To start week 2 we had a lecture from Jordan Magnuson about game poems. He creates small short form games that serve as a personal expression for him. These games are highly accessible and generally have no rules or limits such as needing to be fun in the commonly associated with videogames way.

Our task for this week was to pair up and make a small game poem based off an emotion, using a metaphor. The person I worked with had an old Ukrainian saying “Don’t run before your father into hell.” It essentially works as a cautionary tale of not rushing too much in life. Our emotion we wanted to invoke in the player was impatience, to give them the feeling of wanting to rush and speed through things then at the end make them reconsider that way of life as the character also does at the end. We want to use long winded walking sections, blockades and dialogue to convey this theme to the player.

The software we are using is Bitsy an 8×8 web browser tool, no coding is needed and it is purely visual. There are constraints to it though, only 3 colours can be used at a time and you are obviously limited to pixel art.

The basic structure we wanted for our game was the player starting in a maze like room that is frustrating to move through as it takes a long time. The next room is a forest where a person gives them a warning using the saying. They then find themselves walking a path blocked by people, this draws on the players frustrating by using a real world scenario being stuck on a street behind people walking slowly. The final room they must go to ends up being hell, this is a very literal interpretation of the saying but it fit what we wanted to say – that moving too quickly through life only ever ends up bad, you need to appreciate the here and now. We also played around with a timed element to put the player into the characters head and why they are rushing, but due to Bitsy’s constraints we settled on a reocurring motif of clocks and time.

We began by designing the avatar. We initially struggled with the pixel art but eventually created a small character with a two frame animation of feet appearing and disapearing giving the impression of walking.

The room design was next as there are only 3 colours per room we created colour palettes.

The next room was a forest, we each created trees to populate the environment. To give an eerie atmosphere we made it autumnal with no leaves on the trees.

My tree ^

Once the trees were made we filled the grid with them and decided that the person giving the warning was an old woman. We gave her a hunched over look with a cane and added dialogue.

To add emphasis to the warning we added a shake effect to the word hell using Bitsy effects. My groupmate designed a gate opening and closing to lead into the next scene.

The finished scene ^

For the busy path, we reused the tree sprites and made a simple path. To do this we made vertical strips, horizontal strips and the four corners for different directions. We then laid the path out on the screen. To populate the path we made 4 different sprites of two children (the same sprite just facing the other direction) and a man and a woman. To convey the playeer characters emotions we added frustrated dialogue that pops up when you bump into the sprites.

The finished scene ^

The final room to design was hell. The colour palette of the clock room was used again to link the two places. When we thought of hell we thought of lava so we each tried designing a lava block using the two frame animation.

My one ^

We filled the grid with these and more clock blocks. The finishing touches to the game were to add “items” that you picked up. These conveyed our theme, in the starting room we put simple dots the player collected that expressed the character’s frustration, then in hell clocks that voiced the character’s regret after rushing through life.

The finished scene ^

Once the game was done we exported it as a html file and put it on Itch.io as it’s easily playable in a web browser.

This is the feedback we recieved after people played our game. The general consensus was that people liked our rushing through time theme and that it made sense to them. Though for the third area some people found it contrasted quite a bit with the rest of the game and they were unsure if it was on purpose or not. Of course it was as we wanted to represent the real world with this area the previous ones being a dream of sorts.

Next Steps –

Our first session for year two simply introduced us to the course and set our expectations regarding the structure of the course. 

Our assessment is in the form of a Game Design Document (GDD). This is a comprehensive document outlining a game’s vision, it focuses on explaining things like core gameplay loops, the players experience and the visuals it is often accompanied with as very rough prototype of gameplay. 

We also presented our summer projects in small groups. The summer project allowed me to understand what a GDD is as I searched for GDD material from Subnautica, the game my presentation was about. This let me see what the rough prototype version of a highly polished game actually looked like.

The last thing we did in the first session was to begin thinking about our major and minor focuses for the year. My major focuses were art and narrative as those are the things I am most comfortable creating. The minor focuses were 3D work and creating puzzles similar to the point and click genre long winded puzzles. They are a keen passion of mine and my favourite types of games to play. To get better at 3D I will devote time to attampting to recreate mechanics in 3D games.  

Later in the week we had a group idea generation session based off images we had found after being given the word “movement” as a jumping off point.  

I worked in a pair with someone and we found this image by Jay Mark Johnson, an experimental photographer who plays around with timeline photography. Somehow both capturing a moment in time and also allowing the viewer to see the movement of the scene.

We were assigned groups and created a joint mind map for the word movement. We then shared the images we had found, explaining what they were and how we found them. We then collated all of the images toegtehr into one giant board and began using post it notes to label them with words we saw. Once we had enough words that were similar we grouped them into themes, then we were instructed to add verbs, nouns and adjectives to those themes. These are building blocks for game ideas.

We then began stringing these words together to form game ideasby thinking what players can do with things with certain qualities. The ideas we had were:

• Stretching through an urban city alone
• Release emotions through dance
• Grow nature
• Fast forward whilst moving through urban cities

The next step was to add structure to these ideas by assigning a goal:

• Finding companionship by contorting through modernity
• win over the entire audience
• Improve nature
• reaching a quiet place by navigating dissociation

We then each chose our favourite ideas and began workshopping what we wanted the player to feel under three categories. I chose the 4th idea and put it through the lens of an autobiographical game, an experience I have had and real world issues.

1 2 3

Image 1 is the idea I chose, in image 2 I was exploring experiences I have had, and image 3 I wrote down real life expereinces that many people have felt before. Whilst doing this excerdie a common theme of anxiety and panic attacks came up this has helped me see a possible core theme I could incorporate into the game for the GDD.

For the last activity of the session we voted on our favourite idea which was the dancing to win over an entire crowd from someone else in our group. She had tied it to someone dancing to calm down an angry crowd. We workshopped a game where you had to pick the correct moves so the audience would turn peaceful, if they chose the wrong moves the crowd would turn red and shout things at the player. This was helpful as it got me back into a designing games mindset, constantly thinking how to engage the player and create meaningful gameplay.

Next Steps –

After this week and choosing my major and minor focuses I will make a plan to ensure I work on them appropriately.