Nov 27th, 2008
I made a very quick game (though not quite as quick as the Klik of the Month ones) for a competition that is due today. The game is called The Lake, and it’s for the TIGSource Commonplace Book Competition. The objective was to create a game inspired by one or several of the brief ideas that H.P. Lovecraft jotted down in his Commonplace Book, most of which never got turned into full stories. This is what I did; my game is not ‘based on’ as much as it’s just ‘triggered’ by one of these ideas, though.
You can download The Lake v1.0, for Windows.
My goal was to create a game that would not take me too long to make. I wanted just a full day’s work, it ended up being three, but that’s quite okay. It was created in Construct, which truly is a great promise for the future, but so full of bugs for the time being. I managed, though. The end result is more of a short interactive story; it’s completable in about a single minute, which is a common factor for all my games so far, but in this case the experience is more focused on the narrative. I’m pretty proud of the fact that everything in the game was created by me (well, except for the engine, of course), though I wish I had the time to do something more with the sound design, which was part of the original plan.
As I mentioned above, the idea for the game just came to my mind as if it was a dream when I read one of the entries in the Book. This sounds pretty romantic, but rather than describe the creative process, I want it to be apparent that I applied very few filters on this initial flash. This is why the game may not be very coherent, or have a palpable meaning; nevertheless, it’s there, and I tried to make it as close to this initial spark as it was possible in the time that I had available to do it. I think I’ve just always had a thing for surrealism and their techniques, and this is why I like this kind of pure, unadulterated slice of subconscious, which I oftentimes value more than very produced and over-thought pieces of work. There’s more to life than logic, is what I say.
Nov 17th, 2008
Last saturday I participated again in this month’s Klik of the Month Klub. This time I didn’t use Klik & Play to make my game, because I had heard of a different software, modelled around Clickteam’s own (creators of Klik & Play), but improved, called Construct. It’s still in beta, but it’s a very complete package nonetheless. Much like last time, I used that very day’s afternoon to learn to use the software, scribbled a few notes on the game I was going to make, and in the evening, proceeded to spend two hours figuring out how to do stuff. The resulting game is more complex than last time’s Runaway Blast, simply because Construct is so much more capable than K&P.
I am forgetting something. Before the event had started, I told my friend lofi that he should participate too. He didn’t want to, though, so I asked him to make some music for my game instead. Luckily for me, he agreed! Truly, the game has become worthy of people’s time just because of the cool music that he provided.
What you see above is how the game looks like in its second version. Download Where and play it, if you feel like it (Windows only). This is a much improved version of what I originally submitted an hour after the deadline (because I had some trouble getting other people to hear the music; other than that, I finished it only ten minutes past the deadline). Since the original suffered from some issues I didn’t have the time to fix, I spent several hours figuring out how to do so afterwards. What I didn’t have the time for, in the end, was improving the collisions, but that’s comparatively minor.
In Where, I just wanted to make some radical decisions. I basically wrote down the first few ideas I came up with, but since it was going to be a very small game, in order to make it memorable, some radical choices needed to be made. This is why I decided to obstruct the player’s view with large floating text, and use a psychedelic selection of colors. Since these contributed to a non-harmonic experience, I decided to make the gameplay conceptually frustrating as well: descending a ‘tower’ with an avatar that can’t stop jumping. The text used itself also helps to heighten these principles. And lofi’s music felt right at home when I first played it with it.
Nov 6th, 2008
In a previous post I explained what motivated me to make the game I am currently making as my final project in college. In this entry I will actually describe what I have achieved so far, and my plans for what’s to come. If you so wish, you may play the game, incomplete as it is, before reading what follows. If you do, I’d be very interested in hearing about your experience, how you approached the game without knowing exactly what it was about, what could have been clearer or better.
What I sought, as I explained in that other post, was to create a game whose main objective is not to rack up points, but to create a visual composition. This is a game about creativity, indeed; a subset of games that, I have found, is not very largely represented. Kenichi Nishi said something in an interview that I quote here because I consider to be extremely significant:
Recently, games have been ‘passively interactive.’ Users do not really have to think about what to do; they are guided around until they reach the end of the level. These types of games do not rely on the creativity of the users.
