Narrative architecture and Transmedia Storytelling

Last Wednesday us seniors had another Capstone workshop this time it was about narrative architecture and transmedia storytelling.
There was a big duscussion about these two trends so i am going to start with narrative architecture. We discussed two types of narrative: linear vs. spatial exploration.

Linear narrative is where the player travels through the world with a pre conceived story line, tis is the more traditional approach to narrative. Player starts at point A and goes through the game until he reaches point B at the end of the game.

spatial exploration refers to the fact that even though there might be a pre conceived story line player stills has a choice and can create their own story by navigating through the environment . A great example of this is Bethesda's Elder scrolls saga, i will use their latest iteration Skyrim as an example. In skyrim the player gets to start out by making their character in any way they want, they also get to choose what their play style will be. To this end the player may choose to stray away from the main storyline and explore caves, join guilds, and collect items thus creating their own narrative through "spatial exploration"

I believe that games nowadays are straying away from the more linear paths and they are giving the player more choices than ever before. Games such as Deus Ex were revolutionary for the amount of player choice involved, with each different choice leading down different paths that for better or for worse ended up defining the main character by the end of the game.
The thing is that this is not a new definition of narrative at all, a narrative is essentially the construction of a world to be explored and just like in real life no one has a pre conceived path that they must follow. This idea is great to be experienced in a game because it allows the player to be anything and everyone, the player  can make both moral and immoral choices which they would never make in real life. The key is in the amount of options, nobody likes to feel constrained to follow one path and this is where games are shining in this later generations.

The next topic we talked about was transmedia storytelling. This refers to an expansive multi-platform, narrative experience- a story world. We have seen examples of this in the Halo, Mass Effect, and Star Wars universes. Where they start out as a game or movie and get expanded in the form of books, comic books, other games, movies, or events.
This is all part of a cultural shift in the way people use media, they call it "media convergence".
I took some notes from the presentation, one passage that stuck to me in particular was this "Cross media storytelling doesn't provide an expansion of the created realm but an adaptation of the same story across several different kinds of media." A good example of this was the walking dead series. If anybody has seen the show or read the comments they will instantly recognize most of the characters however the show and the comic don't transpire at the same rate or in the same path thus not "providing an expansion" but using the story as a base and providing an adaptation of it for the masses. This is genius because people that are not into comics can still experience the world of the walking dead through TV albeit not the same story the world is still very much the same and both types of media do a great job of immersing the viewer into it.

In conclusion transmedia storytelling is " a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience." Even tough the games end the worlds live on in the form of different media which adds credibility and richness to this world which hold so much and can be explored in so many different ways.

Nearing the end

The semester is coming to an end and even though Full Metal Tactics didn't make it through to next semester i am very proud of the progress that we made this semester. We started out with a bunch of ideas and learned a lot about our game, the way we work together as a group and ultimately about the kind of people we are as individuals and team members.  

So i realized that i have been bumming a little since we found out that FMT wasn't going forward which is why i haven't really looked at my blog, for those of you who follow it (if anyone does at all lol) that i have neglected you but here i am once again and i wanted to show off the final progress that i made the weeks before FMT got cut.

Lets start with the main character because i finally came up with it. I wanted the Mechs to feel like mechs in terms of  scope and grandeur but also the challenge was to make these mechs look organic. I started out looking at plants and animals for reference, i was going to go in the direction of plants however i wasn't convinced and i don't think the rest of the team was convinced with the direction that professor Crispel and Pile were proposing. Instead i went back and looked at the human body, i wanted to give the mechs a fleshlike feeling but keep it mechanical at the same time. First thing that came to mind were the Geth from the Mass Effect universe. In the lore the Geth are biomechanical robots created by an alien race that eventually evolved their AI into a consciousness. Art wise they have mechanical parts but the arms and legs are much more organic. This got me thinking and i ended up looking at the anatomy of the human muscles, i thought to myself "why not make this mechs have musculature encased in metallic parts?" So i got to work i looked at references from games such as Crysis, Mass Effect, and Deus Ex human revolution because they all dealt with organic looking suits, robots, and augmentations.

