explorationwitwatt-blog

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Final Project

Narrative click adventure game. Co-written by me. Code, and visuals by me. Link; https://www.khanacademy.org/computer-programming/atec-2320-final-20/5590083233775616

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Creating audio that matters.

Gamasutra article.

Summary; Media must have good sound design to make people feel immersed in it. In the platformer Limbo the sounds of objects are intentionally distorted to give the player a sense of  ambiguity. It is important for the sounds, and music of a game, movie, or etc. to match the feeling they want the viewer or player to feel. Overall Limbo chose to make the player feel isolated, worried, and on edge. If a sound would be too recognizable hey would distort it appropriately based on how recognizable it was. When I played Limbo I didn’t know anything about it. For awhile playing I expected something was going to pop out at me, because I couldn’t tell it wasn’t a “horror”. That’s how professional the sound design was. It makes you feel on edge, and scared even thought it isn’t categorized as horror, It just toys around with horror themes exceptionally well. Even when there’s no music!  They feel allowing the players to be in an emotional state without music being their to tell them how to feel can actually amplify their emotions. For instance if someone is scared, and their is no music they might feel even more tense because of that.

Dead Space is another video game, like limbo, that toys around with horror themes. Audio designers do a good job in dead space as well at manipulating emotions. Their music is very effective at creating tension. Music is mixed with effects in order to give an orchestrated experience. Sound design in Dead Space does a good job at manipulating you into feeling a distance sense of place. You actually feel like you are in space while playing. Which really bring together the immersion. Immersion is one of the most key components to a digital medium experience. White, the audio designer for Dead Space, also touches on how different sounds are for film and for games. Interactive media has an entirely different design concept. But regardless making, and breaking tension is a tight rope that a lot of sound designers must walk. It requires an exceptional amount of skill to balance just right.

How sound design impacts my daily life; I listen to music everyday, and also consume media on the regular. Depending on what mood I want to feel I can listen to that type of music, and it will always make me feel that way. When I watch a movie my emotions are toyed with and directed toward whatever emotion they want me to feel largely due to stellar sound design.

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How lighting and composition affect mood, and emotion.

Specifically how dynamic lighting creates tension.

summary; In this article researchers look at 7 films to find patterns used to evoke tension. Chiaroscuro Technique, contrast, and shadows are some effects used often. After finding patterns from movies, they then look to find such lighting patterns in games. A player vulnerability effect can be evoked by suspending the player in a state of incomplete knowledge. Resident Evil, and Silent Hill are strong examples for this tension effect. Games used systems for dynamic lighting. The ELE, and the TDELE. ELE’s function is to immediately give back desired dynamic lighting based on the artists constraints. TDELE’s calculates values based on history. Changes in saturation can function as a signal for danger. TDELE can implement this, and has a much stronger effect on player psych than static lighting. There are still so many things to discover about lighting, and composition. It is an evolving art.

thoughts; It is incredible how deeply these researches analyzed lighting across multiple mediums. Between the techniques used in film, and the engines used in games. It is incredible how much thought and skill is required to make a movie, or game evoke the right amount of tension. Furthermore the engines in games seems exceedingly complex, which is incredible. ELE, and TDELE work in such similar.., but entirely different ways. I love the quote the writer posted at the end;

“The lighting equipment currently in use in the theatre is no longer adequate. The particular action of light on the mind comes into play, we must discover oscillating light effects, new ways of diffusing light in waves, sheet lighting like a flight of fire arrows . . . Fineness, density and opacity factors must be reintroduced into lighting, so as to produce special tonal properties, sensations of heat, cold, anger, fear and so on” (Artaud, 1977, p. 74).

It just goes to show you an art form will never be completely figured out, or refined. Even if there are excepted rules and known facts it’s still an evolving medium. Lighting and composition seems very interesting, and very fun. Which is probably not peoples first reaction when they hear about it.

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GONE HOME

Summary; Gone Home is a first person walking simulator where you explore a house, and a story. The character you play as is named Katie. She comes home from a long trip to discover that the house is completely void of people. She searches around and comes across journal entries left by her sister, Sam. As you advance through the house you learn more about why she is gone, and why no one is there to greet you in your arrival.

