New Skillset Unlocked!

Technical Bits

Name of the Game: Space Investigator

My goal in the project: artist and designer

Tech demo here

What we want to address: how are effective platforming levels designed in a way that doesn't make going back and forth to look for clues/evidence a tedious process?

Me, Doing Art?!

I can't stress enough that I didn't think I could be an artist.

Let's unpack that statement a bit. I do think of myself as a writer and a poet, and I believe that writing is an art. I'm talking about visual artistry here: drawing, painting, digital art. You get the drill.

I'm also not saying I'm particularly good at it. My work is fairly basic and a little flat, but hey, it's a start.

So yeah, today I'm calling myself an artist.

Jamieson learned the power of art!

"How did you get here," you may ask? It started with a playing card, and it lead to the internet.

I was assigned the somewhat vague role of "artist" for my class video game prototype assignment (my first response? "Writing is an art." Like I said: writer.) "Well," I thought. "I hope the art doesn't need to be very good." I'll let you decide whether or not it is, in the end. My partner, Soneer, was amenable to the fact that I had virtually no clue what to do, and said we could just work through it. He'd handle the programming, I just had to go find out how to make some basic assets.

Let the games begin.

First thing first, we needed a theme and a concept to start with. We both instantly gravitated (no pun intended . . . okay, pun intended) to a sci-fi themed space platformer where gravity would be a factor. But not just any platformer! So running and gunning in our game. Instead, a mystery. The player would traverse the treacherous landscape and solve crimes. A space cop, if you will.

Little did we know, another brilliant mind beat us to it.

With our concepts in mind, we discussed production and ideas to implement. We were both (mercifully) okay with old-school 8-bit style graphics. The game would take place on a moon (not necessarily THE Moon) with a colony of peaceful people who were beset by saboteurs trying to destroy the civilization there. During the game, players would meet aliens who they could not understand, and would have to find translators by exploring the elevated platforms throughout the levels. After this, they find clues to what happened by talking to aliens and making dedications to answer that age-old question, "Whodunit?" Once we had this sorted out, we set off into the wild green yonder of creating our masterpiece.

Well, *I* set off to YouTube, to figure out what in the blue hell I was doing.

I won't regal you with a blow-by-blow account of me watching hours of videos about doing digital art, but I will tell you that I spent hours watching videos about how to make digital art. I will, however, absolutely give major props to YouTuber Achebit and his series, "How To Pixel Art." Check his stuff out here. If it wasn't for this, I might have spent even more time blundering around the internet, praying for mercy.

Or just wishing I could play WWF No Mercy, one of my all-time favorite games

I also futzed around with programs to use for making the art. I got Photoshop from SJSU's software program thingy, but was instantly daunted by the sheer scale of it. I used to use Photoshop all the time at my old job, but mostly just for photo manipulation. I also tried a Japanese program with no eraser tool, but seriously there was NO ERASER TOOL. Then I actually went back to good ol' Achebit, who transitioned to using the unfortunately-named GIMP early in his videos. Works for me.

My Process

I've had a bit of trouble with GIMP, mostly because of the toolbox being wonky and also because the select and drag options are kinda craptastic, but overall it has served me well enough to do what I need to do. Then I needed *ahem* 'inspiration' (see: something to steal ideas from). I found some pixel art samples and came up with the concept I wanted to create: a character in a spacesuit and trench coat, partially inspired by an action figure of Gambit from the X-Men I keep on my desk. I basically traced out some pixel images I saw online and changed them to include the features I wanted from the Gambit figure. My first efforts are below, recorded for posterity.

Glorious!

I wasn't thrilled with these two for a couple reasons, the most glaring to me being the difficulty I imagined in animation the tall one's awkward limbs and the small one's stumpy stature. I needed something to reference that I could see animated examples of. Then I thought of Risk of Rain, which I helped demo in class. It has a fairly simple sprite style (though I realized later that it has a lot more going on than one might expect at first glance) and I started looking through Google images of the game, and found this handsome devil, the bandit:

Bingo: Inspired

He even had the jack and hat. This would become the basis for my main character design, a character I had dubbed Buzz Aasimov (inspired, of course, by Buzz Aldrin and Isaac Aasimov). Having something that I knew was a functional sprite was a great jumping off point for me. I've worked on a few animations for Buzz, and created a simple sprite sheet.

Pictured: a lot of time, in digital form

I kind of followed a similar formula making other assets, For space backgrounds, I've just looked at pictures of actual skies and tried a bunch of brush and pen patterns in GIMP. For blocks and pillars I just kind of think about other games I've played and how they look. Generally I worked in either 16x16 or 32x32 pixels, then expand when I add animations. If I need to work on the go, I use a draft notebook of graph paper and colored pencils. For animations, I similarly think of games I've seen in the past and just the way people (or aliens) might move. I try to give sprites a bit of bounciness or quirky things to do. Backgrounds are still intimidating, but I give it my best, experimenting with all the tools GIMP has. And when I need something like a space ship, I just use Google image search and copy an idea. I look around my environment for inspiration.

