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cornelius-of-lykia · 2 months

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Research Statement / Introductory Post

Hey folks! As part of my work for school, I must write a research statement that encompasses who I am, what my work entails, what influences me, and ultimately what I want to accomplish while I am at the University of Connecticut. This is honestly a pretty good opportunity to take stock of who I am as an artist, and why I am doing the work I am undertaking, and so I’d like to share my research statement here.

Personal Background

My name is Christian Romero, I am a 3D artist and game designer of Ecuadorian and Irish heritage, born and raised in the Hudson Valley (NY). I first studied game design at Drexel University, and while there’s a thousand things I would’ve liked to have done differently in undergrad, my work and experiences there are ultimately what led me to becoming an MFA graduate student here at UConn. Overall, I’m pretty happy with where I am right now.

I’ve been very interested in game narratives since I was a teenager, but I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do for a career – all I knew was that I wanted to make games. I didn’t consider myself an ‘artist’ when I was starting out in undergrad – I couldn’t paint, I had no confidence in my drawing skills, and I had no idea what 3D modeling entailed. While I have my criticisms of Drexel University as an institution, their game design track got me to engage with all the major components of game design, which gave me a much better sense of what each discipline entailed. While I did a lot of work with 3D modeling at Drexel, it was only a couple years after graduating that I ultimately decided to go all-in on my 3D art. It took me a while to realize that I really had a knack for modeling and rendering, and even though I struggled for a while to find meaningful work after graduating, I look back fondly on all the art I made in the intervening years. I honestly think a lot of it is pretty dope.

I came to the University of Connecticut to learn as much as I could about 3D art and game design, but these haven’t been the only things I sought to learn about while studying here. UConn’s Deparment of Digital Media & Design has a big emphasis on projects pertaining to the Humanities, and I wanted to explore what sort of work was being undertaken in this regard. To that end, I have learned a good deal in the past year-and-a-half I have been here.

Thesis Project

For my stay at UConn, my MFA thesis project is a narrative point-and-click game called The Festival: Eastoria. In it, you play Nishma Mauranyan, a girl who is trying to put on a food festival in a country that just got out of a civil war.

Its themes and quests are about how people come together to rebuild their lives and their societies after the massive upheavals and trauma that come with war. The game’s setting and story are based on a project I have been working on since 2019, with the protagonist being based on a character sprite I made all the way back in 2015.

There is a lot I still have to unpack and explain about this game, but I will do my best to summarize several key components about it here.

Artistic Vision

While a good chunk of my artistic vision and philosophy can be summarized as “I like making art of stuff I like”, what I ultimately want to do is make art that has something to say. I want to explore complicated themes and say complicated things in the games I make. We live in a very messy world, and live very messy lives, and the stories that have stuck with me the most have been the ones that helped me make sense of it all. I know I may come up short when trying to write something meaningful, especially with The Festival, but it’s very important that I try to do what I do with as much earnestness and sincerity as possible.

Having gone through much turmoil and hardship in my own life, I want to help others make sense of their own struggles by exploring these things in the stories I write. If I help even one person understand themselves better through my works, then I know I will have done my job.

Artistic Influences

In preparing to come to UConn in December 2021, which was also the time I started formulating the concept of The Festival as a game, I fondly listed Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri (yes, seriously) as two of my biggest influences for conceiving the game’s premise. What inspires me about those two (Anthony Bourdain moreso) is how they chose to explore different communities, regions, and cultures through their food. While Mr. Fieri is more focused on the food itself, Anthony Bourdain (God rest his soul) used food as a springboard for talking about a region’s history, politics, and culture(s). I was always intrigued by his approach to these subjects, and it’s ultimately what inspires me to make The Festival as it is: a game where food and festivities are used as the starting point to engage with serious topics.

In a broader sense, I have always had a deep interest in history, politics, culture, and religion. I love learning about other peoples’ cultures, and the different ethnic groups found in The Festival are all based on a variety of different real-world groups that I have a deep respect for, who you don’t see often portrayed within media (e.g. you don’t see a lot of fictional portrayals of Armenian culture in pop culture). Ultimately, the titular festival that you spend the whole game working towards is itself a springboard for exploring the larger world of Eastoria and its people, along with exploring the very complicated and heavy subject matter that comes with life in post-conflict societies. To this end, I hope that the worldbuilding I incorporate into The Festival reflects my own innate curiosity and passions.

