New Site!

Hey ya'll, I've moved over to wordpress, and got me a domain name. Catch me at joelschroyen.co.nz/blog
:)
I won't be updating it here any more, so change your bookmarks!

Personal, or social?

Weighing the options.
A: Personal Balls - when you reach a certain level with another, they will pass something personal for the player to hold onto, a personal ball. How this ball is used reflects on the player's social considerations - which can be good, or backfire.

B: Conversation levels - At a certain social level, the visible representation of conversation changes form. Trying to interact with characters with differing conversation levels will change their reaction to the player.
Level 1: A ball - heavy, tied the ground, clunky.
Level 2: A balloon - floaty, friendly
Level 3: ??Love hearts?? - fast, embracing


Story boarding interaction of conversation levels. Also shows new system of relative social levels. All characters have a social level shared with every other character, and the player.
The relative social level system is intended to represent intelligence in the AI - they will interact with other AI differently than the player (or the same, depending on the social levels)

Mungifier(tm)

I'm just fiddling with something that will create levels of pixelation on game load - so I don't have to do it in photoshop every time (although running a macro isn't that hard).

Anyways, 3 days later and I got some interesting results (3 frames of animation for each of the 6 levels):

 There seems to be a threshold for good pixelation...

This last one looks fairly good, the second level is still a bit weird, but the rest are alright :)

Some more drawings

Seasons

Above: To represent the passage of time, seasons will be used - reflecting the players 'age'.

Levels of detail

Above: The quality of your relationship with other characters is changeable based on your interactions with them, the feedback mechanism will likely be represented in the pixelation of the character. The worse the relationship, the more distorted and basic they are.

Cycling through inventory of balls

Above: If you are kind, you will be given a character's personal ball. Cycling through them, you can see how they are doing. Passing a characters personal ball to another character can have consequences depending on who they, and who's ball it is.

Minimal Pixel Art

Classic pixel art, charsets, FF6 SNES style, I'm finding is too detailed.
And then I came across Minimal Pixel Art. Hazzah!


The Pixel As Minimal Art
link
Moar

 

This compounded effect or the process of adding pixels on top of pixels ... and at various sizes ... enhances the sublimity, and it also brings in other interpretations or connotations such as plurality, for example the coexistence of several worlds. 

 

 

Pixelscapes


pixelscapes from project landscapes on Vimeo.

Concept sketch && notes

I think this idea for feedback is will work well - depending on the characters social level, in relation to the player, is - it will either become more defined, or pixelated. The characters actions will also reflect this, with undistinguishable blocks offering only a slow pacing, and recognisable characters displaying more interesting, and joyful actions.
This is in response to what I read somewhere, likely in Koster's A Theory of Fun, that AI in modern games (still) are dumb, but are looking more and more realistic. Their detail should reflect their intelligence.
It is also a response to what Will Wright argued in a lecture - that pride and guilt and emotions that games seem to have better influence on over non-linear media (literature, film).
Here it is your responsibility to care for the characters, and it is a direct result of your actions that allow them to come alive, or fall into dull greyness.

To further this idea of quality of detail representing the success of the game state, the over world could also have a treatment representing an average of all characters current states.
If you are failing overall, then world becomes a blur to you, you are less part of it.


Experiment game

Coming soon: More Experiments!
In the meantime, here is my most recent experiment. Codenamed Strangers
strangers011.exe 

Doodles

Some forms, silhouettes. See if you can see what they are :)

A tree based on art. I quite like it. Top right are pixelated versions.

Interpersonal relationships

The social world of Ai. They go about their day, minding their own business until some variable goes into the negative and then they return an infinite integer and asplode.

How do they react in this world I am creating?

Simple social scale

Good/Bad
A simple scale of the value of a character. Each character has a static value that is interpreted by other characters. Characters only interact with those that who have a greater value than their threshold allows.
An extension of this could be to have each character have their own 'impression' (value) for each and every other character they encounter based on their experiences.
This method simplifies things, but is very shallow.

Friendship levels/ranks

There is a strict level system in which characters have to work up when interacting with each other. While they have to achieve each level in secession to raise up, they can fall several depending on the severity of the disrespect.

 Level/Rank -> Quality

Love/Marriage -> Commitment

Relationship -> Jealousy

Friendship -> Integrity

Friendly ->Honesty

Meeting/Met -> Friendliness

Familiarity -> Consistency

Neutral -> Inactive

Dislike/avoidance -> Deceit

Hate -> Malice

Civ IV Unit properties

On the face of this, this system is exactly like the one above. Simply too linear. The interesting part comes in when characters have certain preferences and certain quality dislikes. Some sections become easier to overcome, some difficult - or impossible.
This list needs to be narrowed down to 4 states max really, for simplicity sake.
While I want the game to be non-competitive, and therefore not have an obvious statistically strong dominant strategy, this system promotes this type of gameplay. Also, the game representation would have to reflect, or at least elude to this system.

