Recently, I've begun asking Leo questions about our game; tell me about this video game, how does this video game end, how does this video game begin? Each time I take out my phone and record the question and answer. It started out kind of as a joke, I would ask him to tell me about it, and he would respond with something ridiculous: this video game is the Dark Souls of Finnegans Wake. (which this game both will be, and also I don't know entirely what that would mean).
I ultimately found the process of making of the recordings worthwhile, the ridiculous answers slowly petered out into more tempered, if still not entirely serious, answers. 'The game ends when you want to stop playing it'.'The game will only be FMV from now on'. While I'm not sure if these voice recordings will make their way into the final product, I think they struck on a couple of different thematic chords that Leo and I have been reaching for. First of all, I like the shifting view of the game they provide. Each time I ask the same question - how does it end? how does it end? - I would get a different, though often equally valid response (we still don't know how it's going to end). This constant moving under the players feet, and shifting of expectations is something we've talked a lot about exploring.
I think these voice recordings also achieve something that we've been talking about since our early sketching out phase: direct communication with the player. I know it sounds like a 'duh' kind of thing - if you want to talk to the player directly, talk to them! In lots of our early ideas Leo kept coming back to the sticking point that no matter how interesting a world or narrative we'd built up around the player, they were still a couple levels abstracted/removed from the game. That they were not directly being talked to, instead it was an avatar. So now, with these recordings, it was kind of a revelatory moment for me when I realized that, ya know, we could just talk to them.
It reminded me of a game I'd played a while ago, The Beginners Guide. Here's a trailer for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBK5Jheu0To. The game unfolds as a narrator/game developer talks you through a series of short games/experiences made by a friend of theirs. Though the thematics of the game are different, I realized that the delivery mechanism for the story was by far the most direct of any game I'd played in a while. The narrator is the developer (more or less, it ends up getting a little complicated) and I am myself playing through these games as the developer talks to me about these games. Anywho, Leo and I recently played through the first couple levels in the game to get a sense of the narration style and delivery, and I think it might end up being a helpful touch stone for us as we move forward.
So yeah. We've spent a fair amount of time with conceptual work recently, but here are some of the tech and development progress we've made.
I've been learning two different tools inside Unity; Timeline and ProBuilder. The first is a tool that allows one to align events that happen inside the game on a timeline, it's particularly helpful for aligning events to an audio track - which is something we're thinking about doing if we go down the voice recording track. The other tool I've been learning - ProBuilder - is a Unity asset that allows for the creation of flexible in engine meshes (ie, creating the 3D level geometry inside of Unity instead of having to use an outside modeling program). Below is a screen grab from a mockup of an abstract scene I created to test out using Timeline to score a song with geometry made with ProBuilder.
I think I would also be remiss if I didn't mention S C A R E F A C T O R Y before ending this blogpost. So Leo and I were prototyping the skeleton of a clicker style game to maybe be used as a vignette in a part of the game. (Clicker style referring to games like : Cookie Clicker, Space Plan, or A Dark Room). Our prototype for this project accidentally spun out into it's own monstrous monster based clicker game. While it's very likely some of the tech driving SCARE FACTORY might end up in our game, it's probably safe to say it's now another project (something we'll finish maybe after this class). Anywho, if you have more questions about SCARE FACTORY, just ask, in the comments maybe? I'd be happy to elaborate, but as it's not directly related to this project anymore I think that's all for now.
I think that's all for now!
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