October 7, 2014 - No Comments!

Digital Games: Week 2

The second week of the course and we're slowly settling into a routine of balancing course requirements with all the amazing things that occur in London. Although, to be honest, most of the week was spent valiantly fighting a cold which I victoriously beat into submission. Either way, the classes go on and this week has been full of activity.

To begin with, another student and I have decided to set ourselves a rigorous work plan to get the most out of our course. We call it timetable a le rigorous. Aside from solo work such as reading and playing videogames, we are organising gatherings three times a week where we can: Play board games together. Create board games together using game design tasks. Practice MMF 2.5. All in the spirit of criticising, learning from and pushing each other to being the best game designers we possibly can.

In our game design class our task was to create a board game of a videogame in groups of four using crafts material and one hour of time. At the end of the hour, we'd have to have the rules written and watch other students play our creation. We chose to materialise Don't Starve. I won't get into the rules of the game here but we managed to get a working prototype ready by the end of the hour. The major lesson learned was the importance of clear rules and how to present them to the players. In ours we fractured them into two sets. In the rule sheet we started with an introduction: One sentence of what the goal of the game was followed by where the players should start and the general mechanics of the game. Specific rules of the objects you would find on the map were written on the object cards which you would pick up as you came across them. This meant that the students we gave the game to could instantly start playing after reading the first 5 sentences and indeed they did and understood it well. In this sense it was a success. As for balancing, it still needed a lot of polishing.

Steve Jackson started his talks from "Dice to Mice" where he illustrates the history of games. This week he took us on a journey from the Royal Game of Ur to Pokemon sprinkled with highly entertaining anecdotes of the early Games Workshop and dungeons and dragons scene in the UK. He really is a games design wizard with ridiculously awesome wisdom stats!

Theory touched on simulation and immersion. Aside from the debates in class which I won't go into here, we looked at the metaphorical simulation found in For the Records, a website working with psychologists and mental illness patients to bring representations of what having a certain mental condition is like. The game we played simulated what it felt to be bi-polar. After discussion we were asked to quickly describe how we would simulate a particular feeling through a game in our group tables. Someone suggested fear which we narrowed down to a specific fear such as the fear of heights. The setting would be a cliff and the features would be: 1. Loss of directional control as you get closer to the edge. At first you'd be able to control movement but as you got closer we'd invert the controls until finally no matter what you'd push would bring you a step closer to the edge. 2. Movement is slowed as you get closer. 3. Environmental sounds fade out. Internal sounds get louder (heartbeat and breathing). 4. When you get close to the edge the camera tilts up, concentrating on the drop. The reaction from Kelly: A shiver followed by a "I would not want to play that". I'm still conflicted on whether that is a good or a bad thing.

In the spirit of our timetable a le rigorous, Tim and I decided to challenge ourselves into creating a board game in 1 hour. The words our professor gave us were "aliens" and "cows". We set down to work however would often get distracted by the evil villain above roaming the board games room. An hour and a half later we were playing a game we had just created with more notches of valuable lessons learned. The game was all about cows (on a hexagonal grid field) who are tired of being the victims of alien abductions so they decide to fight back the only way they know how: eating, pooping, moving. The first concern was that as only two of us were making this game, we found it much harder to bounce back and forth ideas. We managed to overcome this by getting a prototype out half an hour in. After that point, ideas and refinements flowed much better and we got much further ahead in our design. We looked at previously played co-op games such as Castle Panic to inform how this game should work. Another interesting observation was how tightly the game mechanics and rules we had created were related to the aesthetics of the game. Halfway through the game creation we tried re-skinning it as something other than aliens abducting cows but didn't find another world in which the particular mechanics we had would make sense. This further reinforced my belief that in order to create innovative games the mechanics and the aesthetics of the game need to be co-dependent so that one cannot exist without the other.

New games played this week were limited as my board games arrived (Dixit and Gloom) and I was super excited to get everyone to play them. However I did get my hands on Dead of Winter when two professors came hunting for students to play the game with them. It reminded me a lot of Battlestar Galactica which is a game I enjoy a lot, except there was one thing I found Dead of Winter didn't do so well. It tries to create conflicting agendas between players however the co-op aspect of the game is so strong that we ignored our personal agendas for the survival of the group. More weight needs to be placed on the personal agenda by creating real consequences in the game. Another game I played was The Yawgh with two bachelor students in the games lab. It is an incredibly funny game that often had us in stitches though what was especially interesting to me was seeing the different play styles of each of us. One concentrated on the stats, another in keeping in character, while I found the most entertainment in the story as I created the town drunk who after the Yawgh becomes the town leader. It's a truly inspirational story.

