#studio iii

Theodor Kittelsen - Nøkken // Gutt på hvit hest // Nøkken som hvit hest

The nykur dwells in water; at the bottom, down in the depths, he has his lair; from here he often goes onto land and it is not good to meet him.

Sometimes he is like a beautiful little horse which seems to be good and tame, and thus he lures people to draw near to him to pat him and stroke him along the back. But when they come to touch the tail, they become stuck fast to him and then he releases no-one, but he drags them with him to the bottom of the water.

Sometimes he encounters people in human form, as a handsome youth, to lure young women to himself, and promises them joy and gladness in his hall if they want to go along with him. But if they get a suspicion of who he is, when they are giving themselves away, such that they can call him by his true name — nykur — then he loses the power over them and must release them and go along into his waters.

It is said that the nykur can equally well change itself into the form of all quadrupedal animals, except that he does not know how to create the horn-points of a ram or a male lamb on himself.

DID I MENTION

DID I MENTION THAT SOME OF THE CHOICES YOU MAKE IN THE NARRATIVE AFFECT OTHER DECISIONS FURTHER ON IN YOUR LIFE? 

If that wasn’t clear, then here it is in plain and bold. This is for the purposes of making the player reflect back on the decisions they made.

We’ve done some playtesting with the final result of our project, both participants felt the narrative was engaging. Our hole puncher works well, although the paper sometimes gets jammed/doesn’t move along. We will probably increase the time the wheel spins just a little so it doesn’t stick.

Some thoughts on the narrative: 

There is need for more story lines, more opportunities to be not a nice person, or to be an absolute angel. But yes, I’ve mentioned many things that could be fixed in the narrative in previous blogs, and it would be neat to implement. 

The outcome doesn’t sound as beautiful as we wanted it to, but it was the best that could be done in the time we had. This could be a focus for future if we decide to carry on. 

We’ve set up everything how we want it to be for grading/open studio.

What I first noticed was how out of place the monitor is. With such nice looking, hand crafted contraptions right next to it, the monitor just appears too modern and ruins the aesthetic that is going on. However, with the way we have done the narrative, this is unavoidable. 

We also have an issue which Project Majo also faced last semester, where building the narrative into a stand alone game creates issues with the Arduino. In a built mode, the serial communication does not work, which means for us that we have to leave it running through the editor.

My group and I have come up with a general concept of what we want our video game to be about: We had the concept that instead of controlling the protagonist like in so many other games, you are focused on influencing the protagonist’s experiences in the world in order to achieve a certain goal. This could potentially be done through dialogue / NPC interactions & disposition / weather / objects. I’d like the mechanics to create emergent gameplay - creating a systemic game. 

I had an idea for the narrative of the game that suits the mechanical concept we already have. In my idea, the entity the player controls is a ghost. This ghost is a dead person who was close to the protagonist and is now trying to help them out with their problems or something like that. I like this idea because it hits that sort of bittersweeat but still beautiful My team member Samy (@fallensamy) raised the point that the player might not necerssarily be focused on helping the protagonist, instead they could try to negatively influence the player. I guess this is something we can consider better once we have decided what we want the message / greater meaning of our game to be. 

Put Down That Drone // Studio III

I’ve been busy working on my project this week, which has been both frustrating and relieving to finally get started on the construction side of things.

Before I could string up all the puzzle pieces I had to drill two holes in the top of each piece. I am very thankful I had the foresight to draw arrows indicating which direction was up on the back of each piece, otherwise this would have been a long and overly complicated process.

While suspending the puzzle pieces, I initially started out with placing them using measurements. This was slow and painful, and only worked for the first few pieces. I also had to be millimeter perfect with my measurements, and it was easier to just take a few steps back to the point where the perspective worked and judge everything by eye, manually adjusting and lining the pieces up.

Even when I just went to guesstimating with arranging the pieces it still took up to twenty minutes to suspend each piece, with cutting two strings and tying it to the puzzle piece, using blue-tack to hold the piece in place, walking over to the right point and then checking if it lined up, going back and adjusting it (repeat this step fifty million times), and then once it was in the right spot tying off the strings at the top and then checking for a final time that it still lined up. (It wouldn’t, adjust it three more times)

Over time I got better and more efficient at suspending puzzle pieces.I got better at guesstimating the initial placement, I found a better, more secure way to blue-tack the pieces up (Initially the heavier pieces would fall, and I’d have to tie them entirely on a guess and then go back and retire it later.) And faster at adjusting the pieces. Which cut the time down to... ten to fifteen minutes per piece. And I had a hundred and five to do.

