Presentation – Dec. 15

The day before Managotchi is due is when we realize how big the game actually is.

Having shot and edited all our images is one thing, stitching them together as movie files with sketch drawings and sound clips in Flash is another.

It’s a long, long night leading up to our Tuesday 9 a.m. presentation, most of the group getting less than three hours of sleep to ensure there are no hiccups.

Quality Assurance at 3 a.m. is pretty thrilling though, once we realize how well the game works. It’s just a slight tweak by Jeff to ensure our “fullness” meter is better balanced, and Managotchi is complete.

And despite the lack of sleep all around, our presentation goes strongly. Our newly branded team (Team Eagle Spirit) engages the class in a call-and-answer round of Managotchi, taking in suggestions for how to care for him. Perhaps most importantly, George Johnson seems impressed.

We wearily high-five one another as the semester comes to a close and head home for some much-needed rest. Managotchi was a heck of a lot of fun to work on, but sleep seems far more thrilling right about now!

Week 7 – Dec. 13

This is our final and arguably most productive week.

The best thing that’s happened in our world is our Building Virtual Worlds projects are now complete and no longer diverting time and attention away from Managotchi, which means all seven of us are 100 per cent committed to seeing our vision through.

And this means a lot of long work days.

We cramp ourselves into the Blue Room, Jeff and Anshul sitting on beanbags in the back, busy programming, Clark sitting at a desk drawing with his Wacom tablet, and Ryan, Nick and Ryleigh shooting, directing and setting up Jordan for every action. It’s a long, tedious process filled with a lot of visits to Subway.

For the shoot, Jordan wears the same clothes for four days in a row, and markers are left throughout the Blue Room to ensure the camera tripod and lights always remain in the same position. There’s an advantage to shooting indoors with artificial lights, we realize, as the environment is much easier to replicate day after day.

By the end of the week, we’ve completed our principal photography, with well over 900 shots of Jordan against a white screen.

Jordan himself begins the arduous process of going through every single shot, determining which ones we’ll be using. Once that list is whittled down to a respectable 200 or so photos, he begins “cleaning” them up – it seems some of the shots have taken on a yellow tint that needs to be manually and individually erased in Photoshop.

Clark, using a Wacom tablet, begins drawing out some of the elements in our items list, while Ryan, using Clark’s backup drawing tablet, begins sketching out all the icons for our buttons. Jeff and Anshul continue to work hard on the programming in Flash, editing their code to allow for a number of new decisions made by the group.

Meanwhile, Nick and Ryleigh sign up for a number of web sites that offer royalty free sound clips (i.e. Freesound.org, Freesfx.co.uk), and start downloading near 100 stock sounds we’ll need for the game, everything from the sound of Managotchi eating salad (crunchy) to him eating baby food (soft, gloopy).

We can see it all coming together, we just know there’s a lot of work ahead.

Week 6 – Dec. 4

This is the final week of delivery for our respective BVW projects, so our group is torn for the time being, able to only meet for two half-hour sessions this week.

But we do manage to locate a rail that will work to hold up our white roll in the back of the hangar, so that’s another big victory.

For a set for our principal photography, we look into the staff boardroom, but make a general decision to go with the Blue Room instead, since it affords us privacy and the ability to shoot undisturbed for multiple days.

Since we’re short on time, we move all the equipment up to the Blue Room in the early part of the week, then set up our rail and screen backdrop later in the week. We play around with lighting, but until we begin shooting and playing around in both Photoshop and Flash, we’re unsure what this game will look like.

Since we’re running short on time (and as broke students, money), we decide to have Clark and Ryan draw all our items, and have them depicted in a minimalist pencil sketch style.

Jeff and Ryan continue to work on a spreadsheet, and send out a second draft for the rest of the group to look over.

Week 5 – Nov. 27

This is a tough week for the group, as our Building Virtual Worlds’ class has us all split into three other groups to deliver three brand-new projects just a week before our Visual Story assignment, i.e. Managotchi, is due.

And so while there is steady progress being made towards crafting our vision of Managotchi, most of our spare time outside class has had to shift towards our respective BVW projects, to complete them in just 18 days.

Since Jeff and Ryan are in the same BVW group, they steadily flesh out a spreadsheet that includes an items list and a food and drink list, as well as their corresponding values. It’s the values that will give our game value (as cheesy as that sounds…)

The rest of the group meets online on Skype at 9 p.m. on Tuesday and 10 p.m. Thursday to help sort out what we’d like Managotchi, the game, to consist of.