September 30, 2014 - No Comments!

Digital Games: Week 1

The four rules of the Digital Games MA at Brunel:

1. Do the assigned reading.
2. Get to know the people on your course.
3. Learn the MMF 2.5 software.
4. Play lots and lots of games!

This sums up the first week of games theory and design, a course where booklets are decorated with Scott Pilgrim characters, students have access to all the consoles imaginable and professors quote Star Wars on a regular basis. As a challenge to myself as well as for record keeping, I shall be attempting to record the progress of the course. It has proven to be a very intense program with every day being worth of an entire blog post. To make things easier I will briefly comment on various activities then concentrate on one particular detailed high-light for the week.

Most of this week was spent discovering new games and getting to know classmates. Naturally, we did this over board games which included Once Upon a Time, Castle Panic, Talisman, Jenga, Resistance and a racing board game that had us all in laughing fits at how slow the game was. In the London tube I horrified the english by playing the augmented reality game Face Raiders on a friend's nintendo and learned my lesson on gaming and social conventions. On my own I've played Don't Starve, Prison Architect, Pathogen and Threes with Don't Starve quickly becoming a personal favourite. A lot of these were played on the way to EGX in London where we discovered gems like Mushroom 11, Lumino City and Never Alone. These personal discoveries at EGX are magnificent games that deserve their own blog post but that falls outside the scope of this particular post.

Just an hour into the course and we were already designing and pitching game concepts on the spot. Among a team of four and the key words "burglary" and "fear", we came up with the idea of creating an oculus game all in 5 minutes. You play a mansion owner on a dark, stormy night who's home has been broken into by a burglar. The goal of the game is to get to the phone without either coming across the burglar or loosing all your possessions. While you look at a possession, it is safe from the burglar. Look away though and the next time you look back, it might be gone.

After the class, Tim and I decided to try and make a simplification of the game on MMF 2.5, mainly to learn how to use the program. First I drew a sketch of a top-down, Monaco-styled game which Tim set up to start creating on the software. I decided that the both of us working on creating the same mechanic would be redundant so I began experimenting with various tutorials to get the hang of MMF. One of the first things learned was frame scrolling, followed by having an object follow the mouse. By making that object be a large black image with a transparent centre, I managed to make it look like I was shining a flashlight onto a surface.

At this point is when I realised I had worked out a first-person mechanic for the burglar game. I created a burglar icon that would randomly move across the play area. When it came in contact with your cursor, the game would end. When the burglar was near your mouse, you'd hear footsteps. Then I created a series of "valuables" that would randomly scatter at the beginning of the game. Whenever the burglar came in contact with one, it would disappear and you would loose a point. Finally, I created a telephone that would randomly spawn on the play area. When you find and click on it, you'd ring the police and win.

It took me an afternoon and half the night to make it, most of which was figuring how to do things and the rest refining the behaviour of the burglar and the collision detection to create better gaming experiences. For example, the burglar slows when they are near you so there is more skill involved in avoiding them. Also, I've made the collision area of the cursor smaller so there might be instances of panic where you catch a glimpse of the burglar before they, or you, escape.

Overall it was quite an entertaining game to create especially as it gave me the opportunity to learn from students in other years during the process, whether it was playing their game demos or asking for technical help. The computer lab at this university houses a very creative community and I can definitely see myself spending most of my time here.

A suggestion that was put forward to me by a generous game player was the thought that controlling a character with the keyboard and the direction of its flashlight with the mouse would make the game more coherent. It would feel less like "shining a light from the cieling onto a floor". I found myself agreeing with him as this also means that I could play with the speed of the character and therefore the feel of the context. Perhaps this should be a project for next week.

March 13, 2014 - No Comments!

Misc Doodles and Wisdom of Architecture School

I recently received the news that I got into Brunel University to study my masters in Digital Games: Theory and Design. Surely, it is no wonder I am beyond excited to begin!

