Jesse Vigil

Jesse and Psychic Bunny featured in article in SHOOT magazine

2009-01-27T01:09:25Z

If you caught the December issue of SHOOT magazine, then you saw me in it.

I also posted this over on the Psychic Bunny blog, but as the article has everything to do with lessons learned by young creators who own a start-up who don't have a lot of business school under their belts, I felt very strongly about also pointing it out to my compatriots in Interactive (Start-Up-Starting) Media. Here's the link to the full post, with a little IMD-specific reflection from me after the jump.

]]> Still here?

Okay. But seriously, check out the Bunny Blog, too! IMD at the very end FINALLY got me into the habit of being a more regular blogger (even though the results are not seen too much in this blog) and I'm excited to have become good at this new skill.

So anyone who caught my "Love is Not Enough/Love is Everything" talk in fall's first Seminar knows that I care very passionately about the culture of start-ups that we seem to have fostered in the program. Obviously, being the proprietor of one of those start-ups I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but one thing worth sharing here that wasn't as pertinent to the SHOOT article is the ethos idea.

Founding Psychic Bunny has been an adventure in flying in the face of conventional wisdom. "Don't go into business with your friends," "you can't start a company without going into debt in the beginning," and "under no circumstances can you EVER alter, change or otherwise screw with the logo, icon, brand, etc" all come to mind as things we were flatly called idiots for by People Who Knew Better About Business. And while I'm not advocating that you make a habit of disregarding actual wisdom, I want to encourage a little of the same thinking beyond that the program cultivates with regard to design when you begin thinking about starting a company when you leave.

The last five months should be giving the entire world a wake-up call to the notion that the face of how we do business in this country is going to undergo a change. A lot of the core principles are going to still apply, but as the article alludes to in passing, one of the reasons we're still around is because we've had a long hard think about how we do business and in the end decided there was a better way. In fact that thinking has gone so far and a few recent experiences have only confirmed in our minds that we're on the edge of a new paradigm.

So we're innovating how we do business in addition to innovating in or creative work. And what I'm saying to you start-uppers out there is:

You are creative. Be smart about your business first and foremost, but also, for the love of mud, be creative.

As Promised - Big Announcement

2008-08-26T23:48:43Z

So, on Thursday I teased that last week I'd pitched a project that had been quietly in development for a few years to someone for whom I had an incredible amount of respect. I got some good news almost right away on it, but I couldn't say anything publicly about it for about a week owing to some complicating factors in the digital age. You never know who's reading your blog, on IMD for example...

So, anyway ->

This is the news:

View image

Big Announcement coming next week

2008-08-21T23:34:09Z

Last week I had the opportunity to pitch something I've been working on for a few years now to someone I really, really respect.

I should have something to say publicly in a few days, time, but I'm really excited and can't resist a little tease.

Dev Diary 2 - Some lovely pictures

2008-02-08T09:11:17Z

More regular updates coming soon. But for now, thought I'd share some of the reasons I haven't had much time for documentation, i.e. being the entire art pipeline for the game.

23 now has a few emotes that play...

and, in small thanks to the original dev team, I've re-included the ancient aztec/mayan playground...

finally, the ever-troublesome rings... still troublesome, but very pleasing to me...

Just a few little things I did over the last 36 hours... Some discussion of this, the change in the art style, the change in perspective, etc, to come.

Mid Year Thesis Show

2007-12-12T05:00:00Z

It's like E3 used to be... with the following exceptions:

1) It is still held in downtown Los Angeles.
2) There are no booth babes.
3) We WILL be showing half-finished promises of things to come, but we will NOT be lying when we tell you about all the awesome things we hope to add by the time it ships (probably)

We feel bad about the booth babes. So we all grew moustaches instead.

What: Mid Year Thesis Show
When: Tuesday December 11th 7pm-9pm
Where: 555 23rd Street (The Thesis Space), Los Angeles, CA
Who: The Current Third Year M.F.A Students

Join us to Check out the Status of this year's Interactive Thesis Projects at the Midyear "Prototype Show". Take a peek behind the curtain (but not the curtain to Scott's cubicle- it's too adorable for words in there) and get a glimpse of what's to come in May.

You are reminded that these are experiments in progress. But cake will be served. So what's to be afraid of? You like cake, right? Then come test our... projects. And have cake.

