This weekend was the Nordic Game Jam 2012. I was a volunteer this year, so I chose to hang back and help out the organisers instead of participating. My shifts had been arranged to give me time to participate in the jam as well, however, which left me with plenty of time to check out what everybody was doing and take a bunch of photos. Most of them came out a blurry mess due to poor lighting and my lack of familiarity with the 50mm lens I was using, but here are the shots that came out good.
It was a fairly empty feeling to leave the game jam without a game to show for it, but I made a couple of great new friends/contacts, and I’m particularly proud that I managed to flag down the keynote speaker Manveer Heir, senior designer on Mass Effect 3, to interrogate him about BioWare and their hiring practices. If only the bottom line weren’t that I shouldn’t expect to get a job there until I have 5-6 years of industry experience…
My favourite games produced at the jam (that I’ve seen) are Mein Panzer (which I kicked everybody’s asses in at the after party) and Infinite SWAT (which was developed by – among others – Jan Willem Nijman and Rami Ismail of Vlambeer, the Super Crate Box guys). If nothing else, you owe it to yourself to watch the hilarious trailer for Mein Panzer.
I picked up Star Wars: The Old Republic on December 20 when the servers went live to non-preorders. This is only my third MMOG ever, the other two being World of Warcraft (of course) and Guild Wars. The only way I really enjoy MMOGs typically is to play them with a friend as though it were a two-player co-op game, which hinges on neither of us playing without the other person so as not to create a level gap between our characters. This time I made arrangements to play with Burrie.
If one wishes to play The Old Republic with a friend all the way from the beginning, the players must choose one of the pairs of classes that start together. Jedi Knights and Consulars start on the same planet, as do Sith Warriors and Inquisitors. Smugglers and Troopers start on the same planet, and Imperial Agents and Bounty Hunters do so too. As I wanted to play either a Smuggler or an Imperial Agent because of the simplistic cover system these classes have to spice up the otherwise mostly ripped-off World of Warcraft gameplay, and Burrie wanted to play on the Imperial side with me, we went with an Imperial Agent/Bounty Hunter combo.
As my graduation gift to myself, I decided to get a new lens for my camera. Being a game designer, I’m all about balance. The lens of my life is a Nikkor 18-200mm zoom lens which has such a wide range that I can bring it anywhere I go and rest assured it’s the only lens I’ll really need. The problem with the zoom lens is that because it covers such a wide range, it’s pretty slow – if I want to take pictures with it in-doors without using flash and/or a tripod, it always feels like I have to kind of beat it into submission. Since I didn’t really feel like I needed a macro lens, it seemed like the best lens to complement my zoom lens would be a nice, fast prime lens.
After taking in advice from a few people, I ended up buying a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G prime lens. With it, I can take pictures like these:
- A study of how space affects player perception of movement in games.
Abstract
The design of the game space is a major factor in shaping the player’s movement patterns and the player’s perception of movement (kinesthesia) in computer- and videogames, but very little research has been done into which aspects of the game world affect movement in what ways. Understanding the specifics of how space shapes movement is important in designing varied game worlds that affect the play experience in particular ways. This thesis analyses how different spatial structures give rise to different movement patterns in games with or without context-sensitive controls. The thesis analyses the dynamics between the game world, the controls, and the rules, and employs methods from user experience research to gather qualitative data about how players experience changes to each of these aspects of a game. The results demonstrate concrete relationships between different types of game space and different movement patterns and explain the player behaviour underlying these relationships, which will be especially valuable to those seeking to design environments for games where movement is a central part of the play experience.
Kinesthesia and Game Spaces is my Master’s thesis from the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s 70 of your regular human pages, which comes in just under 90 magic university pages (2400 characters per page). It was handed in on the 1st of November 2011, three months after the original deadline, and I defended it orally yesterday to the grade of 10, which translates into an A on the American scale or a B on the European scale. Not that the grade matters much to me right now, as I’m frankly just happy to have graduated with the least scientific Cand.Scient. in the country after 18 years of education.
I guess this marks a goodbye to this blog’s “University paper” tag.
I’m almost afraid to write this post. There’s so much to say, and I’m not sure how to organise my thoughts. Moreover it’s difficult to identify my own biases based on my history with the Deus Ex franchise and weed them out of my opinions to form something at least marginally useful. I’ll give it my best shot below, but remember this is not a formal review, this is just my thoughts on the game, written in whatever order they matter most to me.
You may expect intense spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. All sorts of spoilers, both for the narrative and the mechanics of the game. You should not read this unless you’ve finished the game.
Since not long after I got an iPhone, I’ve had an unfulfilled use case in my life for a tablet. Sitting on the couch, lying in bed, or just lounging about somewhere in town waiting for something to happen, a smartphone is an extremely convenient way to access that ultimate time sink, The Internet. In such situations, typing isn’t very important, most of my time is spent reading my Twitter feed, checking Facebook, relentlessly refreshing Reddit, and generally just being embarrassingly Web 2.0. The problem is that a phone screen is so small you have to basically stick it in your face, which cancels out a lot of the convenience of not having a full-sized laptop sitting in your crotch, gently melting your genitals. That iPhone was serving the use case reasonably well, however, so a tablet just wasn’t worth the money.