This is why I started to consider my idea more important than at first. Although there have been games like Mario Paint, that are like tools that are given a context of fun, I wanted to make something simpler, something abstract and more concentrated. There was also the question about how this would work as a game; I didn’t want it to become a color-matching, chain-making fest, so how to evaluate what was being made for its own sake? It didn’t need to be competitive, but it also needed a purpose, a raison d’être. There was the possibility of it being multiplayer, and people judging each-others compositions, much like the abovementioned Nishi’s own game, Archime-DS (or LOL, as it’s being brought over to this half of the world). I took a bit of that idea, as I will explain later, but I deliberated some more until I came to the conclusion that the best would be not to judge quality, but to evaluate compositive characteristics, or parameters, as I’ve grown used to calling them. The point being that every visual composition can be evaluated in terms of different characteristics, like how symmetric it is, whether it uses warm or cool colors, whether it is rhythmic or not (presence of visual patterns), etc. We can use these parameters to objectively determine if a composition is harmonic and pleasing to the eye, if it is foreboding, if it is unsettling, etc.
Personally, I am more of a supporter of holistic rather than reductionist approaches to analysis, but in this particular case (and in many others) it is much simpler to compartmentalize the data—especially given that I am hardly a mathematician, or even a programmer, so it simply made my work a lot easier. I realize that to this point I’m still talking abstractly, so let me show you the game proper.
That is what it currently looks like. In the center, but leaning toward the top and left, is the canvas: a grid where the player creates his composition. To the right is the carousel; sort of a conveyor belt of colored groups of circles, that the player can grab at any time and drop on the canvas. In a bar at the bottom there are a series of pictograms of differing sizes: they are actually dynamic, and change depending on the current characteristics of the composition, as perceived by the game (right now the algorithms that calculate this are not very finely tuned). Each pictogram changes to either a neutral, high or low graphic depending on the value: For instance, the fire icon indicates that the colors are mostly warm, and it would change to a snowflake if it was the opposite. Its comparatively small size means that it is not leaning that much toward warmth. The pictograms still need some work for them to be easier to understand, since, as I said in that previous post of mine, this game will use no words, so they need to be self-sufficient. Finally, in the bottom right is the time counter, which, when depleted, will prompt the game to show a results screen, which is pictured below. (continue reading)
Oct 31st, 2008
After salivating a bit for the Korg DS-10, a software that simulates a synthesizer named Korg MS-10, for the Nintendo DS (not a game), I came to realize that I did not need to wait or spend money to make music using my DS, for there was NitroTracker freely available to us lucky flashcart owning people. I had known about this tracker (music sequencing software) for a while, but I had never attempted to use it. I was feeling adventurous now, so I downloaded it and read the rather short explanation on using it; it has a surprisingly approachable interface, which was put to the test with someone as ignorant on music composition as myself. Thirty odd minutes of toying with it later, I had made a song. Hooray—my first recorded composition, ever! I only used the samples recommended in the short tutorial I read, which proved to be insufficient, so I went looking for more. After seizing my arsenal, I went back. And, right now, I’m sitting on four frankly awkward tunes that no one would likely want to give a second listen, but I am, honestly, pretty proud of myself. As much as I love music, it’s surprising even to myself that I can’t play any instrument, so it was not only satisfying to have finally drafted something listenable, but also like taking a weight off my shoulders. I crossed the line, and it feels pretty great.
The little horrors are in extended module (XM) format, which should play fine in Winamp if you have a not-too-old version, and probably in other audio players as well. The first in the list below is my latest ‘oeuvre’, and you could consider it my contribution to this year’s Halloween. The others (chronologically ordered, with the oldest last) are unintentionally terrifying. Boo.
Oct 13th, 2008
I’m currently in my final semester for the Bachelor of Graphic Design degree, so I’m devoting my time to a project I haven’t discussed here so far. Now that I have something to show, though, I think it’s time to talk about it a bit. I’ll start from the very beginning: the conception of the idea.
I’ve been an avid videogamer for the best part of my life, so I can account for many hours spent in front of a screen, with a controller in my hands. One day, around two years ago, probably while playing this brilliantly elegant game called Polarium, I realized that I was having more fun creating levels, and making sure that they were both solvable and aesthetically attractive, rather than just playing the game proper. I found that the visual patterns created by the simple colored shapes in puzzle games like Tetris, Puyo Puyo and Puzzle Bobble could, and sometimes would, form beautiful patterns. This is, of course, where my training in design comes in; I realized that a game could be made where the objective, the very goal, was not to match shapes or make chains, but to create an interesting visual composition.
