Advertising Project.

Interactive ideas:

Interactive projection.

Uses the movements of onlookers to alter the projection, allowing for an artistic and interactive performance. Face tracking/custom optical flow was used.

Art Style Influences

I wanted the art for my game to be as simple as possible -- my own style is intensely meticulous and I overly detailed for an iPhone game. The most successful iPhone games are very streamlined and uncluttered in appearance. Therefore, I started looking at styles that were capable of representing forms with few lines and strokes.

Phoenix Wright, a well known title for the DS, uses simple shading and lighting in order to portray depth. Anime, while not my style of choice, is very good for expressing human form in an oversimplified way. Next, we go back to a game previously mentioned as an influence for its gameplay, The World Ends with You.

TWEWY is very distinctive, using thickly weighted lines and again, simple shading, to express form. The game is very consistant in its style, with each character thinly waisted and many enemies reminiscent of animals a person might find in the real world.

Above is an image from Tales of Symphonia. While in-game, models are heavily simplified and not overly detailed. While this game is not handheld, it captures the intentional movement away from realism I was trying to grasp. Below are some initial attempts and experiments, moving more toward something closer to what I wanted to achieve.

Tenative concept.

After reading through Andrew Loomis' figure drawing book this evening, inspiration struck. Drawn to Life, with its sketchy art style, always appealed to me stylistically. It showed, to a point, different stages of drawing aside from the finished product; something I find very interesting as an artist.

Drawn to Life has multiple modes:

• Village mode: Interaction with buildings and NPCs takes place here. Displayed in top-down view, this area is the central hub for level access, item buying and story progression.
• Adventure mode: Side-scrolling platformer mode where battles take place. Players draw their own platforms in order to cross obstacles and defeat bosses in each zone/area.
• Draw mode: Where players design their own creations and bring them to life using the stylus/touch screen.

(Wikipedia, 2009)

Within Loomis' book, he introduces the mannikin frame on page 38, under the heading 'we begin to draw: first the mannikin frame'. The visual simpilicty of this frame was always something I found very appealing -- it enabled the artist to be able to express movement and form with very few lines.

I was keen to find a way to express this simplicity and form within the art style of my game. Eventually, the idea formed; a game wherein the player begins in the mannikin form, then advances to a more fleshed out, humanoid being as they make progress through dungeons and defeating bosses.

Concept:

• Set in a small village that becomes the safe zone hub mentioned in a previous post.
• Village is watched over by a guardian in the form of a tree, which is then corrupted by an invading evil.
• As a result of the tree's corruption, the inhabitants of the village and the village itself begins to lose form and mass, becoming close to Loomis' mannikin representation of people.
• Players must climb the floors of the tree, fighting in a hack-and-slash style through randomized dungeon floors toward bosses.
• When a boss is defeated, the village and the player character begin to move back toward their original forms.

  

An idea.

iPhone and iPad games, in my mind, should not be too story heavy or demanding on a player's time. While the App Store does have bigger, more involving games like RPGs, the top selling and most well known games are those repeatedly described as 'simple' and 'easy to pick up'. Mobile gaming is all about convenience; games that are easy to jump in and out of are more successful because they can be played during lunches or ten minute downtimes throughout the day. A list of the most popular iPhone games can be found here.

The top ten games are visually distinctive and easy to play. While they, like most games, take practice to become very good at, the average player can pick the game up and become familiar with the controls within just a few short minutes. Thus, the controls are 'intuitive'; easy to use and understand.

Replayability in hack-and-slash games is very important, especially when they're competing against the appeal of score-grinding in a puzzle game like Angry Birds. The randomization of dungeon floor generation is a way to combat this.

An extreme example of floor randomization can be seen in the RPG Persona 3. Players are required to navigate their way through Tartarus, a tower that only appears at midnight and leads toward an unknown evil. There are 265 floors a player must fight through in Tartarus, broken up by bosses every ten or fifteen floors. The process is kept from becoming too repetative by changing the layout of each floor every time it is traversed, and by having enemies increase slowly in difficulty.