We decide that much like Tamagotchi, we want the user/parent to be challenged to keep Managotchi alive, which should involve a limited number of choices of a limited amount of items, each properly weighted against some sort of HUD meters.

We want these meters to include health, his starvation (which we term “fullness” after much discussion), his level of intelligence and his relative overall happiness. What could be great for Managotchi’s happiness (playing video games) may not be great for his intellect, and vice-versa (reading schoolbooks).

We also determine we want Managotchi to have a minimalist white background, and so Ryan and Nick talk to Mark at GNWC to see what the school may have on hand.

Using the school’s green screen in the Hangar would work, but would involve a lot of work in Photoshop, so we as around to see if there’s an easier way.

We discover that a group of C2s working with Tom Wujec has just purchased a white roll to create a seamless background for a video. We also hear that since that video shoot is complete, Wujec has donated the roll to GNWC, which is great news.

We talk to Brian Ford, a member of that group, who checks and clears it for our use. Huge milestone! The only trouble is tracking down some sort of rail to hold it up. Ryan and Nick look more into acquiring one of these so we can begin shooting right away.

At the same time, we also look into where we can actually set up our shoot, without having to worry about intrusion. Possible locations include the boardroom upstairs (by the staff offices), or the Blue Room, near the Sound Lab, which would also be quiet.

We also begin making a list of costumes and items we may have to purchase for Jordan in order to show progression and transformation, and make a general plan to head to a thrift store to purchase them next week.

Week 4 – Nov. 20

Here it is, week four of the project, and we’ve come to some sobering conclusions.

One. We’ve spent so much time learning how to use Unreal Development Kit that we haven’t actually constructed any tangible assets with it. At this point, we don’t feel we have enough time to build all the assets we need for Burst in the time we have left – at least nothing that would resemble the game we envisioned.

Two. If we can’t work with the UDK, we’re not sure we want to keep working on Burst. We feel that the game wouldn’t have the same intended effect, and the last thing we want to do is go full-steam ahead on something we don’t feel passionately about.

And so we make the executive decision to scrap Burst, even though more than half our development time has passed and the concept has been approved.

And so it’s back to the drawing board, with four of seven of our allotted weeks down. A scary thought indeed, but also a strangely liberating one.

With three weeks to build an interactive game from scratch (in the midst of also working on CODE Live projects for our Building Virtual Worlds class), we feel pretty overwhelmed. We start joking around nervously, and someone (we think Ryleigh) comes up with an idea for a game where the user would care for and raise Jordan.

As we joke about it some more, it suddenly doesn’t seem that bad an idea. We think about likening our game to the children’s virtual pet Tamagotchi, and then Ryan comes up with the name, “Managotchi.”

We unanimously love this idea and talk about it some more amongst ourselves. What if we created a turn-based strategy game where the user becomes a parent of said Managotchi, choosing how to care for him? What if in addition to Managotchi’s health bar, we included other aspects, such as happiness and intellect?

We return to talk to George Johnson, unsure how he’ll feel about our radical departure from our previously approved concept. But thankfully, George tells us he really likes the idea, and thinks we can have a lot of fun with it. We tell him our focus will be on strongly developing the character of Managotchi, as well as enforcing his relationship with his parent/user.

Jeff and Ryan begin work on a spreadsheet that includes a list of activities, actions and foods Managotchi could engage in, as well as numeric values for each. We want this to be a strategic game, where the “parent” has to make smart, informed choices if they want Managotchi to live a full, healthy life – but we also want every opportunity for him to have fun.

We spend the remainder of the week fleshing out this list via a couple of sit-down meetings and late-night Skype meetings.

Week 3 – Nov. 13

During the third week on the project, Jeff comes in with a prototype of a game he and Ryleigh have been discussing and are pretty enthusiastic about. It is similar to The Game of Life, a “cellular automaton” devised by Cambridge mathematician John Conway in 1970. Conway’s game is a collection of cells on a grid that live, die or multiply based on a few mathematical rules the user devises.

Jeff’s version also relies on a few simple mathematical rules, which allow for very complicated patterns as the game evolves. It is up to the user to determine their meaning in a social, real-world context.

Jeff talks to George Johnson about his concept, and George is fairly interested, as long as the game can effectively convey a sense of character and story development to the user.

But after Jeff shows his prototype to us, not everyone in the group is enthusiastic about a geometric art game of this sort. After much deliberation, we decide to “razor” the game out of consideration for Jeff to pursue independently, and pursue other ideas.

