CATMITTS'S PROFILE

Search

Filter

new to this..

Greetings. Greetings. I am 'Mickey Mouse'. Welcome to the forums. I "ho ho ho"-pe you have a good time making games and playing games here on rpgmaker.net. Ha ha ha, just a little joke from your friend, 'Mickey'. Welcome to the forums.

Theater and illusion in games

O Fair Enuff

While we're on the subject of analogues between lowbudget plays and nilbudget games: I've been to a few plays that just used a small number of props, lighting, and dialogue cues to suggest actions and locations without bothering with things like scene backdrops or elaborate stage design. Sometimes it's awkward but it can work susprisingly well: a stepladder becomes an enormous mountain, a fake window hug on a backdrop becomes a house or a street at night, some sound effects and a chair become a car ride. There's an initial moment of adjustment when you're watching and then you take it in your stride. It's not so much that you're deliberately imagining these things to be something else as that you're recognising them as symbols for larger structural elements. I guess the immediate analogue here would be in stuff like early Commodore 64 games and so on, where a careful deployment of sprites against a featureless black background could suggest anything from a cabin or a church to a solar system or the bottom of the sea. Sometimes this felt jarring, especially since the sprites used could be weirdly ambiguous, but at best I think it could be more effective than some of the huge hi-res environments in something like recent Final Fantasy games just because since you had to decipher them for what they represented you automatically felt more connected to them than you would if you were just staring at a prerendered mountain. They became evocative through their abstract nature, while sometimes more detailed stuff leaves no room for the imagination.
Cactus's game "Life/Death/Island" plays around with this a lil bit and I thought it worked really well:




Basically I guess that nowadays even indie devs don't have to worry as much about brevity in graphics but it's always interesting to see people manage to suggest a lot with just a little, and how a few carefully chosen tiles can suggest an entire world with little effort while the sense of place generated by detailed ripped graphics etc can fall apart at the first misplaced tile.

Uh? Do you guys listen to music?

author=tardis
this is my favourite type of music in the whole world. the whole english-people-on-holiday-down-by-the-seaside vibe. i wish i could find my favourite version of this tune (as performed by Graham Dalby and the Gramophones) but it appears to not exist on the internet. after i run by the bank and put some money on my debit card, i'll be sending for a CD that the right version is on all the way from the UK. £19 and a month of waiting for it to slowly make its way through two countries' postal services? worth it.

good lord i'm pretentious

yeah i have been hella rocking the Singing Detective / Pennies From Heaven tv show soundtracks lately which are good sources for this kind of weirdly melancholy old 20s/30s pop music (theyre really good shows too! you should watch them if you like this stuff) and i like it a lot!




also here is an old favourite (complete with whistling solo! the best solo). i actually got the idea for biggles on mars listening to this song but could never find a good place to work it into the actual game :(

Theater and illusion in games

what about brechtian epic theatre though, where the entire point is to distance the audience from whats going on through exposure of artificial mechanisms so that they take a critical attitude to what's happening rather than just passively absorb experience like a sponge.....

Seriously, thinking about games in terms of overall coherency in theme/structure/aesthetics is probably important but I do wish that any kind of "breaking the spell" weren't automatically treated as a bad thing. One of the things I liked most about stuff like Earthbound and Mother 3 were the ways they were both very suspicious of the kind of "immersive" game design that can easily tip over into addiction and manipulation. In Earthbound your dad phoned you up if you played for long stretches continuously to tell you to spend a while away from the game. Mother 3 rendered generic RPG mechanics like save points and healing spots in ridiculous and arbitrary ways and also used things like sudden shifts between playable characters and points where you had to enter your reallife name: I'm fairly sure the point here was to make people aware that it was a game, that instead of being immersed into a particular role you stayed at a certain distance which allowed you to enjoy and appreciate what was happening in a broader context. I think it's particularly telling that the final battle of Earthbound can only be won by essentially opting out of the usual battle mechanics in favour of a blatantly artificial deus ex machina mechanic. It's also interesting how both games embraced stuff like DATA INPUT SYSTEMS and MENU SYSTEMS and all the other ways in which games have traditionally broken immersion in order to focus on the larger structural context.

