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Aeronautica Blog Index

This index is in a chronological order.

Pitch: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186618172385/aeronautica-pitch What is Aeronautica: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186830346845/what-is-aeronautica A Chat With Charles (One of many design reviews): https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186830370935/a-chat-with-charles Why VR for Aeronautica: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188658129875/why-vr-for-aeronautica Welcome Zane: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188658212635/welcome-zane Character Development: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188657884945/safety-nets World Design Development: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188657907620/insert-witty-title-here Aeronautica Reflection: https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188658325405/aeronautica-reflection

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Aeronautica Reflection

We wanted to create a story-driven adventure game with meaningful character interaction. We wanted to market a commercial release of the game, however, as the project turned out to be quite ambitious and multifaceted, we decided to reduce the scope of the game and focus on what was realistically achievable in the semester. 

We wanted a core theme of Aeronautica to be innovation, as a form of the discovery aesthetic, where players would iteratively build different vehicles, revealing new game mechanics, however, the aforementioned scope reduction lead to us focus on the narrative aesthetics of the project, specifically, developing meaningful player interaction with our characters. 

Our agile design methodology has enabled us to easily pivot the design direction of the project and consequently produce the current version of Aeronautica, which playtesting has revealed to be well-received.

Directing Aeronautica has enabled me to develop my project management, VR programming, and game design skills, which will be invaluable in the coming future. From where we are at with Aeronautica right now, I have learned that our design process in the future should include more early prototyping and explore many low-fidelity concepts, in order to rapidly iterate and develop our ideas.

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Welcome Zane

@zkelbrick-bct​ approached us, showing interest in working on Aeronautica with the rest of the team from Synergy Digital. The addition of Zane enabled us to perform motion capture for our animations, something we personally haven’t done before, which is very exciting. Zane will also be helping me manage the project, which is very valuable considering that our group is one of the biggest in the degree’s history. 

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Why VR for Aeronautica

Some peers and people we’ve shown Aeronautica to have asked us why we’re making the game in virtual reality rather than as a traditional desktop game, which I’ll talk about here.

For us, we want to explore storytelling in virtual reality as an emerging medium. We also believe that the tactility of interaction is something novel that hasn’t been well-explored in the adventure game genre. I often like to use the example that you can’t get the stomach-lurching feeling you get from looking over the edge of the cockpit of your plane at the distance between you and the sea from traditional screen-based gaming.

Some naysayers have claimed that Aeronautica would be better as a traditional screen-based game, as virtual reality, as a gaming medium, is inherently flawed, since people don’t want to spend long periods of time in VR as it’s uncomfortable, price of hardware required, etc. I refute these claims, where our work in Aeronautica now will serve us well in the future when virtual reality hardware is further developed and more accessible to general audiences. That isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be successful now either. I believe that the ideas we have are novel enough to warrant interest in the game and continue our VR development.

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Key points from a recent design review of Aeronautica.

A Chat with Charles

Yesterday we were fortunate enough that Charles happened upon us while we were having a group meeting and after we explained our project he was able to provide us with a wealth of insight and reference material. Plenty to think about and work from in order to ensure our project works out well.

Keep reading

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Conceptual development of Aeronautica.

Insert witty title here.

Changes, deadlines and copyright strikes?

As we progress, I feel like we are really evolving our ideas for this project; the initial ideas we had weren’t necessarily scraped but we did realize that we had to make some changes;

Upon chatting with Laurant, who is also a big fan of the movie we draw inspiration from (bonus points from me!) quickly was able to identify that we were pretty much remaking that world we see on screen in a different format. Understanding this we agreed that yeah, we were very much using that idea as a platform to start off but reassured him that we were merely using the platform to take off from (no pun intended).

And yes, we always have planned to change, but I do believe that we should keep some elements from our source inspiration. The pig flying a red plane is surely iconic and is something that just about anyone who has seen Porco Rosso will be able to recognize. We can’t copy that as far as I am concerned to due us not wanting a copyright infringement to kick start our careers, but using the Mediterranean like setting mixed with a few influences from various cultures would most definitely do us good. In fact, one of the many sprint goals we have is to have phase one of our vertical slice done by September in order to make a deadline given to us by Laurant so we can demo our hard work in New Caledonia.

