Gifs Are Actually Fun To Make

I was listening to ELO, and suddenly this appeared on my screen. I guess subconciously I'm very excited for the newest season of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Maybe In the future I'll make more artsy gifs. I find it quite enjoyable to make this loopable moment of time that conveys just a little more than a single still image.

Pictures are Art Hugs

Life has been a jumble these days. It can't be explained in any other terms save one of the oldest game design principles there is: give the player too many choices and they won't be able to choose anything. So here I am, looking at what is to become of my life, full of way too many choices, most of which don't lead to anything particularly satisfying in the near future, and I'm stumped.
Things run through my mind all the time. Mostly terrifying, miserable things. They're trivial, frankly useless thoughts, but thinking them will keep me up an night, it'll keep me from being productive in the day, and it's exhausting.

I'm exhausted.

So, I just sat down and drew a picture.
I think there's nothing more satisfying than drawing a picture. Pictures are my first language; some of my best memories involve a picture somehow. When I draw a picture, I can say everything I need to say.

I pressed the pen really hard, and I blared Foreigner into my ears. Then I colored it in five times, then I looped them to make a terrifying animation gif thingy. Anyway, I want to put it here, so I can look at it when I feel tired. I'm sorry viewers, for the inevitable eyebleed that is to follow. I was nice enough to put it after the jump to spare you.

Games I Played at Indiecade: Killer Queen

Indiecade seems to have happened ages ago now, but alas, I can only ever write about my experiences when I'm not buried up to my nose in my other obligations and projects. In any case, just as I did with GDC earlier this year, I want to write about the games that impacted me the most or that I enjoyed the most at Indiecade. Normally I would group some games together into a single post with a category that connected the two, but this first game is just so big (both figuratively and literally) I think it deserves an entry all on it's own.

Killer Queen

Indiecade! It happened.

I just recently got back from Culver City, where I spent four days volunteering for the awesome, epicsauce, incrediballs event known as Indiecade! I have so many fantastic experiences I want to write about, but I fear there is so much to process I may never cover everything I want to say. Nevertheless, stay tuned for future posts where I talk about some of the things I saw, heard, and got to play. I managed to scribble down a few important thoughts I wanted to share, and over the next few weeks I'll be refining them and putting them up.

Jamming Myself Out!

This past week has been an absolute blast--I've had so much free time I've managed to add some art to the blog, put some new posts up, update my YouTube channel, get in contact with some awesome people and arrange my trip next week to LA. In short, all the things that I've been meaning to get to for months have been got to, INCLUDING my very first game project, PEW!

Since Friday I've done nothing but eat, sleep, shower occasionally, go to the gym (before showering, obviously) and work on PEW, a-la mini game jam style. I'm proud to say I actually have three whole environments completely fleshed out. You can see the awesome finished products here:

You can see the separate layers here, each one is larger than the last so that they can easily parallax.

I can't believe how well they turned out--in little more than three days I pretty much gave myself a crash course in pixel environments, grit my teeth and bore through it. It helped immensely to start out with an organized file system, looking at the Game Design Document and writing down the screen resolutions and what my process would be. Having a strict plan is super useful and helped me work much faster, even though I'm not too familiar with that work style--compare these results to my hilarious attempt at an environment earlier this year, which I drew mainly for the GDD.

The horror!

There's a marked improvement, I'd say, and what's more the entire environments feel much stronger and connected thematically. These three environments represent the scenery changes within the first tutorial level of the game--I believe that busting these out this weekend will help keep me motivated as the year goes on; I've got a great foundation and now I can just keep building from there.

What's next? tomorrow I'm going to make everything that wasn't the agents or the environment: User Interface, enemies, special effects, bullets, explosions, and so on. In the meantime I've been passing the artwork on to my programmer, who should be able to turn them all into a little demo later on this month.

Keep tuned, because I did record my process for making these things, and I'll definitely put that stuff up on my channel.

Reading Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun (for game design)"

I'm actually rather pleased with myself for managing to post something recently. I've been so busy as of late, but I'm glad things are finally starting to wind down. I've had enough free time to actually read a whole book, which is a rare event in itself these days.