Dev Diary 1:On the Subject of Second Chances and Lessons Learned

2007-11-30T07:33:14Z

The above image is kind of a lie. It is an image that straddles two worlds: the Game That Was Not and the Game That Will Be.

The game in question is ORIGINAL FIN, and it has somehow ended up becoming the vehicle for my thesis.

You may remember something about a game called BADLANDS and mechanical dinosaurs. I'm so sad to let that go because dammit that was a TV pilot I'd been sitting on for two years and I really hoped that story would see the light of day. But as it turns out, the technology and proof-of-concept I developed for my thesis project works best when it's plugged into a game experience that is nothing more than any game you'd expect to play. Of course there is a surprise gooey center when you discover the game has been tracking your actions and profiling you as a player in order to customize the story, but that's beside the point for the time being.

It just made more sense to focus my energies this next six months on the story engine and not take valuable time to design a completely new game.

Especially when there was a totally-designed game that represents one of my only regrets thus far in this program. That damned game should exist by now. And so it is going to. Of course there are some changes.

Making the transition from a gorgeous open-world 3D Xbox 360 game with sexy shaders and physics and crap to a more modest 2D game has caused me to reflect on some of the mistakes we made the first time around and so I thought it would make for a good inaugural installment in what I promise is going to be a more regular series of updates on my progress.

Mike and I gave a presentation at the May semester-end seminar covering some of the 491 class' postmortem thoughts, but some bear repeating and additional discussion. So here we go:

LESSON #1 - On Scope
If you think you’ve scoped your game down to a manageable size… you are wrong. You are wrong, wrong, wrong. The wrongest wrong that ever wronged.

Tracy will tell you that I have a problem with scope. I am trying very hard to fix that problem. What it has come to mean for me is priorities. When I think about what we wanted to accomplish with the 3D game, we wanted constructable weapons, optional violence only, telekinesis, unique conversation versatility, and the majesty of scale and the accompanying thrill of swimming through a 3D world. Only one of these things required a 3D engine. We all deserve a big smack in the head with a frying pan for not seeing that we could have come so much farther had it not been for the hubris of wanting a 3D game like we so loved playing at home.

So now I'm deving in XNA, or really, Torque X on top of XNA and it's going to be a 2D game. Or... really, 2 1/2 D. There's going to be a neat trick with depth that should be ready in the next build. More on that later. And of course, the 3D assets are being used to generate sprites for the game. In fact, the image at the top of this post is compiled from all the assets used to build the new game. I just couldn't resist tilting the camera and rendering out a cinematic angle on it.

Telekinesis already works.Conversation will work by December 11th. Possibly the whole game we intended to make over 9 months will be realized in some alpha form by December 11th. That's the kind of scope lesson that I wish someone had taught me last fall.

Lesson #2
If your game is ambitious in any single way, the one thing you cannot afford to be is an early adopter.

A year later, yeah, you can play your Torque game on your stupid Xbox. Documentation means the world and a user base to help when you're stuck means seven worlds. Of course, we're skating a fine sort of line since XNA and Torque X are semi-new, but to remedy that I've learned one lesson: I picked a platform and looked for help before committing to it. Apart from that, I'm using a 3D engine I'm trained up on to make the assets instead of trying to give myself a crash course in a new toolset while also meeting deadlines.

But let me stress again that you have no business being an early adopter if you have a required amount of new territory t blaze by semester's end. It will bite you. We got bit SO HARD last time. Never again.

Lesson #3
You always need more people than you think you do. Always always always have a backup plan for the critical path

Original Fin was the unluckiest project to ever hit the lab. Every kind of personal and academic disaster befell the project 2nd semester effectively stalling progress for good. I actually had a small breakdown and ended up cutting one of the 491 classes to sit by the water at Newport Beach and eat chowder from the Crab Cooker and get a grip on what the hell could be done when so many people were counting on me to be a leader and have a effing plan.

I have to take this opportunity to apologize to/thank everyone on the 3D game crew, ESPECIALLY Mike, Garrett, Sharon, Mike "always right" Rossmassler, Diana, Harold, and Hans. We deserve to play our game and I have been thinking about how to finish it for a summer already before ever thinking about doing it as a thesis.

