#bct studio

Draft Animation

Conceptual Statement

  The purpose of my presented project is to inspire fun but also teach a lesson to anyone who is playing the game. My prime aspiration therefore was to develop the game from its youthful stages into something that was wholly immersive. I started off by examining what was already in place from its beta stage in the studio project: it had the base structure and operated on a two phase system with little external impact. I therefore developed this idea further and blossomed a whole story for the ARG Spy Agency.

To me, the ARG Spy Agency embodies social media in a lot of ways: it is powerful, manipulative and mysterious and so my game play style operates as a tool for fighting against this monolith. The game is more a tool of protecting your own identity and securing a victory over the ARG Spy Agency than anything else. As the master puppet of the ARG Agency, the GameMaster spins the wheels to try and cause players to drop their guard and to test them. A vast difference to the original game which focused purely upon espionage and exploitation.

I chose to present the project simply for many reasons but primarily because it needs to appear primarily self-explanatory to any user. The simple layout of a starter pack, a rule book and examples of both items and website images employs a simplistic grandeur which is eye-catching and confidently transfers information without overloading the individual.

Reflective Statement

  As I reflect upon the past Semester, I realise how truly quickly it has passed me by, and how much I have learnt from the three papers that have been given for the semester. Yet it is in the project I present that I felt there was the most learning to be done. As the second project of the Studio Class for the Semester, I joined a group that were forming a mass social media cluedo-styled spy game, whereby players developed personas via social media outlets and projected their own image upon the world. This game, entitled the ARG Spy Agency, offered players the opportunity to trade, barter and investigate with one another so as to procure each other’s items and trade off their own, whilst avoiding getting caught out. Whilst a somewhat successful endeavour, I found room for error and thus expanded upon it in my final presentation. I desired to develop how physicality could come into play alongside the social media, thus making it more directly interactive and not entirely focused on the cyber universe.

For this reason, I provided a “starter pack” which outlines the old rules with multiple additions to refine and perfect the gameplay style. In reflection of this project however, I would have spent greater time focussing on the finite details and expanding the “end-game” possibilities as I feel a game such as this has a lot of room for growth. However this particular project definitely played in favour of my strengths and allowed me to expand my creativity through use of literature and creative writing. My goal was to show the resourcefulness and power of social media whilst also operating as a lesson on the dangers it can present.

I expanded upon the playability of the game to make it more immersive on all fronts. My first addition was to add in a type of in game store which was manned by the GameMaster, followed by the evolution of the “Two Phase Game” into a “Five Phase Game”. Given more time, I feel that this is something I could have developed even further, by then veering to introduce more large scale events which would affect the outcome of the game. The prime reason I chose this project for my Vernissage however, is that it caters to the needs of gamers whilst also offering a valuable lesson. Much alike my previous project, Instrumagic, I always aspire to teach individuals lessons whilst they’re having fun. The ARG Spy Agency Game shows the power of social media and also how dangerous it can be, because it takes 10 individuals who develop their own persona and hide behind it, attempting to fool each other. I think that in its beta state, the game was flawed in that there were no clear cut concise rules governing player interaction. Fortunately, the interaction was just between class-mates, but in a larger scale, the figure of the “GameMaster” operates as a safety net against foul play. I Introduced the GameMaster to operate as the only figure who knows all identities and controls the viability of the game. I think, given more time, I would expand upon how the GameMaster could play out if the game were to become more international, as opposed to a game between friends.

After relentlessly making the material for our game for many hours straight and not getting any sleep it was finally time to put it into the code.

When we had our characters and backgrounds into the code a long with the 5000 word script and played the game things just didn't mesh at all. 

Renpy the programming engine we use to actually make and run the Visual Novel doesn't allow us to fulfill what we wanted and what was told to happen in the script. The main problem with Renpy was that it doesn't let you place where the characters are going to be in the shot except it was fixed to the same positions each time. 

With this becoming news to us on literally the day before it suddenly became a Do Or Die situation as we couldn't work with what we had already implemented into the Renpy Engine. 

Now we figured we just had to make the entire shot ourselves including putting the characters into the background and adding in effects to suit the situation.

After  quickly doing this and putting the game together we couldn't help but feel disappointed with what was being played. Some areas of our script didn't match what was happening on screen. Some sounds were anti climatic and the characters just didn't really suit the kind of game play we were looking for.

Relfective

At the end of the day this result comes down to poor organisation and cohesiveness between members of our group. Since the group were split into different roles of content creating for the game this meant we weren't on the same page throughout most of the project time. What this ultimately lead to was a very uncoordinated game. 

As one off the two script writers, while creating the script i was fully unaware what was possible with the programming engine we were using and what kind of art could be produced. Instead of considering these aspects earlier on in the project it wasn't realized till too late that we were asking for too much in the script even with how little it felt the script was. 

I feel that I have truly uncovered a new passion of recent in being able to play with photography and as such am immensely grateful for having been given the opportunity to pursue it in the first year of the BCT course.