The development side of things.

Currently, I am sudo-managing two and a half guys whilst doing my current workload, and admittedly its a bit harder than I expected as I know I have my own deadlines and goals to meet but to also have to provide sketches for the modeling team, work on texturing, managing the layout and white boxing is quite the handful to juggle. I’d like to thank Max for taking over the management time to time, as it does free up a bit of my mind to focus my attention on my own tasks at hand. It does really help me out a lot. 

From the time freed up, I was able to sketch up some more “junkplane” ideas that we can work with going forth, with the idea of building a seaplane from scratch taking a more grounded idea that seemed a bit more plausible. So here’s this boat that we’ve kinda wedged and engine and ducted tape some wings on to it. It flies!, I swear! is the kind of approach that I took when drawing up the rough concepts. More development is needed as the idea isn’t too concrete at the moment. As my time is currently occupied doing;

Character Concepts;

Admittedly, our first character is nothing too good to come by, but seeing as Kevin as we call him is quite literally the good two-shoes character that is super friendly and fairly generic… I’ll give him a pass for now.

I’ll likely go back and give him an update whenever I can find the time to do so. In the meantime, I’ve already sketched up the concept for one of our other key characters; Steve who is grizzly old lighthouse keeper who is quite unfriendly towards others.

I’m not too fond of this character, I did sketch him up on less than an hour so quality and thought process behind the conscious decisions in making this character are lacking. That being said, I’m just glad he is no longer on my to-do list as I have quite a lot of things to texture over the next few days. Steve the grumpy old fart of a bulldog is now in the hands of the modeling team to be created.

There is one other thing I should blog about but honestly not much has been done to warrant a blog about it yet. That is the white boxing and layout out of the town in which I’ll likely cover whenever my next blog. Till then I’ll be closely working with our scriptwriter Jack in order to make sure everything in the town is where it needs to be and will likely revise the layout with him, as he would know whats best for the town.

Till the next blog post, I’m out.

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Character development of Kevin in Aeronautica.

Safety nets.

With the semester coming to an end, and deadlines getting closer and closer, we have to write more and more ‘documentation’ blog posts to cover our behinds from the lecturers who loom over each of our projects. 

Character Woes.

Character development on my end has been fairly relaxed, with the process of our character simply going as follows;

A draft is produced, and a character is decided, in our example, I’ll take Kevin who is a bit of a meme because of how many versions of him there are.

“Kevin is the friendly face that you are first introduced to in the game prologue, he’s the guy that looks like he’d throw everything aside to help you out” 

So my first thought would have been, golden retriever, loyal and friendly right?

Oh dear lord, what is that?  This is the first draft of Kevin, friendly-looking? sure, but it looks like that dark entity that resides in the dark corner of your bedroom.

We quickly revised that made him appear to be more of a dog this time around.

But ultimately, we had to rework him again with the direction of the other characters in development. Compared to them, he seemed like he was from another game altogether which was not good for us. 

So this time, following the procedures for the other characters created, we made him look more human-like, whilst retaining the character design elements that made him, himself. 

The end results are a drastic improvement over what we had before, with Kevin becoming a well-dressed individual that looks very dependable and characteristically “stupid friendly”.

The eyes are put in engine, don’t judge me.

Now as nice as all of this is, I wished it didn’t take as long for it to have come to where it is now. Looking back at the 27-28 different versions of Kevin makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking sometimes. 

One last look back before moving on.

Since I have run out of things to talk about, let’s look back on this project overall and have a bit a critical review;

Things I liked about this project is the evolving nature of it, this project went from a plane building flight sim to a social-based adventure title with flight in a couple of months. The ideas generated for the group really reflects on the process of the project overall, and at times, it doesn’t feel like we are doing just a uni project but instead gives off more of a professional environment vibe when we are all on task and giving it our all. 

With that being said, I didn’t like how far we’ve moved off from the original idea. Call it developer’s remorse (like buyer’s remorse) or whatever, but I do look back often and wonder what would have happened if we kept the original darker themes that we had, as I do genuinely believe it would work better with the narrative we have. 

Overall project management has improved greatly, we’ve definitely been limited in scope due to bad time management in the past but this time around. We’ve definitely been able to keep on task whilst being able to reorganize and prioritize more urgent tasks rather than letting them drag us down like in the past.

