Design - What Won't Be

 Design - What Won't Be

One of my design regrets is that I sometimes design things that are SO niche and esoteric that they will both never get made or executed, and it feels deeply impossible to believe anyone would be interested in them. So they never see the light of day. Here's a thread of these.

I have a design for a game that is strictly and specifically about foraging for mushrooms (and plants) in the Canadian Rockies. The game structure is specifically that each day you range out, trap, forage, gather, grow, and then cook your findings. The Rockies are an incredible gift for Canadians and every time I traverse them, they are breathtaking.

I have a design for a game where you are a pinball repair specialist who takes salvage from un-repairable games and builds fighting robots out of them. All the pieces are specifically based off of pinball/pachinko style parts. Extremely mechanical/electrical engineering. I'm fascinated by the idea of salvaging prior-era technology and repurposing it, being forced to make do and kitbash existing things.

I wrote a 4 campaign short about running a Wrestling promotion that bridges between Indonesian and Mexican wrestlers for 4-6 players, where the goal is to put on a show using your mixed performance/wrestling styles and entice audiences. My players would never be interested in this, nor ever spend the time to understand the intricacies of it.

I started designing and programming a game that is only looking at a physics engine where you make pasta shapes out of dough. You have a worktable, a huge selection of Italian classical tools, and surgeon simulator style form pasta shapes for cooking with. This was inspired by watching Gianna make Pasta. The discovery of how it all worked and the specific experimentation exposed me to an entire world of that.

I designed a race simulation-style game where you are dog sled racing competing in the Ivakkak. It's a story based game and I spent literally 3 months researching and studying Inuit dog sled racers (the race is restricted to them). The stories from the race (and many dog sled races) are incredible feats of endurance and perseverance, and they're barely understood.

I wrote out an entire magic system based on verbal speech systems that have been lost because those languages are effectively erased. And there's a 20 page novella that's already done about the whole thing. This was specifically because I was fascinated to study lingually where and why humans began to add click sounds to their vocabulary.

I designed a 10 page pitch/GDD based on raising futuristic space Alpaca and spinning wool because I was inspired by various friends' work. The combination of ranching, of sci fi, of discovery.

I wrote out an entire design about exploring and bashing together fashion looks from salvaged clothing pieces in other nations who are frequently inundated with 'clothing donations'.

These are all cool ideas to me, and no one would ever be interested in them. People's eyes glaze over when I mention the wild tangential stuff that I'm researching or reading. Lost knowledge like treasure that I covet as a dragon.

When people ask me what I do with my day, and I say nothing...it's a lie. It's this. I read, I research, I study, I dream, I write, design, compose, draw, and I just keep making.

Books and books, journals upon journals of wild ideas that can never be done because they do not satisfy at the altar of profitability nor practicality.

It makes me sad.

Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 2

Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 2

The following contains spoilers for the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, specifically for Chapter 12. You should be done Chapter 12 and firmly into Chapter 13 if you don't want to be spoiled on anything.

I hate spoilers, and I will always try to protect readers/viewers/audience where possible.

Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 1

Art - Final Fantasy 7 Remake - Meditation 1

This is a spoiler for part of Final Fantasy 7.

Games - Language

Games - Language

I was asked during a game of Wire Run about how a player might instantly learn a language. There are provisos for it before. In Shadowrun, a player could download a langsoft, that is, a digital encyclopedic knowledge of a language (they are expensive) and in Matrix-esque "I know Kung Fu", simply immediately be aware. Heck, even in basic D&D a sorcerer or wizard can cast Comprehend Languages and simply be done with it.

Life - Culture and Games

Life - Culture and Games

I've been thinking and writing a lot of late about the intersection of culture and games. It has been a lasting series of thoughts upon which I have many ideas.

I've been working on Wire Run, my latest universe on and off for years. This is our second foray into it for the RPG table. This 'campaign', I have been working on for about 6 months. During my time creating it the first time, I spent a lot of time building my own lore. Basically taking what was existing, and doing my best to both remove problematic parts of what I perceive as being at odds with a modern Sci-Fi, and also laying foundation work for a sandbox world to play in.

That first campaign was set in Vancouver, about 60 years into the future. It was easy. From a design perspective, it was a simple crutch. The players were familiar with the locations, if not the history. They understood the geography, the places, the people. They know what it means to live in a slum section on the lower East Side. They know what the travel time is between Downtown and North Van. They have a cultural appreciation for what it means to live in Surrey, vs Kits.

