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 :)