For video games that inspire me, I have three key games I would like to cite – each of which I have been liberally cribbing design elements from. Those games would be Fallout: New Vegas (2010), Disco Elysium (2019), and Pentiment (2022).

To give a very rough overview of what I am taking from each game for use in the Festival, I am inspired by how they handle their rich worldbuilding, their complex and nuanced narratives, and their incredibly well-written and relatable characters. I’m taking many notes on how New Vegas and Disco Elysium each handle their politics, how Disco Elysium and Pentiment handle their point-and-click gameplay systems, and how Pentiment handles the passage of time in its quests and stories. Lastly, I am also taking note of how each game handles moral ambiguity and uncertainty in choices – both of which I intend on being major components within the different quests of The Festival.

Themes and Subjects

The Festival: Eastoria is a game about putting on a food festival in a country that just got out of a civil war. As such, it will be exploring the complexities of post-conflict societies, and about how people rebuild their lives after suffering through major traumas. Even so, like with the three games I mentioned before, I want to tie in the large-scale political conflicts with the small-scale personal stories, and show how one influences the other. I want to show how people reclaim their lives, and how they process such heavy trauma and grief, having survived a thousand different horrors.

Expanding a little further on my last point, I want to incorporate ambiguity into both the moral choices the player must make, as well as the choices on what the player focuses on to bring the festival to fruition. While this will be incredibly difficult to pull off, and will require a lot of time and careful writing, I strongly believe it’s a critical component of the game. What may be morally upstanding may not benefit you or your festival, and you may have to do a few underhanded or questionable things to make sure you can pull off your festival.

Evolution of The Festival

The world of The Festival is based on a project I first started working on in September 2019. It first started life as a shooter based off the mechanics of Mount & Blade: Warband (2010), made in conjunction with a couple other aspiring indies like me. While I made a lot of art assets for this game, ultimately we all had to move on from it, especially once the pandemic took its toll on our lives post-2020. While I’m not against revisiting a war game in this vein in the future, I think for now The Festival is the most appropriate and achievable version of the sort of story I wish to tell. The war game I initially envisioned was also centered on the themes of people rebuilding their lives after conflict and trauma, while trying to convey the human cost of war. The premise of the game was that you would be the one to reunite the war-torn country of Eastoria by building an army large enough to topple the squabbling dictatorships that dominated the country.

However, once the war game was mothballed, I searched for other ways to explore the world I spent the past two years working on, and by late 2021 I decided it was best to focus on a story where, rather than working to reunify the country yourself, you skip right to the end where the country has already been unified, and now you must work to bring people back together in this new era of peace. While I can’t recall exactly how I decided to base the game’s story on putting on a food festival, I know that by the time I sent in my application to UConn in January 2022, it was an idea I was beginning to mentally flesh out.

And here we are today!

Creative Process / Materials and Techniques

For this portion of the statement, I will focus exclusively on the art side of things, and how I make the character models and assets I have produced. There is more I can say about my interest and research into the political and humanitarian issues of life in a post-conflict society, but I would prefer to expand upon that at a later time.

As a 3D artist by trade, my preferred art application is Blender, an open-source 3D application. For modeling characters, I have two character bases I have been using since 2020 for a variety of different characters, including here for The Festival. The male version is nicknamed “Cor Boy”, after me, and the female version is nicknamed the “Erik Girl”, after my friend NitroGlyde, who helped me produce her. I try to keep all my models in a low-poly art style using mostly flat shading, as it is an art-style I have grown very fond of since first starting on this project in 2019.

I originally used exclusively Photoshop for texturing, which I still rely on for certain textures. Ever since coming to UConn, however, I have been working extensively with Substance Painter, which I consider to be an absolute godsend for texturing 3D models. As for the game engine itself, I am making this game in Unreal Engine 5.3. These past two weeks (as of February 25, 2024 as I write this), I have been reviewing and learning as much as I can about the basics of Unreal’s blueprint system to implement the code I want, and I have gotten surprisingly far. I will be sharing a video showcasing my work on that front soon.

Course Goals

My ultimate goal for the Spring 2024 semester is to have a rough prototype of the game’s pilot quest, which I have dubbed “Hemmingward”. It is about Nishma’s attempts to solve a decade-old war crime for a village in an attempt to secure their famed recipe for her festival. If I can have a playable quest for this story by my thesis defense in mid-May, then I know I will be in a good position for my final year.

