First-Person Retrospective

Although Chessworld is complete and work on it has ended (at least for now), it’s still quite incomplete - it certainly wouldn’t be suitable for a public release. A lot of work needs to be done in almost every department.

Gameplay: Chessworld is sorely missing any real kind of balance. We implemented some semblance of balance from the start, but it was on based on how we thought the game would play in theory. Actually playing the game as it is today makes this abundantly obvious, and renders the game almost unplayable. Players gather resources way too quickly, pieces don't move far enough or attack with enough power, players start with too much wood, and more. 

Pieces: Some individual pieces seem to lack purpose, too - the bishop seems rather useless, with its low attack and defense strength, and its lack of special ability. At the very least, I think it should be made cheaper, or given a boost in stats, and possibly the ability to heal surrounding pieces. The rook also seems to be lacking in power - considering how it looks, and the fact that it can't attack while moving, I think it should have a much higher attack strength.

Sound: The sounds in Chessworld were admittedly a little rushed, but they are mostly placeholders. Ideally, I'd like to record actual sound effects and implement them, to make the game feel truly unique and whole. The generated chiptune sound effects seem a little out of place with the rest of the game’s aesthetic. Some actions are also lacking in sound effects - for example, attacking the king makes no noise whatsoever, leaving the player unsure if the attack even worked

Visuals: As happy as I am with the models, they probably need some work. I'd love to take the time to go back to some of the pieces I worked on earlier and update them with the techniques I learned while working on the latter pieces. They also desperately need to be animated. How amazing would it be to actually see each individual piece walk around the planet with moving legs? And it would be so great to actually see the pieces move to make their attacks! Imagine the Queen really shooting a fireball, and the Knight really swinging a sword in a 360 degree arc. This could bring a lot to the game experience. Similarly, I also should make the pieces’ “breathing” an animation, rather than making it happen through code (which sort of kills the processing and in turn, the frame rate, since the computer needs to run all sorts of calculations to make it happen). The GUI also needs some work - it doesn't scale itself according to the resolution used by the player, and it doesn't look as good as I know it could, in general. 

Polish: There are some little things which need fixing, too. Players should be able to click on an opponent’s piece at any time to check their health, not only when selecting a piece for attack. We also desperately need keyboard shortcuts to encourage faster moves, and simply ease of access as well. I also think pieces should “truly” find their way to their destination tiles, moving seamlessly from tile to tile along the best possible route, rather than simply moving through other pieces and obstacles in a straight line to get to their destination. But that’s just me.

Developing both Q-Bot and Chessworld has left me thinking a lot about the amount of time it takes to accomplish different goals in game development. While working on each project, I was surprised to find that the things I expected to take a long time to finish tended to get done within, say, a couple hours, while the things I expected to take no time at all would almost always end up taking up the better part of a week to get to a working state. This sort of dissonance between expectation and reality can cause some real problems when it comes to project time management, and was one of the main reasons we slipped on a few of our goals for Chessworld.

Here is a video showing Chessworld in all its glory.

The video should cover most of the gameplay, but in case you missed it, it goes something like this:

Players play as either White or Black. Each player has a king, which is positioned at either pole on the planet of Chessworld.

The King acts a sort of factory, building pieces for the player. Players can start by building some pawns which they can use to gather wood for the King. Pawns move to trees, retrieve wood, and bring it back to their king while the player’s opponent takes their turn. This system means that the longer a player takes to complete their turn, the more wood their opponent is able to gather - this means players naturally strive to make their turns as short as possible, eliminating the need for any kind of “timer”.

A player’s king uses their wood to build new pieces, each with their own abilities. Queens can move far and throw firebombs, setting fire to an area for a number of turn. The fire can burn down trees and inflict damage on any piece in the area. They also have high attack, but are very expensive.

Bishops are scouts, able to move far, but with low attack and defense. Knights can’t move as far, but are stronger, and have an attack which allows them to inflict damage on all opponents immediately around them. Rooks can not move very at all and cannot attack while packed up, but can “unpack” to change to attack mode, where they can attack at a range with high power.

The first piece I made for Chess World was the pawn. You can probably tell I was still very new to Blender when I designed this one.

I decided on a low-poly aesthetic early on in development both because I have a personal love for the art style (largely thanks to spending many hours playing the Nintendo 64 as a kid, and also thanks to the work done over at /r/lowpoly on Reddit), and due to the technical simplicity and time restraints.

The legs (and really, the whole design) were inspired by the legs of the titular castle in the Studio Ghibli movie, Howl’s Moving Castle, of which I am a big fan. I envisioned the chess pieces scuttling around the board on insect-like legs right from the beginning, so I was eager to keep that element to the design.