What i came up with was this: 

The idea was to make the shoulder pieces part of the shoulder weapon. Each the shoulder weapon would be connected to different armor pieces thus emphasizing customization more and give the player a more distinctive mech.

I also re designed the first batch of weapons i had made to make them look more dangerous and out of control here is a picture of the final weapons, sadly i never got to unveil them to the team or the class as we found out that FMT wasn't going to make it through right after i finished them.

It would have been awesome to see the mechs and different weapons in action and to see what the players would have chosen for their mechs in terms of looks and abilities. Perhaps we will take another look at FMT in the near future...... we can only hope.  Regardless it is time to turn the page to Crisis of the Super Verse the new project i got assigned to, this is going to be a great experience we are now a 10 person group and Ryan Hill got assigned to it to this is going to be a blast. More to come on that so keep reading later installments of the Cuadra Blog!!!!

More assets and some weapons!

Well, it has been a long process but our game is finally coming together. This week we had a great mock presentation of a stage 2 challenge we showed off our process and where we were in terms of art design and programming. the reason why we couldn't do a formal challenge was because we don't have a working digital prototype of the game yet. however the customization menus are up and running ad ryan and Jake are working diligently to create the map so we can show off our mechanics, we are hoping that by the time wednesday comes around we will have a working prototype to finally be able to show off our gameplay and potentially pass stage 2. Art wise the game is coming together quite nicely, this week i concentrated on some more art for the environment, as well as some weapons.


For the environment pieces i created ammo crates to put around the map. I designed this crates to look modular, and the contents are all modular as well so that we can change them around for variety. The ammo crates also have a top which i made for aesthetic purposes more than anything. For the ammo crates i looked at examples of how Deus Ex Human Revolution did their crates and the futuristic look they have to them. I also created a floor pannel that opens and closes, this will be the spawn tile.

I also created some weapons to show off for the demo i made a ballistic assault rifle as well as a revolver. I also made an energy rifle and an energy hand cannon. These weapons can be used to customize the mechs and they each have different in game abilities. I am still missing shoulder weapons both ballistic and energy but they will be implemented before class on wednesday.

Environments inspirations and art assets

This week marked the beginning of production of assets for the game. I decided to start out with the environment because i believe that the setting is just as important as the characters.

I constructed different pieces in a modular way that would stay true to my designs and the art style i had envisioned for the game. I looked at games like portal to see how the artists had handled a Research and Development lab setting as well as the color palette they used, i saw that they had muted colors and the pieces were pretty simple but put together everything worked well to create a nice lab atmosphere. Since our mechs are essentially prototypes being tested in labs by the government i figured portal's art would be helpful. So i had my setting and color palette but i still had to figure out the 2D art style i wanted to go with for this i turned to one of my favorite game series, Metroid.  Metroid Fusion to be exact is a gameboy advanced game but the art style is so well done i was really inspired by the way they use values to show volume as well as surface detail so i used it as a reference to make my panels and other assets for the environment.

During my disciplinary review with Joan Patel i was told that the art was one of the most consistent that she has seen so far out of the people that have come to her. 

Thats always good to hear. I have a couple more pieces to make for the environment and then i will move on to the weapons and the mech. I am really excited that things are taking shape!

Mechs And Presentations

This week i concentrated on researching organics in order to draw inspiration for the mechs. I looked at different plants as well as animals and organic materials that would help me reach a decision on what the mech might look like. I personally and i think the rest of the team agrees with me on this, would like to stick to the idea of mechs that we had started with because. This whole project started since way back in the MOBA game where we decided that mechs would successful protagonists because it would be easy to explain and show how the different weapons could be tailored to fit each mech thus allowing the player to customize their own. In this sense i want to keep the idea of the mechs that i have sketched even before, however id id find some ver interesting things that will help me make these mechs look more organic without losing the style that i am going for.