In the below image, the space background was actually inspired by my tattoo sleeve, and the ship was a toy I found on Google.

Stylin' and profilin'

It is interesting to note, I remembered part way through this project that I used to effectively do the same thing in Mario Paint for the SNES when I was a teenager. It had a similar pixel art program and a mouse that attached to the SNES console, and I would basically copy characters like Link and Samus and put them on paint-by-numbers-like backgrounds. Maybe the art was in me all along. After all, someone once said, "Good artist copy; great artists steal."

Some aliens who inhabit the world of Space Investigator

A new designer enters the arena

I've always had machinations about becoming a game designer, and for a long time I wanted to make video games, having been mystified by the potential of making the kinds of games I want to play and possibly having a bit of money to show for it. But in light of the recent views into the grueling video game industry, this fantasy has shattered a bit. More than anything, I'm am a writer and an 'ideas person,' certainly no graphic artist or programmer. I am, however, beginning to fancy myself a game designer - especially board games - and I'm taking rather quickly to the new material I am learning as I engulf myself in design literature and delve into the intimidating and fascinating world of GameMaker. To start off on this journey, I've been working on learning critical play skills and "playing like a designer." So let's talk about a part of this adventure. Tallyho!

                                                 May the dice be ever in your favor

ART108 Video Game Lab

My partner, Nathan Tsen, and I selected a handful of games to try out for our lab assignment from the list of potential titles. Rather than letting my own biases guide me to games I would be familiar with, I picked titles mostly randomly (though I couldn't turn down the description of You Have to Burn the Rope being for "culturally aware, literate" people. I'm at least one of those things). In our short time block, we played There is Only One Level, You Have to Burn the Rope, QWOP, Wizard Wizard, How to Be Happy, and Canabalt, a fairly diverse selection of games featuring different mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics (boom!) We alternated play between my Chromebook (which cannot play games that require installation of a executable file) and Nathan's laptop. The result may shock you - if you are easily shocked by two guys playing video games

How To Be Happy
This was one of those moments where I just said, "Ok, yeah, I get it." How To Be Happy is an abstract dating sim told through the aesthetic of puzzle pieces (get it? Because being in a relationship is like . . . ah you get it). It's clever, short, and basic - the game doesn't tell you what to do, per se, but you can figure it out just by trying a few things and watching for the feedback. For example, at one point your 'puzzle piece' mate begins fading away and you just quickly click on it to keep it from leaving. Nathan and I both played and finished it fairly quickly - once you get past the second puzzle you can pretty much finish the game is a couple minutes, and we both did so without failing after about the halfway point.

                   Pictured: (Not really) an accurate metaphor for the relationships in my life

How To Be Happy does a great job of using aesthetics and feedback dynamics to tell its story. In the first stage where you 'pick a mate,' some options are just not available at all - the puzzle pieces move away from your pointer. On the second stage, you see if your piece and the 'mate' you selected can even fit together - if not, the game restarts and takes you back to the first stage, where you have to try again to find a piece that your piece 'fits' with. The game is completely abstract, so that is as deep as it goes, but it creates a functional metaphor with very few words or systems. The assets are simple, the dynamics function and provide feedback that helps tell the story, and the game makes it point aesthetically without belaboring its metaphor.

Canabalt
Canabalt is a fast-paced infinite runner where your sprite is charging across rooftops and through buildings. The art style is relatively simple black-and-white graphics but it is surprisingly beautiful - at least as much as you can see it while trying to anticipate death-defying jumps! There is only one control (jump) so the game is all about timing and anticipation. I made it fairly far on my first run, but I expect the game probably just goes on forever, keeping track of the distance you run to measure your score.

                   Pictured: A (possibly more accurate) metaphor for my life in grad school

The aesthetic is arguably interchangeable but the look and feel of the game is reminiscent of an action movie, with the player sprite in his suit complete with tie waving in the wind as you race across the map. Pit and obstacle placement and height of jumps are the primary mechanical design elements, with the dynamics coming from the pulse-pounding responses to upcoming and completed jumps. The game feels exciting because of the pace, the music, and the fact that the layout of the map is different every time, which forces the player to pay close attention to their environment. There is also a bit of control over your jumps in terms of holding the jump key down to get a bit more height or hangtime.