One of the things I like most about games is this kind of playful abstraction, the way that you're encouraged not to experience them as an unbroken flow but to step outside this flow and think critically about whats happening: can I make this jump, do I have enough items for this boss, what's involved in this puzzle, is there another route through the dungeon, and also how all this information is represented and processed. The way that RPGs play around with strange formalist representations of experience where battles and such are determined by blatantly artificial statistics like STR and DEF, weird items and commands used for interacting with the world. I think this is where another analogue for the theatre could come in: the "suspension of disbelief" among the audience isn't something which has been grudgingly extorted from them, it's a gesture of good faith which says that the audience is prepared to meet you halfway and honestly listen to what you have to say. It's a willing collaboration between both parties. Treating the audience for anything you have to make - a game, a play, a book, a movie - as imbeciles who need to be tricked and prodded into enjoying your carefully planned experience is not only pretty arrogant but also a renunciation of the good faith and respect for the audience which is necessary for anything to be worthwhile art rather than carnival hucksterism. I don't think it's an accident that most of the AAA games and movies that seem to take this attitude tend to be completely devoid of any imagination and even fun, preferring to force the player/audience down predetermined corridors while painstakingly explaining the boring plot and why she should care than actually allowing them to explore the work and have an honest reaction to it. I've seen good plays that were performed by untrained community theatre amateurs against pasteboard backdrops and still managed to engage an audience who were willing to overlook the flaws to hear what those involved were trying to say. This strikes me as a much better model for making and playing games than an attitude of mutual contempt.

pixothello

The white grid in the topleft is the set of 16x16 squares you draw on; zoom in with the mouse scroller (this part takes a bit of trial and error though). Each square corresponds to one of the tiles on the larger grid to the right, which is sort of like the SOURCE GRID where all the tiles are stored. This is what gets exported in .bmp form at the end. If you drag your pencil tool around the first grid you should see some of the ones on the right turn white, which means that since they've been drawn on they'll be part of the exported image at the end.

So basically you just draw in the squares in the 4x4 white grid, then you can tile them and so on by using the Tile Placer tool in the toolbox or by selecting them from the master grid thing on the righthandside.

I'm making it sound harder than it is but it's easy enough to get the hang of if you just start dicking around with the tileplacer tool and stuff!

pixothello

Hey, what a scoop. A cool guy named "teknogames" has released a free tileset tool called Pixothello: http://teknopants.com/pixothello/. It is still being tinkered with but it gives an easy way of seeing how well tiles loop and interact with each other, and all the tiles are by default 16x16 which is the size of each tile on an RM2k3 chipset. Pixothello is very fun to use... I have been using it merely 10 minutes and already I am having fun, making tiles...




Even a dumb guy like me can have fun using Pixothello... Anyone interested in custom art or just having fun at a computer should certainly check out Pixothello... You'd be a fool, not to check out Pixothello...

If you try this program, then you might fine yourself spontaneously approaching strangers to say

"Hey, there is this neat program called Pixothello..."

Who knows what you may achieve, with Pixothello...

Valedictory Game Drive

also i can make the dog urinate via particle systems when you hold a button down. this is surefire contender for "best cbs" misao

Valedictory Game Drive

1. i didnt have a project until this got rebooted

2. i wrote a physics script that can make a dog accelerate and take off like a tiny plane and am disproportionately pumped about this. also learned lots of unity stuff.

3. add more dogphysick

Whatchu Workin' On? Tell us!



G E M S . . .

Valedictory Game Drive

no it was a what the heck as in i should do this anyway! ya... ya did good kid *gruff snake plissken voice*