For my class’s second assignment, we were asked to create a tile-based strategy game, in which we were to implement pathfinding. On a walk from campus to the shopping center a few blocks away after class, my teammates and I threw around some concepts for some creative approaches to the brief. Eventually, I proposed the idea of a race of “sentient chess pieces”, and a game which plays like Chess on a spherical board - a planet, if you will. I brought it up sort of in jest, but to my surprise, the other guys loved it. We thought about it more and more, fleshing out the gameplay and aesthetic over lunch, and agreed there and then that we had found our game. We drafted up a development plan and over the week leading up to the assignment’s start, we divided the responsibilities and assigned them according to our given preferences.

Following a rocky beginning due to my being extremely sick and bed-ridden with some kind of everlasting bronchitis/flu hybrid, the game started to take shape. Certain elements changed over time, either due to restraints caused by a lack of experience and sometimes lack of time management, but at its core, it was exactly what I'd suggested weeks prior: chess in outer space.

Personally, I was in charge of the aesthetics, such as the models and GUI, and I shared half the responsibility for the core game design. Asher and I had some long discussions about the roles of each piece within the game, their price (we would be implementing a resource-gathering system where players exchange gathered wood for new units) and their abilities. I was faced with a slight challenge: I had agreed to design and produce 3D models for the pieces, and I’d never touched a 3D modelling program before in my life. Luckily, I had a great resource at my fingertips: my girlfriend had created Q-Bot’s model for me, and she had learnt a great deal about Blender in the process, so she was able to set me on the right path. Before too long, I was whipping up great-looking sentient Chess-pieces in a matter of hours.

Unfortunately, time did not allow me to learn Blender animation, so that skill will need to come to me in the future. I had been intending to bring the pieces to life by making them walk, spider-like, around the world, but sacrifices needed to be made. Otherwise I might not have had time to put together anything resembling a half-professional GUI.

Once it came time to put the GUI together, I sort of came into my own. I’d picked up quite a few skills while designing the assets for my first ever University-level game, No One Is Lost (a sci-fi card/board game I designed and produced last year). I put together some nice, simple, aesthetically pleasing menus to display around the screen in Chess World, all the while following established design patterns to ensure the information players would want would be where they expected it to be on the screen - important information which would be used many times per turn would appear in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (such as piece stats and movement options), where western eyes are drawn thanks to the nature of the english language, while less important buttons such as “pause game” and “return [camera] to king” would appear in the bottom left. A button which would only ever be used once per turn, “end turn”, was to appear at the very bottom of the list of options appearing at the bottom left corner, to try and avoid players pre-emptively ending their turn by mistake. I took special care to ensure players would find the GUI’s layout comfortable and natural to use.

Here you’ll see some footage for Q-Bot, which I put together to show off Cameron Canobie’s work on the game’s music for a student exhibition.

Q-Bot really came together in the last few days before my deadline. As the days went by, I slowly but surely refined the camera, created basic enemy AI, added power-ups and dynamic set pieces, designed a level, implemented animations and sounds, and even threw together a basic little menu - all of which I was doing more or less for the very first time ever.

It was certainly a learning process. That is to say, I was learning what I was doing throughout the entire process and sort of making it up as I went along, which I think is probably the best (if not only) way to learn programming. Google searches became my best friend during the development of this game, and I learnt a great deal about scripting and the Unity engine throughout the assignment.

I think I may have set my goals a little too high, causing myself a lot of stress as I struggled to reach some of them, but I think it paid off as I managed to implement all of my desired features (other than a smooth and natural control scheme, I guess) within the given timeframe. Aiming too high is never a bad thing so long as you keep up the motivation to get the product finished at all, and don't brag about what you hope to achieve as if you're already sure you'll achieve it (otherwise known as pulling a Molyneux); hence why I was reasonably tight lipped about the game here on my blogs. Well, that and the fact that I became far too absorbed in making my game to allow myself time to discuss it.

In the end, Q-Bot became quite a cohesive little thing, even if it is restricted to only one fifteen-minute level with the most basic of textures, models and animations.  Actually, scratch that, the animations were awesome.

Oh boy, it’s been a busy few weeks. How long has it been since my last post? More than a month? Oops. I guess I've been busier than I thought.

A few things have happened since my last post. Q-Bot got finished and submitted, and I worked with a team of two other students to conceptualise, design, build and complete a slightly-too-ambitious title; Chess World. It’s been a bit of a ride.

