It was Always in the Back of my Mind

What is up, blog?

Wow, it has been too long since I've posted here. Never fear, I have not abandoned my game. In fact, I have new arts scattered throughout this post to keep your eyeballs somewhat engaged. I feel that the juxtaposition of different concepts this challenge presents has helped me to see and stumble upon and think about ideas and phenomena I would otherwise never have encountered, so even if I were to never actually bring a game to fruition, I would have more than enough interesting stories and discoveries to share. I am the obsessive type, the type that gets completely suckered into a fandom, a research topic, and more importantly, a personal project, so this game idea has literally haunted my every thought for the past, I think, 2-3 years? The degree of my obsession has gone so deeply that themes of ice and the color red literally pervade my dreams on a semi-regular basis now. I am doing research even in my dreams; one of my dreams this past week involved me approaching one of numerous gigantic weird glacier-things scattered around an old mining-based town the class was visiting, and prying off a piece to study the way the colors shift and absorb light at different angles, so I could better understand how to capture its essence visually. My dream self will literally grow excited when it finds an inspiring shade of red or happens upon a snowy bank, or consciously note if some event in the dream world would be an interesting addition to the game.

Well, by divulging the depth of the challenge's impact on even my dreams I am not implying that this obsessive tendency is a good thing, and I definitely know it has no bearing on my actual progress with my game. But it is nice to know that, even when asleep, my brain naturally starts processing and playing with all the cultural bits and pieces I've discovered regarding the cards I've drawn. Dreams have become particularly useful in formulating a unique and personal aesthetic for the game, and though my abilities to translate that into digital form may be limited, some of that essence will definitely persist. I am also especially lucky this winter, since a variety of releases and events have been providing me with even more opportunities for aesthetic inspiration. Frozen has been excellent in teaching me how to catch the enchanting, soothing heavy wash of pink that casts over the snow at dawn and sunset, and Sochi has provided me with many examples of inspiring, strong female leads. And though I know that with the cold comes great discomfort and danger to the homeless, I could not help but glean inspiration from the weeks of snow and ice that cast upon Atlanta twice. Of course, I would rather that not happen again; I could get more out of a skiing trip than that without endangering anyone.

I personally don't really like this picture, but whatever.

Anyways, what I want to say is that during all this time, I have been collecting bits and pieces, turning them over in my head and fiddling with them, gaining insight into things I never knew, and slowly pulling together a blueprint for a game that can naturally encompass all the elements of ice, red, tact and self-control. Oh, I should probably mention that with progressive research I've decided that the terms 'tact' and 'self-control' more accurately encapsulated the essence of the original words I drew, which were 'diplomacy' and 'self-discipline,' but that's info I can cover more in depth in another post. I know how I want to present these pieces now, and I know the basic narrative and mechanics I would use to do just that. Now that I have a high-concept idea of how to present a game encapsulating abstract terms, though, it's time I stepped back and whittle down the idea into something that I am actually capable of building.

A full-body shot that isn't anatomically implausible! Yay! I really despise her sweater, though.

First, though, I would like to talk about the full extent of the idea I've built up. Ideally, if I had a magic wand, I would create this game set in a 3D enviro, inspired by works by guys like Timothy Reynolds. It would be navigated by clicking upon objects and persons, which the mouse would naturally snap to. You would not really walk around the place like you would in a standard adventure game, because the game would be simulating how an extroverted social person sees the world. The mouse is therefore your only and primary means of navigation, and it is representative of your proximity to certain things in the room. If your mouse is close to the gossipy housewives in a corner, you would consequently pick up bits and pieces of their conversation. Move the cursor closer to the younger clique in the corner, and you'd overhear that group's gossip. Click the clique and obviously you'd be interacting with them. You make true narrative progress in the game by the information and interactions you unlock with people, and the key to do just that lies in how you've been spending your time each day. If you've been doing your homework, then you'll be able to better communicate with your professors, and therefore comprehend and be able to ask questions pertinent to the overarching narrative.

Okay, cool, so obviously this whole people-interaction thing covers the tact card. Calling the professor a fatty is clearly a tactless move, and commenting on the implications of blah blah blah smart stuff with the guy a whole lot tactful. Now we need to cover self-control.

