Collated Project Pitches

Here is just all the pitches together for easy reference:

Morlock Tales

Players guide a small group of characters through a map that is constantly collapsing. At it's core, the game is still a basic strategy game, with the player setting goals and orders for the characters he controls. Players can create bases, and the characters he controls need a constant supply of food or other resources, thus must hunt other creatures for food and craft new weapons, etc. The game differs from other strategy games in that there is no guarantee that their bases will survive for long.

A slow moving threat (be it a zombie army, lava, whatever) is moving across the map, forcing the player to keep the characters they control moving. But just moving across the map forever is not an option since some of the tasks (cooking, crafting, something like that) need the characters to stop moving. The player must hop from outpost to outpost, keeping one step ahead of the encroaching force.

Corporate Physics

This game represents the way corporations work through a highly abstract physical metaphor.

The player controls a corporation, which is represented as a series of components that can be connected together a various ways. Each component serves a specific purpose. Having more more employees in a component increases it’s visual size, it’s effectiveness and the amount of capital the player must keep streaming in to keep the company afloat. Some components are:

• Administration provides a large number of tabs onto which other components can be attached.
• Production creates widgets.
• R&D increases the cost at which widgets can be sold to consumers.
• Warehouses allow widgets to be stored.
• Sales acts as a vacuum cleaner, which sucks up consumers can pops them out the other side with less money and in possession of a widget.
• Marketing acts as a magnet, drawing consumers towards itself. The marketing component can be placed to draw consumers towards the sales component.
• Legal acts as a cannon that can be used to attack other corporations, knocking them out of position.

Consumers are represented as little dots, which respond to forces exerted by the corporations. A consumer slowly grows in money, which makes the effects of corporations’ marketing and sales beams stronger, but being sucked up by a corporation’s sales component reduces their money.

Players must balance the need for growth with the dangers of growing too fast and not being able to support their employees. Growth is encouraged by pressure from competing corporations… if rival corporations outpace the player, the player will be crushed by rival corporations legal attacks.

Of course, this is all pie-in-sky kinda stuff. I don’t think I can really make the kinda AI that this would require, and without the AI it all falls down.

Imperialist Caretaker

This game attempts to simulate a simplified overview the issues faced by the imperialist caretakers of a conquered country. The main issue faced is the maximization of profit gained from the inhabitants of the country while avoiding revolution. This involves a careful balancing of education levels, quality of living, taxation and your military presence.

Basically, it's Sim City with higher stakes. In Sim City if you fail to balance your city correctly, the citizens will just leave. In this game, the citizens will riot and destroy your factories or fight a gorilla war against your soldiers.

The game will be quite simple though, with only a few types of buildings: factories, schools, houses, and military bases/barracks/checkpoints, etc. This will keep the scope containable, and the system through which the citizens are controlled quite transparent and able to be manipulated by the player.

Mechanised

Players use a toolset of parts to design battle machines. Design of the machines is entirely in the player's hands... there are no set slots where parts must go. Instead, players can place parts anywhere on a blueprint-style view. For rockets or guns or wheels to function though they must be connected to a power source, of which the player has a limited supply. Each power source is tied to a different trigger button on the keyboard or on the screen. When the player holds down a trigger button, the battle machine components that have been connected to that power source will be activated.
In this example when the player holds the 1 trigger, the two rocket engines will fire, shooting the machine towards the enemy and battering them with the shields the player has placed on the front of their machine.

I'm unsure if gravity is a good or bad idea for this game. If it was ignored, players could have much more freedom in their designs, and in the way their machines work. However, the inclusion of gravity reduces the play field to essentially one dimension of movement, two if the player invests specifically in vertical thrusters... which makes the AI design a simpler task, and also focuses more importance in the machine design, rather than the player's piloting skill.

Music Fight

Music Fight is a strategy/rhythm game in which the game levels are defined by the music that is playing. Players must lead their soldiers across the horisontal landscape of the level which is created by analysis of the game's music. Enemies must be defeated, and difficult points in the landscape must be traversed.


The player's soldiers have different abilities, which are colour coded depending on the abilities type (melee attacks are red, ranged attacks are yellow, defenses are blue, etc). While the song is playing, the game detects points where instruments or pitches are particularly loud, and triggers 'beat blocks' of colours depending on the instrument which triggered them. The beat blocks slide across the game screen, and when they are over a soldier that has an ability of the corresponding colour, the ability is enabled. To actually use the ability the player must click the beat block.