After around 9 hours, our main theme is complete! Cameron has wowed me yet again with what he’s produced, and I’m thrilled to have collaborated with him on my project.

The song is a fusion of synth-techno-grunge with a smooth tune and chilled beat. We think it should suit Qbot’s style just fine!

Tonight I’m working with the brilliant Cameron Canobie to produce the first ever theme song for Qbot. The music will be a 3 minute looping song, and is inspired by the music from Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neighbour Totoro, as well as the soundtrack from Grand Theft Auto V, Psyche Rock by Pierre Henry, and the music from Banjo Kazooie.

I’ve worked with Cameron before on a short film and other small projects, so it’s very exciting to have his talent bringing life to Qbot’s world.

Like Bigfoot fills the missing link between primates and humans, social media fills the missing link between the public and those in the public's eye, bridging the gap between the everyday people and the celebrities, artists, and the otherwise famous or noteworthy. Today, social media is an absolute necessity for any person hoping to build a career out of their creative work. It allows us a platform to promote ourselves, communicate with our customers and fans, and network with other like-minded artists.

It goes without saying that promoting ourselves as artists is a necessary evil. No one likes a gloater, but it is the nature of art for it to be seen, and so it is that we would want our work to be seen and enjoyed by the masses. The Internet grants us the opportunity to make our work accessible anywhere in the world, while social media gives us the chance to reach out to a wide audience and direct them to it. As we build our portfolios and send them into cyberspace, we should be spreading the word on our social networks and making people aware that our work is out there and worth viewing. By posting to social media we can keep our audience up to date and familiar with the work we are doing and ensure that our art is seen and enjoyed.

We can hope that at some point in our careers, we would develop something of a fan base. It’s the dream of an artist to engage our viewers so thoroughly with our work that they should seek it out whenever possible and immerse themselves with it in every way they can. When these fans appear, many will undoubtedly want to communicate with us. Social media makes it possible for fans to contact us on a very personal level, and we get the opportunity to converse with our fans as if they were any other member of our peer group. If you can make a habit of communicating with fans in such a way that they see you not as some otherworldly idol or inhuman creature distanced from the rest of society by your artistic success, and instead as a fellow human being on their level, your fans will only appreciate you and your work more. While it may be important to maintain a certain air of professionalism when communicating in this way, there is no reason you can’t talk to your fans as a fellow humans. It is imperative not to condescend, patronise or look down upon your fans, as this will only further remove yourself from your fanbase and make you appear less human.

Finally, social media creates the invaluable opportunity to network with other talented artists, which in turn can bring forth the chance for collaboration, work opportunities, important feedback, and inspiration. Staying connected to your artistic peers is just as important as staying connected to your consumers, and helps cultivate the public perception of you as a person with ties to your industry. Maintain close relationships with like-minded artists and industry figureheads whenever possible to guarantee important opportunities in the future.

In the post mortem of the hit 2014 video game Goat Simulator by Swedish developers Coffee Stain Studios, Armin Ibrisagic writes how one of the most important contributing factors to the game’s massive success was the careful considerations taken with fan interaction. He describes his philosophy of maintaining a “down-to-earth” manner of interacting with the company’s fans, choosing to write the same way he would if he were merely chatting with his friends on his personal Facebook account. He explains his distaste for the cookie-cutter phrases used by other studios when posting on social media with words carefully put together by a team of lawyers and how he instead opted to simply not “try too hard”. Armin goes on to say that fans "shouldn’t feel like [they’re] talking to some corporate PR person in a suit, [they] should feel like [they’re] talking to a normal 20-something that’s sitting in front of their desk”, since that was exactly the case. He claims that this attitude had a hugely positive effect on their social media presence and states that their page followers only increased in number as a result of their casual mannerisms. This kind of attitude is exactly what I’m personally hoping to capture with my “professional” social media profiles.

So embrace social media within your career as the magnificent tool that it is. Promote yourselves, build your fanbase, communicate with your fans on a down-to-earth, personal level and be sure to network with your industry peers. Your social media profiles could become some of the most important bricks in building your career, and solidifying your position in the public’s eye.

You. You, reading these words on your screen. You are not just a human. Not in this age of technology. Today, you and I are big, walking, talking clumps of meaty data. Everything you do on the web, whether it’s posting a Facebook status update about the concert you went to, watching a movie trailer on Youtube, or running a Google search for reviews of LEGO sets, comprises the collective data stored in cyberspace all about you.

