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October 25, 2005
Screen shots from new ISOSTAR
Strange triangle blocks are attacking ISOSTAR!!!
Monsters are attacking!!!
But they actually aren't that aggressive. :)
Monster went into ashes.
Graphics are not up to the level yet. But wait and see even newer ISOSTAR soon~! (I know I'm just talking to myself) :)
Posted by doox at 02:56 PM | Comments (6)
October 24, 2005
ISOSTAR Resurrection
I don't really like this cover... yet too empty. I want to see more monsters and stuffs on the star. Now I finished lots of programming so I can put some more time on other area.
ISOSTAR Resurrection
Game Mechanics for this has been changed a lot since the first idea of it had come. I'm finally putting more time on this project. I submited the first version of this to Slamdance to keep promise with myself that I will make certain progress for this project by today. It's not that satisfying work yet but I feel good about it. I've been putting most of the time in lots of programming but there will be more and more improvement in other area. I'll do some serious art work for this game, and that will be one of the most fun part of it.
Posted by doox at 09:54 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2005
Playtest Review - Life By The Fire / Chong Qing
Life by the fire
It was very exciting experience to watch my team's game played in a playtest room. It was more than just watching what we expected players to do when we were designing it. It was the moment that a game meeting players and being evolved by their creative input. I think the success of this type of game actually depends in large part on the team chemistry of the players. Designers are like preparing little clew or inspiration for them and rest of it is up to players. In terms of that, I think we had great players (Rick,Justin,Josh) for testing our game. It actually felt like having audition for actors.
The weekness of our game I noticed during playtest was that it felt a little bit too long for the player to prepare their turn. Though, the time gave players to think about right timing for up and down of their narration according to that of the selected music. But actually I want to see players starting narration right away after checking the written card and drawing. Players can improvise their narration when the music changes its tone. I think it can be a pleasant challenge for the players while speeding up the pace of the game. I think it's enough to listen for like 10 sec. to get the feeling of the ambience music and it will be better even share the first 10 sec. of the music together with co-players. I want to revise the rule to have music always going on(by making the i-pod play random track automatically) and when the music goes to next track, the next player immediately starts their story. To make it possible I think players need to have their cards already chosen and think about next story while listening to previous player's story. Unexpected music will make even more fun situation that the next player might need to change their ideas prepared during previous turn.
What I like most about our game is the music part. I think music is a really great inspiration for players. I often notice that same narration with different music will make a totally different experience.
Chong Qing
I think using movie footages for narration is a really great idea. Though, I couldn't really get how the the answers for the questions change the movie. I noticed that choosing between walk and ride actually changes the editing faster paced but not that obviously. I tried to use the words from questions(east/west, work/ridem, man/machine) to make a story. I felt like I would prefer to have more options(words) to come up with a story. I'm kind of confused because I thought it's trying to make a narration watching the film but it was not clear when we should start talking because the movie kept going on and I found players kept watching it rather than saying something about it. I think we were more like trying to understand how the answer s we chose affected the film and we mainly talked about that rather than trying to make a story out of that. The choice of footage was I think really ambient. It was more about the background than specific characters. So I assumed that this is kind of first person view of storytelling. It was interesting to find myself trying to use some visual elements like color, shape, movement used as cinematic language to come up with my own story out of them. It was totally opposite experience of having a story and trying to make a film from it.
I think this game has lots of potential to be a great interactive movie. I think if designers want players to make stories out of it, it needs to be clear when to let players have moment to say something or input their creativity. Also I thought showing the film is sometimes giving too much information that actually limits imagination from the players and let them a little bit passive. But I think footages chosen was kind of ambient with lots of backgrounds rather than specific with certain characters or subjects I guessed that's to give more space to players come up with their own ideas.
Playtest Room Experience
As a player knowing that designers are watching myself or even recording and also the fact that we don't have much time for playing, I found co-players to be more analytic in playing the game. Actually because the nature of this types of game is based on performance, I think having audience(especially creators) for the performance is great motivation for their envolvement in the game. AlsoI think having a room like that really helps to have more focus on the game itself than playing in a space where other games are played together.
Posted by doox at 02:30 PM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2005
Open Mic. - "Interactive Visual Music" by Doox
“The dream of creating a color music for the eye, comparable with auditory music for the ear, dates to antiquity…”
- William Moritz
I always had two ideas for my final thesis. One is about a narrative game that makes audience feel strong relationship with NPC and the other one is a performance art that combines playing the keyboard with visual arts.
Both Music and Visual Arts are perfect forms of arts by themselves. They have their own depth and beauty. But actually we meet arts which are the mixture of both of them more often than separate one. Mixed form of the arts evokes totally appreciation different to the experience from the separate one. How Music and Visual Arts are affecting each other in creation and combined into one art form and what is the synergy effect by that are one of the most interesting research subjects for me. When I was learning how to play the piano I found that the arrangement of the keys in keyboards helped me remembering different scales. When it comes to learning perfect pitch, there was an exercise that imagining a correspondent color for a specific note. Like that using synaesthesia in education is also one of my matter of concerns.
