Progress Report #1

Progress.

Progress update #1.

Well, my computer broke-partially broke- recently. The mouse and keyboard are caput. Which sucks, considering video games are normally created using computers. So, I'm figuring that out. Thankfully I got my hands on a mouse and a bluetooth keyboard, and should have a more permanent fix sometime next week, but it has definitely slowed my progress. That said. There has been some.

Inspired by both Getting over it with Bennet Foddy and the quieter moment in Frog Fractions where you ride on the back of a water dragon as a sillouette and a narrator recounts a fake history of boxing, Leo wanted to experiment with using very direct voice overs during gameplay.

Here's a brief trailer of Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy that gives a good sense of the kind of direct narration that is present throughout all the gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzjuQ3K72u4

This is the referenced scene from Frog Fractions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkfKAHbS6oU

So, Leo recorded a series of three of them off the cuff on a nice mic, recounting small stories from his childhood. The last of the recordings turned out pretty well and I decided to use it as a spring board to experiment with a new scene.


But wait, before getting to the scene, I want to describe some other things that have happened.

So we decided that we wanted to go for a collage aesthetic for the game. Cutting out images from magazines and scanning them in, or just finding them online and cropping them. Leo has a fair amount of practice with this style given his experiences in animation, however I'm a novice. While this isn't some of his animations that deals more overtly in collage (I don't think those are online), this quick rotoscope he did shows a couple elements of using found images to create a cohesive style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6P2XP5R55c

So early last week Leo gave me a crash course in Photoshop, how to easily crop objects out of images, and stuff like that. I ended up practicing and using those skills all week long on a book I was making for my other class this term Artists Books. As a side note, I think the book came out well and it was also about video games, but more relevantly it was really good practice actually using Photoshop in preparation for this project.

Here's a picture of the work in progress of the book, the background image has been altered/tweaked/created using Photoshop.



Earlier this week we met with Anne Haydock, the film professor teaching Leo's senior seminar, about both the progress we've made as well as setting up some initial deadlines. We agreed on February 6th to have a substantial initial working prototype. We also talked about copy right and fair use in the context of collage art and our project. She said she thought that what we said we wanted to do was protected, but that she'd look into more specifics about games.

So returning now, to the voice recordings that leo made. After listening to them he thought that he needed to work on writing them out in a slightly more planned way moving forward. However, since we both thought the 3rd one he'd already recorded was promising I decided to use it as a jumping off point for workshopping a scene in Unity.

I wanted to figure out how to capture gifs in order to include them here - because motion is really important in seeing a game scene - but unfortunately I couldn't figure it out in a timely manner, especially with the state of my computer, so that will have to be for the next blog post. However, here are some screenshots from the scene.










The recording is about a memory in gym class. The scene is slight currently, with the gameplay involving dragging a ball around the screen and knocking these action figurine-y looking guys off the stage. Various things/people spawn in at timed moments in the recording. Moving forward my next goal is to being creating lots of small scenes like this, in response to recordings or written text from Leo or myself. My goal for this upcoming week is to try to make two or three more very quick and diverse prototypes, just to begin testing out a bunch of different gameplay mechanics as well as aesthetic choices.

Thats all for now.