Companies collect this data about us and use it mostly to find new ways to market to us. Every day Youtube compiles a list of videos “Recommended for you”, based on what you’ve watched in the past. Facebook changes its ads based on the things you say in your posts, comments and chats, as well as the pages you have liked, and based on your personal profile. Google caters its search results based on your online activity. All these things work in the best interest of the company, but they’re not so much in the interest of the end user. The person whose data is being mined is the person whom seems to benefit the least.

So can data be used for the good of the user? I don't mean the "for the security of the nation" political sense of collecting and using data for some misconceived notion of "the greater good". How can we, as artists, incorporate data into our work to improve the experience of the audience? Any game developer will explain how data is important for analysing user activity to determine what areas of a game players seem to enjoy the most, have the most trouble with, etc. They'll also mention how bug reports can be collected as data to pinpoint problematic parts of a game's code to fix later. But how could data be used in a more creative way?

The interactive music video for Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait", entitled The Wilderness Downtown, is an exciting achievement in both web design and music video production. In this video, built for use on the Google Chrome browser, a person of indeterminable gender with a face hidden by a hood is seen running down some streets. External windows open in the browser showing Google Maps and Google Streetview images of the neighbourhood surrounding your childhood home, according to the address you entered when prompted upon opening the page. The video invokes a sense of nostalgic wonder, as the person in the video acts as a surrogate for the viewer (known as a "viewer insert") as they seem to be running through the streets they grew up in. This use of data is fascinating, and holds considerable artistic merit. The way the video is customised to suit the particular viewer makes it a wholly unique experience, which every viewer has the potential to enjoy on a personal level.

The video invokes ideas for the use of data in other pieces of art. What if the retrieval of data was more seamless? A program could grab the geographical location of the viewer from their GPS settings and customise a a video game or short film accordingly. They could have characters reference some of a person's Facebook friends as if they were merely other characters within a story. There is no need for users to enter specific information when the information is all too often already available online. This would allow for a more immersive artistic experience, and a fresh new artistic product.

The collection, retention and use of data can be a scary thought. Big, faceless corporations having access to our details is not necessarily a comfortable thought. But if some artistic good can come of our modern existence as bundles of data, perhaps it's not so bad afterall.

Critics make the world of art go round. From fine art to video games, literature to television, stage theatre to film, the artistic world is at the mercy of those with a journalistic high ground. Creators of art rely on critics - academic analysts and reviewers alike - to provide feedback, insight, and publicity for their works.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Critics thrive on the work of artists, which they consume and analyse. Artists depend on critics to reflect on their work, interpret it, deconstruct it, rip it apart and judge it for the world to see. Whether dripping with negativity or wrought with praise, a critic’s careful analysis of a piece of work can be just as important as the piece of work itself. Thus, as artists, it is important to maintain a good relationship with those in a position to define our work in the eye of the public.

Reviewers, the media, and the industry of journalistic critique is one of your most important keys to success as a member of the creative world. Reviewers will experience your piece of work - be it a game, an animation, a film, a song, anything - in the way it was intended to be experienced, and give a judgement on its artistic merit so that their audience (which is also your audience) can decide if it is worth their time and money to invest in your product, whatever it may be. These people are known as “opinion leaders”, whose thoughts on certain works can help guide public perception of the thing you have created, and play a huge part in determining whether your piece will be a memorable hit, or if it will be destined for the bargain bin at a supermarket. It is important to understand and respect the power your reviewers hold, and be sure to maintain a professional relationship so that they can be aware of your products and give timely reviews before their release. This means sending review copies of your products out to reviewers so they can experience it without needing to pay for it, and publish a story about it so that their audience might become your audience. This means keeping in touch with reviewers, making sure they know how to contact you and in the case of game development, perhaps even give them previews of early builds and access to exclusive news about your game. This is an honest way to drive media attention to your product, which results in improved audience anticipation. Provided the end product turns out at the level of quality promised in the press, your work should become successful as a result.

However, it is also important to understand that negative feedback happens. Sometimes, your product launches and despite all your best efforts, it is panned by critics. This is bound to happen in everyone’s career at least once. Something in the production misses the mark and you don’t quite capture your vision the way you had intended. In this case, it would be unwise to lash out at critics and claim that they “don’t understand the game” or “misinterpreted the film”, or try to claim that “this music isn’t for you anyway”. This kind of damage control is dangerous and can quickly result in the public ridiculing you not just as an artist, but as a person. When facing negative criticism, the best way to react would be to simply learn from the experience, take the feedback on board and try to improve on it next time. Audiences and reviewers alike relish in the artist whom actually takes feedback on board and improves their work; “It’s as if the developers heard every criticism we had for the first game, went back to the drawing table and improved the experience from the ground up in every way possible.” The moment a reviewer gets the chance to say something like that is the moment the audience flocks to your product, desperate to drink in all those improvements.

