Semester 2 - Final (Ungraded) Progress Presentation

Posting this super late again but a few weeks ago we had our final ungraded progress presentations.  I've went over the content in previous blogs so I won't bore you with the usual captions I add. However in this presentation I discussed: my colour script and how saturated colours represent danger, the concept of breaking the fourth wall in games and how I'll be applying it to the finale of my own game, gameplay storyboards and how I've been getting across my ideas with the new programmer and finally I showed footage of the latest build and gave some self-critique over it.

Breaking the Fourth Wall and Ritual's Finale

Something I've been really interested in lately is the idea of breaking the fourth wall in games.  I've been trying to come up with ways I can mess with the player during the finale sequence of Ritual and the idea of having the game suddenly glitch out really intrigues me so I've been looking in to the concept of fourth wall breaking in the medium of games more in depth.

Traditionally the fourth wall refers to the imaginary wall between the audience of a theatrical performance and the stage.  To break the fourth wall involves breaking the suspension of disbelief by addressing the audience directly, mentally removing them from the fictional universe they are immersed in. 

In videogames the actual fourth wall is unclear.  Conway (2009) explains “When you play a game, you fulfil the dual role of audience member and performer on stage” – the player is both the viewer and the participant.  Kirkland (2007) agrees with this statement, acknowledging that “Consumer’s presence outside the text is frequently, even perpetually, acknowledged in a manner universal in other popular forms of media”.  For instance, it is often necessary for in-game tutorials to break the fourth wall in some form.   User interfaces are often presented in a non-diagetic or spatial format, on a plane solely for the player/viewer as opposed to the characters of the game world.  

Throughout the years many developers have explored the use of this technique in game design.  The horror genre is “ideal for exploring deconstructions of videogame text” (Kirkland 2007) as the genre excels at subverting conventional game design in support of an often twisted or supernatural narrative.  There are several areas that can be addressed in terms of breaking the fourth wall in videogames.  Firstly, the player character may directly refer to the player.  Examples of this can be found in Silent Hill 3 (Konami 2003) where, should the player choose to make the game’s protagonist Heather look in to a toilet bowl, she will turn to the screen and exclaim “Gross! Who would do something like that anyway?”.  Kirkland describes this as both “comic and chilling” and points out this use of fourth wall breaking is suited to horror as it reminds the player the fate of their character is in their hands.  Another method of breaking the fourth wall involves the game itself displaying self-awareness as a videogame.  For instance during a nightmare sequence in the narrative of Max Payne (Rockstar Games 2002) a note left by his deceased wife reads “You are in a computer game, Max” and in the recent Playable Teaser for Silent Hills the fourth wall is broken directly by having one of the puzzle pieces the player must search for hidden inside one of the menu screens.

Perhaps one of the most interesting uses of fourth wall breaking in horror game text is an example found in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and the use of its sanity metre mechanic.  Should the player let this metre deplete too much a number of intrusive gameplay elements may occur such as blurred on-screen overlays or eerie sound effects.  However one of the most extreme consequences for this involves the manipulation of the user interface, such as the occurrence of false messages stating game controllers are unplugged that all of the information on the player’s memory card is being erased. Taylor (2009) states that “horror games often use the interface to subvert typical play and to challenge conceptions of game interface design”.  This is an especially interesting use of breaking the fourth wall in horror as it questions the relationship between the player and the game and suggests the horror of the game is so real it is not only happening to the player character but to the player themselves.

If implemented efficiently, designers of horror games can make practical use of breaking the fourth wall in their games in order to enhance atmosphere.  Though an element of this breakage is already present to some extent in certain videogames through the presence of UI elements on a separate plane to the game environment, the fourth wall can be broken through the player character addressing the player directly or the suggestion of self-awareness by the videogame itself.   Doing so can create feelings of confusion and paranoia in the player that can only support a horror atmosphere.

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As mentioned in a previous post, saturated colours represent danger in the game so I want the "limbo" area to be a sort of distorted version of the forest area with a very intense colour scheme.  I took a screenshot of the forest and messed about with it in Photoshop:

I really like how the sky turned out in that last one and how the bright cyan contrasts with the lava-like oranges and reds.  However the purples and greens come across as too friendly so I plan on having the foreground and trees appear more dark and sinister.  For the glitch effect I'll take snippets of the environment and add noise and animate segments distorting and place theme around the environment, with the effect growing more intense the further the player progresses, with error messages occasionally popping up in the same way as the ghosts do in the beginning of the game.