I had very little experience programming, though, so I never took it upon myself to make that game. Time passed, and one day there was a special event, hosted by a friend, called the Super Game Bakedown, that simply consisted of creating a game for the duration of a single month, in the spirit of the NaNoWriMo. I knew I couldn’t achieve such a feat, but I joined anyway, and made it my goal to finish a design document for this dream game of mine. I even added a secondary characteristic to the game, which was an idea that had intrigued me for a while: The game would not use words (or numbers) whatsoever. In the end, I didn’t even finish the design document, but I did get a clearer idea of what I wanted to, and could, achieve. (continue reading)
Sep 20th, 2008
Remember that idea I had of making a round-robin webcomic? Well, I’ve finally launched the site, with a strip to start things. It’s called The Ants Parade, a name that, I believe, illustrates what I want to achieve with the comic: collaboration, a succession of authors, whose works, together, contribute to a bigger opus. Not that big, of course –we’re not talking elephants here–, but hopefully worth everyone’s time.
The first strip is already almost not a comic strip, which is how I wanted to steer this from the beginning. Not that I mind traditional comics, but I wanted the project to explore vastly different ways to make a comic. If we’re talking many authors with so many liberties, the least we can expect is radical diversification. So I hope that my first strip, regardless of its quality, can inspire future contributors to go wild.
The site incorporates one rant per strip for the author to voice his thoughts, as long as they’re vaguely related to the comic. There’s also a blog, which, honestly, I don’t foresee getting used much, but it’s there for the different contributors –who might not even know each other– to discuss anything at all. Anyone can comment on posts, and I can promote registered users so that they can create new posts. It’s almost a message board, really, but those are generally too hermetic to outsiders, so I wanted something that was transparent, with a quicker flow.
The technology I use is Pixelpost for the strips and Chyrp for the blog. I had used Pixelpost before, and it’s as easy to set up as ever–even if it lacks versatility, reason why I had to edit the script’s code at times. Chyrp, on the other hand, I will admit, was a big pain. Its theming language is really poorly documented, and the little documentation there is seems to assume that the reader is familiar with Chyrp’s code. Errors in the themes’ syntax don’t even receive a helpful error message from the parser, which just breaks, so bug-catching is a slow process. In all, the experience was pretty terrible, but once the language (called Twig) gets some decent documentation, it might become very usable, since it’s quite flexible–but hell if I know how to tame that flexibility right now. The engine itself is very economic, with none of the bloat of Wordpress, but, then again, with the limitations one would expect, which are partly offset by its modules (add-ons). What that means is that the blog can be exactly what you want it to be, with none of what you don’t need; in theory, because it’s rather difficult to get it to be what you want it to be in its current form.
But the site is up now, so whatever happened in the process doesn’t matter. It still needs to be improved and polished, but it’s perfectly usable right now…, I believe. All it needs is some more strips.
Sep 11th, 2008
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been very observant, always trying to understand why things are like they are or why I perceive them the way I do. Even though I can’t say I have studied physics, philosophy, neurology or psychology very deeply during my life, they are subjects that have always fascinated me. Often, upon being perplexed by some mystery of nature, I would keenly observe and finally conclude its reasons and solve it, as if it were a puzzle. There was one such mystery that I was never able to solve, though. I believed that I was simply not smart enough, so for the longest time I forgot about it. But today, as I was waking up, I seem to have found the answer.
This mystery is a trivial one, like most others that have puzzled me over the years. The enigma is: why do we see ourselves horizontally flipped in the mirror, and never vertically? It doesn’t matter where I’m looking from, the freckle on the left side of my face will always be on the right, but my head will never be where my feet are. I had always deduced that it was a matter of perception, but I was never able to solve the riddle in its entirety.
Now I believe I have found the reason. You may already have been ‘enlightened’, but if you have not, please read on. The key is: gravity. We are beings that not only cannot imagine living without gravity, but even our bodies have been shaped to match this fact, as we are symmetrical on an axis perpendicular to the ground. What this reveals is that we find left and right to be interchangeable, but never up and down; we cannot conceive the possibility of the sky being under our feet, but we very often take a right turn when we should have taken a left.