I have a much smaller team right now. We're working really hard and I'm very proud of said team. But that's a lesson I've learned but haven't been able to fix this time. Insert my regular pleas for producers, designers, and writers here. You first years especially. I buy lots of beer and food.

Final Lesson:
Have a plan for worst-case win scenario

We had nothing to fall back on when we started to fall behind with the 3D game. Tracy suggested around GDC time that what we really needed was a white room with some white fish and a working conversation that we could at least call an "art game" - that was the kind of idea we needed to have in mind from the beginning. Something thatshowed the part of the game that made us cool and rockstars. Instead (and it's late so pardon the metaphor) we had a bunch of frosting and no cupcake. Always know what your cake is and how you can show people the cake and only the cake in event of a problem.

Shawn the talented and tireless lead engineer has sent me a communique. I have to wrap this up. More soon. Hopefully, this was enlightening.

Tom Swift's Memory Cabinet - My Curiosity Cabinet

2007-03-29T20:39:52Z

In the future, we'll keep moments in time in cabinets just like we keep other stuff. This box is based on a design drawn on a cocktail napkin for me by a drunken Tom Swift himself!

Concept: A self-contained memory box that when armed records audio and video whenever the cabinet is opened. A switch moves it to playback mode, which plays back the entire history of recordings placed in the cabinet whenever the door is opened. It's a time capsule for moments, pure and simple. And it comes in a retro future box!

A little history:

Here's my desk on Monday night:

I had a lot of issues with defective hardware. Stuff I bought turned out to be junk, which was actually a huge problem because for a long time I assumed I was just not hooking it up right.
We also had a lot of issues with not really having a workspace that was ours and undisturbed. Still, I think it got pulled off okay. I'm just so glad it worked and went well... my heart's not really in any kind of bitching.

Here's how it looked ten minutes before doors opened:

Chester, my be-goggled daemon and moral support, sits proudly on the top.

When you open her, she looks like this:

And here's a few samples of the video it took:

Me Showing Our Esteemed Department Head
Download file

I got it running again for Max:
Download file

I may keep working on this... it needs to not run off my laptop and I need a new LCD display since the one used is Perry's... still... it was fun.

10 Things My Thesis Is Not

2007-03-29T05:53:13Z

It's not a simulation.

That would bore me from my mind.

It's not a conversation game.

It's not something I've tried.

It's not an MMO, you know,

cuz I ain't crazy in the head.

It's not really Facade per se;

I want something fun instead.

It's not procedural at all.

It's not about A.I..

It's not something Chris Crawford likes,

cuz that's for Ken, not I.

It's not a branching narrative --

we've had those for too long.

But most of all it's not enormous,

It's small

contained

and strong.

Schedules

2007-03-20T20:05:47Z

I make weird schedules. This is how it works best for me. It's not broken out into little specifics like I would if I was doing the schedule for the same project next year, but mostly because big to-do lists scare the living hell out of me and actually keep me from doing a ton of work.

View image

Motion Capture scene is in the can!

2007-02-17T18:34:45Z

That's Eric Furie helping me apply the facial markers to my actor, Frank, prior to shooting my scene last week. Here's what it's been like in my head leading up to this.

Wow, this is totally rad. I am going to love this!
I've had famous people teach or guest on classes here before, but Robert Zemeckis ranks very highly on my list of inspiring, helpful instructors. Aside from the cool rush of actually getting to pitch the story I wanted to shoot to him, he gave some of the best story/script feedback I've ever gotten from a teacher here, and it improves the final scene tremendously. That said, he and Eric have also been very patiently helping us re-train our brains. There are a lot of things about motion capture that are closer to theater than film, which is awesome for me because I spent my formative years very heavily involved in theater. So this mode of thinking is very natural for me and something I feel more instinctively suited for than traditional film production.

Oh geez, we're shooting WHEN?!! I don't know how to use the system yet! I don't have actors! I'm going SECOND?!! We don't know what we're doing yet! I'm SCREWED.

And we did come in a little hot. But fortunately, I've been getting some really good lessons in scoping myself down this year. And I wrote a scene that makes good use of the technology but isn't going to ruin my life. My scene is probably one of the more subtle ones in terms of content in the class, but my interests in the technology are very close to Bob's: I'm very interested to see how close we are to getting subtle, human performaces -> so my scene is written and the shoot was set up to get really clean facial data and was rehearsed heavily to coax a natural but energetic performance out of the scene. I approached it totally theatrically. I got myself the best, most expressive actors I knew who can do all kinds of great things with their face and body language, and we treated it like a stage performance.