At my last game design club meeting, our adviser brought in Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun (for game design) for the group to take a look at. I was the second one to get her hands on the book, and I took it with me every morning to the gym to read on the treadmill. I still remember the adviser's remarks on the book; "This is the first book you should read as a game designer."

Theory of Fun is Raph Koster's take on the idea of fun and why it matters not only to game designers, but society as a whole--it proposes that games are a powerful tool for the use of educating and furthering the development of human behavior and thought, a tool perhaps not fully wielded correctly by game designers today. The book isn't too big, I think about 200 pages or so with each page having text and an accompanying illustration. I made sure to take note of my reactions as I read through the book for the specific purpose of writing my response on this blog--my very first thought being, "this ought to be the second book you should read as a game designer."

Reflecting on My First game jam

I know, I know, I haven't written anything in a very long time, whip me vigorously and douse me in saltwater, etc, etc.
In the meantime, my very first official gam jam has come and gone. I'm going to discount the Ouya jam, mainly because it was more of a promotion than anything else, (and I also later found that apparently it was totally okay to enter things you've been working on before). So, once the Iamagamer game jam arrived,  I thought I'd give myself a clean slate.
Working in association with the newly formulated group Team Jupisday (named after the eighth day of the week), we hunkered down in our offices (and by offices I mean the living room of one of our members) and tried to put together a game in a little less than three days. I have to say, I couldn't have felt more cool or official doing this, jamming alongside other talented game makers. I was especially excited about setting up a livestream which broadcasted us jamming to the world. We had as many as 12 viewers at one time, and we got shout outs from other developers who were doing the same. Hip, or what?

The Idea Process
Once we got started, it took us about twenty-four hours before we could even come up with a concept to work with--the idea came to us just as night fell, when we were walking alone through the shrubbery to guide one of our members who had just arrived to the driveway. It was kind of frightening, but oddly titillating: we decided on creating a roguelike game where the player had to navigate her way along a path. The rest of the night we performed research to look at locations and themes. One of the members made a really great suggestion about basing the game in the Japanese suicide forest Aokigahara, so we watched an interesting documentary about it to give us some more inspiration and ideas. We also watched playthroughs of "The Path", helpfully suggested to us by someone watching our livestream. The research allowed us to give more depth to our game, and we started forming the designs, assets, and systems to be metaphors for redemption--we called it "Vaincre", after the French word for vanquish.
Our story was, the player was a young girl who found herself in a similar forest to Aokigahara, on the precipice between life and death--she changes her mind at the last minute, and the game becomes her effort to escape the forest and overcome the obstacles and mistakes of her past (represented by wild animals).

Building the Game
The team worked hard for three days straight making models of rocks, trees, birds, and wolves; we unwrapped them, textured them, re-wrapped them, boned them, and animated them. We built assets for the menu; buttons, sliders, text, lots of things. All we had to do was get a programmer to put it together in Unity for us and we were set!
We never got to finish the game. Unfortunately, our little group was devoid of a programmer, and despite our best efforts and frequent internet postings, we were unable to get one. So, due to circumstances beyond our control, the team tripped at the finish line. Needless to say, it was a pretty disheartening blow.

Postmortem(ette)
I learned plenty of new things during this experience. Among them was a variety of useful skills, like how to paint textures, how boning and animating a 3d model works; how to plan out a game with a team in a matter of days, how to take inspiration from things around you to design. I also learned helpful suggestions in preparation for the future--before you start anything, make sure you're prepared; collaborate with the group ahead of time to get some ideas ready, save up some money for decent food, make sure the venue is clean, and for god's sake, don't do anything until you have a programmer.  Finally, I think that our game, Vaincre, deserves a second pass--I hope someday in the future with the right resources we could actually turn it into something playable.
In a word, the game jam was awful. In many words, it was nauseating, stressful, anxiety inducing, creatively draining, very unhealthy (I ate nothing but pizza and hot dogs and hardly ever got up off the couch), and made me want to murder all of my team mates individually and creatively in ways that would make even the most seasoned murder-mystery writers turn their heads. But I know that I'll inevitably want to dive headfirst into another one in the future, because it's one of the most fun and rewarding activities I can participate in as a future game designer. If anything, I'll do it again so I can actually finish what I started.