Dissertation Update

First draft for my dissertation is done.  The content of my dissertation currently consists of:

1.       Introduction

2.     Contextual Review 

2.1    Art and Stylisation in 2D Games

2.2   The Horror Genre in Videogames

2.2.1     Horror Wrapping Versus Horror Simulation

2.2.2     Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

2.3    Influence of Horror Film on Games 

2.3.1          Camera Angles 

2.3.2          Gore  

2.3.3          Narrative

2.4    Player Point of View in Games 

2.5    Player Agency and Pacing 

2.6    Breaking the Fourth Wall 

2.7    Monster Design 

3.     Methodology

3.1 Research Methods and Findings

         3.1.1 Relevant Literature and Case Study Findings

         3.1.2 Practice Based Research

3.2 The Project Artefact

        3.2.1 User Testing 

        3.2.2 Critical Analysis 

        3.2.3 Future Work

As the minimum word count is 6000 and I'm now over 11, 000 I've had to cut down my dissertation significantly.  I've taken out the Narrative sub-section of Influence of Horror Film on Games as I personally didn't put a lot of emphasis on narrative in my artefact.  My supervisor has also suggested taking out the section on Breaking the Fourth Wall.  This is an area I'm really interested in however it is a rich enough topic that it could be a dissertation in itself and I m already bad enough for rambling in my academic writing! I'm also now no longer carrying out any formal user testing (though I have been getting feedback from players throughout development) as my supervisor has pointed out that self critique should be enough for the methodology section.  On to the second draft!

Ritual Build 11-03-2015

This is the build for "Ritual" as of 11-03-2015.  Excuse the dodgy frame rate, my laptop apparently can't handle screen capture software.

I'm pretty disappointing with it to be quite honest.  I feel like my art hasn't improved at all since first semester and if anything has gotten worse,

Forest area

I got some feedback from a friend who saw a previous build who pointed out the trees are too bright for a horror game.  I've darkened them here but I feel like they create too much contrast now.  Perhaps a sort of dull, greyish purple will work better.  I'll have to experiment.  It also feels a bit too cluttered so I'll play about with removing some assets and see how it feels.  I also still need to tweak one of the tree assets that looks unnaturally straight.

A few people have pointed out the flickering overlay is uncomfortable on the eyes, however these folks have only seen the video with the temperamental frame rate and everyone who has played the game so far has found it appropriate.  However one person who played the game did say the flickering isn't random enough so I'll try work out a way to have it randomly flicker.

Hallway

Obviously quite bare at the moment due to being a work in progress however I feel it would really benefit from some blurred foreground assets in order to give a better sense of enclosure and isolation.  I've also thought about adding a letterbox frame to the game for a similar reason.  Won't be too hard to mock that up to get an idea. The floors are also maybe a bit too bright and should at least be darker nearer the top of the asset to give a better sense of depth.  Perhaps I could add a bit of subtle perspective to the asset itself too.  I also find the doors don't exactly scream "school" so more iteration is required.  Also not sure if that purple colour is really working, seems too "pretty"... May have to rework my colour palette for this area again.

Basement Corridor

I think the flickering works well here and could maybe do with being totally dark at certain points to take more visual information away from the player as they're being chased by the enemy.  Also need to make it more obvious you have to press space at the ends of the corridor to enter and exit.  The neon graffiti should have a glowing animation or something just to give the room a bit more life.  Might be interesting to experiment with tilting the floor at an angle however I'm not sure how this would work via code with the player walking horizontally.  The pipes in the background also seem a bit "stuck on"  will have to create a bunch of other subtle assets to integrate them better.

Ritual Room

Really not happy with this one.  The entire scale just seems a bit off.  I showed the concept art for this to Ryan a couple weeks ago and he pointed out the composition as a whole needs more diagonals to break up all the straight lines.  I feel the skirting board I've added to the bottom of the wall is a major part of the problem as it's too big for the scale and thus visually confusing and also breaks up the image too much.


I think the portals look nice though!

Next Steps for art asset creation
- Finish hall assets/tweak current layouts
- Play about with character scale
- Polish overlays
- Feedback animation/tutorial for Ritual area
- Bespoke animations

Gameplay Storyboards

One of the main challenges I've come across so far on my venture in to game design is getting across gameplay elements to other disciplines on a team.  As an artist I'm obviously a very visual person so I thought I'd try storyboarding my gameplay.  They're pretty basic but speed and clarity were the priority here and (hopefully) this gets the job done.  

