mariusgames-blog - Tumblr blog

[mariusgames-blog]

Overview:

As a final-year project at Teesside University, I designed and implemented a game concept in the Unity 4 engine that involved using a Playstation 4 controller. It was a personal project; so all the backgrounds, scripting and game design work were done by me. You can watch a gameplay video later in this post.

Why should you care? In an industry dominated by violent and stressful gameplay, this project explores the viability of a game based around problem solving using our social and emotional intelligence. Gameplay emerges when the player interacts with a character by expressing emotions in real-time, while considering the character’s responses to get the desired behaviour.

(When I was asked to do a project, I seized the opportunity to create something I’m personally passionated about and push myself with something that would really put me outside my comfort zone. Creatively, this project has been challenging, but to the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been made before.)

Design and Development:

I want to see a game where the story and gameplay are so tightly connected, that without the other, neither of them would exist. A game where the play is a story about social relationships. This was the goal I gave myself for this project. A goal I felt would help games communicate more about people’s relationship with each other, instead of the primal violence that is usually depicted.

The first design problem I had to overcome, and the most fundamental one, was how do we create gameplay that can also work as a story about characters? The key to solving this problem comes when we realise that the way we understand and empathise with characters in stories is through our social and emotional intelligence. Now, if we design gameplay that challenges the player in this intelligence, we’ll have gameplay that naturally works as a story, because there is no conflict between gameplay and story – they’re the same. (You can read more about emotional character interaction in my dissertation.)

Flames Surround Me is designed to challenge the player’s social and emotional intelligence. The reason for this is that it encourages greater emotional involvement. Because the player is actively trying to understand the motivations of characters, the chance of emotional responses increases.

The way it challenges the player is by giving the player; (1) a way to express himself, (2) a character with different ways of expressing itself and (3) a desired “goal” behaviour. The challenge comes from reading the character and responding appropriately to get the desired goal behaviour. This is theatrically valid because the player has an objective (which is provable), and plays an action in pursuit of that objective, while overcoming the obstacle-conflict.

In the case of this game, the goal behaviour was left open so that the player can decide for herself if she wants the dog in the game to follow her or to go away. This open structure demonstrates the “infinite” possibilities, and stories, a system like this can create.

There was a lot of C# scripting involved in this project, but another design problem I came across was how do we balance the character’s responses? I decided to use a technique that is often used in item-drop systems to make sure that the player doesn’t get the same item-drop over and over again.

The way this technique works is by assigning a value to every action. This value represents the probability of that action being chosen again. It will drastically decrease if the action is chosen and slowly increase if it is not. This really helped the artificial intelligence to not repeat an action too often, which made the character more believable.

Please watch in HD.

As demonstrated in the video; the dog will react to the actions performed by the player. You can see how the dog’s personality is expressed through algorithms. This was achieved by using an algorithm that interprets the player’s input and a finite-state machine where each state describes a different action or behaviour for the dog’s artificial intelligence. This way, everything that happens in the story is a result of the player’s input. This project serves as a proof of concept for a game about social relationships.

In fact, the project was selected to be displayed at ExpoTees, an exhibition celebrating students’ work. And the feedback was amazing, both from young and surprisingly old players. (A couple in their 60′s who have never played video-games before, was able to play it 'till the end and loved it!)

I hope this project has given some game designers the initial tools, inspiration and courage to explore games that discuss people’s relationship with each other. Perhaps it could even change the way we tell stories in games.

[mariusgames-blog]

1 Thing I Learned About Thinking

Chris Anderson: What is it about you?

Elon Musk: Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful.

[mariusgames-blog]

Games, stories and interactivity

// A transcript of a part of the BBC Radio 4 programme "Did Douglas get it right?"

Narrator: It was on the then maddeningly hot topic of interactivity. Remember interactivity? Remember how around the turn of the millennium that everything was going to be interactive? Remember hearing that word crowbared into every meeting and conversation, generally by people who didn’t seem to know what it actually meant? Douglas, ahead of the curve as always, already seems to have been bored with it.

Douglas Adams: Interactivity, there is nothing more stale like last decade’s buzzword, but in fact there is nothing new about it. Tennis is interactive. Cooking is interactive. Sex, conversation, carol singing is interactive. What’s remarkable is that we suddenly would need a word for it – and the reason is that the twentieth century was the first and maybe the last century to be dominated by non-interactive forms of communication and entertainment. Movies, radio, CDs, TV, media that you can turn on or off, but which otherwise don’t take a blind bit of notice of you. They bombard you with stuff, I’m doing it to you right now. Designed to interest you, provoke you, excite you, upset you – in other words to arouse your emotions but not to respond to them.

