Games as Paratexts and Products

What is the diegetic language of your game? The paratextual language? Are they different? How can you use them to support one another?

In Burrow the narrative and emotion behind the game is very important, and the environment needs to be able to support that context. Because our diegetic language is so heavily focused on the contrast between survival and comfort, our paratextual language in the game’s two scenes its made to emphasize these different emotions. The bunny’s burrow includes interaction with family members and a homey environment that provides comfort, and the outside forest is a hard environment, with more obstacles and a darker atmosphere that further pushes the sense of danger.

Write about one arcade/cabinet game and explain the relationship between the paratext (cabinet art) and diegetic elements. Did early game developers rely more on paratext to set context?

Pong is an example of how paratext and diegetic elements can work together to create an aesthetic. While it may look like the creators of Pong simply didn’t pay attention to aesthetics or paratext when creating the game due to its simplicity, this only makes the point of the game stronger. The mechanics and main goal of the game are very simple, with the object only being to hit a ball back to another player. Pong’s aesthetic/paratext simplicity goes hand-in-hand with this and rather than making up for mechanical simplicity with complicated imagery, Pong’s simplistic design is paired with simplistic art that stays away from over-complication.

Code 2 Midterm Deliverable

Concept Statement

My game is going to be exploration based, most likely taking place within a castle in the woods. I will use several different states in order to allow the character to enter the castle and explore different areas. Each scene will be a different type of room with different ways in which the character can behave and interact with their environment such as collecting objects and unlocking text/ information.

Precedent Analysis

The game will be similar to other games such as Gone Home and Bioshock where the environment plays an important part in the narrative and the player has very little initial knowledge, having to play through the game in order to find out more about the game’s setting. The data model will be based on the character’s movement through the states and their interaction with certain objects and clues, such as books or letters.

State Diagram

Data Model example

see github repo

Github link

Github.io

What are Game Mechanics?

 

Doki Doki Literature Club

● What are the game mechanics?

Because DDLC is a text based game, the core mechanics are just clicking and pressing space in order to read through dialogue between characters and make your personal choices to affect the outcome of the game.

● List 3 examples of feedback loops. Describe them.

  1. A main component of the game is the creation of poems, where the player is simply asked to choose words from multiple lists. The player then finds that each choice is favored by a specific character and can use that knowledge in the future to cater toward their favorite player(s) when creating more poems. This ultimately affects your player’s interaction with said characters in the end.
  2. The player can choose who to talk to and show their poems at many points throughout the game, and as the game progresses they will realize that their choices on which characters to favor in this sense affects their interactions with surrounding characters. This can also be used to influence the direction of the game and the tones of interactions with each character.
  3. The player can also choose at a few points in the game which character(s) they wish to interact with outside of the main story setting (the literature club at school) and are often asked to choose between two specific characters. These decisions are just as important and again, will affect future character interactions.

● Discuss the relation between narrative and feedback loops.

The feedback loops are directly related to and directly affect the narrative and the direction that the story is headed in. This particular game has more than one ending, and the player finds throughout the gameplay that their decision making can affect character interactions and eventually the overall narrative itself. The way that the feedback loops are set up allows the player to create their own story to an extent and directly affect the narrative while playing, if they are aware and deliberate with their decision making.

Platformers

Camera angles are very important to the way players interact with scenes and can change their experience in the game. This is a concept I have been thinking a lot about while creating my platformer and designing the platforms themselves as well as background scenery. Deciding on what type of camera movement works best will also help me to decide where to constrain my main playing area and expand on or limit my character’s world. Although I had thought of climbing vines in order to get to higher tree branch platforms within my game, one thing this brought up that I hadn’t thought of was swinging, which could be beneficial to implement into my game as an added form of maneuverability rather than restricting the characters motions. Moving platforms are also something I will have to think a lot more about, as my current form of platform is a tree branch which must remain stagnant. I will definitely look into other options for passing platforms in order to avoid such a stiff scene with more restricted movement and interaction. My mechanics will most likely start out very simple with just running and jumping in order to establish basic rules for the player such as how high and far they can jump or how long it takes them to travel certain distances for future scenarios when they are avoiding enemies. They can then be built up by adding swinging motions and actions such as shooting or defending that still use the same basic rules to allow the player to predict what will happen rather than guessing at the new mechanics.

Game Production Cycles and What Makes a “Good” Game

Game Production and Development Cycles:

How does this process relate to smaller, indie productions? The work you’re doing?

No matter what the scale of a game, following the production/development process is crucial to creating a good game. All game developers need to plan properly and playtest early on in order to catch bad decisions and bugs at the beginning of the process, rather than later on when they are affecting multiple elements of the game. Having a clear plan of what needs to be done, mapping out major decisions and creating deadlines for yourself is an important part of any developer’s process and will do nothing but help them in the long run, even if they don’t have a large team to communicate with.