Aeronautica has been much more than just a project that we are doing for university, it is for me, a summary of everything we have learned and plan to take forward with us into our current and future projects. It is all the mistakes, all the small victories and the hard work we’ve put through our time in university. 

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Nice summary of Freyberg Heroes here.

I&P Overarching Blog.

Because why make 10 posts and spam someone else’s feed

I&P has been been a rollercoaster and an absolute clusterfuck of an idea that we had to mishmash and filter to get to where we are today. With that being said, it is an absolute meme that I loved being part of.

Keep reading

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The agency and expression dilemma is interesting to note here in the context of our previous project, Bard, from 2018.

I&P Reflection

Learning

I’d say the greatest area of learning during this paper was definitely about player agency and expressionism. From this project, as well as other game design projects I have been a part of, expression seems to be a tricky aesthetic to implement properly. Expressionism arguably requires freedom, however, in a setting like a public space or an instanced video game experience, how much freedom can game makers really give the players without losing control and moderation.

It’s a tenuous balance to keep. Our team touched on this during the development of our game ‘Bard’ in 2018, but again in this paper, my experience has proven that expression can still be meaningful despite limitations being forced on it. 

I think in the case of Freyberg Heroes, the expressionism works because of humor. Personally, I feel that the creation process, despite actually really limited still allows players to add their own personal touch to their hero. This personal touch being a user’s unique sense of humor. They decide what combination of prompts and powers makes the funniest hero and release it to the world.

Process

Although I think we settled on a cool concept, the process should have been way smoother. Our end result was essentially an emergency reshuffle induced by weeks of Limbo caused by a lack of communication and planning amongst the team. Part of this is my fault as ‘team coordinator’, but I think there was a general lack of enthusiasm and wariness across the board which made teamwork hard. 

It was a self-destructive cycle that started with creating an ill-considered and poor initial concept which demotivated the team. We would try to solve our issues but failed because we were so demotivated, and in the process became even more demotivated. In the end, we saved ourselves out of sheer necessity; but If we had done it sooner we could have achieved better things.

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Freyberg Heroes Lite

It’s been an uphill battle getting our I&P project to a state where we’re happy with it. This has largely been due to the conflict I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, where it’s nigh impossible to solve the tension between ultimate freedom of expression and creating depth and meaning easily in the format of a quick public interaction. The pieces just don’t fit here.

So what we’ve done is redesigned the pieces, effectively. In order to provide meaning we identified that we need to add some constraints, so we moved away from writing and towards memetics. Our initial idea was for people to iterate on a short story in written form, but in favor of shortening the interaction time and cost, we’ve opted for something much simpler, yet with meaning.

Legends of heroes have been passed down for millennia, and we emulate this practice by allowing people to quickly create their own legends to battle it out in a public arena. We’ve designed our new project to allow people to generate a hero with a unique name and power (we write these, which inserts some comedy and interest easily). They can re-roll if they’re unhappy with the hero they have, which makes it very quick to iterate on their legend until they’re happy. Once they submit the hero it goes into a hero pool, where people can click on any hero to vote for them. The biggest hero is the ‘villain’,  and when the second biggest hero is the same size as the reigning villain they battle it out (via coin-flip). This adds some drama to the interaction and enables multiple different sorts of people to interact with the project (e.g, passive observers, jokers, those with not much time, etc.), which is something we wanted to work on after hearing the relevant feedback from our prior critique session.

We presented the new form of “The Freyberg Novel”, now known as “Freyberg Heroes” in class, and we were pleased to learn that by adding constraints we seemed to have put an end to that dastardly agency dilemma.

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I&P Critique Feedback

In Week 5 we presented ‘The Freyberg Novel’ to our Interaction and Play class and received feedback on how we’re going, as well as ideas for future directions.

A lack of clarity around how we wanted people to collaborate yet remain anonymous in their writing was identified from our feedback. Here, we discovered the inherent tension between total freedom of expression and the amount of given agency in public writing. 

The skinny of what we learned is that it’s nigh impossible to design a game that allows total freedom of expression and still provide depth and meaning in said expression. There’s just too many variables and not enough constraints to make the system work cleanly, so we will begin to investigate allowing expression while decreasing the amount of agency that participants have.