There were only a couple of points where working when I was convinced that I was going to fail, that it wouldn’t line up properly or that it’d take too long or something. One was when I’d just started, I was working on the hair, which was comprised of many small, fiddly pieces which were difficult to place and had to be super-duper accurate. This was frustrating as hell, and slowly destroyed my enthusiasm for my work as the sculpture just wasn’t coming together. I ended up skipping those pieces, and went back to fix it later. Working on her arms and chest was much easier, and the sculpture actually started working properly. It was kinda cool, and I was half-surprised that something I’d constructed digitally was actually working in real-life as well.

I used over a hundred and fifty meters of fishing-line in the sculpture, but fortunately I had enough. Buying the fishing line was probably the easiest purchase of my project, the shop had exactly what I was looking for, enough of it, it was relatively cheap, and it was also easy to find.

I started work last Saturday, and after about eight hours I’d only done about twenty pieces. I was a little panicked at that point, but I’ve spent almost every day this week in Studio working on it, and I’d mostly finished suspending all the pieces by this Saturday.

I haven’t suspended all the pieces, some of the littler pieces aren’t necessary and would just take up too much time to do. I’ve only got four more pieces to hang up, and then I’m going to glue the strings in place and get rid of all the excess fishing line. 

I want to write little tidbits of information about her on the back of each piece, a part of her personality, to enforce the idea of how a person is many different fragments and facets and not just one thing, but I don’t want the meaning to be shoved into people’s faces. However, most people wouldn’t be looking that closely at the back of the sculpture, so it would be sort of like an Easter-egg thing, and shows how if you want to get to know somebody you have to spend time around them. I have her thoughts projected on the wall behind her, but this extra part to the sculpture would tie things together better I think. I’ll think more on it before making a decision.

One thing that didn’t really become important until people from class started looking at my work was the different heights that everyone is. While everything lines up perfectly at eye-level for me, other, taller people have to duck. I’ll put a mark on the floor indicating where people should stand, but I like that people move around my sculpture, ‘playing’ with it as they try to find the right spot to make everything line up. 

Narrative done and other things

So I’ve finally completed putting up the narrative into Unity and I believe it is working fine (need to test it out a bit to make sure the options lead to the right places and all that jazz). It’s been a long process with a lot of dealing with if statements and writing up new narrative bits for situations where you don’t have kids or aren’t married etc.

So the other things:

I only just looked at Slack for the first time in who knows how long. Turns out I missed a lot of stuff.  Ben has been talking about our narrative and the other mediums we could use instead of text. One suggestion being photos.  I haven’t thought too much into other mediums as I’ve just been focusing on getting this all done up in time.  In terms of a text narrative, it’s very hard to make a life story where the decisions are very limited to what I write. It’s, as Ben said, very hetero-normative and wouldn’t appeal so much to a wider community. However, for the sake of the project, the narrative is more of a vessel to make you make decisions and direct your imaginary life to make you reflect on those decisions.  Images would be an interesting way to go about it, as the cliche goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Ben linked us some articles in which the pictures paint a powerful story and create such emotion through them. [ 1, 2 ] This might make it feel as though you are in control of another person’s life. I think what we’re trying to aim to do is to make it really personal, as though you are the one in the story and having to make these decisions.  So what other options are there? There would be film, which would be a bit difficult to do a whole life sequence well with. Filming in first person would make it feel quite personal and having real characters could be quite impactful as it would give the illusion of everything being real. Having the story being read out in a with like a soundscape could be an interesting way to go about it too. It would require clear narration and attentive people to follow it well. Pros to this would be being able to convey emotion using sounds and the narration.  What else can we play with? Touch? I’m not too sure how this would turn out. But it could be a fun aspect to play around with.

Put Down That Drone // Studio III

I’ve been working on nailing down exactly what the design will look like for the perspective where the sculpture looks like a person. It’s been developed from the static silhouette, which I thought would contradict my message that people that work in the service industry are more than just the two-dimensional characters that we can often see them as, into a more detailed design. I’m going to make all the puzzle pieces out of wood most likely, probably balsa wood or maybe plywood, but I’m going to use different coloured wood or just stain the wood different colours in order to get the details and shadows. (The colours in the picture are just to demonstrate the idea, I’ve yet to look at what colours are available to me.)    

Studio III

Project Final