When I came up with this topic “Interactive Visual Music”, it immediately reminded me of the well-known popular film “Fantasia.” So my first idea out of it was sort of “Real-time Interactive Fantasia.” Also visualization tools in Windows Media Player and WinAmp might be the closest art form to my envisioning of “Visual Music.” Fantiasia and Visualization tool are very different to each other in their creation and appreciation. Fantasia is an animation art created on the basis of well-known classical music pieces. In its order of creation, music is first, and then the animation is carefully created inspired by the pre-made music. In terms of the inspiration from one art from the other, Fantasia is one-way. The visualization tools I mentioned above are also one-way in its creation. In visualization tools, although the visual scenes are created procedurally which is different to Fantasia, only music affects the creation or modification of the visual scenes and visual scenes doesn’t have anything to do with creating music at all. My envisioning of “Interactive Visual Music” is two way form that music and visual scenes affect each other when they are created in real-time. The degree of affecting each other can be different but both of them must have some relationship at the point of its creation. That means when creating a mixed form of the arts, the artist should be inspired by both of the art forms in its progress of creating or performing the mixed form of the art.
When I was thinking about specific interface for this art I instantly came up with this idea of having musical keyboard connected to PC by MIDI interface. Keyboard is the best musical instrument that can express broad range of complicated musical elements for single player. That is why it is considered necessary for composers to learn how to play the piano. I need to program a visual music performance application which makes it possible to visualize what a keyboardist plays in real time by analyzing actual MIDI signals into various musical elements like pitch, harmonics, velocity of pushing keys, types of musical patches and so on. With those analyzed data out of MIDI signal, the application will control various visual elements on the screen like types of object, color, scale, animation, etc. The application will offer various options for keyboardists to preset what kind of musical elements will take effect on what kind of visual element. Main difference compared to other music visualization tools I mentioned before is that my visualization program will use actual musical elements, which I mentioned above, out of MIDI signal; which is different from using sound frequency of the music being played by the application. Especially with great improvement of today’s 3D engine it’s possible to render real-time high polygon objects with various effects almost close to that of cinema in its detail.
Preparing this open mic. I could find that “Visual Music” has already a long history.
A good start point to find various forms of “Visual Music” was “Center for Visual Music”.
http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/
Also “iota center” is one of the major sites for “Visual Music”.
http://www.iotacenter.org/
The famous visual music artist Oskar Fishinger’s site.
http://www.oskarfischinger.org/
William Moritz’s article about “The Dream of Color Music, And Machines That Made it Possible”
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html
When I found a visual artist from various internet sites who’ve had same idea with me and had already developed the idea, I felt like meeting an old friend of mine.
Especially for the idea of using musical keyboard as an input, I found there is someone who had already done similar work before. Like the perfect pitch exercise I mentioned before, the way it visualizes the music is mostly like expressing corresponding color to a specific note or harmony.
http://homepage.tinet.ie/%7Emusima/visualmusic/visualmusic.htm
It is kind of limited way of visualization compared to my picture, though. But now, thanks to today’s great improvement of PC, real-time graphics opened a whole new era for individual artists and I want to make the best use of that in my visual music work.
This link below is about Audiovisual work from MIT guys. It was quite different approach because it has visual art tool as an interface in creating certain audio work. Don’t miss the movie files from the link.
http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/golan/aves/
This work is perfectly two way creation, procedural contents and real-time performance. The content for this work is totally abstract. For me, audio for this work is more like sound effect than music. This work is the closest one to my picture of visual music except the fact that it uses visual art tool as an interface and it doesn’t actually have something to do with musical elements I am envisioning.
Watching various kinds of visual music arts, I had some questions for myself about them.
1. In the process of creating music or visual arts, is either of them actually affected by the other? ( Most of the visual music works I could meet were one-way which means one art form is made on top of a pre-made art form inspired by it. Like animation made out of a music and so on. )
2. Does it contain procedural contents or not?
3. Is it real-time or prescripted?
4. What’s the interface for the creator or author? Is it making a visual out of an musical interface(or instrument) or creating a music out of an art tool?
5. Is the content containing obvious narrative? Or is it more abstract and symbolic?
6. What are the actual musical elements or visual elements that affect each other in their creation?
7. Does it still have enough meaning or appreciation when it’s experienced separately?
8. What are the synergy effects when they are combined together?
I think this is a great beginning for me to start researching this area, and I am happy to find that I am living in a capital city of “Visual Music”. Lots of visual music artists and important organizations are here in LA. I wish to experience more visual music works from now on and keep developing my own idea. Visual music is also really fit to my study on programming procedural 3D graphics. I hope to start developing something on this as soon as possible. That leaves me lots of study in music, arts and programming. How exciting!!!
Posted by doox at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)