Clark then pitches a game idea that we all get on board for. It’s a first-person art game incorporating the Unreal Developers Kit (UDK) where the user takes on the role of a bubble in a glass of ice.

The idea is that when the user begins playing, they are not sure what they are or what they should do. As the user, you become aware that you’re attached to these other transparent spheres, and as you move about, you free yourself from them. You can choose to bump bigger spheres and become slightly bigger yourself, or bump smaller spheres and make them disappear.

You can float about this world, and either explore the beauty of the glacial ice cubes around you (which you don’t yet know are ice cubes) or follow the other spheres, which all seem to be heading in one direction. As all this is happening, the “liquid” in this world keeps decreasing.

Soon the user gets to a point where they may choose to follow the other spheres, and head up a narrow passageway. Here, they must knock out other bubbles in a seeming race up to the top.

But at the end, just when you think you’ve “finished” the game, it cuts to an animation of a fat kid drinking coke at a fast food restaurant – and the user gets the message that his life was simply leading to inevitable death, and “racing” through the tube (the rat race) simply got him to that conclusion faster. We wanted to convey the idea of just enjoying life, no matter how quickly the liquid around you is disappearing.

The whole idea is to build this simple art game ironically using one of the best gaming engines at our disposal.

Convinced we have a strong idea, we sit down with George as a group and pitch it to him. George really likes the idea and recommends a few strong changes, and so we spend the rest of the week coming up with art assets and rules for such a game, while our programmers Anshul and Jeff begin looking closer at Unreal and what it can offer us.

At this point, we decide we want to call this game “Burst” – an allusion to both the bubble inevitably bursting, and to it bursting through life.

We all spend the weekend playing and closely looking at the game Whizzle, also created with the UDK. That title seems to have elements of the game we’d like to create, although ours, of course, won’t be as detailed.

Week 2 – November 6

It’s the tail end of the week, and we’ve met twice and discussed a number of different story ideas.

These include both ideas that involve the story of Charon and those that do not.

One involves a shooter game where you play as Charon, guarding your boat and its dead inhabitants from angels coming to pluck them away. But it seems tough to develop characters from this idea, so we decide to drop it.

We also discuss building a game that would work as a sort of anti-Flower, a PS3 Store downloadable title whose simplistic style we enjoy (Anshul and Nick actually finish that game in the GNWC Games Room this week).

While in that game the idea was to bring colour and life to the world, in ours, you would play as Death, walking across a world of colour and turning it to black. But not enough team members are behind the idea, so again we decide to investigate and pursue other ideas.

During this week, we also adopt the idea of working with either the Unreal Engine or with Unity as a skeleton to develop our game on.

We decide unanimously that while a strong class grade is important to us, what is even more important is having a strong portfolio piece that showcases our talents. And considering a number of us wish to work in the gaming industry, we think having experience with either of those programs would be a great asset.

Anshul and Jeff decide to look further into both programs, and both send us links to tutorials for each. Everyone in the group takes the time to look into both programs, and some of us even get trial versions of both programs to determine their ease of use.

Also this week, Ryleigh and Jeff show the rest of the group the art game The Marriage. There is a lot of talk of developing our own “art game” with a lot of seeming simplicity wrapped in a complex structure to allow for a deep meaning.

Jeff begins work on a prototype of such at home.

Week 1 – Oct. 27, 2009

Instructor George Johnson assigns our C3 Cohort its second major project for our Visual Story class, this time allowing us a six-week delivery period.

The assignment, either a game or an interactive film, has us considering using the mythical tale of Charon and his boat traveling down the River Styx, transporting dead souls who may or may not interact with one another. But its main tenants included the following:

“The Specific Challenge for this exercise is developing strong characters.”

The idea was that the more the user explores the game space or environment, a stronger sense of the personality of one or more characters becomes. Also from the assignment instructions:

“The nature of the player should be addressed and made clear within the project.”

George also allows us to create our own groups, much as we had for the project before. Since a number of us had worked on some awe-inspiring projects for the first assignment, we sought each other out once class was over.

In a short few days, our group is complete. It consists of:

Jordan Braun

Ryan Klesc

Jeff Lane

Clark Kim

Anshul Goyal

Ryleigh Kostash

Nick Lewis

Everyone in the group wants to work on a game of some sort, which rules out the idea of us making an interactive film.

Each one of us takes the weekend to read over and understand the assigned project, with the intention of returning on Monday with some ideas for stories we’d like to tackle.

We talk about this being an assignment that had to involve some element of transition, and we thought about loosely interpreting that for some novel ideas.