Other than triggering an ability to use, the player has no control over the soldiers. When they are told to attack, the soldiers will find an appropriate enemy to attack without the player having to give speficic orders. This is made easier by the essentially one-dimensional play field. Having a traditional 2D playing field like in most strategy games would make the very control scheme too constrained for the required complexity of input.

Visual Research: Rhythm Games

For my visual research, I'm looking at the way different rhythm games display the song, beats and game elements, and what elements I could use or improve on for my Music Fight game idea.

Audiosurf

Audiosurf generates a race track based on the song that the player specifies. The player must collect coloured blocks that are scattered along the track, and build groups to same-coloured blocks to score. The placement of the blocks is effected by the intensity of the song, as is the shape of the track.

The specific design of the track is not made by a level designer, but by algorithmic analysis of the song by the computer.

The game's visual design is quite nice, with abstract 3D forms spinning and pulsing in time to the music. Each track ends with the player flying towards a giant octopus-type construction that waves its arms with the music.



Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero attempts to simulate the playing of a rock song by the player. The player must hit notes represented on the by different coloured points or lines moving towards the bottom of the screen, using the buttons of their guitar-shaped controller.

Aside from the dots and dashes moving along a guitar fretboard, the rest of the game represents the music rather literally with shots of a 3d rock band playing along with. But since the game is attempting to simulate playing a rock and roll song, this representation is sensible.



Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution is one of the most famous rhythm games, and it's influence is certainly visible in Guitar Hero, which I wrote about above. Like Guitar Hero the player must simply hit the notes moving down the screen, though in DDR the notes are hit by stamping on the large buttons of a dance pad, not a fake guitar.

DDR's representation of the music is even more simple than Guitar Hero's; it just shows the song's music video, with the game notes transposed over it.



Rez

Rez takes an approach to rhythm games that allows for more player creativity. Different actions in playing the game, such as targeting or shooting enemies will trigger different musical sounds. The levels are designed so that when played the player creates a song of sorts.

The graphics of Rez use quite abstract 3d forms in an interesting style, but are quite similar in their function to other 3rd-person shooters; an avatar, controlled by the player, and enemies and other elements of the level that must be traversed. Unlike previous examples, there are no distinct beats to hit.



Patapon

Like Rez, Patapon also allows for a more creative approach to rhythm games. The player controls an army of little creatures that are given orders by hitting the correct sequence of buttons, which make different drum noises. The buttons must be hit in time to the beat, so the player makes music while giving orders to their soldiers.

The graphical style of Patapon is more illustrative than previous examples. Like Res, the beats to be hit are not represented on screen, but are only shown after they have been played. The players soldiers are shown as flat characters that perform the orders given to them on screen. Like Rez, the graphics do not respond directly to the music. Rather, the music is more defined by the actions of the on-screen characters.

Pitch Draft: Music Fight

Music Fight is a strategy/rhythm game in which the game levels are defined by the music that is playing. Players must lead their soldiers across the horisontal landscape of the level which is created by analysis of the game's music. Enemies must be defeated, and difficult points in the landscape must be traversed.


The player's soldiers have different abilities, which are colour coded depending on the abilities type (melee attacks are red, ranged attacks are yellow, defenses are blue, etc). While the song is playing, the game detects points where instruments or pitches are particularly loud, and triggers 'beat blocks' of colours depending on the instrument which triggered them. The beat blocks slide across the game screen, and when they are over a soldier that has an ability of the corresponding colour, the ability is enabled. To actually use the ability the player must click the beat block.

Other than triggering an ability to use, the player has no control over the soldiers. When they are told to attack, the soldiers will find an appropriate enemy to attack without the player having to give speficic orders. This is made easier by the essentially one-dimensional play field. Having a traditional 2D playing field like in most strategy games would make the very control scheme too constrained for the required complexity of input.

Pitch Draft: Mechanised

Players use a toolset of parts to design battle machines. Design of the machines is entirely in the player's hands... there are no set slots where parts must go. Instead, players can place parts anywhere on a blueprint-style view. For rockets or guns or wheels to function though they must be connected to a power source, of which the player has a limited supply. Each power source is tied to a different trigger button on the keyboard or on the screen. When the player holds down a trigger button, the battle machine components that have been connected to that power source will be activated.
In this example when the player holds the 1 trigger, the two rocket engines will fire, shooting the machine towards the enemy and battering them with the shields the player has placed on the front of their machine.

