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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.

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On October 9^th of 2010, after dark fell in Culver City, I participated in a magnificent big game as part of IndieCade.  This game was Human Asteroid.  Seriously, think of the old game Asteroids but instead of rocks moving around in a physical space, it’s people.  And we were lit up with blink-capable LED shirts.  The result is beautiful.

At first I thought being an asteroid would not be something I’d be okay to do.  I haven’t been a performer of any sort in many years and I didn’t want people watching me while I blinked in the dark.  But after I got into the cool shirt costume and played with it for a few minutes, I stopped thinking about it as, “people will stare at me,” and felt like an integrated part of the game, which ended up far outweighing my self-esteem issues.  Practicing in the shirts before we actually had the players playing in the same space with us was a magical experience.  Even with all the directions on how the game works (which I’ll get to soon), it doesn’t seem brilliant until you’re doing it live.  When players got to play in their shopping cart-style ship and begin shooting at us, there was a general mood of fun.  Even though we were mindless automatons as part of the game, there was still anticipation of whether or not the players would win or the asteroids would defeat them.  Players had LOTS of fun engaging in a light up ship with light up helmets and knowing that people were actually creating the experience for them seemed to make it extra exciting and draw in more players from the crowd that quickly formed around our playing field.

The Rules.

To be a human asteroid has simple and, most importantly, uniform rules, so I’ll start with these rules.  Asteroids start out in groups of four, hands on your fellow asteroids’ shoulders, and move very slowly, with a general leader when you bounce against a border or another four-human asteroid.  When someone is shot, a four-person asteroid breaks apart into two sets of two-person asteroids who move a bit faster now, more like a slow dance than a slow crawl.  After that, the two people break apart and move much more quickly with arms crossed “I-Dream-Of-Jeannie” style.  Once shot in this mode, a human asteroid must turn off his or her light and remove themselves quickly from the playing field.  This is the moment when an asteroid is no longer a mindless automaton and can root for the players or fellow asteroids from the sidelines and just enjoy the game.  If an asteroid cluster or single asteroid collides with the ship at any point, the asteroid will shout out “BOOM!” and throw their arms up and turn on the blinking on their shirt (during normal game play, the light is solid).  All other asteroids in the playing field (and generally outside of play, because this part is lots of fun!) will shout as well and mimic their fellow asteroid.  The game is essentially on pause while the ship resets with a new life (or perhaps the game is now over) and all the human asteroids in the field wait to restart.  The only rule for restarting (aside from changing your blinking lights back to solid when the game play resumes) is not to immediately rush back into the ship.  This is also mostly for safety.  Though it’s pretty simple to be a human asteroid, everyone must coordinate and practice together so that everyone works in what looks like a perfect group.  This is definitely the hardest aspect of being a human asteroid volunteer – doing it all the same as everyone else consistently.

Players don’t have difficult rules, but they do have a higher level of responsibility for following the rules, as the ship can more easily hurt the participants of the game due to its size and weight.  Players in this run through got two lives.  There was a large crowd and giving too many lives to each set of players may have made each game too long to accommodate as many potential players as possible.  There are two players per game.  One is the shooter who sits inside the ship and shoots.  The other is the captain of the ship who literally navigates in the play space – by pushing the ship around.  Ammo is limited and if the shooter runs out, it costs a life to refill.  If an asteroid crashes into the players, a life is lost and ammo is refilled to maximum while they get to reset somewhere in the playing field towards the middle.  Asteroids pause when this occurs and do not leave their positions at the time of the crash, so the reset place is never exactly the same.  The ship itself is lit up beautifully and a little larger than a shopping cart (which is the base of the ship!).  Players get to wear helmets that light up as well so they are all a part of the game.  The bullets are still not lit up, which is a shame, but it’s a technical issue that needs to be worked out because the launcher requires a special weight and may get jammed if the little nerf-style discs are painted or made heavier by lights or tape or any other similar idea.

The Design.