Man: They were very iffy about interactivity, and I think that that was correct. People don’t like interacting with bits and pieces as much as they’d enjoy playing with them or absorbing stuff.

Douglas Adams: I think that interactive storytelling, in which the audience decides what happens in the story, is daft. Hollywood would love it of course, and regularly bringing focus groups to ruin films for them in just that way.

Muriel Gray then: Interactive drama, what a ghastly idea. Um, no.

And Muriel Gray now: That’s my job. I’ll tell you how the story ends. Haha!

Man: I’ve got a great degree of sympathy with that sort of horrified no, because I think art can’t really be a democracy.

Muriel Gray: No, art is not a democracy.

Man: And one can only shut up what the test audience would have made of Romeo and Juliet. Do you know what I mean? If there’d been a test audience for Romeo and Juliet, it would have… Sometimes there has to be a creative person who’s got to have the guts to see their vision through to the end, and not necessarily give the people what they want.

Muriel Gray: ... If something works they will make twenty sequels, but equally coming up the inside lane is something nobody predicted. Which is uncompromisingly direct and straight from, you know, the heart and mind of an artist. Which people are desperate for. And they don’t pay to actually have to make their own dramatic decisions, it is incredibly difficult being creative. You have to be a genius, you have to work hard at it. And so, I say that as a consumer. I don’t want to have to say what happens to Juliet at the end. You tell me, I can’t wait!

Narrator: But a version of which the story unfolds in response to the reaction of the audience, is another matter. That is the oldest form of storytelling there is, whether it is Homer, whoever he was or they were, telling and retelling stories to a small rapt audience, or a parent telling a bedtime story to a child – the reactions are fed right back into the unfolding of the story. And that is something we see being replicated in some computer games. Typically, the adventure games of the 80s. I’ve designed some myself, and I know very well that you don’t surrender authorial control to the audience. Rather, you get to tease and play with the audience’s expectations much more readily than you can with a purely linear narrative. So, you’re not telling the audience that they can pick the ending of their choice, instead you are subtly preparing a stage for your player, an environment she is going to interact with and explore.

// AGREED

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

ilya_ktsn. (2015) DSC_0090. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/ilya_ktsn/16275446601

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Lupole, K. (2013) Curve in Road. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/katlupe/10927647825

Siggerud, S. T. (2014) Autumn Road. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/starsandskies/15118730781/

[mariusgames-blog]

As a final-year project at Teesside University, I designed and implemented a game concept in the Unity 4 engine that involved using a Playstation 4 controller. This was a personal project; so all the backgrounds, scripting and game design work were done by me. You can watch a gameplay video and read more here.

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Tonelli, N. A. (2012) Distance. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/nicholas_t/7353310358

[mariusgames-blog]

undefined

Just a short video of the beginning of the game

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Dyogi. (2014) Hoffa Mill Road in Autumn 2. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/30014417@N04/15052243503

Renee, N. (2011) Two Trees. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/nicholereneephotography/5527399825

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Kee, L. (2015) Road to Mursi country. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/lipkee/16146530540

[mariusgames-blog]

undefined

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Harmon, D. (2014) Bench With A View. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/demonsub/15225668225/

Siggerud, S. T. (2014) Untitled-8. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/starsandskies/14794070076/

Siggerud, S. T. (2014) Untitled-9. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/starsandskies/14307969754/

The KC Kid. (2014) Fall-2014-11. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/51887949@N07/15702357077

[mariusgames-blog]

Why deeper character interaction will improve the aesthetic qualities of video-games

Abstract

Video-games that touch the heart in life changing experiences. The promise of creating life inside a video-game. Living characters that can be your friend or foe. These are dreams that may some day become a reality. Achieving this requires some form of character interaction — emotional interaction that can entertain us and stimulate reflection. This paper focuses on the first steps toward making this a reality; namely improving character interaction.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3oszpae0yt62d86/Holstad%2C%20Marius%20%5BP4234228%5D%20%E2%80%93%20Why%20deeper%20character%20interaction%20will%20improve%20the%20aesthetic%20qualities%20of%20video-games.pdf?dl=0

[mariusgames-blog]

Read Paper

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Hasselle, C. (2015) Dirt Road, St. Croix USVI. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/129742758@N02/16218957982

[mariusgames-blog]

Created in Photoshop and Psykopaint using the following images:

Dyogi (2014) Hoffa Mill Road in Autumn 3. Available at: www.flickr.com/photos/30014417@N04/15051642844