I'm unsure if gravity is a good or bad idea for this game. If it was ignored, players could have much more freedom in their designs, and in the way their machines work. However, the inclusion of gravity reduces the play field to essentially one dimension of movement, two if the player invests specifically in vertical thrusters... which makes the AI design a simpler task, and also focuses more importance in the machine design, rather than the player's piloting skill.

Book cover for class exercise

(But done out of class because I didn't have my tablet at school).


After making this I looked at the book's Amazon page. My cover is more fun I think, though it looks like I've focused on a similar idea (dude with his ghost).

Concept Dev. Class 3

Overview of timeline

• wk4 presentation of 4 ideas
  
• wk5 assessment & pairing down of ideas
  
• wk6 hand if of workbook
  
• wk7-8 presentation of more detailed concepts
  
• wk9-13 individual consultation

Concept Presentation (week 7-8)

In document form and presentation:

• synopsis
  
• developed idea of themes and intent
  
• draft of treatment/description
  
• idea of visual approach
  
• general description of research
  
• storyboards/other development
  

Visual Literacy

• Develop relationship between theme and visual style.
  
• Consider how the visual style effects the way the audience will understand the idea.
  
• The connection between style and concept should be strong and believable.

Pitch Draft: Imperialist Caretaker

This game attempts to simulate a simplified overview the issues faced by the imperialist caretakers of a conquered country. The main issue faced is the maximization of profit gained from the inhabitants of the country while avoiding revolution. This involves a careful balancing of education levels, quality of living, taxation and your military presence.

Basically, it's Sim City with higher stakes. In Sim City if you fail to balance your city correctly, the citizens will just leave. In this game, the citizens will riot and destroy your factories or fight a gorilla war against your soldiers.

The game will be quite simple though, with only a few types of buildings: factories, schools, houses, and military bases/barracks/checkpoints, etc. This will keep the scope containable, and the system through which the citizens are controlled quite transparent and able to be manipulated by the player.

Concept Development Assignment 2: Inspiring Article

The article!

The article is an analysis of the actual weights of the new set of ‘social sins’ introduced recently by the Catholic church, and the distinction between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ sins in Judaism and Islam.

Because I think about game design a lot, I find arbitrary rules fascinating when they are brought out into the real world and applied people’s real lives. Religion, especially Catholicism and Judaism are wonderful examples of this. Also interesting is the way in which rules can be rewritten ‘mid-game’. Before last monday, stem-cell research was not an actual sin, now it’s on the same level as lust and gluttony.

The article makes me think of two things:

• A game where the only way to gain points is to commit sins... but if your character dies before being forgiven by your priest all points are lost. So the points you gain must be 'banked' before they are safe.
• Also, a game where rules can be arbitrarily changed at any moment.
  

Rust Mollusks

top: Adolecent Rust Mollusk, below: Adult Rust Mollusk, right: Dude with a big hammer.

Was too damn hot to think of anything original so I drew some pictures for the Morlock Tales pitch.

The creature is a rust mollusk. They feed on fungus in damp underground caves. Their metal shells are grown from minerals absorbed from the ground, which they will also specifically seek out. Veins of iron can often be found by the congregations of adolescent rust mollusks jostling for the best feeding spot. When their shells are fully grown, adult rust mollusks retreat to quieter and darker pools to feed and raise hatchlings.

Pitch Draft: Corporate Physics

This game represents the way corporations work through a highly abstract physical metaphor.

The player controls a corporation, which is represented as a series of components that can be connected together a various ways. Each component serves a specific purpose. Having more more employees in a component increases it’s visual size, it’s effectiveness and the amount of capital the player must keep streaming in to keep the company afloat. Some components are:

• Administration provides a large number of tabs onto which other components can be attached.


• Production creates widgets.


• R&D increases the cost at which widgets can be sold to consumers.


• Warehouses allow widgets to be stored.


• Sales acts as a vacuum cleaner, which sucks up consumers can pops them out the other side with less money and in possession of a widget.


• Marketing acts as a magnet, drawing consumers towards itself. The marketing component can be placed to draw consumers towards the sales component.


• Legal acts as a cannon that can be used to attack other corporations, knocking them out of position.

Consumers are represented as little dots, which respond to forces exerted by the corporations. A consumer slowly grows in money, which makes the effects of corporations’ marketing and sales beams stronger, but being sucked up by a corporation’s sales component reduces their money.

Players must balance the need for growth with the dangers of growing too fast and not being able to support their employees. Growth is encouraged by pressure from competing corporations… if rival corporations outpace the player, the player will be crushed by rival corporations legal attacks.

