The Stonewall Inn
Today's Document
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Jimmy Eat World
Show & Tell
EXPECTATIONS
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Fieri Frames
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Kiana Khansmith
Noah Kahan
KIROKAZE
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Origami Around
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@digitalfuturelab
One important thing artists in industry may be asked to do is to seek out reference pictures on-location. Yesterday, our team for Hug the Line (HTL)—our reverse-tower defense game where the goal is to help a bunch of animal and plant-like creatures reach the end of a hostile track—visited the Sarah Simonds Green Conservatory to brainstorm ideas for future HTL creatures.
More good news! Ghostlight Manor has broken into the Top 100 on Steam. This gives us a much higher chance of being picked up for this Greenlight cycle.We still need to keep up momentum (next stop: the Top 50!), but the whole Lab extends a giant THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us this far!
While our GHOSTLIGHT MANOR Steam Greenlight campaign is in full force, we're thinking to the future. Here are some new creature designs by Natalia for HUG THE LINE, which has moved out of its curriculum prorotype phase and is moving into Unity Development—this is the first step of moving HUG THE LINE towards its future as a commercial product.
Likewise, Natalia also came up with a ton of designs for the Litghtbot. Hm...any guesses for why we want so many new and different Lightbot skins?
Wonderful news!
Ghostlight Manor, our monster-themed arcade strategy game, is up on Steam Greenlight! As you might imagine, this is really exciting for our entire team, especially our students. We have 92% of the votes we need to get into the Top 100. This means we have a much better chance of being picked up by the main marketplace!
ID@XBOX, PAX WEST, AND SIX AT PAX
As many of you know, the Digital Future Lab was recently a featured developer at both the ID@Xbox and Seattle Indies Expo PAX Conferences. We also had representatives on the floor at PAX West (which we are about to tell you about!) and PAX Dev (which we can’t tell you about), making connections with other people in the industry.
ID@Xbox started early and went late. With a single play station for each featured indie developer at Microsoft’s campus, GHOSTLIGHT MANOR game demos went fast and we were in good company! We are looking forward to our partnership with ID@Xbox and being part of the vibrant independent gaming community they have created on Xbox and Windows.
PAX Dev is a black box convention—this means that no media coverage, social media posting, or mention of what is discussed at panels is allowed outside (without explicit permission from the panelists), but I can tell you we were there, and I can actually tell you how cool it is that PAX Dev has such a strict no-press policy: it basically means that developers can talk to each other without the extra pressure of needing to be camera-ready, and this is an excellent opportunity for our student interns to communicate with other professionals in their discipline.
PAX West is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the country. Having our staff on the ground, wearing our shirts, gave our students an excellent look at developer-to-consumer outreach. It can also be a bit overwhelming—with bright lights and countless LCD screens with games of all shapes and sizes on display on the show floor. Expect a little interview later this week with some of our first and second time PAX-goers about their experiences!
SIX at PAX was a wonderful, scrappy expo event around PAX that we were honored to attend and show GHOSTLIGHT MANOR at. SIX took place in the basement of a building that was built in the 1920s, and it felt like we were being ushered into a video game speakeasy. They hosted a variety of games from local Seattle indie developers. It’s fantastic to be able to connect with people from all over the country (sometimes all over the world!) at PAX and PAX West, but it’s also great to get in contact with other developers right here in our own neighborhoods.
We are crunching hard on releasing GHOSTLIGHT MANOR soon, but we got a lot of great feedback that week, and were thrilled to be able to either show or evangelize GHOSTLIGHT MANOR to so many wonderful people.
All in all, we had about 12 people working shifts over the six days of PAX! Feel free to keep watching this post in case our staff add additional photos of their experiences.
More exciting news! In addition to our attendance at SIX @ Pax on September 4th, we’re also thrilled to announce that we will also be attending the ID@Xbox pre-PAX Open House at Microsoft’s Redmond campus on September 1st, where we will be showcasing our game Ghostlight Manor.
