Personal expression in video games: Construct 2 and my first personal game
I love to express myself through art, and for the most part I've been doing that by writing poetry and playing music. I get a great deal of emotional release from both, and find it fascinating to return to these works at a later time. Ever since I started exploring small, personal games, the itch to make some of my own has kept growing. Most of the games I've made date from a time I wasn't yet into personal games, and I'd always write them in a programming language in combination with a graphics library like SDL or SFML, or a game engine like Unity or Godot. It seemed logical that since I'm studying Computer Science, I should use game-making as an opportunity to hone my coding skills. But in my recent attempts, when I specifically wanted to focus on making a personal game, I found that I'd quite soon lose the motivation to see it through. Programming games takes a great amount of time and effort, not just to get the game actually working but also learning how to do thatâthe creative process soon gets lost in overcoming technical obstacles, and it can become seasy to give up on the project, especially if there are many other things in life calling for your attention.
Switching to high-level tools
Luckily, this cycle got broken for me during the last Ludum Dare (#34) in December. It's a quarterly, online-hosted game jam where anyone can participate, either individually or as a team. I'd known about it for a long time but had never participated, and thought it was finally time to take the leap. It wasn't my first game jam, but in the ones I'd participated before I was always part of a team as a programmer, and usually the tool we used was Unity. Other games I'd made on my own were mostly clones of popular classics like Pong, Tetris or Space Invaders, and they were more of an exercise in programming than a specific intent to create something personal and unique. So this time, I was creating a game on my own over the timespan of three days, in which I had total creative freedom, and with the specific intent to create something that was meaningful to me; something that previously, I might have wanted to write a poem about.
Because my previous, somewhat frustrating game-making attempts had been mostly about learning programming and new tools, I now strongly felt the need to try a rapid creation tool. I opted for Construct 2, which is a high-level visual game engine that several friends had recommended to me. It's perfect for quickly making 2D games and prototypes as it saves you a lot of time by abstracting out the technical details.
Even though I knew I wanted to make a game that was meaningful to me, I had no clue what it would be about. Once the theme was released however, âGrowingâ and/or âTwo-button controlsâ, I almost instantly remembered a quote that I've been living by for most of my adolescent years:
âFear is not your enemy. It is a compass pointing to the areas where you need to grow.â
and I knew the game was going to be about that. Fast-forward a few days, and the finished game was Compass. It's a small, atmospheric game in which I tried to embody what the above words mean to me on a personal level, and more specifically, how I've experienced the process of gradually overcoming (mostly social) fears. I could just as well have written a poem about the topic (which I have, actually), but now the result was a digital artifact the player could interact with to excavate the meaning I've given to it and the meaning they'll create from itâthere are no words in the game except for the appearance of the above quote at the end.
To me, Compass feels like a poem in the form of a game (which is one reason I would label it as a 'game poem', 'poem game' or 'poetic game'), as do a great amount of other personal games I've played (Gravitation and Passage being the most notable ones). The way I expect the player to interact with Compass is how I expect someone to read one of my poems: curious about what it is that has been molded into the work at hand, which they may or may not discover and which may or may not be meaningful to them.
The creation process contrasted so much with my previous game-making experiencesâboth in the nature of tasks, speed of progress and the overall enjoyment I got from the process. Choosing to develop in Construct 2 was the best decision I could have made, as it freed up an immense amount of time and energy that was previously spent (or wasted?) by fretting over technical details. This time could now be used for creative exploration, playtesting and polishing. It occurred to me after the jam that if I hadn't used Construct 2, I very well might have ended up with a totally different game. I'll explain this in the next paragraph.
--SPOILER ALERT--
(I kindly invite you to play Compass, it's only takes about 2 minutes!)
My starting point was the quote mentioned earlier, and the basic idea I had at first was to use a static screen with the player positioned in the middle, unable to move, and abstract âfearsâ popping up over the screen. One reason for this was because I wanted to keep the game as simple as possible so I would be able to finish (and polish) it in the short amount of time available. Incorporating the âtwo buttons themeâ, the player could then turn around (like the needle of a compass) with the left/right arrow keys, and by looking at the fears, they would come closer and the player would go through the process of âfacingâ that fear, making it go away as it moved through the player after which the scene would grow brighter and brighter to simulate the clarity, freedom and fresh perspective one gains when not in a hold of fear.
On the second day however, I realized that keeping the player static didn't make much senseâin the majority of cases (unless forced to do something), you have to actively seek out your fears and put yourself in situations where you can undergo the experience that you're afraid of. This was when the game shifted radically; I flipped the tables around and made the fears static but the player able to move. This made more sense, as now the player was more actively involved in seeking out a fear and having to engage with it, which felt like a better reflection of reality to me. From this new perspective, the rest of the game fell into place from there, and I had a lot of opportunity to polish and tweak and explore different atmospheric changes before the final deadline (not to mention exploring Construct 2 itself, as this was the first time I'd made a game in it).
Had I been developing in low-level tools however, I might not have realized that I actually wanted the player to move until the last day, or perhaps not at all, because it would have taken me more time to get the game to a playable state where I could actually explore it and evaluate and redirect my own ideas. And even if I had, there would still have been much less time for polishing and exploring.
Creativity and personal expression in video games
The idea of constant and active exploration and re-evaluation has long since been gaining popularity in game development and software development in generalâbeing able to rapidly prototype mechanics or other aspects of games is considered vital nowadays. This is in the same spirit as other creative processes (think painting, composing, dancing,âŠ), and I also see it happening when I write poetry. Reading and re-reading a work-in-progress poem can be essential in order to evaluate it and have it grow into a finished poem as it gives it a chance to grow organically; to start from a vague idea or feeling or concept and work it out in detail as you go, guided by what feels right. Very rarely do I start a poem knowing exactly how I want it to be in its finished form, unless it's really short and it magically appears on the page and I'm satisfied with this initial bursts of words. Most of the time though, what the poem will become is something I need to discover myself, and this happens during the actual writing process.
What really excites me at this point is that this is now also possible with video gamesâitâs possible as an individual to create a game at a rapid pace without having to dig deep into technical details, which allows for more room for the creativity and exploration. This makes the threshold for creative expression in video games as a medium much lower than before, and allows for individuals to explore new and interesting ways for expression that aren't possible in other media like literature, music and film. The obstacle for me always seemed to have been âit takes so much timeâ, âit takes so much knowledgeâ, âthe progress is just too slowâ, but now that these statements can pretty much be thrown out of the window, there's nothing preventing me from leaping in and making personal games besides actually making the time for it every now and then, knowing I will finish something soon enough and that I won't get lost finding solutions to technical problems.
Luckily there already seems to have been an explosion of individuals with no (or little) programming knowledge making personal games in the past years, which is absolutely fantastic. Exploring what's already out there has been a gradual and slow process for me, and I try to let it happen organically. There's just too much to discover and keep up with. In any case, I'm happy to be a part of it and hope to contribute meaningfully. But above all, I look forward to discover how I can express myself in the medium of video games as I have done before with music and poetry. And that, in essence, is why I'm pulled to video games.