While the combat in Persona 3 is the usual turn-based mechanic you would expect from a JRPG, it manages to achieve the objective of having a player repeat the same action multiple times without it becoming repetative. Floor climbing is broken up by visits to non-combat zones and social interaction. While the latter is not suitable for the game I have in mind, this gave me the idea of using a hub as a base of operations for the player; a place for them to view their achievements (enemies defeated, longest run made) and organize the items they have acquired while taking a break from the fighting sections of the game.

I have no words and I must design.

This week's contextual studies assignment was to read through Greg Costikyan's 'I have no words and I must design' and pick out a number of points to take a further look into.

Greg makes a point to discuss MUDs and roleplaying games, noting that these games do not have explicit goals set out for the player. He goes on to note that these games allow a player to pick and choose his own goals -- and often the goal simply comes down to character improvement. Greg also addresses the issue of boredom in these kinds of games; an interesting point. MMORPGs, games that allow players to do what they wish within the world, are constanting being updated and maintained to provide new content because, inevitably, the players of the game become bored with constantly redoing what is available to thm. There is an issue with games that have no set point of completion; eventually a player strays into the realm of repetition and eventually becomes tired of the game. I have played, and ceased playing, a number of MMORPGs. The first of these was Ragnarok, a Korean MMO. Within Ragnarok existed a core flaw; the only real goal or activity within the game was solely character improvement through the repeated killing of the most experience per hour effective monsters. Many MMORPGs, while boasting open ended gameplay that allows a player to choose what to do within a world, fall into the 'grinding' trap -- forcing players to mindlessly repeat the same action in order to advance. Developers of MMOs find that the biggest challenge is keeping end-game content, things for the player to do once they have reached the ceiling, up to date and engaging. Within the MMORPG genre, boredom is the greatest threat.

An amusing area of Greg's book is within the 'Struggle' section, and is in regards to his description of 'coperative games'. He notes that the call for cooperative games is a call for games without struggle or conflict. However, in today's world of gaming, a cooperative (or co-op) game is a game wherein players work together specifically to achieve a goal, and the conflict/struggle comes from the challenge within the game itself. The term co-op gaming, in regards to a game such as Lara Croft and  the Guardian of Light, appears to have different meaning within Greg's book. It is interesting that Greg notes that cooperative play is entertaining in the attempt to achieve a mutual goal, but seems dismissive of the term "cooperative gaming".

Greg makes a comparison between EverQuest and Ultima Online during the Structure session, explaining that while both are intensely similar games, EverQuest does not allow player versus player conflict, while Ultima Online encourages it through better rewards for doing such. He explains that such a small difference creates a huge change in player interaction; Ultima Online breeds fear and avoidance of other players, while EverQuest players engage in relaxed conersations and assist each other. This was very apparent when I played World of Warcraft; within the same game the difference in player interaction could easily be seen between PVP and non-PVP servers. Within a PVP realm, players often instigated witch hunts to take out players of the opposite faction, and paranoia ran high while out and about exploring the realm; high levelled players saw killing lower levelled players as a sort of sport. Relations between the two factions were as the developers intended; people were at war and developed a genuine dislike for players of the opposite faction. By contrast, on non-PVP realms, while conversations between factions were difficult due to chat filters, players from opposite factions were happy to ignore each other, or even sometimes assist using what little communication there was available with emotes and stunted phrases.

Straight on from the previous point, Costikyan then stresses the importance of understanding how game structure affects player behaviour, and explains that the player killing aspect of Ultima Online was not wholly intentional, pointing out that the developer's previous games focused on moral, prosocial paths. However, it is very difficult to predict how people will respond to certain structures. An example of a negative response would be one wherein people attempt to find creative and roundabout ways to exploit the system in order to cause another player grief or difficulty. Within many, many multiplayer games, player versus player interaction is prohibited. In a competative environment, though, people become very adept at finding ways the developers did not intend to kill or take revenge on one another. Going back to Ragnarok Online, player vs player is restricted to designated PVP zones, some of which are only active at certain times of the week. Players found that certain monsters had patterns of aggression that would allow them to switch target to the nearest and more vulnerable players, to prevent easy 'tank and spank' encounters. This behaviour allowed players to gather up large groups of monsters and then run them passed another player, causing all of the monsters to swap targets and ambush the unsuspecting victim. Costikyan briefly touches on this by stating that 'by an dlarge, you can expect that a player will respond to the incentives a game provides. Not always; players sometimes delight in doing the perverse'.