Ghostlight Manor is a PC/Mac game inspired by classic arcade and strategy games, set in a world inhabited by a menagerie of ghosts, ghouls, and other monsters. Your ultimate goal: the scary manor house at the end of a long and treacherous path. Your enemies: a seemingly endless horde of monsters that don’t want you to reach the end! But there’s good news: accompanying you is your friendly robotic assistant “Lightbot”, who sends monsters scurrying back into the shadows with a variety of special light beams! Traverse this haunted countryside by scaring away wave after wave of spooky antagonists. You won’t want to miss this creature feature!
All of the Digital Future Lab’s games begin life as research prototypes to teach programming fundamentals to beginning computer science students at the University of Washington Bothell, and Ghostlight Manor was the first of these games. When we realized the game had commercial potential, our design team did a deep dive into gameplay and all the ways it could be expanded. Cue an armful of student programmers, designers, composers, artists, project managers, and testers to turn Ghostlight Manor into the fully realized experience it is today.
While this game has been a labor of love (and time...and resources), and the whole team is happy to have the opportunity to bring it to its largest audience ever! Ghostlight Manor is the DFL’s maiden commercial title, and we’re proud to know it will be shown alongside some of the most exciting indie titles in the industry.
Special thanks to Katie Stone-Perez and the rest of the ID@Xbox team!
The ID @ Xbox Party will take place on the Microsoft campus, from 5PM to 9PM. PAX West passes are not required for entry and Microsoft will be providing a complimentary bus service from the Washington State Convention Center to Building 92. We hope to see you there!
Earlier we posted about our moving block designs for the blockbreaking half of "Corrupted”. Our design team is hard at work creating and testing levels just like this one. Here's a glimpse at what gameplay is going to look like!
Here at the DFL, we’re always looking for new twists on the games we make. “Corrupted” is our combined match-three/blockbreaking game. While “Ghostlight Manor” is likely to be the focus of our efforts for the near future, we wanted to show you something, well, really cool that we have for “Corrupted” (specifically the blockbreaking half).
Here’s a teaser for all the exciting things to come, fresh from the design team!
We’re in crunch, so our project manager, Christina, needed a little extra cheer via our Ghostlight Manor party hat prototypes.
Photo 2: You can tell by Christina’s face that she definitely saw this in her risk assessment.
INTERN PROFILE - Ricky Le, Game Designer
Undoubtedly, the most important thing to Ricky is user experience. If you ask him what first brought him to the Lab, he mentions it being one of his earliest draws to our internship opportunities. From there, he found an opportunity to start gaining experience as a game design intern.
"Undoubtedly, my favorite aspect about being a game designer at the DFL is that I get to contribute and shape current projects into having an ideal user experience," Ricky says. "This is due to my experience and perception that many modern video games have been providing lack luster experiences, with many having glaring issues and oversights in regards to the user experience."
Currently, Ricky is designing levels for the block-breaking half of our upcoming game "Corrupted". He's also hard at work balancing and testing "Ghostlight Manor" for our crunch. During meetings, he's always advocating for new players.
For Ricky, the devil is in the details, and he brings this laser-focused insight into everything he does as one of our design minions.
Presentation from the QA team at our big Friday scrum meeting!
One of our goals with "Ghostlight Manor" is clarity and communication. After going through a number of iterations on our Ghostly Demolition and Monster Slayer mechanics, Art Lead Nathan Evers came up with these enhanced sprites for our PC/Mac release.
Now, keep in mind that these are still in development and that they will fade in and out way more slowly when they're implemented, but this short video gives you a good idea of our current direction.
What do you think of the new look for these mechanics? Let us know via replies or reblogs!
THROWBACK THURSDAY
We want to talk about a completed, shelved project from the early days of the DFL. There's no easy way to explain it to new people—but a lot of people on campus still walk up to current or former interns and say, "Hey! Didn't you yell at a unicorn once?" and are still not totally clear about what was going on.
Well, wonder no more! And it's actually pretty exciting. About three years ago, the fledgling Digital Future Lab received a grant from Microsoft Research to run an alternate reality game called "Reality" out of the University of Washington Bothell campus.