The design of this big game version of the original Asteroid is beautifully simplistic.  It’s pretty much what you might think of if someone said “What if humans were the asteroids in the game Asteroid?”  Of course, you might want to cue responders to that question with, “And it’s at night!”  This way, people would probably think of bright lights on dark people for themselves.  But the dance of it is something that seems like people might respond with if proposed the original question.  Except, until Nick Fortugno came up with it, nobody ever asked that question.  At least, nobody ever follow through on it.  With great designs and costumes from Nick, Sam Strick, and Dave Warth (as listed on the IndieCade website in this project, whom I did not meet or know about until I looked up exact spellings of names), this big game was definitely a successful recreation of the original digital game.  Both Nick and Sam who were at the event were very nice and very enthusiastic.  They prioritized the safety of their asteroid volunteers as well as the fun of everyone else.  It was wonderful to hear Sam talk about the design of the costumes and the ship, and it even gave me ideas for future projects of my own.  The costume design was simple and brilliant.  It’s clear that lots of time and hard work went into finding just the right pieces to the puzzle and then put them together in a way that created a perfect presentation.  Designer Information from IndieCade 2010 Event Site.

The Performance.

It turns out to look something like this on the evening in which I participated as a Human Asteroid, though this is not from the same night.
A Trailer/Preview.

Actual Game Play with the crowd talking animatedly about it. *This was not the night of IndieCade, just a previous play.

The dancing lights in the dark draw crowds instantly and everybody wants to watch and participate in the game.  When it’s clear the asteroids are having fun while communicating with each other in coordination (so no one gets hurt), people can’t help but be charmed by the experience:  What is it they’re doing?  They say “boing” when they hit the border!  When they’re hit they break apart and still make sounds when they bump into each other and move in different directions.  They all blink when they yell BOOM!  What happened, did they hit the ship?  Somehow, our coordination along with lights in the darkness made us a venue that was irresistible.  And as much fun as it may have looked to others, it was at least double for me.  Shouting “BOOM!” and throwing up our arms was lots of fun and I found myself really hoping I’d get to crash into the ship so I could instigate the lot of us all shouting, throwing up our arms, and blinking.  I did get to, which was enormously fun, by the end of the night.  Then, somehow, the night felt complete.  Whether the players lost or won, they always had big grins and thanked us for being asteroids for them.  I wanted to thank them constantly for playing so that we had a reason to be blinking and bouncing around!  People seemed to really love the beauty of taking an old arcade classic and turning it into someone everyone could be immersed in together in the same physical space.  I suppose that’s the beauty of big games in general, but there was something extra special about Human Asteroid. Maybe it was how a quarter of the crowd spontaneously starting humming the two notes that make up the music for the original, or maybe it was the way our blinking before we even got started (in pause mode) drew people from across the lot, but whatever precisely it was that drew each person into the crowd, the whole performance of it was what kept the crowd pretty solid for almost two full hours.  Just watching my fellow human asteroid volunteers was magnificent and beautiful.  I had a tremendous amount of fun and felt like I was getting this great light show.  It didn’t matter if players won or lost, I wanted to cheer everyone on if I was out of play at the moment – during my “human” time.  I found myself forgetting to be self-conscious and turning on my blinking lights to cheer when the game ended.  I can honestly say that I haven’t had so much fun since my first trip to Disneyland last May, where I experienced the intense excitement of Disney that I hadn’t felt since my 12 year old trip to DisneyWorld in Florida.  I felt like I was bursting with excitement in just the same way – I didn’t feel my feet getting tired or sore in my shoes and I never felt like it was time to stop.

The Final Review.

I’m not a critic in a magazine or internet site or anything, but on my own blog I get to be a critic if I want to.  And I say Human Asteroid gets a 10/10!  Five Stars!  Here’s a 1-Up!  I don’t know if players or spectators felt, or even could feel, quite as enthusiastic as me, but I know that they would all give it a high score for being fun and appealing from the enjoyment that was clear on their faces.

It turns out when I’m not in a good mood and have to play a game not for fun while taking notes every 2 minutes, I become very negative and critical. Compare the notes I’ve made about Eversion and another puzzle-oriented platformer which I played during the summer, I was much more generous and recorded pretty much just all the brilliant aspects. I realized that rather than ripping into the puzzle design details or technical issues, I should have been more moderate and impartial to describe, explore and analyze the game from different perspectives.

So hopefully I can finish the paper analysis about it asap, submit it on time, and then post it here, which may help whoever heard my terrible presentation about it to regain the will/rethink about the possibility of trying it, or at least know why there’s no need to give it a shot.