On another note this week we had to present our game in 15. We only had one speaker and we didn't have that much to show in terms of gameplay because we had just barely passed stage 1 and we have been working with a paper prototype for the Q&A. The presentation was alright sadly it failed to convey our intentions to the people that hadn't heard our presentation challenge for stage 1, namely professor Manley and the other teachers from the other section that were present. For our next presentation we will strongly consider having more than one speaker so that they can take turns relaying information and have time to get their  thoughts and ideas together before they speak so that all the facets of the game can be properly described. another important thing we need ASAP is a digital prototype so we can demonstrate our game properly as well as our customization options.

As an artist I have to not only define the main characters but also keep the art direction for the environment and the GUI in order to challenge stage 2. Next week i will probably put the mech designs to the side and work on the environment which represents a big part of what the game's look and feel is going to be.  

Full Metal Tactics

After looking over our previous ideas and iterating on the paper prototype success we decided to go forth to the class and present our idea of a new turn based strategy party game with customization options for the mechs. In the game each player gets to roll a dice and the dice dictates who goes first each player then gets to move and perform an action. The actions may include defending or attacking depending on how much range is supported by their weapons. The objectives of the games can include capture the flag, conquest, or just plain team death match up to 5 lives. Every time a player dies he has to sit out for 2 turns so players have to work together in teams in order to survive together or stay alive as 2 turns of 2 on 1 could drastically change the flow of battle. We decided that this battles would take place in a lab as these mechs are weapons being tested by the government and piloted by death row inmates which are seen as expendable.

We went ahead and challenged stage 1 with Full Metal as the game we wish to go forward with. We had a successful presentation, except we almost forgot to talk about the gameplay, the most important part of the whole thing. Luckily Amanda brought it to our attention and we were able to go into the gameplay further.

I think we had a successful presentation because we presented the information concisely and as a team, we all spoke and we were confident with our material. We had plenty of concept art and terrain ideas. From an art perspective i got some interesting criticism, it was pointed out that mech games have been done almost as much as zombie games at this point and that i would have to somehow think outside of the game world and come up with something fresh, something new that would set our game apart. People also mentioned the idea of organic, or fresh mechs. I cant think of anyone that has done anything like that so i have been doing some research and i think ive found some good directions n which to take the art, more research is still necessary but plants and organic material are fascinating and if they could somehow be incorporated into the mech theme then that would be a killer duo. I would also need to make the environment fit the same art style which would be challenging.

MOre to come as we move on to challenge stage 2 in the upcoming weeks .

Progress

A lot has changed since the last time i posted about our game.
At first the team decided that all of our ideas were not viable, the MOBA mech game wold be much too art intensive as well as programming intensive. The designers couldn't come up with a solid set of systems to implement on a tactical strategy game that involved moving troops around and making them battle one another, this game also proved challenging in the programming side. We dropped most of our game ideas and decided to go with the Shape shifting game which we called "the Cube Game".

In this game the player would play as a cube, it would be heavy on platforming and finding other cubes to attach itself to. The idea behind attaching this cubes onto the player was that they were "cube friends" that needed to be rescued from the attacking sphere onslaught.

Needless to say i wasn't pleased, we went from all of this awesome ideas to me thinking about creative ways to portray cubes in a game i wasn't really that interested in. But this is a team effort so i set my bad vibes aside and did some research:

Block Game (Name in Progress) Art

For this game I wanted to first and foremost give the cubes a personality. Since the player was going to be controlling this cube I wanted it to be relatable. For the main cube design I looked at games such as Portal which features a companion cube and other games such as edge, and icy purple head (online flash game).

But I also wanted to add a little touch of my own art style so I came up with the idea of making the cube hollow and put a brain with eyes inside it.

I thought this would be appropriate since the gameplay requires a lot of thinking as well as giving the hero cube a personality. Other “friend Cubes” would also be depicted in similar ways, a color change in the filling of the cube or a difference in size of the brain or eyes would set the apart the cubes.

For the environment I looked at games such as Guild Wars 2 in it there is a town called Rata Sum. I found this city interesting because the architecture is made up entirely out of cubes some used in very creative ways.

Consequently I also really liked the color palettes and wanted to use similar colors for the cube city setting.