Currently, I have locked in the very basics of my point-and-click mechanics – locomotion, interactivity, and dialogue system. I will be showing those off in a future post soon; the locomotion and interactivity I was able to piece together from various tutorials, while the dialogue system is a plugin called Dialogue Tree by Unraed on the Unreal Marketplace. I’ll need to polish and experiment with the system a little more – and eventually resume work on art assets for this game – but I’m making headway, slowly but surely.

Production Timeline:

Here is a rough timeline of what I expect to have done within the coming weeks for the rest of the semester.

Feb 26th to March 8th – Polish and lock in point-and-click functionality, get very simple dialogue camera working the way I want.

March 9th to March 16th – Spring break; review Hemmingward script for further revisions. Set up levels to be explored, and begin greyboxing scenes.

March 17th to March 23rd – Finish greyboxing environments. Implement note/diary system (which will be used to review documents relevant to the quest).

March 24th to March 30th – Implement basic cutscene functionality, including transition from cutscenes to gameplay, and vice versa. Have first wave of Hemmingward script revisions completed.

March 31st to April 6th – Begin implementing the actual script into the game; set up cinematics, dialogue, and events appropriately.

April 7th to April 13th – Continue implementing the script content into the game.

April 14th to Apri; 26th – Complete implementation of script into the game; finalize alpha build of quest for presentation to committee during Thesis defense.

Closing

This is as much as I have to say for my research statement right now. Thank you dearly if you have read this far.

There’s plenty I wish to talk about more, with both The Festival and my own journey as an artist. For now though, I’m just excited to say that I’m getting a lot of good work done, and I have many exciting updates to share in the coming weeks.

I hope you have a lovely day, dear reader, and as always - Solidarity Forever!

#cor text #the festival #the festival: eastoria #game design #game development #reblogging this to The Festival server as well

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corvidist · 1 year

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The Festival - 2

The apprentice turned guide stared intently at the copied drawings laid out before them, letting out a small rattle of annoyance. The entire local collective had assembled earlier in the day to celebrate the researchers return, culminating in the group coming to a consensus and promoting every apprentice aboard to guide, including themself. A spot on the tall ceiling now displayed three new names, bioluminescent lines and swooping turns representing the cycle of life and death, with personalized markings along their lengths, etched into the malleable surface. Still, that mattered little compared to the unfolding discovery and multi-collective, global effort now underway.

The apprentice was troubled by the behavior of the giants they had witnessed, especially the one who drew the images. Agreement had built among collectives pertaining to inter-system psychology, biology, and medicine that the giant was likely in distress, and a theory within the paleontology and historical collectives was growing that these giants were in fact members of a prehistoric natural configuration that existed briefly before ultimately dying out during a still-mysterious mass extinction event. Quieter theories even accused these giants of being the culprit.

“Brought you something”

The guide jumped, accidentally jostling an already dischevled low desk as they turned their head. Behind them one of their older siblings stood, their eyes making it quite clear that they found this hilarious. In their beak they held up a package meal, the label giving it away as locally grown meat derived from what had once been beetles, selectively bred over the course of centuries to functionally be harvestable, regenerating meat.

“Thank you” they replied sincerely, only now realizing how hungry they were. They took the container with their right talons and placed it on a clear area of their desk. When they looked back, their sibling had an expression of concern. Perhaps it was inherent to them, they were in the habitat growth collective, as a safety inspector no less. Still, this seemed like something more

“You’re a mess.”

“I know.”

The guide still had remnants of the wretched membrane that they’d been forced to wear while on the ship buried in their feathers. The decontamination shower hadn’t cleaned all of it out, and it was uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the multicolored, intricate patterns of UV paint that typically adorned their wings were faded and washed out in some places, and it was unlikely that they’d have time to replace it for a while.

Without replying further, they pecked into the package and tore at the interior. Their sibling let out a chitter at how quickly they downed the meal, before gently pecking the back of their head to get them to turn around.

“Are you going to come home tonight? We’ve got something of a celebration planned. We know you had one already, but everyone’s adamant.”

“Oh, yeah…”

As they finished the package meal, the guide shuffled the papers together with their beak and right talons, picking them up and carefully folding them into a neat pile. Noticing something interesting, they scribbled it onto a piece of paper and left it at their desk.

