Ian Dallas

It's a little hard writing a summary of my experience at GDC this year because, to be honest, I didn't really go. Technically I was there from Monday to Friday but I didn't have time to go to a single session.

Instead I spent the entire week in pitch meetings, writing/giving speeches, and standing around the Independent Games Festival booth talking about my game to anyone who wandered within earshot. It was fun (and humbling) to watch so many people play through the game but surprisingly exhausting to do that for three days straight.

Ultimately the most enjoyable and useful part of the GDC experience was also the easiest: reconnecting with old friends and meeting up with indie folks I knew virtually from mailing lists, etc.

GDC always feels a lot like summer camp to me, but this year I felt like I'd become one of the counselors. I'm looking forward to being a camper again next year.

• Games can be in 3D, 2D, or 1D
• Games can be played on Windows and the Xbox 360
• Very active community with lots of well written documentation
• Full support for shaders, boned animation, and dozens of useful buzz words

Following a long line of colorful and occasionally disaterous failures, most of us have had to abandon the dream of flapping flight for humans.

Two recent interactive pieces offer us a chance to live out our bird flight fantasies in virtual spaces.

The prettier of these, by Float4 Interactive, uses a pair of cameras to track player movement and a massive projection screen to put players directly into the experience. As far as I can tell there's nothing technically innovative here at all. They've just taken existing methods and used them to create what appears to be a beautiful and engaging piece. The fact that you're completely untethered to any game controller seems very much in keeping with the liberating feel of the piece itself. Rumor has it they're working on a new project for Cirque du Soleil.

The iBird, developed by NYU's Media Research lab gives players a more tactile control over their bird avatar. The whole thing is operated using a system of pulleys much like, say, a Victorian-era battle mech. Unlike Float4 Interactive's simulator, this one isn't designed to entertain. It's designed to make learning aerodynamics fun.

We've been talking about "evocative knowledge objects" in seminar for several weeks now but I'm still not sure what they are. Since I'm probably not the only one who's confused about this, I decided to ask Steve Anderson for a definition and use it to analyze one of my favorite objects, cemeteries.

Steve's short version was "tools to think with." When pressed, he coughed up "designed systems that enable the production of different kinds of knowledge." He also cited a few examples of EKOs including Wordle and the microscope. Which fits in nicely with Mark Bolas' seminar earlier this semester on virtual reality, which Mark often likens to a microscope that permits us to see familiar things in new ways.

So does a cemetery fit this description? Let's see...

Continue reading "Cemeteries as Evocative Knowledge Objects" »

The Visual Amalgam show is a venue for artists in the film industry to show off their personal projects. This year's show includes photography by USC professor Eric Hanson.

The artists' backgrounds and their pieces are impressively eclectic: there's work from title designers, make-up and prosthetic artists, visual effects artists, matte painters and, as noted above, even USC professors.

The show is at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica this Sunday, October 5th from 5-9pm.

These are all interconnected tasks which I'm planning on completing in roughly the order listed, with a goal of finishing all of them by October 26th.

Write a description of art needed for the game
To find collaborators for the game it'll help if I can clearly delineate the work that needs to be done. I'm particularly interested in finding a 2D animator for the cutscenes and a 3D creature creator to model the garden's inhabitants.

Prototype a water ripple effect
I'd like to create simple black and white ripples when players throw things in the water (sort of like this). This will also give me a nice, relatively easy project to test out the new physics engine wrapper I'll be using.

First pass on a prose story
I have a pretty good idea now of the major scenes I want to include, but I don't quite know how they're all going to fit together. Working on a linear version of the experience will help me focus on that sort of connective tissue, and in making sure that it fits with my broader goals of creating a fairytale-like world.

Detailed level descriptions
Once I have a solid idea of what scenes I want and how they'll flow together I'll need to come up with more detailed descriptions suitable for implementation. This will include a list of art and sound assets, non-player-character behaviors, and any enhancements required to the game's engine to support the design goals of the scene.

Playable (and testable) first level
Since the game is based on an earlier project, from a technology standpoint it's more or less playable now. But since I haven't designed any of the final environments (or know how they'll connect with each other) it doesn't yet *feel* like the game I want to make. The goal of the first playable level will be to have something I can give to playtesters that will enable me to gauge player response to a more exploratory, less goal-oriented play experience. At a practical level, I'm interested in finding out how often they stop to smell the roses and which ones they smell.

Some of the art I'm using as reference include:

The surreal 1954 Japanese ghost story Ugetsu is my primary visual reference for this project.

In terms of the environment design, I'm basing it a lot of it on Japanese gardens and, to a lesser extent, English gardens as well.

The simplicity of the 19th century painter Hokusai has also been inspirational.