It was so easy.

Equality - On The Basis of Merit

Equality - On The Basis of Merit

Redditor Psyladine wrote a fairly detailed idea about why the argument "The most qualified person should get the job" lacks a certain amount of understanding. I wanted to save and share widely this contextual view for consideration.

'most qualified' implies the 'most qualified' inherently seek out the position. What affirmative action seeks to address is that half of all available brain power, i.e. women, are not pursuing the industry.

Since men already pursue the industry disproportionately we'd have to rule out a common factor explaining this discrepancy, the remainder then seems to be a contentious choice between implicit bias in the industry on the basis of gender, hidden disincentives towards women, or a factor inherent in the women themselves independent of the industry. Given the prevalence of sexual discrimination laws and the very existence of the civil rights movement, the third, while convenient in placing the burden of evidence on the non-participating gender, seems a bit too convenient.

The reaction to even token participation of women in the industry as being contrary to a meritocracy is evidence of that bias itself. When there is a disparity, corrective action does seem heavy handed, but the disparity itself is the issue, not the beneficiaries of positive incentives.

Let's look at it from a different angle. Say there's a fascinating industry directly relevant to the interest of the 18-45 crowd, massive entertainment industry here, nearly 100 billion a year.

When you look at the employment in that industry, you find out out of 10 people, only 2 are white to the 8 black (maybe a sliver of one goes towards latino or other minority).
The very fact of its distribution creates a specific mental image and set of preconceived assumptions about that industry, assuming you aren't part of the 80%. Sure, you might get in edgewise, you might even make it, but you will always be an outlier, an exception, and possibly, god forbid, a token used by the industry to ward off possible discriminatory action by the state.

This isn't about a 50/50 distribution so much as it is assessing a disparity and critically weighing whether that disparity is innate, cultural, social, or even purposeful and self perpetuating.

For the white programmer in the gaming world, you are the 80%. To hear that someone doesn't feel included, well, what's it to you? It's your club, your environment. If they want to belong bad enough, they'll bend until they fit into yours.

But it doesn't seem right, does it? Or maybe it does, and you don't know why it should ever be different. After all, if they aren't already a significant corpus in the industry, maybe they just don't belong there, right? Culturally, of course.

Game Design - Resist Jam - If Not Now, When

Game Design - Resist Jam - If Not Now, When

It has taken me a week to collect some thoughts. I think that might be a hallmark of doing difficult and meaningful work. That you need to take time away from it, just a little bit, to decompress and actually think, and consider what you did.

Last week Sunday, the team of Chris Slater, Ian Pratt, Lindsay Comeau, Lawrence Cheung, Bryan Link and I completed our Resist Jam submission. Resist Jam was a week long game jam inspired by the recent events going on in America today. We were mandated to make a game about resisting authoritarianism in all its forms. We were tasked with making a game that showcases some ideas about diversity and inclusion.

Check out more information on Resist Jam Here.

Game Design - Waiting

Game Design - Waiting

Things they don't tell you in game design school. That some days, you might lose 4 hours just to updating your toolsets and equipment. That your life might become watching the progression of a progress bar in its slow march towards completion, just so that your ideas might be better optimized and realized.

Our world is strange and weird.

Game Design - Tiny Moments

Game Design - Tiny Moments

I've been designing games around singular moments for the last two months.  In the depths of night, completely alone, with only hand crafted assets around single things.  I've been designing small games, tiny, infinitesimally small, unpolished games, usually one a week.  A lot of them are exercises.  To make sure I still know how to code in Game Maker, Flash and Unity.  Sometimes they are about figuring out how to do one little thing, dynamically dealing with specific problems or solving specific ideas.

Sometimes though, I make a tiny little game, because there's an idea that needs to get out.  It encompasses everything I do when I walk home, or to work.  I think about it while I eat lunch, I sketch it in the margins of my notebooks, I recite the lines of text or ideas of the game to myself while I listen to music.  It has to get out.

So I build a tiny little game.

This one is called Crosshair.

It's very simple.  You're a soldier on the back of a jeep, you have a machine gun, a .50 cal mounted to the back.  You're in an urban environment, and you have a spotter.  Your spotter designates possible targets, you swing around your crosshairs and sweep the street to check for the target possibilities.

