ido & GLASS 2015 — Trial, Error, Summary, Reflection
Since I fought my demons by submitting the documentation, I will be able to finalize this dev blog by summing up my work on ido, as well as the overall experience in Paris. I don’t know whether that’s necessary or not, but I feel it needs to be done.
My part in ido was setting the visual tone of the game, creating the graphics and throwing in ideas for the game design by planning the juice aspects. I spent the entire first week of the project, which had started on July 6th, studying videos, tutorials and my own ability to learn 3D to contribute to the aesthetic I was aiming for. I scribbled crappy doodles to clarify what I was talking about. Which meant, that for the final production I was left with 2.5 weeks, in which I actually needed to create a whole lot of stuff, which, to make a really long and tedious story short, I didn’t manage. I studied Blender and made two avatars: the first one, its name was Trial, was based off of a prism with an octagonal base, from which I extruded neck, torso, hips and arms, mirroring the entire thing by applying the mirror modifier. I quickly noticed legs and feet to be a pain modeling, but by extruding those from the hips I did the feat and had a slightly humanoid shape.
It looked like this:
Mhm, yeah, I thought the same. I finished the feat by rigging, weight painting and UV mapping it and deciding I needed to do another one, cause this didn’t live up to my ideals (should scratch that word from my vocabulary for good.) Especially since now I knew at least some parts of Blender much better, I felt like I could do the other one quicker and better.
Let me introduce you to the second avatar, Error, that was done entirely using planes, which felt much more organic, drawing like, fluent.
I liked its head, its waist, the feet were horrible in any case, but it was kind of pretty and less clumsy than Trial. Rigging and weight painting were a pleasure, since I kept in mind how joints are supposed to be created and did it accordingly (three (parallel) loops for each joint), working with the mirror modifier and watching it all assemble. I checked the axes of each bone, tried moving it, watched it bend and almost fell in love with it, when I was done.
Then we imported it into UE4. Plugged in the Kinect. And ended up with a yarn ball made of human.
Julian invested two sleepless nights in tweaking the plug in, the rig, everything, slightly improving the outcome, but it was nowhere near presentable. So I offered to mess around with the default avatar, that looked like one of those artists puppets with balls for joints etc. I needed to cut down on the polygons and vertexes and learned how to not do a 3D model by disassembling this train wreck. But it had the rig I needed, so I went to lengths, the last night before presenting the game at Cité des Sciences. A colleague helped my by creating the cave in the background, I chipped in an island that the avatar was supposed to stand on and sadly had to call it a day.
Now you will ask yourself, how I wasn’t able to finish a working avatar in two weeks time or at least do a nice GUI or… something.
Among others, we were supposed to write a blog on our progress, as well as create a scientific poster for the presentation, come up with an idea for the installation e.g. setup of our game exhibition at Cité des Sciences, organize play tests and attend lectures we had throughout the project phase.
And once we were setup and headed towards the final presentation, I had no time to really reflect on what I had been doing the last 2.5 weeks. I was supposed to explain two of my projects (yes, I even showcased SolarRace) in four languages (there were Germans as well as a Romanian family visiting our exhibition), talk about the scientific purpose and educational value of ido, spent time promoting the other games and personal projects of some of the people I got to meet at the CRI. And I got the opportunity to speak to young people interested in making games, handing out my email address and information on what I learned Game Dev to be about.
I know this doesn’t directly relate to what the collaborative project in itself is about and I’m surprised I cannot simply transpose my experience and contribution into a similar context, since everything I did felt related to everything else. And telling children “Dude, you can make your own games! Check out itch.io, Twine, Construct or Game Maker, check out Unity and Blender and use libre software. And don’t believe that only AAA is valid game material. Btw, have you ever heard of game jams?”
Why should we share what we do with others?
Because our games are dead if no one plays them. Because a game is meant to be interacted with. One of my happiest moments so far was watching this bunch of children play SolarRace. It’s the lamest, most buggy game in the entire world (let’s assume so for the sake of drama). But these kids stood in front of the telly and played approximately 2 hours straight. Once their parents worked out I was responsible they came asking me if I knew how to get the detached from it. They had already started teaching other kids to play and had a blast, were laughing and mashed the poor space bar for restarting into unconsciousness. I handed the parents the link to download the game on my itch.io and told them it was for free and omg how happy i was to see their children enjoying it so much. There was a group of four elderly people who came checking out SolarRace and never before had touched a controller. And after some doubt, they enjoyed themselves to no end.
It still fuels me to think, that really chic mothers were moving in front of the Kinect to break the highscore, or fathers joined their kids playing a really terrible racing game. But these were the moments that gave me the feeling, that it doesn’t matter if my art for both games wasn’t great, or I cannot present tons of cool shit, I learned what the art in this medium is all about by watching people play it.
Gaaad, this is so cheesy. But I found it to be true.
So, in the end, what did I do in Paris?
The only souvenirs I brought back are a bunch of project ideas, a couple of dozen really good conversations and discussions I can still draw a lot from, the wish to return for my 5th semester (I might have a project for that in mind). I was able to deepen my understanding of learning, science and art and how everything fits together. And I was intrigued by finding people twice my age that have already been fighting for and believe in the same things I do. If Paris has given me anything, it’s the consciousness of what we can achieve if we deeply understand things and, most of all, ourselves.
Thanks for reading.
PS: The poster is set in Book Antiqua, a beautiful typeface with serifs that I found to be perfect, because typing capitals (surnames, that’s what French LOVE to do) looks really good in it and it is readable and clean.