Thinking about going back to university I remembered all those moleskins I filled during my architecture course at the Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA. Aside from all the building sketches and perspective lines, movement studies and plans, I'd often sketch things that were not exactly architecture, but were not exactly anything else either. Simply knowledge and experiences collected during the three years in Canterbury. Here are a few.

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But the truly dearest is the back page of the moleskin, where a few friends decided it would be great to leave their own signatures.

Perhaps its wishful thinking but I like to think I'm not exactly leaving architecture. Having done three years of it, it has heavily shaped the way I approach game design and I will continue to sketch, analyse and create from the architecture around me.

August 23, 2013 - No Comments!

VR Jam 2013

Galaxy Rise Games now has a studio!  Beginning of this month Adrian May and I moved to Gandía, Spain to fully dedicate our time to the Oculus Rift. A few paellas and beach days later our equipment arrived and we are set and ready to work.

Before working on our main game, Adrian and I have created Rosetation, now in its testing phase. In July I mentioned a little something I wanted to try out for the Oculus Rift based on observations of Proton Pulse and other sensations of height and speed. This game has evolved and we are now making it for the VR Jam.

Rosetation being my first start to finish game, there were many times where I felt like I had been dropped in a maze of freezing cold water and left to figure things out. With perseverance and guidance from Adrian things worked out and honestly, it feels amazing. A lot of lessons have been learned and the prospect of how much more I still have to explore is truly exciting!

I spent the majority of these three weeks:
+ Writing up and explaining the game, its mechanics, levels and concepts to Adrian.
+ Modelling and texturing the assets in Maya.
+ Discovering displacement mapping, how awesome it looks and how Unity doesn't support it.
+ Setting up assets in Unity ready to be programmed.
+ Fidddling with the scene's lighting to get the right environment.
+ Discussing technical problems with Adrian and researching solutions.
+ Reading and editing code to improve gameplay based on observation and feedback.

Though the VR Jam is ending soon, I will be playing with this game a bit more and keep on testing.

July 16, 2013 - No Comments!

Oculus Rift, Post University and Proton Pulse

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After my recent graduation from university, I've been spending most of my hours toying with this device, the Oculus Rift. In a team of four we are developing games for the new virtual reality.

Current workstation: a wall of computer screens.

Owning an oculus also means playing it a whole lot. I've explored underwater, seen the earth from space and had everyone in Half-Life 2 stare me straight into the eye. So far my favourite of all VR games has been Proton Pulse. I've beaten the giant face boss about four times by now and had friends play it many more.

Alex playing Proton Pulse in the Rift.

There are lot of things that game does right with the Oculus Rift:

1. No walking means no stillness illness. A huge problem with the Oculus is the nauseating feeling of your eyes telling you you're moving when your body isn't. By simply not having to walk, this uncalibrated sensation is no problem at all.
2. Space perception as a game mechanic. What the Oculus does really well is the perception of space and depth. When you are in a tunnel, you feel like you are actually in one. So when Proton Pulse places its blocks further and closer away, you can tell the distance it is from you and react accordingly. (Also when they decide totwist the tunnel it is awe-striking.)
3. The Oculus as the controller, looking as the game mechanic. The thing about 3D space is that you can tell when an object is flying straight towards your face. By simply looking at it, you bring the paddle up to stop it from hitting you. Simple, intuitive, no explanations needed.
4. Unrealistic realism. Another problem with the first Developer Kit version of the Oculus Rift is the wire mesh sensation. Due to the screen not being in HD, realism is shattered through pixels. Proton Pulse doesn't try to look real, it sits happily in an 80's world of pulsing and pixelated lights that through it's consistency becomes immersive.

Let's not forget the amazing music of Proton Pulse that keeps you on your feet and dancing with the Oculus.

Based on these observations I have decided to work on a little side project in Unity with the help of Adrian May. It is a first person SuperHexagon type game where you must escape closing in walls. Five minutes into building it we found the walls made really cool patterns when viewed from above.

A lot of my hours are now spent building models for the main game and I'll be keeping this blog updated on my side of the ups and downs. The Oculus Rift is an amazing piece of technology and what is even cooler than jumping in VR is to be a part of its construction.

May 4, 2013 - No Comments!