“I think I’m ready to go now anyway.”

—--

The journey home was quick. The ravine-like, largely indoor complexes were designed to integrate with the landscape while also satisfying a psychological need for a sense of altitude. These housed roughly 250,000, though their home was close by. The two weaved though walkways, over the river that spanned the base, and along flight paths, the membrane used for the exterior windows having dimmed to reduce the glare of the nighttime sun. As they reached their family’s residence, another one of their siblings called out, welcoming them back home. They were exhausted, quickly ushered to one of the common areas where the radio played quietly, a collection of chimes arranged in an idle melody. The guide sprawled awkwardly but comfortably on a pile of cushons while the rest of the family finished preparing the meal or otherwise meandered about.

They dozed for a moment, only for their eyes to open again to their family gathered around them, four siblings, two of their partners, their mother, and their father pecking them gently on the head as the mat in the center of the room sat adorned with food and drink of all kinds. Though they had to fight off sleep at various points, they felt content, and as the evening wound down and they once again felt themselves slipping away, they were the happiest they’d been in a while.

—--

A mycilium-based telephone continuously buzzed in the entryway of the residence. The guide’s mother was first to answer, followed by a cawing through the house that woke up anyone not already awake. The guide arrived shortly after, putting their ear to the device on the floor.

“We think we might have something. Your note, the one about the sun and moon cycles indicating some sort of regeneration or biological immortality? One of the big bio-research collectives has taken it into consideration. I will say, they’re iiffy on how the structure itself could regenerate. The samples you all got from it seem to just be metals, but some of the compounds in and on them are incredibly rare. We’re setting up a discussion later for it if you want to join in. Multi collective but mostly local.”

“I’ll be there.”

—--

Sandra Jiménez felt her consciousness slowly materialize, looking down at the same fucking pressure gauge as last time and all the other times before that. She recalled the last cycle, watching the Crows fly off with her drawings and the submarine dissipear. Then, like always, the ship began to list, and the rest didn’t need to be said. Sandra punched the gauge with her right hand, hard enough to shatter it and slice a small gash in her index finger. Blood dripping, she walked out of the room, past an almost catatonic crewmate, and up the stairs to the bridge. The watch was there, having already thrown the ship to a significant starboard list at full speed. She smashed open a computer and pulled out the wires, walking to a window, breaking it with a fire extinguisher, and holding the wires out in the wind. She couldn’t recall having done this many times before… She steadily dropped them over the course of several hours.

“We have theories and we have data, but even so this defies standard natural explanations. If it does regenerate or replicate itself in some way we have no idea how."

"What we do know is that it has only - in any reputable manner - appeared during major summer storms in the polar archipelago. I think we should start there. We're only now starting to be able to send craft out into these kinds of oceanic storms so perhaps we should keep our options more open."

A number of those who'd shown up for the discussion cawed in agreement, securing a majority.

"The illustrations seem to indicate the passage of time, but how can we be sure the corpse is actually a corpse."

"Seems fairly clear, we can asume whatever they’re using to breathe is in the water and more significantly, half of their body’s gone."

"Then in the next drawing they're seemingly healthy."

"Getting us back where we started."

"What about the line they drew. The structure afloat below the sun and sinking below the moon, at the opposite ends of an oval. That seems to indicate repetition."

“Maybe we should wait on the linguists, they only received the language samples yesterday.”

“It’s just, how do we expect them to figure anything out with a language structure that’s entirely different from ours. I mean, we may as well be dealing with aliens here. Shit, we could be.”

The discussion didn't get very far before one of the older guides, their right wing missing several primary feathers, proclaimed simply:

"Assuming the structure appears again, if it’s possible, we need to figure out how to prevent it from sinking, at least long enough for us to do more than some sightseeing. This could be the discovery of our time. Some of the other collectives are starting to consider it. And can we please start calling it a boat, I think if anything that's obvious."

The group hesitated.

"How?"

“I don’t know, but we should try and get some of the other collectives together and see if we can figure it out.”

#the festival #crows #crow #corvid #raven #ravens #speculative evolution #worldbuilding #story #sci fi #digital art #digital painting #art #Not sure I like how I'm writing some of the story #too many buzzwords #technically post apocalyptic #horror #depending on the character #This Grand Nest

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