At the same time, my laptop has been less and less useful as time has passed. At 6 years old, it’s no longer powerful enough to run reasonably modern games, and while a smaller laptop might make up for such shortcomings by adopting a new role as a digital type writer, my laptop with its 17″ screen is just a bit too large and heavy to carry everywhere. I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook instead, to fill that need for a mobile typewriter which is especially prominent right now when I’m finally working full-time on my thesis, but available netbooks just didn’t seem to be worth the price.
But then this little spark of genius appeared unexpectedly:
That’s the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, or the TF101 if you want to make it sound like some secret military detachment. It runs version 3.0 of Android, Honeycomb, and the magic trick that makes it worth its price where ordinary netbooks or tablets aren’t, is that it’s both.
I have found the nature. Norway has it. They have all of the nature.
That must be why we don’t have any in Denmark.
This weekend I flew to Oslo, rented a car with three of my class mates, and drove into the mountains to chill in a cottage with some board games and go for walks through the amazing landscape. With two days of travelling (Thursday for getting there and Sunday for getting back) and two days at the cottage, the cost/benefit of the trip in terms of my motion sickness was not brilliant, but the guys were remarkably accommodating and patient. Even with the sky overcast and the rain pouring down half the time, the spectacular Norwegian nature just about made up for the suffering.
The weather was all right on Friday, so that’s when most of my photos were taken. Saturday started out grey and quickly became very wet indeed, but we hiked undeterred (though drenched) up to a nearby mountain and back again in spite of it. I have no regrets. By the time we were leaving again on Sunday, the valley was partially flooded and we had to go off the highway and up through the mountains instead, where the roads are crooked and full of holes.
Yesterday I handed in a 20-page paper on the topic of emergence vs. progression. I wrote the paper in April to get it out of the way so I could concentrate on my Master’s thesis, then proceeded to do fuck-all on the thesis for the entire month of May because I’m an idiot. The project was focused on the production of Archive X, which was meant to be an arcade-action game but turned out to be a puzzle game instead. In relation to the point of my paper, the game is quite a failure, but in and of itself it’s a pretty decent, if very short, puzzle game.
You might wonder how I could manage to work on two different Unity-based university games (Archive X and Broken Dimensions) at the same time. The answer is that I could not, and I did almost no real work on Archive X other than writing the original pitch document and putting the level geometry together in 3D Studio Max (a painful process which required me to first learn how to use 3D Studio Max). Most of the credit for the game should go to my class mate and programmer Isaac Dart (who is also not responsible for its failure to be properly emergent) and the rest is due to his partner in crime Juan Ortega and our artist Veselin Stoilov. They did most of the work while Ali and I were occupied with Broken Dimensions.
If you’re in the mood for a quick little puzzle game based on a very clever physics/chemistry simulation, feel free to download Archive X (111 MB). If you’re interested in the project and how it was used in my academic work, by all means grab the paper, Designing Emergent Gameplay (7 MB). I actually quite like it, it’s probably the first truly academic paper I’ve written at the IT University.
The exam is scheduled for June 16, and it’ll be my last exam before I defend my thesis.
Broken Dimensions is my graduation game from DADIU, the Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. Ours was the last class to make two full game productions as part of the programme (last year I worked on Imachination) – starting this fall, DADIU will become a one-semester programme involving a curriculum and a small prototype-style project in addition to one big game production. Time will tell if that produces better games or not, but it certainly will fit better into the curriculum of IT University students. I didn’t get any ECTS credit for this production, but I’m using it in my MSc thesis, so at least it’ll get me a modest scope reduction there.
Broken Dimensions is a puzzle-adventure game. I could also call it a puzzle-platformer, but then you immediately think of side-scrollers about jumping accurately, and Broken Dimensions is more about… falling with style. I could also call it a horror game, but it’s more creepy-freaky than horrific. Puzzle-adventure it is.
I’m not particularly a fan of challenge in games. I’ve never had a high tolerance for playing the same sections over and over again until they’re finally grokked, and that tolerance has only lowered as I’ve played more games. I’m currently at a stage in my life when I have enough time and money to play all the games I’m interested in playing, both out of personal taste and professional interest, but because I’m squeezing as many games as possible into the free time I have, I still don’t want to “waste” any of that time, and replaying difficult sections over and over certainly feels like a waste.
Obviously there’s a difference between my personal tastes and my professional design paradigms, and I’m fully aware that a lot of players love a solid challenge and get a kick out of finally pushing past a nearly impossible part of a game. That’s what difficulty settings are for. It’s just that I generally play on Easy, or Normal if I’m playing a type of game where I’m pretty confident in my own skills or which is pretty clearly targeted for a mainstream audience.
Narcissism Inc. is the mostly game-related blog of Jonas Wæver, Creative Director of independent game development studio Logic Artists and recent MSc graduate from the Game Design programme at the IT University of Copenhagen. Curriculum Vitae (PDF). Portfolio.
