design collective by the name of Untold Rubies. We design games for studios, filmmakers and competitions. Really good news and interesting doors have opened up since we started laying down the groundwork in winter. Working with game and film studios, we have made many prototypes, game design documents and artwork. My role was mainly in game design, layouting and editing of documents, and art asset creation. Two projects have been particularly successful.

On the 30th of April a team of us submitted E-Sol, an entertaining and informing mobile game that interacts with pollution databases across Europe, to the MYGEOSS European Commission competition. We won! With the EU grant under our belts, we are now in the works of making this game a reality. But first a bit about the game and how it came to be.

E-Sol gives players a virtual pet plant named Sunny who needs your protection from air pollution. The more attention you give your plant, the happier it will become and the faster it will grow. However Sunny is directly affected by the air pollution of the country it is in needing you to clean the air, water it and encouraging it to stay happy and grow tall. The game promotes environmental awareness to young children and encourages them to learn about air pollution levels across their country as well as the rest of Europe.

The project started when I received a very enthusiastic call from Andreas Paspatis about an opportunity for Untold Rubies. A group of us gathered and began brainstorming for an interesting way of beautifully showing the data provided by MYGEOSS. The challenge: we had a week to bring it all together. Luckily, we have a lot of talent in our collective. Many daily meetings, sleepless nights on Photoshop and discussions over tea and whiteboards were had. A day before the deadline I was arranging Pong Nantapan and mine's artwork on InDesign. Then playing with fonts for the excellent text Andreas, Toni Brasting, Tim Philips, Givoanni Rubino and Daniel Thompson had written. A week of insane work payed off with such talented people on the team. Our game was picked as the top 10 apps and won the European Commission grant.

The winning GDD will be made public on the 10th of November.

Shortly after the E-Sol project, we were contacted by Kate Stonehill, documentary filmmaker applying for the Tribeca New Media Fund. The brief was to create a game to complement her documentary on a very interesting development on the West Bank. "A Palestinian millionaire has built the fist futuristic, high-tech city in Palestine but the fate of his dream city is threatened when an Israeli official refuses to supply the city with water." I jumped at the opportunity to work on such a game. In collaboration we created DRIP, a game where players assume the role of water and navigate the pipe infrastructure of the West Bank. On their journey, they become witnesses to a multitude of events and discussions relating to the conflicts in the West Bank.

The proposal has been submitted to the Tribeca New Media Fund and we are looking at beginning the development of DRIP in late 2015. You can view the game design document here.

With so many projects popping up, I think it is time I temporarily retire from these rooftop networkings, however fun they may be.

The last taught classes of the masters course are done and the final assessments have been handed in. But the young game designer never rests. The past two months have been a series of non-stop work straight through the Easter holidays and into the summer break. It included pitching, theory work and creating a game demo.

Geopets was the focus in design. A solo project for the game design module. Geopets is an augmented reality iPhone/iPad tamagochi that uses geolocation and object recognition software to pin your pets to a particular location in the city. Originally, it began with the idea of using magic realism to enchant the day to day lives of citizens. Some brainstorming later and it had evolved to enchanting Londoner's commutes with creatures hidden in the city.

The pitch was done entirely using Adobe After Effects. The result was a 10 minute long animated presentation that illustrated the game. It took a relentless fueled week to create the presentation, including artwork and practicing the timing. Above is a short compilation of some of the highlights of the presentation.

After pitching the game comes making it. There were massive limitations in terms of tech (augmented reality and geolocation services in particular), however I found ways to simulate the feel of it through the games presentation. As this project was entirely solo, the biggest problems were overcome through feedback. A week into creating the demo I had people playing prototypes of the games. It became invaluable to making the game flow smoothly in ways that players could understand intuitively