Wizard Wizard
Wizard Wizard is in some ways the most traditional video game on the set we played. While the controls are still relatively simple, the player does actually control a sprite by moving and jumping, and the level design is more varied and challenge-based than some of the other games. Aesthetically I like the design because I have a huge nostalgia factor for 8- and 16-bit games, and who doesn't want to be a wizard at any opportunity? Though not getting to cast spells just feels, kind of low... Anyways. The game is about escalating challenges in getting through short 'deathtrap' levels, mostly a combination of pitfalls and saw blade traps,

                                                            "You're a wizard, 'Arry." 
                                             "Does that mean I get to cast spells, Hagrid?"                        
    "No, you're just doomed to constantly repeat all your mistakes, and you can never actually die."
                                                                      "Oh god!"

The game provides a solid challenge without punishing the player too much, since death just starts you back at the beginning of the (single screen) level. You usually advance through a combination of planning (looking at the stage and using your judgment gleaned from playing or watching another player) and trial-and-error (jump, die, repeat). The aesthetics are fairly replaceable - you could slap in the dude from Cababalt and change the mountains and floating platforms to skyscrapers and cranes and effectively have the same game. My biggest issue with Wizard Wizard was the fact that the hit detection feels off. Sometimes I would get caught by a saw blade even though my sprite should have ostensibly cleared it. This bug in the mechanics really hurts the dynamics of the game, since precise jumps are basically what it is about.

Looking at the source code for Wizard Wizard was interesting. I don't know the first thing about code, but in my head I expected such a simple game to have relatively few things in its code. I was surprised by the amount of content - not that I understood much of it - that went into a game that doesn't have any control more complicated than 'double jump.' I started thinking about Risk of Rain, which I played in front of the class and have hours of prior experience with, and began to think how much coding must have gone into what I initially considered to be a deep but possibly attainable level of design, if I gave myself enough time. Now I'm less confident that I'll be able to make something with jumping, shooting, and weapon choices any time soon.

Playing Versus Observing
When I was playing a few of these games, I would get frustrated by the controls. I'm not a huge fan of playing on a keyboard, especially for action games. For one, the layout doesn't usually work great with diagonal controls, and most of the time using the arrow keys is much more difficult for me since I usually use my left hand to control my sprite, rather than my right. I enjoy the puzzle aspects of the games we played, and figuring things out was interesting usually but also occasionally it was obtuse (I'm looking at you, mouse-controlled levels in There Is Only One Level!) In some cases, I would give up faster than Nathan, who was determined to complete the levels in each game.

Watching another player is interesting because I can compare my own experiences and learn more about game design. The above-mentioned mouse levels in There Is Only One Level threw me off - as soon as I got to one, I fumbled around for a bit with the keyboard, got nowhere, and gave up. When Nathan played, once he realized that the keyboard wasn't working, he started clicking and solved the puzzle. I laughed at myself for giving up without trying the mouse, and tried again, getting farther.

Similarly, Nathan played Wizard Wizard first and I watched and got acclimated to the game without actually playing. He got through a few levels and passed the controls to me, and I was able to progress through some pretty challenging stages just because of my own experience with games and watching how this one in particular worked through observation. My own familiarity with platformers gave me most of the skills I needed to play, and watching another player let me know what to expect.

Comparison: Canabalt and How To Be Happy
Comparing Canabalt to How To Be Happy is an interesting experiment, since on many levels they are very different kinds of games. That being said, both require you to play - and fail - a few times to anticipate what has to be done to progress through each game.Trial and error are major components of both. Conversely, the games have different degrees of telling the player how exactly to play. Canabalt has simple controls and tells you right away what to press, though you have to figure out for yourself that the point of the game is to jump over pits and through windows; meanwhile How To Be Happy gives you little to go on - it might say, "click" or "fit" but you have to figure out what that means for every stage. Both games, however, feel intuitive if you are paying attention. You'll know what you are jumping over in Canabalt, and the use of puzzle pieces in How To Be Happy assures that you likely know what you are fitting together. The mechanics help tell the player about the dynamics, without having to just spell it out in a tutorial.

All that being said, in How To Be Happy, there isn't really a challenge beyond the first attempt, so replay is kind of nonexistent. Plenty of abstract games are replayable (chess or checkers, anyone?) but How To Be Happy just kind of tells it story and then you can move on. From a designer's point of view, this might not exactly be what you want from your players. Canabalt is simpler in a way but has more replayablity since you can always try to get a longer run. You can compete with friends' scores or just try to get a better run each play.There is no set endpoint, and the scoring mechanism gives you feedback to go on. How To Be Happy begins and ends, and that's kind of it. You might have to restart 5 or 6 times to get the right piece to start with, but after that you are kind of done.

Actually, the rest of the How To Be Happy played out in my head, as I have still been considering the metaphors after I played, so maybe the designers just created a game with a different kind of replayability. Well played, indeed.

                                          That's what game design is all about, folks!