45 seconds in, between the 4th and 5th target possibility you get a call out on the alley to the left.  The instant you swing over there, your crosshairs fix on a young Iraqi girl of 5.  She freezes.  Her mother appears behind her.  She also freezes.  As long as the crosshairs are pointed at them, they stay frozen.  You get text, and chatter, voice over, information...but as long as you stay pointed at them, they stay frozen.  If you point it away, but where they are going, they stay frozen.  You can only disengage and point it straight up, and you won't see them then, but they'll run across the screen and leave.

The game takes just over a minute.  The 'game'.  It's not really a game.  It's just a moment.

You're in full control.

I needed to make this.  And I'll never release it.  Ever.

I've been making tiny games, about super tiny little moments.

I'm not sure if it's for my sanity, or everyone else's.

Art - On Death

Art - On Death

I spend a lot of time as an artist thinking about death.  It’s morbid I know, but bear with me for a moment.  It’s a fixation point in most of the artwork I create.  I’m fascinated by grief, and more keenly than death itself, by the loss of possibility.  I obsess over chance and possibility, what people could or do or choose to amount to.  I find it fascinating to observe the decision-making process.  And there is something keen about the onset of death and how it presses on all the people around who observe it.  Whether they are personally connected to the death itself, or are a more casual observer.

I’ve done a tremendous amount of writing about death, and grief, loss and loneliness.  Truthfully I don’t really know why.  Stories about loss and death are my favourite, I write them, draw them, paint them, and make games around those moments.  I know it’s weird.

But for a long time I have struggled to really capture the myriad whirlwind of how humans deal with death.  I was really touched today when I read an article today by William Hughes.  It’s available here.  http://www.avclub.com/article/fake-deaths-cheap-resurrections-and-dealing-real-g-210402.  The article is beautiful, and sad, and raw.  It's raw because it means something, it's not covered in flowers and pretty words, it's harsh and hard, savage and ripping, and angry.  Really angry.  Angry at the possibilities of what might have been.  Angry at the trivialities that creators are taking with death.

It’s hard for us as creators to think about death and grief.  When we are in mindsets of creation, we want to capture pure emotions and reactions. Unfortunately we live in a society that is not obsessed with death like I am, but rather with killing.  I find myself at a strange crossroads where people push me to put the action of killing into my games.  Combat, warfare, weapons and guns. We are intrigued by the possibility of shooting, of pulling the trigger, of ending life.  Killing has become the causality of this strange fantasy we have of power.  We have actually lost sight of the possibility of death.

We rack up tremendous kill scores, ever increasing strange numbers of heads bashed in, limbs chopped off and bullets to the brain.

I’m walking this strange balance these days between designer and artist.  As a designer I understand the fundamentals of a repetitious cycle that reinforces engagement and entertainment.  I want to provide satisfaction, enjoyment and sloped ever-increasing challenges to my audience of players.  As an artist, my heart writhes in boredom.  I want to make games with stories, where there are no guns and no killing.  I want to think about absorbing people in the ideas of what grief really is, where there is only one death, and never another replay.  I’m in love with the game That Dragon Cancer, while my designer brain analyzes every challenge they will eventually face and wonders about how effectively they will overcome it.

These two sides juxtapose themselves against me, and I have no answers.

Well not no answers.  I’m making a game, quietly.  And I don’t know what it means.

Game Design - Inside Tip

Game Design - Inside Tip

Let me give you an inside tip.  Game designers, game developers, game programmers...none of us sit around and debate to each other about some kind of weird mythical set of guidelines that define whether what we make is a 'game' or not.  This whole stupid debate around needing a fail state, needing gameplay, needing player choice or player motivation in order to make something a game?

None of us are talking about that.  We are talking about metrics, UX design, UI design, narrative, story, character driven scenes.  We're talking about tuning numbers, watching playtests, coming up with concept.  We are staring at code, long sheets of xml data, inputting weird database numbers and looking at what comes back.

We're watching lines of graphs printed out for us in real time and trying to draw conjecture out of it.

But let me tell you, none of us are sitting around asking each other if what we're making is a game or not.  Nobody cares.  We're making it, if it has any kind of interaction at all, and isn't a piece of productivity software, it's a game.  We don't debate that part, we just make games.  Lists of assets come down, milestones get declared, we tune the controls, replace big grey boxes with interesting things, watch people play and take notes.  Not even the dumbest intern at the lowest level of EA ever asks some senior dev "Is this really a game though?"  It just doesn't happen.

Just because you didn't like Gone Home? Just because you thought To The Moon was too linear? Just because you thought there's no difference in the narrative to Journey?  That's your problem.  Those games, perhaps are not for you.