Example of representation system

Simple Art

Simplified forms allow players/viewers to apply their own meanings and experiences to the forms they see - therefore become more relevant and meaningful to them and enhancing their experience.
Jason Rohrer's games lack about as much detail as is possible before loosing the forms into obscurity. They are still quite specifically representative though.
Is it necessary to have specific references? Rod Humble's The Marriage has the most basic forms possible - squares and circles. Using colour and transparency to convey further meaning.

But what about the Fine Arts? Let's have a look at artist's ways of representing things.

Impressionism
Impressionism was a move away from realism, and used the strength of brush strokes to convey forms - arguably conveying the mood better than a realistic image.

Expressionism
"An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself... (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures... Impressions and mental images that pass through mental peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence [...and] are assimilated and condense into more general forms, into types, which he transcribes through simple short-hand formulae and symbols." (Gordon, 1987) (From Wiki)
  
Abstract Art
Abstract art has the intention of abstracting forms to their most basic - while still containing their meaning. Mondrian worked with the tensions between geometric forms and bold, primary colours. Pollock succeed in taking his expression and putting it directly onto the canvas, his movements and intentions are recorded right onto the frame.

Animation/Cartoons

Cartoons are simplified forms. Originally simply because a detailed character takes too long to animate. But as Scott McLeod argues, the more simplified a face is the easier it is for people to project their own impression onto it.

Finished The Marriage

(Click on image for animation of my game)
Finally! I figure it out! The variables are obvious if you just pay attention. There are two types of feedback here, the opacity of a square (when it goes invisible the game is over) and the size of the square (when it shrinks too small the game is over). I could go into it more, but I think I might already have..

Jason Rohrer's Passage

I needed a break and ended up digging through my archive of games (the temptation to start an RPG like Zelda or FFVII, or CivIV was strong).








Passage by Jason Rohrer is an art game, in his typical style - you'll notice some graphical elements and music from Gravatation.
It is embeded with meaning which he explains on his page What I was trying to do with Passage. 
You take the agency of a charcter in a maze. To the far right is a compression of the future - it's compressed and fuzzy. As time goes by, you shift to the right and the left becomes compressed and fuzzy. There are tresure boxes which can be spotted in the distance, but only certian ones give you points. It is possible to learn to distingush between them. Early in the game, you have the opportunity to meet a female character and become attached to her for the rest of the game. While attached you earn twice the ammount of points walking to the right as you would by yourself. The downfall is that you can now not walk down narrow corridors. 

The intention of this was the express aging. When you are young there is no past - only an impression of the future. When you get old, there is only past.

While playing I noticed that was that it is possible to walk backwards. But I felt that walking to the right expressed aging, so am I walking back in time? I think the expression of age is related only to the window frame - even though you can walk backward you cannot reverse your direction in the frame, and the ammount of compressed maze you see does not change. Perhaps in the wisdom of you old age you can see parts of the maze you didn't see before and can now expore them.

Something  I noticed in Gravatation, and is back again here - is the presence of the scoring system as points. And I've been wondering, recently, what's the point? (no pun intended). They have no real meaning, they seem like some shallow way of showing your progress, or success in the game. Rohrer writes something similar:

Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible, but in the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone.

 Scoring points for the sake of points, is meaningless. Like earning money just for the sake of money. In competitive games, scoring of points is a way of measuring one person's/team's success in the game. But the presence of point scoring in single player, non-competitive games is totally unnessecary.
Not that I'm taking a stab at Rohrer, it does feel like a concious intention.

Perhaps for my 'Strangers' game, the selfish player could rack up the points but gathering stuff, and the friendly player may miss out on the points, but have a different (argurably more better) reward at the end.

Final thoughts.. Did the game mean anything to me? Possibly, it is hard to say. It provided me a different way of viewing relationships for sure. The moral of the story is: while you may not be able to search the whole maze and gather all the stars, you will instead be able earn more points :)

Eye contact

Paraphrased from Wiki

Eye contact can suggest intimacy or hostility. Eye contact and facial expressions provide important social and emotional information; people, perhaps without consciously doing so, probe each others' eyes and faces for positive or negative mood signs. In some contexts, the meeting of eyes arouses strong emotions.
Cultural differences:

In the Islamic faith, Muslims often lower their gaze and try not to focus on the opposite sex's faces and eyes after the initial first eye contact, other than their legitimate partners or family members, in order to avoid potential unwanted desires. In many cultures, such as East Asia and Nigeria, it is respectful not to look the dominant person in the eye, but in Western culture this can be interpreted as being "shifty-eyed".