What Makes”Good” Writing?

Discuss the difference between knowing a good game when you play it vs having the insight to describe WHY a game works:

Anyone who has played many games can go through a particular game and pick our parts that don’t work and tell you if the game is good based on what they liked or disliked about the experience. However, it is still very important to develop the skills necessary to know why certain choices are good or bad, rather than just going with a gut reaction, even if your gut reaction is correct. Not only does this knowledge allow you to communicate with people who may not be able to tell as easily what makes a game good or bad, but you will be able to make important decisions in the planning process rather than having to reiterate and tweak ideas later on down the production process when they don’t work quite right.

How can Anna Anthropy’s analysis of Mario Bro’s influence the game you’re working on now?

Because we are currently working on 2D games with limited screen movement, many of the design decisions Anthropy discusses can serve as inspiration for the creation of more game components. For example, having two states for a player, each with different abilities and being called in different situations, can add an interesting dynamic to a player’s gameplay and keep a game from getting too static with repetitive abilities and play patterns. Anthropy also brings up the simplification of ideas and how they can give players the ability to infer what is going to happen in the game. She uses the example of creating a simple pyramid shape within a game in order to get the player to think about pyramids and the possibility of treasure being located inside. Creating game components like this can also create more dynamic play and lets the reader think about their decisions and what might be coming more carefully.

 

 

Dark Forest Shmup – Character Rankings

The Protagonist: A young adult who somehow has ended up in a dark creepy forest and needs to find their way out past oncoming monsters.

Their competence ~ 5/10

Their likability ~ 7/10

Their commitment to the cause ~ 10/10

The Antagonists: Enemies and boss enemies that are variations of mutated plants taking on a monstrous form.

Their competence: Small Enemies ~ 4/10 vs Boss Enemies ~ 8/10

Their likability: Small Enemies ~ 6/10 vs Boss Enemies ~ 3/10

Their commitment to the cause: Small Enemies ~ 8/10 vs Boss Enemies ~ 5/10

How Does this Affect the Game?

Because the smaller enemies are cuter and more likable with a lower competence level, the player may sympathize with them and underestimate their abilities. However they are very committed and can possibly band together which will make them more powerful. The boss enemies are very powerful but don’t seem to care very much about the cause, so they could be easily distracted or avoided instead of facing such a challenge. The player is being thrown into an unknown environment for unknown reasons, so it will be hard for them to figure things out at first, but their commitment will help them to persevere.

Core Studio Environments – Shmup

As a designer, what most interests you about a Shmup as a design space?

I really love the simplicity of what makes a shmup a shmup, in that all that is required is a similar style of movement and obstacles or enemies to defeat and pass. Although many people think of games that take place in space with the player being a ship of some sort, the true definition of a shmup is very open for creativity. This allows for designers to really make each game their own through the addition of power ups and their obstacles and enemies. I am really interested in being able to explore my own narrative as a shmup and develop a type of game that I normally wouldn’t have been drawn toward.

Write up the rules of your shump. What are you prototyping? How? What do you expect to learn from prototyping and what ideas will you test?

In my shmup the player begins in a dark forest, unsure of how or why they got there, with finding a way out as their purpose. The plants and wildlife around them then begins to mutate and take on monstrous forms, moving and attacking the character. It will be a side scroller, allowing the player to scan their environment for oncoming enemies as they attempt to make their way out of the forest. I expect to learn how well my narrative comes across and how it can be further developed. I will be testing out mechanics mainly, and how well the player understands the overall concept and narrative of the game.

Choose a narrative and deconstruct the plot based on the model described:

Narrative: Fullmetal Alchemist

  1. You: The storyline’s main protagonist is Edward Elric, a young skilled alchemist. He is introduced with a shot of him and his brother, another important protagonist, followed by an action scene in which many of his characteristics are introduces such as his automail arm and military status.
  2. Need: It is soon made obvious through a scene depicting a military briefing that something is not right within the country, as there have been criminal incidents and possible corruption within the government, and Edward is determined to create peace.
  3. Go: It is later revealed that Ed and his brother Al have a dark past, and committed an alchemy taboo that left Al’s soul without a real body and Ed missing an arm and a leg. The characters are determined to do whatever is necessary to get Al’s true body back, as his soul is bound to a suit of armor and he cannot feel, sleep, or eat.
  4. Search: Ed and Al learn that at an unknown point in the future Al’s soul will reject the suit of armor as a body and he will be pulled back to his original body which is in another world, similar to heaven/hell. This makes the need to retrieve Al’s body that much more pressing.
  5. Find: Ed and Al have been searching for a philosopher’s stone, which can enhance alchemy and make any alchemist much more powerful, in order to get Al’s body back. They then learn from a fellow alchemist that the stones are made from many living souls and require multiple sacrifices to be created. Because of this the brothers refuse to use something so evil for their cause, and are forced to search for their answers elsewhere.
  6. Take: A secondary storyline has been the corruption within their country’s government, and the government’s plan to create a philosopher’s stone. Ed is swallowed by an immortal being on the opposing side of this fight, and is transported into a failed portal to the same place in which Al’s body has been taken. At this point it seems that there is no escape from this abyss for Ed and that Al has been left on his own.
  7. Return: Ed find remnants of transmutation circles which can be used for alchemy and discovers the way out of the place he has been trapped in. Along the way he also passes through the portal once again where Al’s body is being kept, and learns that it will be possible for Al to reach it in the near future.
  8. Change: Ed and Al along with the rest of the military continue their fight against the immortal beings’ creation of another philosopher’s stone, and in the end they win the battle and reunite with their father. The pair is also able to send Al back into the portal to retrieve his body and they head back home to be reunited with their friends.