My experiment: I think that slight amount of over-acting that you do for the people in the balcony of a theater is what you want to shoot for using the current technology. A little exaggeration seems to make a big difference. Definitely what we saw of Beowulf so far leads me to believe that film acting is too subtle to really translate well.

I think it worked. Also, I want to make movies this way.

I'll blog about this more, but shooting this - the scene is one of the best I've ever done. Great actors did a lot, a script I'm proud of helped, but technically, the way we make motion capture overcomes many of the limitations I have personally as a filmmaker. It went really well. More soon.

Thesis Thoughts (February Edition) - comments welcome

2007-02-15T19:24:48Z

I wasn't going to blog this just yet because I honestly felt like I wanted to have something a little more solid in my head before I started throwing names around. It's not useful to anyone reading a blog if they don' know where I'm coming from, right?

But I did have these thoughts while waiting for the woman at Spudnuts to get off the phone and not use any kind of telepathy to get me the same thing I order twice a week from her like clockwork.

* I'm interested in creating an experience that puts players in a broad context, but leaves them very much in charge of their story. In many ways, this is the lie I buy into (foolishly by this point) every time I join an MMO. And I cite Star Wars Galaxies as a case in point for this.

I am very much in love with the idea that the Star Wars Universe exists somewhere, is persistent, and can be inhabited by me and my friends. Like the holodeck, I always stupidly anticipate that the world will be there and the only rules the world will have are the ones that hold the universe together. Instead, MMORPGs tend to create a truly hilarious number of rules that govern how I can play in that universe.

I feel like this is the equivalent of telling kids on the playground they can play tag, but they can't run and they can't shout while they do it and oh yes, if you haven't been playing tag for a really long time, you're not allowed to be "it."

So I don't get to live out the personal story I want for myself in the Star Wars Universe. Over the period of a year, I'm living out the same basic story as everyone else in more or less the same order. I don't totally fault the makers of the games for this - they're putting this out in the only format they can- one that is, as its name implies, designed to accommodate a massive number of people in an orderly fashion.

So I want to do something similar but on a smaller and more personal level. I think games like this should be about personal storytelling. You get to have your own personal adventure in a world that fascinates you and appeals to some level of your private fantasies.

I will need a lot fo help with this.

It doesn't directly speak to what I just said above, but when I think about the games that really made me think of this as a storytelling medium and not just a dexterity challenge, I immediately think of Tim Schafer. I think he gets it in a really linear way, and I feel like games have felt the absence of those glorious point-and-click Lucasarts games -- I would love to have his input on how to create that kind of experience inside a persistent universe.

On a more practical level, Rich LeMarchand has been a tremendous help and had really great design feedback on Original Fin. I think he'd also be a big help, and I also have access to him already.

Korba also mentioned that I might really want to seek someone on the Hollywood side since in a lot of ways I'm trying to bridge the experience of games and the story richness of movies. That's all worth thinking about.

Sigh. I wish it didn't seem like such a chore to sign in and comment on blogs. I'm really interested in the thougts of others. Even if you just want to give me a call or email me and say "I have five minutes to chew on your ear, that is swell, my friends. Swell.

Frank Miller-esque Jitter patch (plus bonus cartoon)

2007-02-14T04:26:14Z

The above was a short pencil doodle in class I just wasted valuable time here at home turning into a real comic. But given the discussion, I couldn't resist doing a take on Perry's patient instruction in the style of Frank Miller.

That's because I made this jitter patch, which is still in progress, which lets you route video into the system and record it on the fly in Frank Miller-vision. Controls in the brcosa let you adjust it or invert it for those Sin City night shots.

Here it is: Download file

Girl in the Museum - a distributed narrative... will you win a prize?

2007-02-01T19:53:06Z

This from Jordan's design challenge last week to choose a favorite painting and "bring it to life."

I'm reposting this explanation from the wiki so that the department's other distribute narrative junkies can play.

I think the paintings of Edward Hopper are so significant to me because of the deep emotional connection you can form with them if you're in a particular state of mind to connect with them.

Hopefully, most of us are not in that state most of the time, but if we ever are, man, that's powerful.