Animals of many species, including dogs, often perceive eye contact as a threat. 

The great differences, and the inter-species connection goes to prove that eye contact is a very powerful henomena.

Insect & animal colonies...

Colonies... The game I described earlier (with Aukje) has a system similar to colonies. A mass of individuals. While my focus is from the 'individual to other' interaction and not the wider 'many individuals as single organism' idea colonies could still provide an interesting framing device/ context.

Ants
Ant colonies are often used to portray ideas of individualism in popular media (Antz, A bug's life, Adam Ant). It might be because they're a colony type insect that is very common, and the common ant is not harmful. They can be quite entertaining to play with.

Bees
Not so friendly, not quite as often used. But also exhibit some amazing collective behaviors.

The human ant colony

This is a section of the script from the film Waking Life. 

              A guy and a girl pass on the street.  

Girl:         - Excuse me.  

Guy:          - Excuse me.  

Girl:         Hey. Could we do that again?
              I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know?
              I mean, it's like we go through life...
              with our antennas bouncing off one other,
              continuously on ant autopilot,
              with nothing really human required of us.
              Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there.
              All action basically for survival.
              All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along...
              in an efficient, polite manner.
              " Here's your change." " Paper or plastic?" "Credit or debit?"
              "You want ketchup with that?"
              I don't want a straw. I want real human moments.
              I want to see you. I want you to see me.
              I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be an ant, you know?

Guy:          Yeah. Yeah, I know.
              I don't want to be an ant, either.
              Yeah, thanks for kind of, like, jostling me there.
              I've been kind of on zombie autopilot lately.
              I don't feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one.
              It's kind of like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road...
              And instead of just passing and glancing away,
              they decided to accept what he calls "the confrontation between their souls."
              It's like, um-- like freeing the brave reckless gods within us all.

Girl:         Then it's like we have met.

Following a lead from a film analysis: 

Martin Bauber

Ich-Du

Ich-Du ("I-Thou" or "I-You") is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. 

Ich-Es  

The Ich-Es ("I-It") relationship is nearly the opposite of Ich-Du. Instead, the "I" confronts and qualifies an idea, or conceptualization, of the being in its presence and treats that being as an object. All such objects are considered merely mental representations, created and sustained by the individual mind. Therefore, the Ich-Es relationship is in fact a relationship with oneself; it is not a dialogue, but a monologue.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations - even between human beings.

So what have we been playing all this time?

Blasts from the past(s).

SNES - 100 Super Nintendo games 

Many similar games here. Plentiful platformers with variety of quality, some classic RPGs. Personally I've played a couple of these, but most SNES games are too early for my demographic.

 

 

100 Game Maker Games 

Impressive quality for games that were likely made as hobby projects.

 

100 PS1 Games
Lots of violent games. More sport games. 95% 3D. Good portion reality based. A lot of Thirdperson. Lots of robots & anime influence. 

 

100 More PS2 Games 

When paying attention, there really is plenty of fighting/shooting games. Interesting. There is definitely more FPS games, I suppose now the hardware can handle it enough.

 

Top 100 Board Games

A great series on board games. Has the daughters favorites, and then the fathers for a great fix of perspectives.

Progress!

No, I'm not talking about fanatical love of the microchip - I'm talking about my major project, silly! Ideas are abundant. Here are some notes..

Post-Roy
After talking with Roy, I was taken back to the Joey game experiment I made earlier in the year. Using video games to literally swap places with others, as the "step into their shoes" saying goes. Teaching people to see beyond the surface impression of others, and to understand their motives. Perhaps working with stereotypes engaging in stereotypical behavior, but in truth simply going about their business. The surface impression breaks down when the players switch places and come to understand what was really going on.
A side note from something Roy said: Teaching about systems of ecology. Eg: Have some complex detailed way to create a potion, but then have some ecological disruption change or remove one of the ingredients so that now because of some small change the potion can no longer be made. :)


Post-Aukje
Talking with Aukje was very helpful, it helped ground an idea into a specific experience. What this particular idea came down to was the transitional moment when two strangers pass each other on the street. They both know the other is there, but often avoid eye contact.  
Why?
I think it comes down to eye contact being deeply personal. When eye contact is made with another, and is acknowledged by both, by smiling for example, a real connection is made. This is why I feel listening to music on the street, amongst others, feels... rude. It is an open statement that the person is separate and closed, not willing to communicate.
A game could simply express this concept of passing by strangers and making eye contact (or not).
A strong idea, a detailed game description will likely follow :)