I wanted to have vibrant colors for the vegetation and neon colors for the cubes themselves. Some of these colors would include, green, blue, yellow, light brown, etc. 

I wanted the setting to portray a village in inhabited by the cubes but it was also supposed to look run down and kind of dirty since they got invaded by the evil spheres.

In the end I didn't feel like this game was balanced in terms of amount of work since it presented a major challenge for both Design and programming but at the end of the day I would be texturing blocks.... I let my team know and they agreed with me in the sense that everyone should be invested in the game on equal amounts, we also agreed that programming would be too much of a risk.

The Verdict was to drop this game idea. 

Saturday was a QA day for our paper prototype of the MOBA Mech game. It was such a success in fact that i thought we should look at our game ideas one more time. 

  

Guest Speakers

This week we got a visit by some very important people in the industry. The lead designer and creative director of the Deus Ex Human Revolution team came from Eidos Montreal and talked to us about what they went through throughout the pre production, production, and eventual shipping of the AAA title.

One thing that stuck with me was how they came with the systems and ideas for the game story line. I really enjoyed their description of how they wrote all of their ideas with sticky notes and and the bigger ideas on bigger paper on the walls until eventually the room told the story of Deus Ex. This is a much different approach than what we are experiencing in our senior team projects in which we use the agile system. In comparison the Deus Ex team approach was much more organic with the downside being that it took more time. The development process in the industry takes a lot of time as they have to think about every facet, every action that the player might or might not take. The speakers reinforced my notion that making a video game is not only hard but also a monumental undertaking which is why the industry is so competitive and why companies hire only the most talented people.

One of the things i was to hear about was how long the project was in the conceptual phase, nothing can really get done until the story, characters, and game mechanics are all fleshed out which took the Deus Ex team quite a while to achieve.

I really enjoyed the speakers' presentation i could tell they had rehearsed it before hand which i am not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing but i thought it was very successful. I think that the main things that i gathered from the presentation were the importance of pre production and how much that shapes a game, this applies to our capstone project because we are exploring many different ideas and we are taking our time to weigh each one and come out with the most viable and fun in the short time we have to develop it.

Week 5

This week has been about brainstorming new ideas for games because we dont want to stick to just one game idea so early in the game. The team was brain storming some more on the idea of the shapeshifting objects but nothing relevant has been decided.
Justin also had ideas to make a relaxation game we look at examples such as Flower a game where the player controls the petals of flowers as they fly through the wind and leads them from flower to flower.
Pretty sweet idea and very unique but alas we could not come out with a solid design or idea to go forth with such an idea.

So far this week i have been doing research for possible weapons for the MOBA game as well as the turn based strategy game which has come back into the picture as another possible game idea.

Back to the MOBA game in a moment of revelation while researching i came across the idea that the game should be set in space, that would take the weight of some animations such as walking; it would allow us to not spend a huge amount of time on the environment as well, we could have an asteroid field as the battle zone and ships as ammo and energy depots as well as some barrels and crates spread around to populate the map, this would also add another level of interactivity to the game as players could attack from above and below. I have not discussed this idea with the team yet but i am hoping them as well as the class will give me some useful pointers to nail this art style down.

Week 4

Another week goes by as we move along the semester. It is now week 4 and we have seen some radical changes to our game idea. The first of which and probably most important of all is Dragon Song. 

I spent a good chunk of time this week researching art styles that would be successful. In class we had discussed how it would be better if the game was 2D instead of 3D because it would be more in scope. So i started doing some research. I came up with a couple of ideas such as a 2D platformer in which the heroine needs to explore the environment by jumping around from spot to spot.

Another art style and probably my favorite was to set the heroine in a dark world Limbo style, color code pieces of the environment that could be used as interactive objects to make music and make the heroine white as she represents hope. Once she started unlocking different parts of the song, color would start coming back to her world  to represent happiness but the color would be washed out and kinda faded because her world would never be the same after dragons ravaged her village.