Of course, this is all pie-in-sky kinda stuff. I don’t think I can really make the kinda AI that this would require, and without the AI it all falls down.

Pitch Draft: Morlock Tales

Players guide a small group of characters through a map that is constantly collapsing. At it's core, the game is still a basic strategy game, with the player setting goals and orders for the characters he controls. Players can create bases, and the characters he controls need a constant supply of food or other resources, thus must hunt other creatures for food and craft new weapons, etc. The game differs from other strategy games in that there is no guarantee that their bases will survive for long.


A slow moving threat (be it a zombie army, lava, whatever) is moving across the map, forcing the player to keep the characters they control moving. But just moving across the map forever is not an option since some of the tasks (cooking, crafting, something like that) need the characters to stop moving. The player must hop from outpost to outpost, keeping one step ahead of the encroaching force.

Character development assignment

Step 1

A person I know: my buddy Joel

Their qualities: opinionated, conservative, confidant, funny, personable, loyal

Step 2

A scene from life involving the person.

While at Port Fairy folk festival last weekend. Joel and another friend have decided that they are going to talk in cockney english accents for the whole night. There’s a stunning looking girl sitting near us, and Joel decides to talk to her… in his fake cockney accent. But as soon as she answers his questions he realises that she’s actually english. Joel quickly backs out of the conversation.

After the band we are watching finishes, Joel follows the girl out of the auditorium and asks her on a date. She agrees, and luckily doesn’t recognise him from previously. Later, we find out that she’s the pianist from one of the visiting bands.

Step 3

If he was:

• weather: a rainstorm at night


• an animal: basset hound


• a household object: dinner table


• a machine: a hammer


• a place: the sea

• music: that one song by Led Zepplin that goes WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN


• a color: bright orangey-brown


• a font: Bookman Old Style


• a fictional archetype: animal house style frat boy

Step 4

Braid art process

I really love the recent series of posts that David Hellman has made on his blog describing the process he went through while designing the graphics for upcoming indie game Braid.

Part 1 shows use of early abstract paintings to quickly describe ideas and capture moods.


Part 2 shows the iterative process of designing the graphics for a single scene.

Also, if you're not aware of David's old comic, please fix the situation.

Concept Dev. Class 2

Read article about growing up in China and desire for Tang - discussion of various themes contained. Shows that everyone finds different elements. Also, pokemon cards are similar; as children they were prestige products that were unaffordable for most. Now with hindsight they seem mundane, even worthless.

Assignments

Week 4: present 4 ideas with synopsis. It's a pitch. Specific ideas, but doesnt need to be a fully detailed proposal. A few paragraphs for each idea.

Week 8: present a more solid proposal for the single idea that you intend to tackle.

Discussion of scope: 3-4 minutes for linear media is a reasonable length. More is possible, but 10 minutes is overkill. Quality, not quantity.

Why a solid idea should be made in concept dev. class: Doesn't take time away from production, avoids design by committee.

Review of last class:

Design generation: list on blog. Also, try introducing random elements to mix things up if you're stuck. Try asking 'what if'. Personal experience... can be dangerous. Be aware of your perspective.

Focus: what is your angle? What is the 'vehicle'. Representation.. how do you show your idea? Show, dont tell. Can you present events that demonstrate your theme, rather than just showing theme directly? Allow audiences to 'put things together'. Not throwing themes in audience's face is much more interesting for them. Respect for your audience's time.

Visualisation/metaphor: Decide on visual form... use visual metaphors as well to tie to themes. Provide metaphors to give audience a way in to your work, make it more concrete for them. Also, metaphors provide for a shortcut to save time.

Synopsis: A short statement 1-2 paragraphs that introduces the reader to the most important aspects of your proposal in condensed form. This can be broken up into a more literal description of the project and a description of themes and underlying intentions. The reader must understand the basics, the details can be extrapolated from that later.

Homework

Finish class task: using a description of a person you know, write a scene from life that illustrates/demonstrates their personality. List a bunch of objects that the person would be if they were that object. Create an image of that character using a few of the objects listed as inspiration.

Research task: Non-fiction starting points... find an article that you find interesting as a 'starting point' about concept development. Write a paragraph that explains what you find interesting and why.

Lil Aliens!

Inspired by how much Onolungian Salad Zakkers made me laugh in the class on tuesday, I made this!



(click on the image or here to see the flash app. Click on the alien to make a new one)

A nice improvement would be to use the alien's name as the random seed for it's appearance. So then I could type in 'Onolungian Salad Zakkers' and see what they actually look like.