For those of you who don't know, alternate reality games are mixed-media scavenger hunts that hinge on participation in analog spaces. "Reality," originally created by grad students at the University of Southern California, was a project intended to be a game that could be picked up and run on any college campus in the country.
While the DFL's role in "Reality" is officially over and we're exclusively focused on our digital games, you can still see our beloved unicorn mask surveying the new office space. We remember "Reality" fondly and generated a lot of useful research data about some of the things that make UWB a neat campus. The project actually ended up highlighting how essential UWB's commuter population and economic demographics are to our identity as a campus.
We also suggest you look into other alternate reality games! They're a pretty cool, very different creative exercise (and may make a neat class project).
Jam session at the DFL! Our sound team wanted to get that extra special sound you can only get with real instruments, and scheduled a recording with our in-house musicians. This is a small sneak peak of Lamiya Kazi and Bryce Villanueva playing their violins for a special string section on a new track!
We’re thrilled to announce that our upcoming Ghostlight Manor game for PC and Mac will be featured at the Seattle Indies Expo event, SIX @ PAX 2016! The Seattle Indies Expo is a celebration of independent games made by local Seattle developers and coincides with PAX West, one of the biggest gaming conventions in the hemisphere.
Those of you who have followed Ghostlight Manor since its early beginnings as a teaching tool are perhaps aware of what it’s taken for our largely student-driven studio to reach this milestone. Ghostlight Manor has benefited from the creative energy and passion of dozens of UW Bothell students, staff, and faculty on the road to this commercial release, and we never would have made it this far without the fans and players who have provided such great feedback during every step of the process.
We would also like to thank the Seattle Indies Expo team of judges for providing detailed feedback on all aspects of the game; we’ve been able to integrate a number of their suggestions into our final release.
If you’re working on your own game, consider submitting it to Seattle Indies Expo next year, and—most importantly!—come visit us at the Seattle Indies Expo between 9am and 6pm on September 4th , Melrose Market Studios, 1352 Minor Ave, Seattle, WA 98101.
Abstract: Design is a discipline filled with Philosopher Kings, holders of arcane knowledge who believe we’re uniquely qualified to dazzle the masses stuck…
A few of you may have been fortunate enough to attend a speech given by our executive director, Jason Pace, at UW Seattle a couple weeks ago. Invited to speak by the Human Centered Design and Engineering Program, Jason spoke critically about the future of best practices in design education as they relate to radical inclusivity and diversity--not just in the context of end users, but in the context of who is designing our environments and shaping our experiences. The provocations in this talk are not only about working within existing structures, but are also about re-framing the contexts in which humans design, which humans are doing the designing, and which humans they are designing for.
Jason begins their talk by establishing that right now, we live, at any moment, in environments that are almost purely designed by other people. Via a handful of devastating case studies, the talk looks at the consequences of design teams, methodologies, and goals being set by one dominant group, and how attempts at mass appeal can go wrong even when the teams in question have good intentions.
They also look at the history of design in the affluent world and examine who has shaped our cultural perception of what designers value, and what factors influence (or perhaps even limit) best practices as designers migrate to designing for a post-screen future.
The meat of the video, ultimately, is an interrogation of current approaches to diverse design and examining possible pitfalls. What does it mean that most of our Design Rockstars are straight, white, cisgender men? What does that mean for future designers? What does that mean for the increasingly augmented spaces diverse bodies inhabit? If current trends continue...maybe the answer to that last question isn't so positive.
But all is not lost! The talk also examines possible solutions to these highly complex issues, and offers a series of questions that both fledgling and senior designers can use to interrogate (and improve) their processes.
Despite furiously marching towards our "Ghostlight Manor" PC and Mac launch later this summer, we're always thinking ahead to our next projects.
Natalia, of our art team, has been tasked with working on future concepts for our game in early development, "Hug the Line" or "HTL". "HTL" is a twist on the classic tower defense game mechanic. Instead of trying to keep our little characters from reaching the end, "HTL" is geared towards trying to help a line of creatures reach the end of a hostile map with the aid of a collection of helpful wizards.
Comment or Reblog and tell us which of these design concepts is your favorite! (Our community manager loves Bard Bee.)