Artificial confusion

Ever played a split-screen game and thought you were the other player? 'Your' avatar was not quite doing what you told it to, but it almost was, and then you realise you're actually the guy far behind that you were taunting a second ago.
I made a quick prototype based on this idea with the intention of occasionally switching the players controls so that their avatar appeared to disobey their commands. This idea stemmed from the recurring idea of different-views-of-the-game-world-but-in-the-same-world that I keep having.
This was also to practice my digital prototyping and networking skills. The new networking system I used turned out to be slower than the previous, so at least I know that much!
The method I used, here, was to pass the actual controls being pressed over the network so that they can be passed on to the right avatar, and easily switched. Because of latency issues, however, it just didn't really work.

You can download it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9238729/Control_005.exe

Challenges and Rewards: “Why can't Call of Duty actually be about duty?"

From http://www.design21sdn.com/feature/2250

“You can’t just have a fun game and then tack on an ethical message. The message has to be the mechanic,”

“A game about Darfur or Hurricane Katrina sounds horrific,” he says. ”In entertainment, the whole goal is to have the audience experience an emotion then [empower them to] let it go. The problem with playing Darfur is Dying is, not only am I feeling awful, but I can’t stop feeling awful because it’s a real. There’s no end so now I feel even worse. It’s not bad enough that I read about Darfur in the newspaper, my country won’t do a damn thing and there’s not much I can do about it either. Let’s say you play the game and save Darfur or whatever – it’s a frustrating experience because it’s a game and you didn’t actually do anything. In the end you can only feel bad about it.” He maintains that expecting gamers to behave honorably is completely counterintuitive to the appeal of computer games and points to games like Fabel and Knight of the Old Republic as revealing of players’ true nature.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Okay so those horrible grey windows (click image for larger version) are my implementation of Game Theory's Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
The idea is to have players understand the strategies - the dominant strategy in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is to consistently co-operate. Note that this is only the dominant strategy if the number of rounds is unknown. I feel the IPD game has the best moral implications, as it proves that cooperation is sustainable. The game reflects on reasoning and rational decision making.

This program features networking - it should work over a LAN or the net, as it is important that players cannot see the decision made by the other player before making their own.

Portfolio

Download My CV/Resume

Organized by descending relevance.

Warm, dull, angry water

 

Completed for a Digital Media Studio project part of a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

I aimed to reflect and communicate a mood in the context of a film.

Simulated with RealFlow, modeled in Maya and rendered with Mental Ray, cut in After Effects.

Watch it in HD

Little nausicaa

 

A short animation designed for a Massey University paper, completed as a personal project. Created with Maya 2009 and Photoshop CS3.

dod_vigilance

DoD_Vigilance is a custom map made by myself for the HL1 & HL2 mod Day Of Defeat.

This map was in development for ~3 years, and was completed in 2007 as part of the Community Assembled Map Pack (CAMP) . CAMP1 achieved over 40,000 confirmed downloads, it was advertised on Steam's News and dod_vigilance made it to #5 and stayed in the Top10 for several months.

A map that was made from blood, sweat and tears.

For a bit of trivia, it was originally made for DoD:Gold Source but ported to DoD:Source before release. It was also approximately completely re-textured 3-4 times.

For download and discussion, see the CAMP1 Thread here: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums...

Watch it in HD

Tommy and Simon

 

This a short sequential art piece. Made from cut paper composted with Photoshop. Below is the entire book, click on the images to enlarge

Debate for an art game

I was reading Serious Games by Ritterfeld, Cody, and Vorderer and was think about motivation to play a game. Why play a game with a 'message'? I came up with 3 ways to market it.

• Ninja the message in.
• Declare this is a serious game.
• Call it an art game.

Ninja the message in:  For this to work, the game would have to stand on its own as a good, solid game. While a great way to get a message 'out there', it requires a very solid game, well polished and marketed. And this simply isn't what my project is about, its too much of a detour.
Declare this is a serious game: Again, the game would have to be a solid game, well polished. On top of that, the 'message' would have to be iron-clad, here-is-my-message kind of thing. Again not really what I want to do.
Call it an Art Game: This means it is not commercialized, does not have to sell itself as a game for masses to pick up. It does not required masses of polish and can be far more ambiguous. This method would allow me to concentrate on the design of the mechanics and gameplay, rather than spending all the time creating cutesy graphics to just get someone to pick the game up in the first place.
Now the question arises, am I allowed to do an art game? It is a Bachelor of Design, after all - not fine arts. I suppose the argument would lead to 'designing of mechanics'.
:D