The next key, then, are expectations. If you ask someone to turn a chair around, will you expect them to put it upside down, with its legs up in the air? Of course not: they will turn it around a vertical axis, because gravity has conditioned us to it, so it’s the most logical response. They won’t even think of doing anything other than the latter, unless they’re being playful.
You might already see where I’m going with all this. Take a look at the following picture:
The leftmost picture is what you’ve always seen when you look in the mirror; nothing new. The second is what you’d expect to see, with the image in the mirror ‘corrected’. And on the third hinges my argument. If you look carefully, the second and third reflections are the same image, rotated 180º of one another; the third was simply the result of ‘flipping’ the image (as you would a paper sheet) vertically instead of horizontally. In fact, I could flip the image around any odd axis, and the result would be the same, only crooked to a different angle. What does this boil down to, then?
We choose to see the image in our mirror as having been ‘flipped’ horizontally, when in reality it could have been any direction, simply because we are conditioned to our expectations: that the feet must be against the ground. The correct image, in our mind, is the horizontal ‘unflip’, because flipping vertically would result in an image that is opposed to gravity; thus, we eliminate any other possible unflip. So, next time you’re in front of the mirror, looking at your face, stop and think that what you see is an inverted image, and left and right, up and down, or even north and south make no difference: it’s just backwards.
Aug 18th, 2008
What happens if you mix a group of people, an old and crippled game-making software, and two hours on a Saturday evening? Awesomeness happens, that is what. It’s the basic premise of the Klik of the Month Klub; you grab Klik & Play, a buggy, limited and old (from 1994) software that is nevertheless endearing and fun to use (also free,) then make a game with it during those two hours. The results are often broken and nigh-unplayable, but hilarious or even enlightening.
You can’t do a lot during that short span of time, so not being overly ambitious is key. Last saturday was my first time participating in the monthly event, and I thought that I was going to have about an hour’s worth of time to work on my game, since I was supposed to go visit some photography exhibitions, which in the end didn’t happen. Given my lack of familiarity with the (at times esoteric) software, my humble aspirations were, nevertheless, extremely helpful. My design document, if we can call it that, was scribbled only a few minutes before the two hours started. Sadly, I ended up going 40 minutes over the deadline, which is not actually enforced, since it’s all just in good fun, but still. The end result is a game I called Runaway Blast; you can download the slightly polished version of the game, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, the original from the official thread of the KOTMK #14, though you’ll need some DLL files only included in the other package.
It was an exciting experience, being there in the IRC channel, everyone making terrible games together, sharing advice (or asking for it, as I was doing) and just having fun. Afterwards, everyone trying out each others games, sharing praise or anecdotes. I will certainly try to be there next time too.
So, my game. The main idea was to make it a tense pursuit, to be outnumbered and with little resources, that is, only your wits (and some timed bombs) to aid you against the brainless mass of enemies. Which is not unlike a zombie game (survival horror,) now that I think about it. The map that I drew in my sketch illustrates this, but being surrounded from every side would have made it difficult to be strategic. The resulting mechanics are not too bad; not incredibly original or engaging, but for a first attempt, and for having been made in under three hours, it’s not a half bad result. Of course, what I’m not mentioning here is that the game is broken: you can go through walls, even though you’re not meant to. The limitations in the software made this unavoidable; attempting to overcome them would have costed me too much time, and I’m certain that it would have been worthless, considering the scope of my efforts. Had all conditions met, my character would have actually followed the pointer with a specific velocity, which would have fixed the wall-crossing bug and also made the game more challenging, since you would not be able to outrun your enemies quite as easily. The game will stay as it is, though, so we will all have to learn to live with that.
Aug 6th, 2008
Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano is my favorite director in Japan right now. The first film of his that I watched was Dolls; at the time, it had been recently premiered (2002 or 3.) Someone from the Internet community I used to frequent was praising the film, so, fan of everything Japanese as I was back then, I went looking for it. Now, my memory gets fuzzy at this point, but of one thing I’m sure: I ended up not only watching Dolls, but Hana-bi too, and while the former was a good movie with interesting cinematography, it’s the latter which really caught my interest and made me the fan that I’m now. The film was so very contrasted; it was violent but it was not raw as life, it was preternatural, it sublimated the awful and the quietly beautiful and confronted them, just as black and white struggle in the chiaroscuro of a romanticist painting. The stillness and the orthogonal perspective and framing of the camera captivated me.