Code 1 Final

My initial inspiration going forward with this code project was heavily based on the Nintendo game, Electroplankton. I knew from this that I wanted to create something similar that employed design based elements heavily rather than focusing more on the actual gameplay or on a predetermined goal. Because I am already creating a lot of more “traditional” games in my core studio and lab classes, I thought it would be great to be able to explore something not so traditional in the sense that the game is heavily based on visuals and the player themselves can play around with the game and decide for themselves what they get out of it. My initial idea was to create a game based on archery, a sport that I have been ver much involved in and had a passion for for many years. The game would start off with the player clicking and dragging to aim an arrow in the desired direction, and upon release of their mouse the arrow would fly, bouncing off of the surrounding objects in the forest and leaving behind trails of color along with a creation of some sort of song or melody.

I ran into many issues while attempting to bring my concept to life. It ended up being very good that my initial concept was broad and mainly visual because it allowed me to tweak my overall concept multiple times when figuring out the mechanics behind it. Though I was worried that I might not be able to achieve what I had set out to, and often considered turning my concept completely around in order to create something more plausible for someone with my skill set, I stuck with a core mechanic and pushed myself to discover other options. Although I had no previous outside coding experience and have only learned the basics of Processing and Unity this year, I wanted to explore even more rather than simply sticking with the specifics that we had learned in class and test my problem solving skills and my knowledge of the language.

As I played around with different aspects of my project after getting the core mechanic of clicking to instantiate shapes that then translated on their own, I started to branch out from my original concept in order to further incorporate audio into my primarily visual designs. I abstracted my core concept quite a bit in order the explore this new direction. I ultimately got rid of the background forest scene in favor of a more simple background in order to allow the focus to be on the actual mechanic and the movement itself. Because of this change the arrows then failed to serve a purpose in support of the overall conceptual direction and I decided to change my images to reflect a more abstract and colorful visual experience.

My initial direction steered me toward Box2D in order to create the collision affects I desired, but this approach led to many bugs and some of the main components seemed to have changed and are no longer recognized by processing, so I had to take a different approach to achieve my desired object interaction results. I still managed to be able to check collisions and make adjustments to the experience accordingly, and successfully got my shapes to generate on click and bounce around within the constraints of the canvas size, which was my main goal as it was the core mechanic that I had in mind from the beginning of the ideation process.

I created a machine that employs both visuals based on audio and audio based on visuals. At the beginning of the sketch the audio starts playing and a single fish is automatically generated and released into the system, where it bounces around the screen which results in the generation of additional sound effects. From there, the user can try their hand at the interactivity and click around the screen to general additional fish which act similarly to the first. As far as the visual aspects, the fish cycle through a series of random colors, all shades of blue and green in order to emphasize the oceanic nature of the inclusion of fish, splashing sound effects, and ukulele music. I also included code that analyzes the audio itself and puts out sound waves according to the specific song that it is listening to. The wavelengths change color, much like how the fish do as well, and so do the particle systems. All colors are randomized and between green and blue values. The particle systems appear based on the clicks of the user’s mouse, allowing them to control where they instantiate and allowing for further control of the overall image that is created.

Overall my final creation is not extremely interactive or particularly “game-like” in the sense of traditional goal oriented games. The individual parts of the project do interact with each other quite often, but the interaction stimulated by the user is fairly limited and the project runs itself for the most part. The audio is based on and interacting with the visuals when it comes to the fish specifically and their ability to collide with and back bounce from the walls and send out a splashing sound effect. The visuals are in return based on the audio in that the sound waves directly correlate to the main background song and feed off of that audio file. What I have created is more of a simple audio and visual experience in which the user in question has the choice to control certain, though somewhat minimal, aspects of their experience. Ideally if this project were to be in a professional setting it could be a large scale creation that because very immersive, perhaps with very large screens surrounding a space in which the audience can move around or simply stand and take in their surroundings. I want those who experience my project to appreciate its simplicity and, rather than trying to take control of the project itself, let the audio and visuals speak for themselves and provide a somewhat calming addition to the existing experience of listening to music.