So I wanted to design an experience that would help you get into that emotional state and have a deep experience with the work but also not plunge my audience permanently into a big state of loneliness. So... I built a little story into the painting that if you get involved in it, helps lead to that experience.

I thought the best way (and this is in no way sucking up - I actually agonized over doing this but decided this was still the best method) to ensure that people got really involved int he story would be to set it up as a distributed narrative tied to the painting. Also, there's a prize if you get to the end.

I swear it's not hard to solve. The requirements are mostly that you spend some time looking at the painting and thinking in new ways.

There is a hint about the order to solve it all in the frame as well. And the thing in the middle, that's kind of significant...

http://www.girlinthemuseum.com

thanks to Jenny Krochmal and Matt Jensen for the acting, Jared Yeager for the support, Doug Spice and Julian Bleecker for the VXML assist.

Building an automated telephone system with no knowledge of VXML in a week's time

2007-02-01T19:20:38Z

At the request of Julian, who was a big help to me on the project I'm about to describe, I'm blogging a quick how-to on one aspect of it. It's longwinded and contains examples, so read on for the full story.

]]> At the request of Julian, who was a big help to me on the project I'm about to describe, I'm blogging a quick how-to on one aspect of it. It's longwinded and contains examples, so read on for the full story.

The project on the whole is a distributed narrative. You can find it at http://www.girlinthemuseum.com

One of the clues to uncover is a phone number which leads to Todd's voicemail. Certain clues you find from unlocking videos elsewhere in the painting provide one of three PIN codes to Todd's voicemail that deliver the final clue in three parts that leads to the prize. This was a very good idea of mine on Tuesday and by Thursday night a very big source of personal woe.

Automated phone numbers run on a version of XML called Voice XML. If you know a little about XML, this is not so challenging, but if it's your first run at it, this can be a little daunting. To set one of these up in a hurry you need some good working knowledge and also, ideally, a hosting environment to test this. I had an initial account with TellMe - it's free to set up an account so long as you have a non-free email address, and they have a great scratchpad to quickly cobble code and try things out. It's not suitable for deployment, though, because the only way to use the number for free is to distribute your developer ID and PIN.

So Julian turned me on to Voxeo . They'll give you a local phone number for your app, plus you can also Skype to it. And unlike TellMe, Voip hosting is instant, instead of waiting a few business days.

Now we're to the nuts and bolts of creating the app. It needs to answer automatically, play a greeting, prompt for user input, then accept a 4-digit code, then recognize if it's one of the three correct PINS and play a corresponding message for each correct PIN.

I set up the first part with very little trouble. Voxeo and TellMe both have good resources for rudimentary things like this and text-to-speech is next-to-automatic. The tricky part is the prompt and getting it to listen to the proper response. This is handled by grammars, which you more or less have to define or link to from someone else.

As an example, here is what Julian gave me to help with that part:

As it turns out, Voxeo has a TERRIFIC beta application that is a visual designer for rudimentary voice applications, called Evolution Designer. Just as I was mastering the grammars, I discovered this and because my app was actually quite simple, Evolution Designer was perfect. It lets you lay out your network in a tree, very similar to how i'd done it in a notebook earlier that day, and then use menus and libraries to construct the inner guts of the sucker. It's far from point-and-click because the tool still assumes you understand the mechanics of how an app like this is set up and the nomenclature is not for laymen. If I hadn't spent time trying to force my brain to learn the language and had Julian's help to understand the grammar and the names for the handlers, it would have been much harder. But assuming you know enough, it's a big time saver. Publishing and then tying it to a phone number is not documented too well but I figured it out, and it's accessible via a (310) number which I'm not giving out because my class is playing the game, via 1800 with a PIN, via Skype, or VOIP. If you really want to test it, though, the clue to the number's hidden in the door. :)

I'll blog the phone number at the end of the week when the game's over. In the meantime, if anyone has any questions or wants to mess around with it, feel free to give me a shout. Having it all working by Saturday made me feel pretty darn cool.

on writing...

2007-01-30T08:50:13Z

"But if you think that there is a dearth of Innovation in this industry, and that its scarcity confers upon it the high value that other rare materials command, I urge you to seek out a well-written narrative. You will find an industry in crisis."

Well said, Penny Arcade.