Optimising my Art Assets

One of the responsibilities of a game artist is making sure all your art is optimised for the game you're working on.  In my experience so far this has involved making sure all my assets are an appropriate size for the resolution of the game, utilising tricks like flipping certain assets via the game code or level editor etc to add a bit of subtle visual variation without taking up any more memory, creating modular assets etc etc.  However, one of the great things about Game Maker is the freedom it gives you as an artist.

I've found it's generally good practice to stick to powers of two for the sizes of art assets however when implementing 2D art Game Maker doesn't restrict you to this.  Upon discovering this I admittedly went a bit, well, mental with it-  I immediately chose a resolution of 1920 x 1080 for the game and created some pretty massive assets as a result.

So, not wanting to sacrifice any quality I finally got round to optimising my assets in game last night thanks to this very handy blog post by Yo Yo Games.

Game Maker stores all the graphics for the game in texture pages - images with several sprites stored on them that sprites will be pulled from whenever they appear on screen.  The first step to optimising my art was to create a texture group for each room (scene) in my game.  

I then went through all of the sprites in the game and selected the appropriate texture group for them.  After doing this all the texture sheets were more or less ordered with all the sprites for each room/scene in chronological order.  This already sped the loading speed up quite a bit as it shortens the amount of texture sheets the game has to look through.

Finally for each room I created a "create event" for an object there and added the code:

draw_texture_flush();

Which clears the texture memory.  This was followed by the line(s) "draw_sprite([sprite name], 0, 0, 0);" for one sprite on each texture sheet for that scene (the forest scene in the above example has A LOT of sprites).  As I understand it, this way the game now instantly knows which sheets to load up for that scene, rather than searching through all of them for each individual sprite.

I've also had to scale down the scope of my game due to time restraints, so the current map looks like this:

However quality over quantity, and the game is running a lot faster now!

Semester 2 - Week 3 - Progress Presentation

A couple weeks ago I had my second last ever un-graded progress presentation!  It's absolutely terrifying how quickly this year is going.  I also just realised I forgot to post my second progress presentation, however it was mostly just concept art I've already posted on here and going over the design of my game.

After playing a lot of 3D horror games for research I've personally found that hyper-realistic first-person 3D games tend to be scariest.  There's something about having that ability to move around freely in 3D space that's just really immersive.

However, even if I can't make a 2D horror game that's as frightening or immersive as 3D it's still possible to create a scary 2D horror game.

So the cognitive science theory of the Two Factor Theory of emotion states that in order for an emotion to be felt there must be a physiological change in the person, such as an elevated heart rate and something in their surroundings for them to associate with that physiological change.  Game designer Dan Cook applied this theory to horror games and suggested that it's not actually fear a player feels when playing them, it's actually stress.

Players might feel stressed due to a high difficulty level or jump scare and because of the horror imagery in their surroundings they mislabel the stress they are feeling as fear.

Therefore a horror atmosphere is essential in creating fear in games, which is something 2D horror games are more than capable of, making them a valid platform for the horror genre.

Even though there's not exactly a formula for creating horror atmosphere, we've already established that horror imagery and stress are essential in creating atmosphere.  However pacing and anticipation also play a major role.  It's important to build tension and suspense through little things like bespoke animation the player will see out the corner of their eye, eerie sounds, horror imagery appearing for a single frame on screen etc - subtle things that will help build the tension - then add a bigger scary like an enemy appearing, before giving them a bit of breathing room, a calm before the storm, before building the tension again.

Another important factor which I briefly covered in my last presentation is the monster design.  The enemy needs to look threatening and epitomise death through it's looks and sounds.  However it's also important to not reveal it to soon.  The second the player gets to know the enemy it looses that mystery and fear of the unknown.

There's also the concept of "nothing is scarier".  This trope is the idea that the player will fill in all blanks with their imagination which will always be more twisted that what the designer can come up with.  The idea is to take visual information away from the player for example through thick mist or sudden darkness to confuse them.

Project wise I've been working on some concept art for the portals and the design and animation for the main character.

I also created this map of the game level for my audio designer however I thought I'd show it here to give you an idea of the size of the map.

"Ritual" build as of the 4th of February.