My decision to explore, "Natural Life and Death" through photography is one that I am very pleased I chose to go with. As I am unable to make it to the presentation day, all my material will be presented through tumblr, in the exact same format as I would have aspired to present it in class. With each of my selected images, I was very particular about how I set them out. I wanted there to be progression of Life to Death stages, whilst also exemplifying the Natural aspect of it. I felt that this was something that was captured particularly well in the images of the white flower, in it's various stages of life. Firstly as a flower in full bloom and all it's glory, onwards to one which has been touched by death, on to the final one which has embraced death and is completely browned in colour. This shows a natural cycle and also reflects the natural motion of the seasons which embody and reflect the idealism of life to death: Every autumn the world dies, and at spring it is born anew.

I find that this reminds me in particular of how the Greeks explained the cycle of the seasons in Mythology. By their canonical belief, every Autumn and Winter, Persephone, the daughter of the Goddess Demeter was sent to the underworld to reside for 6 months. In these 6 months, her mother would no longer tend to the earth as was her dominion, and thus the world would die. Upon her daughter's return to the earth however, Spring and Summer would appear, when the world would come back to life and be in full bloom. The first and second images, encapsulate this perfectly as they reflect the life to death cycle (image one) and the arrival of Spring from Winter (image two)

Image Two, of the tree branch stretching out to the sky perfectly reflects the concept of Winter becoming Spring. On the right hand side of the image, the branches are very dark and the trees in the background are clearly covered in amber leaves and still fully burdened by Winter. Yet as your eyes pan to the left, the image comes to life once again and you can see flowers, green and the branches grow much lighter. This, in a way almost looks as though it has just been touched by a Goddess out of myth. The tree seems to be stretching towards the warmth of the sun and beginning to burst with life in order to rival the dark, cold nature of winter.

The third image on the other hand, takes a different approach. A favourite of my childhood, and a beautiful flower, it is in fact a death bringing and a weed. Typical in most gardens in New Zealand, these flowers crop up in shaded areas and choke the plants around them. I found a cruel irony in this, in that the weed produces a beautiful flower which gives life to dark areas, yet at the same time it kills the other plants around it. I feel this takes a twist on the intent of my project in that it reflects how in Nature, death can often take the guise of life in order to preserve itself and wreak havoc to those around it. Much alike images of wolves disguised as sheep; these flowers operate in a similar fashion in that to the unknowing eye, they are but beautiful flowers.

Having kind of leaped  into deciding a visual novel was what our group was going to do before even researching about it felt quite optimistic and risky, but the reassurance from other members of the group who had experience with visual novels kept us on track and not questioning if what we were doing was right.

Well right now i feel its goes without saying that at least some research has to take place. 

First of all since i hadn't played a visual novel game before i immediately found myself playing this one (http://bassnovel.com/platform/game.php?id=58751777) to get a feel for what we were trying to accomplish. Since this game had aspects missing that we wanted to include in our visual novel i wasn't entirely convinced that it was an effective way to display our skills and collaborate them.

After checking out this (http://storygames4u.wordpress.com/page/2/) massive forum i saw the endless possibilities of what can be achieved in a visual novel and noticed a trend with what separates the good and popular ones from the bad ones. Having read this article about 'How to make a good visual novel (http://uchiharan.blogspot.co.nz/2013/12/how-to-make-good-visual-novel.html) just confirmed the notions i got straight away. Basically what drives a visual novel is 1. The Story 2. Art 3. Music. All equally important in it's own way and without balance in each sector comes an attractiveness about your visual novel. 

With this now in mind i can already see some imbalances in our visual novel at the moment. Right now the Art isn't looking too amazing but pretty average to be honest whereas so much time has been put into the story line rather than ensuring the visual aspect of it was up to par. What's hard about this is that usually all the work would drop onto the designated artist of the group but that isn't the case as we want to make sure all the work load is spread evenly but this creates problems. First of all it would look strange if our characters in the story had different art styles and different levels of detail but this is something were just going to have to deal with and look back upon once its complete. 

I have also done some research into the backgrounds of visual novels and how its done. (http://lemur3s.deviantart.com/art/Anime-Visual-Novel-Backgrounds-from-photos-371395755) Initially we decided upon just taking real life photographs and not altering so much that its cartoon but just filtering it. But after reading this tutorial i think it would be entirely possible to make that transformation a normal photograph to a enhanced visual novel canny background. 

So we are at the last stretch of the project and this week couldn't be more crucial to having our project be a success. 

This week is the only time we have to put all our work together and hope that it pans out the way we want it to. The script is more or less done hitting around 3500 words which is quite short for a visual novel but the time that we have is limited so we have to work with what we got. 

Character design needs to be done ASAP which is beyond my power since we pretty much have 2 artists but they both have different styles which is the main problem. 

Photos for the backgrounds have to be taken as well so we are going to try our luck again with hiring a good camera to take em with.