Also, here is a wallpaper of lots of silly lookin', randomly created aliens:

Will Wright

This for a Concept Development assignment. It got a bit wordy, as things I write tend to do.

Behind Shigeru Miyamoto (designer of Mario, Zelda, Metroid, &c., &c.) Will Wright is possibly the most well known game designer currently working, and with good reason too. Will Wright’s first hit was SimCity, first released in 1989, which allowed players to design and maintain simulated cities. This spawned a line of similarly-named games exploring similar themes: Simulation of real-world systems, and giving the players a lot of power to be creative in the manipulation of these systems. Will Wright’s second major hit was The Sims in 2000. The Sims again attempted to simulate a real-world system, this time suburban family life. It appealed greatly to ‘non-core’ gaming audience (women, mostly), and is credited with expanding the audience for video games. The Sims is still one of the most highly selling games of all time. Will Wright is currently working on the upcoming game Spore, which simulates evolutionary biology, social evolution and space exploration.

Will Wright’s creative process involves detailed exploration of everyday but complex ideas. This is something not usually seen in games, which are often explorations of more outlandish and simple concepts. The ideas that he explores are also taken from experiences or concepts outside of games. The Sims was created from the initial concept of giving the player a dollhouse where the dolls were alive. The main inspiration for Spore were taken from Drake’s Equation, which was an attempt to mathematically determine the number of civilizations in our galaxy. Will Wright’s game designs are also usually created over long periods of time, working with small teams. The Sims was first pitched by Will Wright in 1993, though actual development did not begin on it until 1995, five years before it was released. Spore has also been in development for more than five years. Much of this development time is spent on small throwaway prototypes to test specific concepts that may or may not be used in the final product. Will Wright’s creative process involves gathering ideas from external sources and iterating until they work.

Articles:
Innovation, design
Prototyping

Video:
Will Wright at NASA

It's another blog!

Because the world needs more! More more more!

This will be my blog for concept development class, plus maybe other school things.

If you want to see my 'real' blog, it is at here: http://isaacwilliams.net/

Exercises from 1st Class

About a Record

I have always loved my dad's record collection. A lot of it is really fun! My dad has all the Smiths records, all the Morrissey records, all the Split Endz records. So I guess he's a tragic for tragic 80's indie rock. Which is great, because he and I are both now tragics for modern tragic indie rock.

A few years ago I started going through all of Dad's records that I want to be able to listen to, playing them back into digital format. Lying on the dusty lounge-room floor with laptop uncomfortably balanced on my brother's guitar amp, a long analogue audio cable going from the headphone jack on the record player to the mic-in on the computer. Once the record was played back into the computer I would painstakingly cut up the tracks into individual mp3 files so I can actually listen to them. My friends would call my blasphemous: 'Intentionally subverting the purity of vinyl'. I called them irritatingly nostalgic luddites. While it may be nice every so often to lie on the loungeroom floor and play out a record in it's entirety, the reverence for rituals associated with an antiquated technology is just silly.

The entire process was mostly pointless anyway. The songs were taken from 20-year old, often listened to records, played out on a record player of the same age, to the headphone jack, down the cheapest variety of audio cable I could find, into the analog mic jack in an aging laptop and finally converted to mp3. By the time they reached my mp3 player they were almost unlistenable. So I just ended up downloading the albums my dad has on record from bittorrent. Just keeping up with the times.

About An Alien!!!!

The cold black desert stretched on as far as the eye can see. The gritty dark surface an unsightful blight on which no life could have ever survived. And yet there are some signs of life. Massive, semitranslucent beings tower through the rifts of the desert. At dusk their gargantuan cries echo between the dark peaks: "Whoororororororo!! Whroooororororo!". And lo, the black desert rumbled from their cries. On the third day one of the massive creatures trampled towards our camp. It moved so fast that we could not escape. I stood in front of it, waving my arms and yelling "Stop!!!! Or I shall be trampled to death by your spiked mass!". To my surprise it did not listen. I was stompled to death. I died. I was both astonished and astounded, as well as being slightly constipated.

I continued my trek across the desert. A giant spire, shooting up into the sky, millions of feet. The ancient groan of twisting steel ripping through the night air like a chainsaw through a bathtub of baby Onolungian Salad Zakkers. It sounded exactly like Rolf Harris' first album: "Whoororororororo!! Whroorororororo! Whroorororororo!!". My cranium was turned inside out! Luckily, one of my shuddering assistants was nearby to pour me into a soup bowl.

With impunity!