The Last 3 Fragments

Though I've been lacking in time to post any kind of Journal update related to the advancement of my project, i've been advancing fairly well, and i'm going to be posting my updates in the coming weeks. In the meantime though, i will be presenting the remainder of my fragments here:

Artistic Singularity

"All that remains are ‘just the individual styles and the lives of the artists as a plural biography’. At the same time, this amounts to artistic liberation: artists no longer have to contribute to any overarching art historical mission. In particular, they no longer have to contribute to the project of inquiring art’s essence."

-Regina Wenninger, UNIVERSITY OF GÖTTINGE

http://www.british-aesthetics.org/uploads/wenninger%20FINAL.PDF

In the same way that a designer's art is represented through the stimulation of the senses and arousal of the emotions of the people playing the game, the Game Designer is required to show their individuality through their work through signature design techniques, or through signature design styles. Supported by the above quote, Designers are not tied down by rules or guidelines, such as an absolute Template that would need to be followed, or an absolute style, or a preconceived group of categories of design. What they do follow though, while maintaining a certain freedom of individuality, is a set of principles, which allows them to succeed at making a product worthy of the term (art). Of course though, as technology advances, and as new platforms emerge, Game designers are presented with an ever growing number of ways that they can have their signature on their work!

Commercial Art vs. Traditional Art

"Sure, it’s nice ego-balm in the event your screenplay does not sell to be able to say “This town just doesn’t care about art,” and it makes it a lot easier to dismiss any studio notes you don’t like as knee-jerk Philistinism in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, but the fact is:

If you write a screenplay and want someone to buy it, you are hoping it will be commercial — and the more commercial, the better.

If it does sell, then it is commercial.

If doesn’t sell, then it’s non-commercial.

If a movie is made, and people pay to see it, then it’s commercial.

If it is, and they don’t, then it’s not.

And none of that has any bearing on whether or not it’s “art.”

-  Ted Elliott

http://artfulwriter.com/?p=41

I actually think that this Fragment speaks for itself, and the artist has made a very valid point in the case that people are always comparing Commercial Art and Traditional Art, when in fact, they are both alike and the same. All art can be commercial, but we cannot label a specific kind of art as "commercial art".

Video Games are one of the unfortunate victims of this "classification" of art. Because the end goal of a majority of video games is to sell and make money for the creators who spent their time making these works, they are classified as Commercial, and are therefor not considered art.

As i've stated in my previous statements, this is unbelievably FALSE! I don't think i need to go over the reasons again though.

The Technique


"Games have a central goal in their design: to keep people playing. Games use a variety of interactive and immersive techniques to create a play space, techniques that are useful to designers of more work-oriented or transaction-based interactions. These other interactive spaces, in fact, have the exact opposite goal: to reduce the time users spend on the task or interaction."

-Dominic La Cava and Kellie Rae Carter

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-3

This is where things get interesting in the realm of Game Design, because there is no actual predefined "How-to" or "template" that one should follow in order to do their game design. There ARE a large number of tools and techniques in the form of a whole lot of documentation, that a Game Designer can use, but each Designer will interpret the information differently, and the way that each designer does this interpreting is what makes each piece of art different! Of course, as previously stated, when I refer to art, i'm referring to Game Design at Art.

Fragment - Artistic Representation

The 4 fragments required of us for our thesis are the following

• Artistic Singularity
• Artistic Representation
• The Technique/The Art
• Commercial Art vs. Contemporary Art

The first of the four that i would like to go over is that of Artistic Representation. Being a game designer and working alone in my project (along with Tiago Fernando, a programmer from Brazil,) i have a certain lack of REAL talent for the artistic aspects of my project, but i have found a style that i believe will serve it's purpose in bringing out my Game Design, and my mechanics. I'll Explain further.