SPOILERS

The story is beautiful. Katie’s sister Sam is going through high school in a new place. She lives in the “psycho house”. A name everyone at school gave to her home. A girl, named Lonnie, is interested in seeing the house. They begin hanging out and immediately there’s a spark. The progression of their relationship is put together nicely. Technically you could read the journal entries in any order, but the game does a good job of leading you in a way that makes the story feel natural. Nothing abrupt. In the story Lonnie is going into the military right after high school, so Sam and her try to make the most out of the time they do have together. The story does an amazing job at making you feel the intended emotion it wants you to. (Now listen closely, because this is an important point.) I had so many different feelings throughout the game. At the end Katie (you) finds out that Sam is gone because Lonnie couldn’t go through with it. She couldn’t go into the military, and leave Sam behind. She didn’t want to live without her. Sam leaves to go start her life with Lonnie, but leaves this journal for Katie to find. That way Katie knows why Sam is gone. After I finished the game I found myself going back to search for things I missed, and also researching about it. The game had this strong of an emotional effect on me, and I loved it. I thought Gone Home was amazing. Unfortunately it is very short game (maybe not a $20 game), but amazing nonetheless. Despite its short play time; the game is deep. There is a lot of things to find, and amazing detailed work. Especially the environment, and the voice acting.

Is this game art?

Absolutely. Let’s set my opinions aside for a second, and just prove, factually, that this game is art.

 ‘Art’

  “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

This game was a produced work expressed by human creative skill and imagination to be appreciated for its emotional power.

It is almost painfully obvious that this game was created with the intention of having “emotional power”/”beauty”. It was a produced work. It was an expression of human creative skill and imagination, and in reference to my point I had you remember earlier; this game had a strong emotional effect on me. Like I’ve said before; the story was beautiful. 

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Intelligent level design in The Legend of Zelda that wasn’t very easy to spot.

Gamasutra article

Summary; The writer of this articles originally thought that when he revisited the original Legend of Zelda game it wouldn’t be very adept to modern concepts of what makes a game great. He figured because there was so much undocumented information about level design in particular, the game would be more of a nostalgic trip rather than a well constructed video game. Very soon he came to the conclusion that his predictions were incorrect. The game was mostly linear, but felt adventurous. It gave the illusion of being open world when it is in fact linear. As seen in the diagram the progression through rooms is very straight forward. However due to the beginning room choices between rooms 1, 2, and 3, in addition to small hidden shortcuts it feels less linear. This is a huge success from a level design perspective because it is linear (so the player will not get hopelessly lost), but feels more open (so the player feels like they have more control). 

The enemy ramping is done well also. Enemies get progressively harder, and more abundant, but don’t repeat in a row. Once again the authors original impressions were way off. The game has enough variety of monsters, and differently designed levels so that the game doesn’t end up getting stale or boring. Almost all of the level design is very well constructed. Feeling less linear than it is (while being very linear generally). At the end of the game, however, there is a design choice that left the writer scratching his head. Why was the silver arrow not on the critical path? The silver arrow is required to beat Ganon (the final boss), but isn’t placed on the critical path. Why is that? In modern Zelda games they would have required the use of the silver arrow (or light or whatever) somewhere in the level before Ganon to ensure you picked it up before facing off against him. In the rest of the game they pay extreme attention to helping the player not get lost. This is an open ended question the writer has yet to answer.

Thoughts; The Legend of Zelda is my favorite video game franchise. It’s refreshing to see my taste was justified. This article gives a very deep look at level design. Specifically the feel less linear, linear design. I found that particularly interesting. It must take some serious skill to create a game that IS linear, but doesn’t feel that way. Just the sound of that is impressive. Basically tricking the player in to thinking of the game as something it isn’t.

Why was the silver arrow not on the critical path in the final level?

I’m probably way off, but I’d like to attempt to answer the open ended question this writer asked. 

Short answer; in testing the final level didn’t seem difficult enough.

Long answer; The whole game is forgiving. The game is linear, and it is designed to make the player not get lost and want to keep playing, but difficulty can be fun. At the final level the player is invested in beating the game. And I’d imagine that they would want real challenge towards the end. At this point the game doesn’t have to be forgiving. It doesn’t have to follow the rest of the games ideals. They are okay with having the player miss it then get crushed by Ganon. After that they will scan the level to see if they missed anything, and it will be that much more euphoric to discover the arrow. However this is just a theory. Aaaaaa level design theory. Thanks for reading.

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The cleverly designed no ‘good’ choice mechanic in The Walking Dead.

Gamasutra article.