And I've been trolling flickr for random images that capture some of the moods I have in mind for the game.

In light of our seminar this week with guests from Ugobe, who created the robotic dinosaur Pleo, I wanted to call attention to another interactive dinosaur, Gertie.

Gertie is best remembered for being one of the first animated characters with a clear (and very likable) personality. What isn't so well remembered is that Gertie was originally presented to audiences as part of an interactive vaudeville show, hosted by the animator Winsor McCay himself. Highlights included McKay throwing a large pumpkin offstage which is "caught" by Gertie, in whose mouth it looks positively tiny.

In the finale McKay enters the film and rides off on his enormous companion. The video below is from a later repackaging of the live show into a more traditional film.

I want to make a game that feels like a kids' book.

A few of the most significant features of kids' books I'm drawing inspiration from include:

* They're short. This makes every word feel important since we know the story will be over soon. It also makes them easily accessible (even for busy adults).

* They have a steady, rhythmical pacing. The ratio of words to pictures tends to be constant from page to page, and the act of turning the pages themselves limits the speed at which the book can be read. We're encouraged (or forced) to take our time. Each page follows a predictable pattern: scan the image, read the text, look closer at the image, turn the page and repeat.

* The conclusion has a strong sense of finality -- even if nothing within the story has actually been resolved, we know the adventure is definitely over. For example Alice's awakening from her dream.

* They're designed for repeat reading. In fact, *many* repeat readings. The stories remain interesting even when we already know what's going to happen in them.

* Characters tend to have clear desires. They often want something tangible and are verbally explicit about it. No one spends time wondering WHY they want to chase the white rabbit.

* There are frequent, massive changes. Often as a result of very small actions. A wish will turn a kingdom upside down overnight. Alice becomes a giant after eating a piece of cake. They create huge reversals of fortunes (eg going from predator to prey) and have a very striking visual component (eg a mountain turns into gold).

* Scenes are visually quite distinct. On subsequent pages we may move from the desert, to the ocean, to a city. We can get a pretty accurate sense of the story by simply scanning the pictures.

* Forces are powerful but ill-defined. We have no way of knowing what a creature like "the Spirit who lived in the mountain" is capable of, just that they're clearly a heck of a lot stronger than we are. Obviously this mirrors a child's relationship to the world at large.

For my game, this translates into several concrete goals:

* Being short, with a clear sense of progress.

* Being interesting and easy. Forward progress should always be available and death should be (almost) impossible.

* Having huge changes in landscape, creatures, mechanics and player objectives. The bigger the differences, the better. Scenes should stand on their own, like pages.

* Having an authorial voice in the opening and closing cutscenes that provides a dash of the omniscient narrator so common to these sorts of stories.

The world will be realized as a digital game titled "The Unfinished Swan" using some of the same painting mechanics I developed for WhiteSpace, a game I made last semester. In addition to first-person gameplay there will be 2D animation at the beginning and end that bookend the game to enhance the storybook feel and provide for visual differentiation between the Garden of Unfinished Things and the more mundane world outside it.

In addition to the game itself I'll be creating an illustrated story book designed for young readers that touches on some of the same themes and events presented in the game. The book will be developed in tandem with the game. My hope is that having to constantly remediate ideas from the game back into the structure of a children's book will give the game itself a more bookish feel.

The unhurried pacing of the book will also provide a way to explore character motivations and backstory about the world that wouldn't fit as comfortably within the more frenetic, goal-oriented format of the game. Which is not to imply that the book will be a long one. Far from it. One of the key stylistic elements of the authors who've inspired me (like Edward Gorey) is their extreme brevity. Having to distill complicated player interactions from the game down into one or two sentences and a picture should be helpful in figuring out what aspects of the experience to highlight within the game.

The Unfinished Garden is a place for unfinished things and creatures.

Some of these were projects from our world that were abandoned (like the first page of a novel), and other inhabitants are things from the early days of the universe that the creator decided *should* never be finished.

The garden exists apart from our world, but occasional entrances can be found if you look hard enough in places no one in their right might would ever be likely to go.

It's being designed as the backdrop for a single player game intended for a general audience. The experience will focus on exploration and the discovery of wonderful things.

The interactive media program is hosting a game jam next week. Game jams are a chance for people to get together and make a bunch of quick and dirty games around a common theme. The theme will be announced when the game jam kicks off, next Friday, March 21 at 7:30 pm in the Interactive Media Lab (main campus, CSS G142).

Participants will have 48 hours to finish their games. We'll demo everything on Sunday, March 23 at 7:30 pm, also at the IML.

The game jam is open to all USC students. Computers will be provided, but feel free to bring your own. If you're interested in coming, email me at idallas [at symbol] usc.edu.