Finally, there are the critiques. These pieces will deconstruct your work in ways you thought impossible, breaking it apart and interpreting it in whole new ways you never dreamed of. Usually, if your work is critiqued and analysed on this kind of level, it is an utmost form of flattery. It means your work has become so culturally significant, such an important part of the period in which it was released, or such an interesting work in general, that someone decided it was worth their time to pick and prod at it and truly understand what makes it just so good. In other cases, it may be to discover what makes it so bad, and that’s okay, too. You should pay attention to critiques, but never try to correct them, as a person’s interpretation is their own, and even as a creator, you usually have no right to try to adjust those views. Offer insight when it is needed, and answer questions as honestly as possible when asked, but never expect someone’s interpretation of your work to completely line up with your own. This is one of the trickiest parts of accepting the public perception of your work, and where a lot of artists truly fumble. If you can work to appreciate everyone’s views on what you make, you will only evolve as an artist.

N’awww, isn’t he cute? Q-Bot is animated, now! When he’s  standing still and wondering what to do next, Q-Bot likes to bop - perhaps to a merry little tune his antennae are picking up - and when he’s got places to be, he’ll happily run along! He may still be quite naked, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have personality.

Sometimes we have to face harsh realities in life. Death. Taxes. The Tooth Fairy isn't real. Firefly was cancelled after one season. Winter is coming. Candy Crush is successful. The Kardashians remain popular. These are facts of life, and unfortunately they are unavoidable. All we can do is accept them for what they are, and try our best to live our lives as best we can despite them.

Another such fact of life is that employment is hard. Sure, it may be easy enough for some of us to land a part-time job to earn some extra money for video games or drinks while studying, but I’m talking about actual, post-uni full-time entry into the “workforce”. Statistics suggest that as of 2015, Australia has hit an unemployment rate of 6.4% - the highest it has been for 12 years (ABC News, 2015). One can only imagine how those in the art industry might struggle to find work with figures like that.

While as a game designer/developer the dream may be to start a small independent studio, create a little game about mining, building, and crafting, sell thirteen million copies over the next few years and then finish up by selling the property to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, but really, how often does that happen? The reality of it is that there are thousands of other aspiring game makers out there with the very same dream, each of them as sure as the next that their creations will be the next big thing. Not every game can be the next big thing, though, so unfortunately that dream won’t come true for the vast majority of us.

If we are going to make a living out of our fields in art, we need to make some compromises. Chances are that we will each need to bite the bullet and just accept the facts of life. We will likely need to look for jobs working for “the man”. If we're lucky, we might get a chance to take a job with a big company like Ubisoft or Activision. “Lucky?! But won’t that mean I’ll end up working on a single gun for 12 months for a game I’m not allowed to know the name of?” I hear you ask. Yes, that may be the case, but at least you might have a decent wage and a taste of job security, and although you seem to be working on something menial, you just might find yourself gaining some valuable experience from those who work around you, right? And in the meantime, you should be earning enough money to support yourself and your Magic the Gathering addiction, and in your spare time you should have the opportunity to work on a project you really care about. 

Of course, this doesn't just apply to those in game development. Animators dream of landing that job for Pixar, Graphic Designers want to land contracts for ad campaigns with big, prolific companies, musicians want to write or produce the next Triple J Hottest 100 chart topper. But while working on their portfolio for that future Pixar interview, or spending long nights finding those perfect tunes for your debut album, you might need to take whatever small jobs you can find just to keep yourself fed. Maybe eventually, you could even produce a successful Kickstarter campaign to get that first, dream project off the ground for real.

Art is not an easy industry, and not everyone can be the next Notch or Marc Ronson or John Lasseter. Not right away, anyway. In the meantime, we need to take those small jobs, working our way up to living that dream. Maybe one day, who knows - we might produce an iOS game that outsells Kim Kardashian’s, afterall.

Jenda, M. (2015, 13 Feb) Unemployment surges to 12-year high of 6.4 per cent; 12,200 jobs shed - retrieved from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-12/unemployment-data-january-abs-jobs/6088070

Minecraft Wiki, (2015) Timeline of Events - retrieved from http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Timeline_of_events#December_5

Q-Bot developed a new dimension!

Look! 

Q-Bot is all colourful.

I've been trying out some different colour schemes, in an attempt to figure out how the little robot buddy is going to look in-game. At this point, I'm not sure which I'm going to end up using, but feel free to give some feedback so I can get an idea of what people like!