Self control would come in by using your standard old 'here's a list of stats, level them up!' system. It would be a bit like the Sims. Click that treadmill: five minutes later, oh look, your Sim's Athletic stat went up! Here is where my interpretation of self-control would come in to differentiate it, though. When you make Sally get on that treadmill, you don't just sit there and wait for her to loop through her running animation until Athleticism goes up to Level 4. There are going to be some major Mental Hurdles that pop up! Sally is, just like most people, not always going to be in control of herself. That means that if she feels lethargic and tired of feeling sore all the time, she may autonomously step off that treadmill and beeline for the couch. This negative state of mind is reflected in negative note clusters, and the only way to counter them is to play note clusters representing positive ideas. There is also a goal/motive window thing, and if it happens to be fuzzy and fading away, chances are her stamina and will are not going to hold up very well. Play those positive notes well enough and on tempo, and that goal may come into sharper focus for her. (There is a reason I'm using music as a means of controlling mood, but that would be something for a later post).

Something else that I'd want to implement in the name of Self Control is a feature for habits. It would be painfully tedious if you had to do the whole note-playing rote series of task-clicking every single day. The key is in doing something, like running at 5pm every other day, regularly enough that Sally cannot help but start autonomously doing it every day. When something becomes a habit, happy buzzy feel-good special effects and musics pop out at you and instead of making you sit there while she runs, it skips through the action and summarizes it, otome-style.

Here's an example from an otome called Love Revo:

Here you see the protagonist attempt a weight-reducing activity. The outcome is based on a stat called 'Info.' Once you initiate the activity, there's not much else you can do to control the outcome.

If she has a full routine of habits going on, then you've got some serious pumped up music sequence stuff going on, with all these cool graphic success-indicative panels flying at you. You also end up saving time. None of this is fixed, though. While she walks off that treadmill and heads towards the easel to, I dunno, practice painting like she usually does, you can cancel that and make her walk over to the guitar instead, and switch up her routine. As she becomes comfortable enough with various types of tasks to form habits with them, her stamina also levels up, and picking up a related habit (like learning drums after learning guitar) is far easier and accessible.

Yay, something lineless! Also, I really need to work on rendering gems, that looks like an oversized gusher on her arm.

Obviously this is all very abstract, conceptual, Babel-y stuff, and whether it actually would be enjoyable is something that I really cannot predict. Whether I can actually implement it is also another matter. I feel that this model does encapsulate tact and self-control, though, and while I definitely won't be implementing all the particulars of what I've just described, I'll be taking the general ideas presented and placing them inside a less ambitious, conventional framework (like a top-down pixelly RPG). I have been taking an AI class this semester and, um, I am made all the more aware of how inexperienced and noobish I still am. I have wanted to try and implement it in Unity, but my mind draws delusions of amazing soft, crystalline shaders lovingly drawing sophisticated, life-like NPCs on screen, and well, reality check says that's not possible for me right now. Instead I'll be focusing on using Flash to build what is basically a dollhouse. I will have a single semi-autonomous AI roaming about a single-room house, and it will be surrounded with items for building habits and skills. I am debating on using Flixel or plain old Flash at the moment. I'm most interested in the Habit/Routine mechanic. If I could get just that part down, I would feel like I'd accomplished a major chunk of the challenge. If I succeed, I wouldn't mind just wrapping up the rest of the game into a standard otome.

What I come up with for the prototype is probably going to look like the now-defunct PlayFish social game Pet Society. Except the pet will be replaced with a person. Gosh, I hope that doesn't end up being weird.

Also, I've been doing a lot of (attempts) at digital painting this semester for lab, and as you can see I've managed to pull out a few more colored concepts of what the protagonist may look like. I think I pretty much have her face/hair down, but am still kind of struggling with her outfit.

Anyways, there are a lot of things I want to talk about regarding the past few years, and I plan on populating this blog with detailed info on all the interesting things my research has unearthed. Dry posts on the particulars of a speculative blueprint aren't particularly all that entertaining. A fun post I plan to do sometime soon is on the range of solely ice/snow/winter-based games out there at the moment, both commercially and less formally via Indie platforms or flash portals. I'll try to make it a habit to post here more regularly, probably every week. I am really teetering on the edge with Grad school at the moment, so I definitely can't do much on the prototyping end, but compiling all the research I've done into digestible posts should be fun and relatively easy. I have to keep my writing muscles nimble for that final master's thesis anyways!

Before I go: check out this ice-based game from the interwebz. It's simple and pretty satisfying to play:

www.kongregate.com/games/Nitrome/ice-beak