Sadly after talking it out and assessing the risks we decided that it not viable for the team to go on with this idea since the gameplay is so focused around sounds. Sound presents a problem because there are very few if any sound engineers at champlain and while members of our team are taking sound design classes they are not experienced enough to make the best out of their abilities to make a game in which we need not only music but good quality and engaging sounds. 

The verdict, Dragon Song has ben scrapped form our idea books and we have moved on to new ideas and improving old ones. 

There was talk about a shapeshifting game in which the player would have a certain shape and would use different shape shifts to put it through a hole. Personally i don't know how i feel about this game, i feel like i wouldn't be challenged as an artist as much as our other game ideas. which leads me to my next point.

This week i concentrated more on research than sketches. I really like shows such as Gundam Seed, 00, etc. My favorite childhood mech show has always been Neon Genesis Evangelion, but there are many more such as the red baron and more contemporary ones such as Gurren Lagann. The stories as well as the animations were a huge draw for me but more than anything i like the characters and the robot designs. 

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfxjdfGo4p5GmEmNLitXoWd8e9BMhk4hvtdmCm90PPHbKkkx3PnDfB4_AjdBmB50aw1iKAqSZG5i7-kNBwRPcVRrJzy5F0xvGThysVZvZk3MfN5OFKvMw3KW-JAay3kBUX_ce7Grml3c0d/s1600/gundam00+robots.jpg

http://wiki.evageeks.org/images/a/a4/Eva2-0_evas01-00-02-03.jpg

So for the MOBA Mech ( Wow we really need a name for this thing...) game i am drawing inspiration from these shows. This week i researched different locales in which the game could take place i looked at some of the most futuristic cities in the world right now such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai. As well as some other cities that i believe could work for the setting such as Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bogota, Colombia; Medellin, Colombia; and Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. When i was thinking about cities i thought to myself who has ever used Bogota, Medellin, or Buenos Aires as game settings? these are all cities with amazing architectural designs, skyscrapers and a booming population what better location to have an all out robot war? 

That was it for my research this week more to come on the MOBA Mech (like a name hopefully) and other ideas next week. 

Week 3

This week we discussed some details about the MOBA mech game. We presented to the class a simple interface of how the mech could be customized and how each different part would affect the gameplay. This was well received but the question remained of how it was going to play? to this end Ryan made a paper prototype which involved rolling dice at the beginning of each turn to see who would go first.  This person would then move their "mech" which was customized in the areas of health, ballistic and energy resistance, mobility, and tonnage with the latter determining how many weapons each mech could equip (up to a total of 4) depending on the weight assigned to it. Each player would then get a turn and the objective was to get 5 kills. The game was very successful in my opinion although it does need some refining it was most definitely an enjoyable experience and i cant wait to go forth an make it into an actual virtual game.

We also discussed the issue of dragon song being a open world sandbox style game and it was decided that it would be a 2d game. Now how we are going to represent this 2d style remains to be seen we have some cool ideas but some research will be necessary. As for art this week i concentrated on some art for dragon song, i sketched some ideas for the main heroine as well as other iterations for the logo and some other concepts, in the end i presented a mood shot to the class:

I am starting to get more and more excited as to where this projects are heading as the ideas flow and we refine our concepts further.

Week 2 Work

Capstone- Week 2

This week i did a lot of research of mechs, vehicles and machinery to get some ideas as to what artistic direction i want to take the Mech MOBA idea in. I came up with some good designs and studies, which we presented in class on Wednesday.
The concept art work i presented was received well by my team and class members. I am now doing more research on machinery and mechanic things to get a better feel of what could be inside these giant mechs. I have also started research for our other game idea Dragon Song.

Week 1

This week marked the beginning of the end. I have now started my last year of college and the prospect of the real world is dawning on me. For our senior Capstone project a team of 4 including myself is tasked to create a game, we can take it in any direction we want and it can be about anything, anything at all.

My team consists of a couple of classmates that went to Montreal last semester, Jacob Mott, Justin Ryder and another class member whom i have worked with in class before, Ryan Hill.

Right now the group is discussing roles and ideas that we will flesh out in order to keep going through the stages presented in class.