I have a secret, not all games are for everyone.  In fact, I would even posit that many games are not for many people.  There is A game out there for everyone, but not every game is for every one.  That's a sad truth of the matter.  Some people like more guns, less guns, more blood, fewer jump scares, more jump scares. Some people like more variety in the art, others don't care about pixel art, maybe some people like vector, or painted styles.  Some of us like voice over, others are perfectly content with blocks of text.  Sometimes you want hip hop music in your game, I would think you're crazy because I like orchestra or minimalism, but I get that you like hip hop in your game.

Does that make sense?  Just because someone else sees the value in a game doesn't mean their opinion isn't valid.  But having weird little internet arguments over what are subjectively 'good' or 'bad' or 'not even' a game, games?  That doesn't even make any damn sense.  And beyond that, you're actively treading on people's REAL LIFE agency.  You're telling them what they can or can't love.  And why.  And the reasons you are presenting are stupid.

Criticize tangible things, like disagreements about flow, or textures, or functionality.  Criticize community, or policing, or the company's EULA.  But you want to tell a developer that their game isn't a game?  Well my immediate response to you will be "Your face, isn't even a face."  I mean what?  Your statement doesn't even make any OBJECTIVE SENSE.

Get over it.

And stop being so offended that I muted you that you went to harass my friends.  We're not in grade school any more.

Get.
Over.
It.

Game Design - Ludum Dare 48

Game Design - Ludum Dare 48

Quick sample of the writing I've been working on for Ludum Dare this weekend:

In darkness and silence,
A splintered faith moves without direction.

There, a ruin of stone and metal,
...and death.

Time drags eternal, and the rain stops
The land runs over, green to grey
and grey to black.

And the splintered faith cares not,
for worldly matters.
Deep beneath the nowhere.

Until it found a breath...

Liminality of Death - Light

Liminality of Death - Light



My friend,

we … are going home

I close your eyes now

we are going. Home.

Home.

Liminality of Death - Darkness

Liminality of Death - Darkness



My friend
you are a lost thing


But it need not
be terrifying


No color
no substance
emptiness


You are not stopped
by anything,


You are now at neither
a beginning
nor an end


Death has happened
It will happen to everyone

Liminality of Death - Water

Liminality of Death - Water



My friend
you are feeling light


The wind element in your body
drifts away on the wings of crows
to plummet and become rain


Be rain, fall
and fly


Your spirit is light.
It has no anchors


Every thought you have now,
has a kind of power


Don’t pity yourself
Don’t make yourself small


You want things,

your things.

But they are no use now
and you are no use
to them.


Release them
and yourself

Liminality of Death - Wind

Liminality of Death - Wind

My friend
you are feeling heavy


The fire element in your body
burns itself out
and drifts on the free air

No more external sounds
No more internal sounds

You have no saliva
No sweat


Now you feel cold
You have a sense of far off
of Vastness


You see fireflies or sparks
in the smoke rising


You can’t get enough air
you are become a hollowness

Liminality of Death - Fire

Liminality of Death - Fire

My friend,
you are feeling heavy

The earth element in your body
is igniting and burning

Your breath forms soundless words
the mind forms wordless images
the images shatter

Your mind is losing its hold
You grab at this thing
then you reach for that thing

Blood slows
Faintness

Logic, and the chair
and the table
and the air dissolve.

Liminality of Death - Earth

Liminality of Death - Earth

My friend,

You are feeling heavy,

The time has come

for you to start out.

You can no longer open

or close your eyes

Blue, yellow, red, green

are turning to white.

And white to grey

and grey to black.

You try to remember

who you love.

But your memories,

are fading embers.

Liminality of Death - Introduction

Liminality of Death - Introduction

Liminality of Death is the new game I'm working on, here's a taste of the introduction.  I've been researching and inspired by the Bardo Thodol for this game.

You, oh you

You who have come

to this place

Sisters, brothers, friends

This person is dying

He has not chosen

to do so

She is suffering greatly

He has no home

She has no friends

He is falling, as from a cliff

a great height

She is entering

a forest of strangeness.

Thoughts - Design vs Art in Video Games

Thoughts - Design vs Art in Video Games

I've been thinking and writing a lot about design and art.  Not in a particularly adversarial way either, but in the tail end of my degree now, I cannot help but think of the two as being somewhat opposed.  Design, as I have often seen it can encompass some art, but the main focus of design is to create function.  Design is always purposeful, it's usually related to interpreting function, it is premeditated (or should be at least), it has a sense of intention.