The perhaps strange thing do consider is that, in his early years of fame, Kitano performed as ‘Beat Takeshi’ in manzai comedy duo Two Beat. Last night I watched Glory to the Filmmaker! (Kantoku, Banzai!,) a comedy that seems to harken back to those days. It’s worth mentioning that this is not his first comedy, but it does seem to be his silliest. It could easily be divided into parts and made into a TV show; even better if it’s live, with the audience laughing and interacting. Office Kitano’s troupe would do great in television, if this movie is any indication, as I constantly felt the actors about to come out of the screen, almost talking directly to me; breaking the fourth wall is not a new thing for Kitano, but it seemed like the whole point this time around. For starters, the movie is about Kitano himself (again, nothing new,) or, rather —in a way that reminded me of Adaptation,— about his troubles trying to make a film. But the script is fanciful, so while that is the point of the movie for the first half hour or so, it promptly forgets about all that and decides to just incoherently throw situation after situation, loosely tied by the characters and a certain chronological continuity—and this is what I meant by it being perfect for television. I spent most of the movie staring at the screen and going ‘what the F?,’ too offput to even laugh, as I had a hard time even deciding when it would be appropriate. Yes, it’s a weird, stream-of-consciousness, post-modern comedy; and if that sounds appealing, then it won’t disappoint you. Me, I actually liked the film immediately preceding it in Kitano’s filmography better: Takeshis’.
Maybe this fact is true of Glory… as well, but probably more so for this film: You should watch it only after you have amassed a decent number of Kitano’s movies under your belt; otherwise, most of the irony will be lost on you. It’s an absurd comedy as well, but in it, the character of Kitano himself, as a director, is at the center of the attention the whole time. Here, Kitano is not only himself, but also a regular, quiet store clerk that happens to be a fan of Kitano’s. After he meets him and is ridiculed by his idol, the story drifts into the surreal; every character has a more sordid double in town, and the store clerk-Kitano turns into a parody of the yakuza characters that Kitano himself has impersonated in his gangster films. This time the script loses coherence but not focus, as it is delivered at a tight and ridiculous pace. It feels like a film the whole time through, too.
If the abovementioned films are meant for a knowledgeable fan, then the complete opposite must be Zatoichi, apparently his most commercially successful film to date. The good thing about it is that he does not compromise; yes, it’s part of a franchise (not unlike England’s James Bond,) but the movie still exhudes Kitano. It’s an action/comedy flick of a blind swordsman, which sounds (and is) a clichéd concept, but the Kitano flavor takes precedence: you’ll be amazed when the tap dance group The Stripes intervenes in the background; it gave me goosebumps, at least. If you’re new to the glorious filmmaker, then give this film a watch.
Aug 4th, 2008
I’m a very amateurish yet enthusiastic writer. I started when I was about 14 years old; back then it had not been too long since I had discovered anime through Ranma 1/2, which aired on TV here starting from around 1998, probably, so it also became the subject of my AltaVista searches of those days of my young Internet persona. This is how I discovered fanfics, which I first thought were official, alternative stories, but, I soon realized, were actually written by fans like me. I became fascinated by them, and they provided a good part of my learning of the English language. Eventually, I too became interested in writing them, which is a shameful admission in many circles; I got to completing around five (in Spanish,) most pretty short (what some call ‘one-shots,’) and even though they were not terribly good, the standard was so low for the literary genre in Spanish that at least one of my stories became rather well-known, which means that around ten individuals read it in total. I wouldn’t dare share those, though. Later, during my latter years in high school I got into an elective subject about creative writing, which was terribly mild but did get me writing a couple of things, though nothing noteworthy; and that subject marks the extent of my literary training.
The year before last I discovered Santiago en 100 Palabras (Santiago in 100 Words,) a literary competition of micro-stories of a hundred words or less, which had actually been going for a couple of years already; I just never learned of it because it’s main form of promotion was through the Metro’s (Santiago’s subway system) ad spaces, and I only took buses back then. Last year I was actually able to participate, by submitting two stories that I wrote the very day of the deadline, which was a terrible move. This year’s competition has already started, so I intend to take this chance to send better stories. Either way, here are the two from last year, for your perusal: (continue reading)
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