According to my recent pattern of behavior, I also decided to set up this post as a sign to remind and push myself.

Here’s the paper excerpt that is largely a review of Week 1′s lecture.  For next week, you will play a number of videogames. And in class you will discuss a number of questions as a group. Part of that includes describing a videogame as innovative, experimental, or avant-garde in order to better understand the value of independent game design (or as I like to call it, independently-minded game design).  More at http://usc.peterbrinson.com

INDIE GAME SCHEMA
I consider “indie games” to be videogames that challenge the mainstream, and I parse them into three perspectives – innovative, experimental, and avant-garde. Some “indie games” function as a constructive proposal for commercial opportunities, while others offer a clear critique of the mainstream. In this discussion, “indie games” do not refer to the indie scene as vibrant art community that does it all – develops, plays, celebrates, debates, and critiques videogames, nor does it relate to the question of funding sources. In particular, there are plenty of videogames developed independently of larger videogame companies that otherwise embrace traditional designs, aesthetics, and themes.

Innovative Videogames
When I talk about avant-garde videogames, I am not describing incremental improvements on established design models and concrete genres – what the commercial perspective hopes to offer consumers as soon as possible. Rather, innovative videogames represent visions and ideas for the near-term future of commercial videogame design. So just as Half Life integrated elegant cinematic moments into the first person shooter to inspire a myriad of successors, the Wii controller re-imagined the console interface so that accepted game designs could be repurposed as providing refreshing experiences. This does not mean that innovative approaches are not financially risky. Nor does it suggest that designing innovation requires anything but the most rigorous creativity. But innovation looks to chart new territories while targeting the largest possible audience. Innovative videogames are developed with a sound business model in hand in an attempt to provide solutions to widely understood concerns and goals, such as combining storytelling and play (Half Life) and popularizing alternative interface methods (Wii). And so an innovative videogame is not so much outside of the mainstream as it is an immanent expansion of it.

Experimental Videogames
Before I can discuss avant-garde videogames, I must first describe my conception of experimental videogames. Compared to innovative videogames, these are indeed positioned outside of the mainstream. Such works might not be concerned with profit, and are ostensibly looking to enrich the form. These may tackle themes that have been traditionally relegated to cinema, poetry, and music, but not to videogames.

Art as Experiment
If innovative videogames expand commercial domains, then experimental videogames push the form’s artistic boundaries. Experimental games are the champions of the independent videogame scene as they tackle game design questions the industry is indeed asking, and to which many gamers are receptive. These opportunities include broadening the videogame designer’s emotional pallet beyond experiences of tension and guilt, as well as simulating conflicts that look nothing like violence. Jason Rohrer and Rod Humble’s shorts are held up (by critics, industry veterans, and academics alike) as hopeful glimpses into a future of videogames as art, not just commerce. The fact that Rohrer and Humble’s work are about personal experiences is hardly radical, but the experiences they provide is no doubt paving new artistic ground.

Experimental videogames include Ian Bogost’s Proceduralist’s Style videogames, which both take advantage of the procedural nature of videogames while inviting personal introspection and subjective interpretation from the player. “These games say something about how an experience of the world works, how it feels to experience or to be subjected to some sort of situation: marriage, mortality, regret, confusion, whatever.”

Even though the commercial potential of experimental videogames may be quite viable and easily imagined, they are primarily experiments into what the form would be without business compromises. In fact, a popular experimental videogame is an ideally suited influence on innovation. The experimental videogame does indeed demonstrate Flanagan’s critical play without subversion being a foregrounded quality.

Independence as Simplification
Many indie games embrace low-resolution graphics. These videogames stand as an appreciation for a time when videogames were simpler and supposedly did not make commercial compromises. In his GDC 2010 “rant”, the game designer Jarrad Woods described the value of such videogames as the “nu-lo-fi”. It is well known that contemporary industry developers spend an impressive amount of their resources on creating high-resolution art assets. Producing the myriad objects, characters, and buildings for a 20 to 60 hour videogame represents a daunting amount of work and craft, and often compels the developers to compromise every other production task, including game design.