BarCamp Canterbury 2013

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No place has more tecchy goodness than BarCamp Canterbury and this year Sam Lowe, Eliza del Carmen and I made sure we would not miss out. The event lasted Saturday and Sunday and consisted of amazing talks by amazing people.

Highlights would be Allan Callaghan's "How much is that retrogame in the window?" His enthusiasm on retro consoles made for a very entertaining talk. TinkerSoc's Ikea hacks and other designs made me wish I was a UKC student to join them in the construction of more blinking tables and arcade stands. Saturday was wrapped up nicely by Carl Jeffrey with his "Sharing tools and stuff (A starter for 5)" where we pooled interesting links and infobased on previous talks. On Sunday Marcus Ball, founder of Ambition House, motivated universities to treat students like the Avengers and Sam Lowe ignited an interesting debate with his talk on "Identity and Genuine Experience Online".

I held two talks as well. The first was on "Meaningful Interaction on Video Games" (slides can be found here). It had a considerable outcome and I was excited to talk about my discoveries in the video game field to an experienced crowd. We debated quite a bit on goal-oriented level design and the sandbox style of Minecraft and received a memorable comment from Colin Johnson on the pretentiousness of some architectural designs. A few people approached me after the talk illustrating how it had influenced them. I am beyond ecstatic on how it went and would like to say thank you very much to BarCamp and everyone who came to listen.

The second talk I held in conjunction with Eliza del Carmen on "There are no women on the internet: Discuss". We gathered a small group and debated sexism on the internet and geek culture. It was a rewarding half an hour chat with a very engaging audience. A huge thank you to everyone who came and contributed.

The overall experience was amazing and I hope I will be in the country for next years BarCamp!

November 21, 2012 - No Comments!

Memento Vita

The massive digital spectacle is offering us a magic circle than we can escape to that can and will give us more meaningful experiences than the real world. The internet has made the world smaller and denser. The human mind cannot grasp the vastness of the network so we group individuals into communities. In the small online community, we can find our place in the collective, share our view of utopia and help contribute to its virtual creation. Here we can find meaning and create a collective greater than the sum of its parts.

Litany Against Being Transported Into An Alternate Universe

If I'm going to be happy anywhere
Or achieve greatness anywhere
Or learn true secrets anywhere
Or save the world anywhere
Or feel strongly anywhere
Or help people anywhere
I may as well do it in reality.

In the words of Jane McGonigal, games aren't a waste of time. Instead, they are an opportunity to improve the real world. Rather than a "memento mori" or "carpe diem", games and the spaces in which we play these games can be our memento vita.

November 16, 2012 - No Comments!

Nearing a Brick Wall

This week has so far been the most difficult in this project's history. There is something about being told to link my project even further to the Olympics that has just drained my creative juices. What do you do when you reach that point yet you still have to produce a heavy amount of work?

At the intercrit my tutor suggested going through the route of e-sports and graphene then using that simple, centered concept as an answer to the wider philosophical questions. Probably the best piece of advice I've been given while seriously stuck on a project: make it simpler.

In the meantime, I went to a series of talks at Digibury in which Andrew Jackson explained the act of making. He mentioned the concept of Flow which I had come across when reading Rules of Play. It sparked an interesting discussion between other visitors and myself  in which we discussed the magic circle, our states of flow, flow in video games and the dangers of escapism. Even after the event, it sparked a  conversation in response to Sam Lowe's project where I mentioned that I don't believe there are experiences for experiences sake but experiences to attempt to reach a state of flow. There was one mode of phrasing coming from Jackson that essentially helped me break through the brick wall. He described the sensation of flow as "becoming your environment".

Now I can tackle this project with momentum again.

November 6, 2012 - No Comments!

Portrait of an Architect

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"Modern man fails to realize he is the inheritor of the great march of technology, an exponential progressionwhich, at this fragile point in history, soon become too rapid to predict."
This is the lone architect, wondering the world, looking down at cities that they can no longer master-plan associety has grown too complex. It has grown old and weary, bound by the tradition when it should have adapted to the new. As an architect, it is my obligation to think of the future and with it the rapid increase in technology. We must be philosophers at the same time as we are scientists and constantly ask ourselves: Where is this world moving towards?

This is a collage created by me, inspired by the Futurology Subreddit which I eagerly follow. The original images are Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich and Mass Effect 2 Citadel by BioWare.