Our testing was a bit simple (merely qualitative analysis of in-studio testing), and the multiple facets of the project are too complex extract anything of true value, where numerous elements of the installation needed to be rigorously tested, such as the UI design, installation placement, time of interaction, phrasing of instructions, visual installation design, and many more. We aim to conduct more thorough testing in public at Freyberg Place in the coming week.

Moving forward, we’ll be coordinating our group efforts for the project in Monday meetings and regular discussion over Discord. 

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Freyberg Heroes Iteration Map

Blogs

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186775551240/beginning-playtesting

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/186943965530/interaction-and-play-week-4

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491703775/ip-critique-feedback

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491860570/freyberg-heroes-lite

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491887880/ip-reflection

https://synergybct.tumblr.com/post/188491895505/ip-overarching-blog

Slides

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OslPwJysci7kltnolerA5stSqL_Ayx1AFvcQE-lp_hs/edit#slide=id.g5d31ec324e_1_41

Videos

https://youtu.be/tJg-uk-i5GU

https://youtu.be/VU-HU8pOL0M

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Interaction and Play - Week 4

Week 4 for InP was mainly based around research for me as other members of my group (Max) worked on creating our program for our next playtest. We spoke to Ben on Monday and he gave us a few things to look into:

One was a board game that focused heavily on roleplaying, creating a narrative between different characters. He wanted to us to have a look at how they controlled the theme of the session which allowed participants freedom but still kept the story from devolving too far into random madness. 

Another example we looked into was work done by a previous BCT student Jenna Gavin. She had two projects that were useful to us as precedent for our idea. Cut And Paste was and interactive work that allowed participants to create a written work by selecting quotes from various authors and adding them to a larger script. Word Wars was another idea that caused players to fight over letters in order to create a longer word,  it showed a competitive take on the collaborative story telling we had been looking into so far.

Finally Ben also briefly mentioned Exquisite Corpse.  Exquisite Corpse is a drawing technique were participants would each draw part of a creature without looking at each others and combine them to create something weird. This idea might be used in our project to create a unique story narrative.

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A Chat with Charles

Yesterday we were fortunate enough that Charles happened upon us while we were having a group meeting and after we explained our project he was able to provide us with a wealth of insight and reference material. Plenty to think about and work from in order to ensure our project works out well.

Keep reading

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What is ‘Aeronautica’

Aeronautica is a VR adventure game that immerses you in a fictional multinational world. By piloting vehicles and iterating on their design through social-based questing the player is able to progress in the game.

We’re working on two different verticle slices in preparation for showing our game at both the Creative Technologies Showcase and an opportunity that our lecturer Laurent Antonczak has offered us to showcase the game in New Caledonia. The first verticle slice (for New Caledonia) is what we’re working on right now, which is basically a short 5 minute intro to the game, providing some story context and demoing the base gameplay of the game. The second verticle slice is intended to be a more focused gameplay demo, focusing on VR dogfighting. 

We’ve got quite a bit ahead of us (including motion capture for our animations which is coming up soon), but for now we’re on track. Stay tuned.

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Beginning Playtesting

We’ve set up the first iteration of playtesting for our Interaction and Play project, ‘The Freyberg Novel’. The instructions are simple: Add/edit/remove up to 5 words. We primed the collaborative written work a little by writing ten words, “Dwarf planets are not good. Although, some say red giants...” This evolved over the week that we had the whiteboard up in our studio, simply sitting on a plinth. 

It was interesting to see that some of the initial sentence structure we wrote was still present (”___ are good. Although, some say ___”) but most of the writing was gibberish and didn’t make coherent sense, which was expected. We didn’t get as much engagement as we were hoping to receive, and I have a few theory for why this was the case: People prefer to type rather than write these days. With the prominence of digital technology it is increasingly becoming more uncommon to write by hand. Different styles of handwriting could also be difficult to read for some people. People could fear that their handwriting would be considered poor and hence judged. 

This all suggests that we should develop our digital playtest and refine the system rules at the same time to create the next iteration of our project. We hope to exhibit our digital iteration in public this week as well. 

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Aeronautica Pitch

More to come.