Woods says he is not describing “retro” games. A videogame like Fez provides new game mechanics in combination with its pixelated look. But Woods is not quite right; Fez is smartly and selectively “retro”. Its visual aesthetics operate as an allusion to older videogames. This approach defers any player expectations of hi-fidelity images, so that our critical eye shifts elsewhere. Videogame developers of the nu-lo-fi are not only making wise use of limited resources, but are making an open, authorial claim – their videogame’s visuals pays homage to an earlier era when high-resolution graphics were technically impossible. These developers hope that players will quickly recognize a nu-lo-fi videogame by its graphics, and therefore will probe deeper for the true site of artistic priority, namely game design, the proper expressive concern of videogames.

This self-positioning is not unique. Many filmmakers of the 1960′s looked to the earliest films for inspiration. They wanted to work from a clean slate, to shed the baggage of Hollywood tradition as much as they wanted to rebel against it. Jonas Mekas’s film, Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, opens with “Dedicated to Lumiere”. If Mekas looked 70 some years back, then perhaps artistic cycles are indeed shorter than ever, and so it is not surprising that many videogame developers today look back to the late 70′s and early 80′s for a conceptual and material resetting of design paradigms and visual and audio aesthetics. (No doubt the recent attention to big games and augmented reality games also stems from a similar sensibility.)
And like the Dogma films of the 1990′s, ideally, this rebellion against industry polish and excess is a starting point for expression in order to serve a higher goal of mapping out new expressive trajectories. This is not so with most videogames of the nu-lo-fi as most of them simply lack high fidelity images, rather than doing so in the service of unconventional gameplay, radical story techniques, and the like. Experimental videogames are often also nu-lo-fi videogames, but by no means are nu-lo-fi videogames necessarily experimental.

Avant-Garde Videogames
Having made these distinctions, I can now address the avant-garde videogame with less confusion. Like its counterpart in cinema, the avant-garde videogame is both in conflict with and paying tribute to mainstream videogames. Avant-garde videogames propose design questions the industry is not apparently curious about, while practicing methods that subvert tradition.
Avant-garde videogames can be described through the traditions they reject. They have taken a look at what videogame developers have created thus far and are trying to do it differently, by purposefully using so-called “bad” game design to make good videogames.

This is an impressive team. Two years ago, the first version was developed in the Intermediate Class (here: http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/games/20080514-intermedia.php),

got more ambitious (and on the DS) in the Advanced Class (a collaboration with CS) and now it being released commercially. I’m sure they have a good story to tell.

—————–

Divergent Shift (aka Reflection) is releasing on Monday 8/16 on DSiWare. The world splits in two when a powerful mirror is broken and its shards dispersed. Run, jump, and slide as the agile Kirra, but to successfully navigate the shattered world, you’ll need to use both screens of the Nintendo DSi together!

Developed by Intrinsic Games at USC as part of the Final/Advanced Games Course, and winner of the 2009 IGF Mobile ‘Next Great Mobile Game’.

List of Credits:

Keith Riley Co – Director

Hersh Choksi – Producer

Henry Liu – Designer

Jeff Magers – Designer

Jeremy Jung – Designer

Abhinav Jain – Designer

Aadarsh Patel – Senior Engineer

Noel Overkamp – Engineer

Gersh Payzer – In Game Art

Andrew Tio – Character and Concept Art

Igor Nemirovsky – Composer

Kenny Wood – Composer

Bill Rahko – Sound Designer

Nathan McNamara – Writer

From Joey and Komdetch,

Our first playtest went satisfyingly well. It was very fun seeing

people who didn’t have a hand in making the game actually play it. We

got to see the different ways people went about solving our puzzles,

trying things that we the game designers would never have thought to

do.

A major issue we found with people first playing the game was a lack

of clarity regarding the instructions. We included a text file with

instructions, but feel it would be better to add an instructions

screen into the actual game.

We also found that the familiarity of chess could sometimes be a

drawback. A tester familiar with (and skilled at) chess was able to

breeze through the levels once he figured out the basic gameplay.

However, a tester who had little to no chess experience had difficulty

understanding how the pieces worked, and ended up frustrated.

In the end, it was very reaffirming to see that despite some hiccups

and frustrations, people overall liked the game. The feedback was very

helpful and the lab was a very cool environment to work in.