First, i would like to present my Fragment for this part of the project:

"The structures that comprise an instance of a videogame are various kinds of graphical, aural, textual, and even tactile representations on a display device, because it is these things that a playing has the role of rendering from the game’s algorithm. Furthermore, given that these representations are almost always of fictional events, in depicting situations with an imagined existence only, we might in a Waltonian sense say that the structure that is being determined by the interactor’s choices is a perceptually modal “prop” that depicts a fictional world (Walton, 1990: 21). Hence, videogames may be “interactive fictions” in a theoretically robust sense (Tavinor, 2005)"

- http://aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=44

Essentially, that which engages the player through visuals, sound, and touch can be considered art in the same way a movie, or a painting could be. It is not art in it's traditional sense, but Game Design is represented through how the player will interact and engage with the Product, and a Game designer's job is to try and convey specific feelings and reactions in the player with engaging, attractive, fun mechanics, the same way an environment artist would with a beautiful landscape, but the Game Designer must (most of the time) do so without the visual aid and without the help of sound. A Game Designer who has set out to make the players of their game get excited trying to do manage 3 or 4 things at once, and ends up getting the desired effect is an artist in his own right.

What I set out to do with my artistic choices is to employ a minimalist style visually, so that a person playing my game is more engaged in the mechanics and the gameplay than they are with the mind-blowing visuals, and incredible sound. I made this choice so that the visuals do not take away from the mechanics, but also so that their simplicity (hopefully) doesn't make the player want more to look at. Obviously, a player will also only be engaged into a game that they find visually stimulating at the very minimum, so i decided to employ brighter flatter colors into the gameplay so that the game would still be visually attractive (if screenshots were to be seen on the app store for example). I also chose a simpler route visually, to really emphasize that the simplicity of my game is spread throughout every aspect (from the controls, to the other mechanics, to any other aspect).

Here are some examples of how I am currently employing my visual aspects (actual ipad screenshots):

These are evidently all screenshots of a WIP visual representation of my project. They are in no way final, but serve to show the simplicity of the graphics and visuals.

Let the Journal Begin - INTRO

So here i am. In my final Thesis project in my Bachelor's Degree in 3D Animation and Graphic Design at Centre NAD. I have a come a long way to get to this point in my specialty, and I finally get to show people what I can do.

So here we go.

As a Game Designer, I've been watching the trend of the industry for the last three years at NAD and I've made note of the fact that there's been a HUGE boom in the domain of mobile gaming. The funny thing is that people at my school (mostly the teachers) are slightly skeptical when the subject of mobile games comes up.

Not necessarily for the reasons people might assume (you don't need as much talent, etc...) but I believe that it's more due to the fact that here in Montreal, we have what many could very easily call one of the biggest hubs  in the video game industry. With massive companies being here in Montreal (Eidos, Ubisoft, EA, THQ, Square Enix, Warner Brothers, and so many more) and the quality of the games that come out of Montreal's studios (the entire Assassin's Creed series, Deus Ex, etc...), Centre NAD is known as the leading producer of Montreal's HUGE talent in the 3D arts domain, having trained some of the best modelers and animators ever to  come off of the island, but their reputation for Game Designers isn't as known.

So... What to do with me? A Game Designer, who wants to do his Thesis project for iPad (even more unorthodox than normal!), when Centre NAD has always been about the high quality, incredible graphics and about the AAA.  A lot of people might think that it could hurt my credibility when it comes to my opportunities to work on AAA projects (which is where the money is, most of the time) if my "flagship" piece is on a mobile device.

I prefer to take this as a challenge though, and this is why:

Mobile games are fairly touchy because they're accessible to a much broader base of users than the average AAA console game, mostly due to the fact that they're really really cheap and a majority of them cost something like 0.99$. This broadened user base also means that a mobile game is THAT much more open to criticism than the average game, and will be scrutinized by THAT many more people, so for a Game Designer, having SOLID game mechanics are key and are PRIORITY #1! More so than they would be in a AAA game (in my opinion, of course), because though a mobile game will be targeting a basic target audience, a game designer will also want to try to make pleasing mechanics for ALL users, including the ones who fall in the extremes, out of the target audience (example, the 80 year old woman), while maintaining a simplicity in the mechanics *breathes*. Essentially, it makes things a tad more challenging to design mechanics for a mobile game (again, in my opinion.)

But i digress; What I intend to do is to simplify the RPG to a practically bare minimum and make it fun, simple, and intuitive for everyone to play. I'll be doing a recap of the steps I've taken so far, in blocks (per mechanic), to show the progress I've made over the last couple of months.

i'll also include the 4 subject I've been told i'll have to cover over the coming weeks, and somehow find a way to convey an artistic view into Game Design.

Thanks for reading!