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On May 9th and 10th, UCLA is having a game festival. (It’s organized by Eddo Stern at the Design Media Arts department).
Here are the IMD games that made it into the show. Congratulations!
TALES FROM THE MINUS LAB by Alex Beachum, Sarah Scialli, Steve Wenzke, David Young
THE HOLD by Adam Liszkiewicz and Alex Silberman
THE CHARLATAN by David Mershon
SONGLINES by Samantha Vick
NEVERMIND by Erin Reynolds
The IMD has cultivated a strong and valuable focus on rapid prototyping to test out new design concepts and interaction systems. The ability to rapidly test ideas is a powerful tool in a designer’s skillset, and for me in my First and Second years in the program, it became an appealing tool. I learned to devise the fastest and dirtiest way to test the experience I wanted to create for a player, and was able to use this knowledge to play around with many ideas that had been cooking in my head. After a while though, the payoff of rapid prototyping can become a crutch, making one feel as though she is gaining more understanding of desiged systems than she is. Read More
Every Spring in the IMD graduate program, the Second Year students have entered into a week-long grueling tradition lovingly known as The One-Week Project. For this one-week assignment, the class is given a theme and a design challenge, and are asked to create an interactive experience with their own unique touch. The entire department then comes together to critique the work. Unfortunately, this year for logistical reasons, the Second Year students weren’t given the assignment. While the conflict that existed this year was understandable, I want to take a moment, as someone who went through this trial, to elaborate on why it is such an important tradition. Read More
Come check out the awesome games our students have been working on!
For more information, click here.
Everyone at IMD is very excited that Richard Lemarchand will be joining us!
For more info, check this article out.
NeverMind, a thesis project by MFA Interactive Media graduate student Erin Reynolds and her team is a “first person horror puzzle/exploration game”. The premise is simple; a player is exploring the mind of a trauma victim. During exploration, the player encounters horrific memories within the patient’s mind and must control his own emotional responses relating to fear and anxiety.
A player’s fear and anxiety is measured by a biofeedback sensor monitoring his heart rate. The difficulty of play will adjust according to a player’s stress level. The more stress a player feels the more difficult the level becomes to navigate until a player learns how to better manage his anxiety and fears.
The thematic elements of the game are deeply derived from the horror genre and provide the perfect backdrop for exploring mechanics involving biofeedback technology. The soundscapes and visuals are reminiscent of horror classics. A recent trailer for NeverMind conveys the intent of its designers to use the conventions and iconography of classic horror films to create environments that illicit fear and anxiety. Nevermind is not only an exploration of how a player feels and manages stress but more importantly provides a new level of immersion for players.
I am looking forward to a game that may evolve how players interact with game systems.
Over the past semester, Robyn Gray and I have steadily been working on our Intermediate Game Development project, The Ballad of Tam Lin. We’ve been invited to show our game at a few shows including TEDxUSC and SCA’s own First Look festival. We’ve received comments that the game is surprisingly polished for a project completed in 2-3 months. This came down to good audiovisual design, scoping our project well, and playing to the strengths we knew we had as designers and developers.
As the programmer for Tam Lin, I’d like to talk about how we achieved the layered paper cutout look for our game from an implementation perspective. I remember someone mentioning that very often when using art and design tools such as Unity – and even with many professional-level tools – there are residual tells which indicate that the end product was made using those tools. We aimed from the start to create a distinctive visual aesthetic for our game, and we went to great lengths to achieve a look and feel that was unique to our game. A number of people who played our game during playtests, showcases and galleries commented that they appreciated the distinct visual style we presented in Tam Lin. I’ll explain some of the techniques I used to achieve this style.
applying modern phsychology to game design
There was a great talk given by someone whose name i forget (he wore a cowboy hat, but that’s not why i forgot).
He was trying to incorporate something called the Big Five into game design. The Big Five are constituent traits that every human has, but in varying degrees, so we can think of each trait more like a spectrum.
These traits are put into the acronym (OCEAN), and what they stand for are as follows:
Openness to Experience: appreciation and curiosity for things like art, emotion, adventure, exotic ideas, and variety of experience. its spectrum lies between inventive/curious and consistent/cautious.
Conscientiousness: a proneness to demonstrate self disciple, act dutifully, and strive for achievement. This is calculated and methodical behavior as opposed to spontaneous. Its spectrum lies between efficiency and organization and easy goingness and carelessness.
Extraversion: this is the characteristic of seeking stimulation, pressed out beyond one’s self, and seeking the company of others. Its contrasting side of the spectrum is introversion, solidarity, and reservation.
Agreeableness: a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
Neuroticism: the liklihood for one to easily experience emotions from the darker side of the spectrum, like anger, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. it’s opposition is confidence and security.
So, as designers, it’s impossible to make our game appeal to everyone. Some styles and genres put players into a very clear and definitive side of the spectrums. But, what we can do, is understand what sides of which spectrums our games are heavily invested in and then trying our best to dial it back slightly to the center. So, for instance, if an MMO was based heavily in exploration and adventure, include the ability for players to still have a good time hanging around in the town. Ultima Online did a great job at appealing to both sides of this spectrum, as players could choose to play entirely as craftsmen.
Understanding these elements of personailty can not only provide a great way to tweak the games we already have made but provide a potential jumping off point from where to start designing. If we said, “I want to design an experience for the neurotic extrovert,” it acts as a great frame from where we can start trying to think of potential interactions and mechanics.
Coincidentally, just after giving my pecha kucha on the role of and potential deterioration of currency, it turned out there was a talk being given on designing virtual currency by Vili Lehdonvirta, a economist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
He raised an interesting point by asking what the difference between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ currency is, and, what he said was that ‘rea’ money has a large currency area, or space where it is accepted as a form of currency, whereas ‘virtual’ currency has a small currency area.
So, if in our classroom, we all decided to use our old game disks as a form of currency, it could essentially be considered ‘virtual.’
The main point of his lecture was about designing currency for games, and, in order to be able to design a form of currency, we have to know what kinds of characteristics money can have. Money can be a good or bad “medium of “exchange,” and, in order to be good, it must be fungible, easily divisible, countable, recognizable, convenient, and valuable.
The other quality is its “store of value” – how well does it retain its characteristics. In order for it to do so, it must be durable, theft resistant, inexpensive to store, private, and maintain a constant value.
Currency must also be transportable. Vili gave an example of these huge stone tablets that were used by some (i think south american) civilization. They were enormously heavy and not very portable.
So, as game designers, when we design currency for games, we dont have to alsways design “good” currency. It may be in our best interest to add “bad” characteristics to the money in our game world because those characteristics are what make it fun to use and play with.
The Ballad of Tam Lin is a semester long project that Richard Emms and I created for Intermediate Game Development. One of the most commented on aspects of Tam Lin is our aesthetic. It’s appealing, unique, and has mechanics created especially to go with the style.
The project has come a long way since January, so I thought I’d write up a brief post about the process that took place to create and polish Tam Lin’s visual language.