Summary; Choices in Telltale’s masterpiece The Walking Dead are not just “good” and “evil” choices. They are tailored to the player’s opinions and personality. No choice is a straightforward “obviously you pick this” choice. However this article explains how the game was previously being designed with a different choice mechanic. The choices wouldn’t explore additional narrative options. Once they decided to change the choice mechanic, and go “all in” on the new one; they encountered a problem. Episode two had to be almost entirely rewritten! They brought in a whole team of writers, designers, producers and directors to create a new direction for episode two to take. Almost all of the dialogue got rewritten, and so all of the prerecorded voice acting had to be rerecorded. On top of that they were already behind schedule before having to redo the episode. It’s amazing how even while knowing how much work was ahead of them, and being behind schedule they stuck to their guts about the new design.

Thoughts; Story games have always stood out to me because of my love for film. Especially one as cinematic as The Walking Dead. The amazing dialogue, and well constructed story really makes it feel like you’re watching an interactive movie, or TV show. But underneath all of that beauty are hours upon hours of hard work creating it. This article gives you a good hint as to how dedicated the team behind it was. The fact that they almost entirely recreated episode two says a lot. It shows that telltale was very dedicated to creating the best game they possibly could. They valued deleting all of that hard work, and having to work even harder to make the game better; over taking it as it was and not worrying about have to put in so many extra hours and money. That is very admirable I would say. 

 Game designers are very important for a games success. If the designers of The Walking Dead did not creatively fix the choice mechanic, and have the ambition to know that they had to completely redesigned the game; it would not have been as excellent as it was. Not only did the game designers have to figure out so much in the pre production of The Walking Dead, but they also had to keep track of all the environment, story line, characters, and game play in the production stage. Good game designers are definitely necessary to create a video game like The Walking Dead.

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Animation and rigging is used in live action movies too???

Pacific Rim VFX

“ Monster mayhem:Pacific Rim”

Summary; This article analyzes all of the small details and incredible amount of work invested into Pacific Rim. As I was reading multiple times I shook my head it disbelief at the detail “some of the shaders have 2,000 nodes and it was really difficult to render those shots.” It really is incredible. A very admirable aspect of pacific rim is the extensive use of real life sets. Even though a large amount of the film ended being computer generated, the real life sets were great reference tools for ILM to use. It also made the movie look even more real than it would have before due to the combination between real sets and CGI. Half-sets were extended upon by the ILM crew. Additionally ILM made sure they had the best of the best effects, so they looked to collaboration.  Hybride, 32TEN Studios, Stereo D, and  Rodeo FX took on challenges in different fields. Amazing just what it takes to create some of the best effects of our time.

Thoughts; I was about to take the easy way out and just discuss an animated film, because that is very straight forwards. But I realized CGI is everywhere now. Animation and rigging is often the norm in recent movies. Naturally my first thought after this realization were the giant city crushing Kaiju, and the gargantuan Kaiju killing Jaeger. How much difficult modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, etc. must have been put into those to make then look so incredible? I never could have imagined just how detailed a group could be, until after I read this article. The animation, and rigging processes especially must have taken many long nights. I was blown away. 

My favorite aspects that went into this film were the beautiful elaborate real sets, and just how much collaboration ILM had. You can tell, especially because of these two facts, that the Pacific Rim team wanted the movie/effects to just be the best they could possibly make.

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Modeling and Texturing in The Amazing Spider-man.

“Spider-Man: the detailed vfx of spiders and lizards.”

Summary: This article gives you a much deeper understand of just how much work, and time it takes to produce a big budget movie with tons of special effects. For example a lizard bust was used onset as a lighting reference. On top of that many environments were made from scratch. Also models had to be created, textured, lighted, rigged, and animated for every scene over and over. Just goes to show you giant Lizards and mutant Spider people are no easy feat to create.

Thoughts: An interesting application of modeling and texturing is creating an ENTIRE scene solely with modeling, texturing, lighting, rigging, and animating. I never realized until watching this video displaying an in depth look into one of the fight scenes that it was possible to do that. I assumed that movie scenes were live and then had models added after. It’s very amazing that while watching this movie I didn’t even realize. Special effects created by modelers and texture artists are extremely important to present day films and tv shows. Without those amazing artists we wouldn’t have science fiction movies this crazy. Considering the film industry is where my ideal job resides, it’s good to know about the inner working of the modeling/texturing side to movies.

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About me.

Hi! My name is Wyatt. I was born and raised in Austin TX, and graduated from Lake Travis High School. I’ve always been interested in Arts and technology, so I decided to go to UTD to study ATEC. One of my specific interests has been film for awhile. Cinematography, editing etc, but I am also interested in learning about other professions in the field. Also; I am extremely excited to be starting my college experience!