Michael Steffen

IM Party Pictures!

So the party was a success! Here's some pics!

Story in Max Payne

The "bedrock" of the game? Yeah right! I recently finished playing Max Payne, a film noir first-person-shooter video game (does that make it "game noir"?) They did an excellent job in creating a sense of place through detailed settings. Story was presented as a series of graphic novel pages that would interrupt at key (or not so key...) moments in the game. There certainly is a story being told in Max Payne, but it is in fact doing nothing to "motivate [the player] forward." The story sequences could be completely removed and the player would still know exactly what to do to beat the game.

Anyone else played this?

Summer's Over! (Now, What Did I Learn?)

So, as of now, summer vacation's officially over. So naturally I find myself thinking about how I spent the summer and whether it was worthwhile. Overall, I'd have to say "yes," though I should note that I didn't actually finish either of the summer projects that I set out to do. Still, I did get a lot accomplished and learned a good deal in the process.

Project 1: The Postern Office

In this project, I was attempting to create a 3D-rendered, Myst-like interactive walkthrough of a story space (it was based on a design I created in Peggy's Interactive Writing class).

WHAT I LEARNED: More than anything else, I learned that it takes a ridiculous amount of time to develop 3D graphical content. What's more, I learned that I have a personal limit to how much time I can spend tinkering with abstract settings and pulling on vertices before I go insane.

For a long time, this frustrated me. "How am I ever going to get my thesis project done someday if it takes this long to develop the content?" I asked myself. But then, I came to a realization: maybe everything in my thesis doesn't have to be 3D. More on this below...

Project 2: A Romantic Comedy

For at least 4 years now, I've wanted to write (and ultimately produce) a romantic comedy based on my own dating experiences. My original goal was to write a first draft by the end of the summer. Summer's over and I've only written a few pages. But on the other hand, I've written almost 50 pages of prewriting notes, and have already learned a lot about myself in the process.

WHAT I LEARNED: The most interesting things I learned were discovered as I searched for the requisite "emotional incompleteness" in my main characters. Most interestingly, I've learned that I'm too analytical, and should trust my feelings more, and ultimately just trust God, rather than analyzing everything to death. This theme will definitely be present when I do get a draft out (as well as a consistent theme of "opening up" that I kept coming across).

So What's Next?

It just came to me today that I'm still getting too bogged down in technology and in what I can't do, rather than focusing on what I'm already good at. Just this morning, I was getting down about my "lack" of 3D knowledge--that I still don't know how to mod a game engine; that 3D art takes me so long to produce; that I'll never know enough to be able to make the kind of awesome interactive narrative project I'm imagining...

But then tonight at the beach, a thought I'd had before reasserted itself with a passion: Story and character are the primary things I'm interested in developing. Why am I spending so much effort on trying to learn technologies when should instead focus on designing a compelling interactive story?

After that, a lot of other thoughts started falling in place. I'll go into more detail soon, but for now, here are some key words & phrases from my brainstorm:
- Kuleshov Experiment & drama engines
- Why do everything in 3D, when you can achieve the same effect with a motion picture camera?

More to come...!