Dark Souls

Time, choice, and subjective value

I guess I used to be a hardcore gamer. But then you get older and life does its thing, and you get interested in other things, and playing games isn’t as central anymore. Also, you’ve played so many games, and you’ve internalized all the various systems they are composed of to an extent that they become these more mechanical experiences, that almost everything you come across seems like a slight variation or evolution of what has come before. At this point, time has become a huge variable in your life, a nonrenewable resource in short supply that is divided among the obligations and the many things you’re passionate about.

With that semi-obvious observation outta the way, I recently tried playing Dark Souls. I don’t think it has passed through my more stringent filter I’ve acquired. I could see a younger me totally becoming hooked on it, though.

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I recently decided to revisit Shadow of the Colossus via the PS3 remastered version. It was already one of my all-time favorites—it originally came out on the PS2 around 2005—and playing it again just further solidifies it in my mind. Here are a few observations about the game that I believe contribute to its sheer artistry: the game world is a sort of melancholy psychespace. There’s a deliberate loneliness to its expansive emptiness, a certain ambience of loss encoded in the lighting, wind, colors that may be reflective of the protagonist’s state of mind. But here and there you’ll find glimmers of life and hope. It’s kind of jarring when you do encounter all of a sudden these strange eel-fish in a lonely pond, or bats in a cave, or turtles crawling around, after moving through so much relative desolation. And the ending speaks to this hope, too, which suggests the cursed land has a brighter and livelier future ahead. animation has rarely been used as effectively in games as it is used in SotC. Ueda comes from an animation background. There is so much life and energy instilled in and conveyed by the animation and the attention to subtle detail. There’s this kind of abstract physicality and expressiveness of motion that somehow manages to make the experience more immediate and less abstract. It’s masterful. complimenting the animation is the camera system. It also lends energy and life to the game through motion and defining the game’s scale and space. It’s such a harmonious blend of programmed and player-directed movement. If you’ve ever played it, notice how that part of the battle with the colossi is in controlling the camera. When they thrash and try to shake you loose, so too does the camera thrash. And you have to actively steer it back into a favorable angle. So many games would go the straight-up functional route, but it takes a deliberate artist like Ueda to understand that functionality can be the enemy of meaningfulness. Here’s a few other things I like about the game: boss battles as environmental puzzles (which many games have subsequently ripped off) Kow Otani’s brilliant and epic orchestral score minimalistic focus with little extraneous filler, both in the gameplay and narrative I don’t know about you, but playing this has left me in serious want of Ueda’s The Last Guardian. Seven years or so of development and secrecy infused in it—troubled or no—has left me beyond curious for what is in store…
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I recently decided to revisit Shadow of the Colossus via the PS3 remastered version. It was already one of my all-time favorites—it originally came out on the PS2 around 2005—and playing it again just further solidifies it in my mind. Here are a few observations about the game that I believe contribute to its sheer artistry:

  1. the game world is a sort of melancholy psychespace. There’s a deliberate loneliness to its expansive emptiness, a certain ambience of loss encoded in the lighting, wind, colors that may be reflective of the protagonist’s state of mind. But here and there you’ll find glimmers of life and hope. It’s kind of jarring when you do encounter all of a sudden these strange eel-fish in a lonely pond, or bats in a cave, or turtles crawling around, after moving through so much relative desolation. And the ending speaks to this hope, too, which suggests the cursed land has a brighter and livelier future ahead.
  2. animation has rarely been used as effectively in games as it is used in SotC. Ueda comes from an animation background. There is so much life and energy instilled in and conveyed by the animation and the attention to subtle detail. There’s this kind of abstract physicality and expressiveness of motion that somehow manages to make the experience more immediate and less abstract. It’s masterful.
  3. complimenting the animation is the camera system. It also lends energy and life to the game through motion and defining the game’s scale and space. It’s such a harmonious blend of programmed and player-directed movement. If you’ve ever played it, notice how that part of the battle with the colossi is in controlling the camera. When they thrash and try to shake you loose, so too does the camera thrash. And you have to actively steer it back into a favorable angle. So many games would go the straight-up functional route, but it takes a deliberate artist like Ueda to understand that functionality can be the enemy of meaningfulness.

Here’s a few other things I like about the game:

  • boss battles as environmental puzzles (which many games have subsequently ripped off)
  • Kow Otani’s brilliant and epic orchestral score
  • minimalistic focus with little extraneous filler, both in the gameplay and narrative

I don’t know about you, but playing this has left me in serious want of Ueda’s The Last Guardian. Seven years or so of development and secrecy infused in it—troubled or no—has left me beyond curious for what is in store…

Braided Epiphany

You know what I’m fond of? Epiphanies. I had one of those today, while taking a shower of course. Is it possible to set up a work environment in one of those? Heh.

For Project Timeline, the main gameplay hook is the seed from which all else sprouts from creatively; it was the first thing I conceived. Obviously, a lot of games start out like that, and as a consequence the story—if the developer(s) want one—has to be retrofitted or molded to fit over that. In my experience and observation, the narrative is usually an afterthought or at least subservient to the interactivity. That’s always kind of bugged me, and it’s something I’m always conscious of when conceptualizing games.

Ever since initial conception, Project Timeline has gone through at least two general story iterations. Each time those iterations became a bit complicated, and each time I would run into problems weaving parts of the interactivity with the narrative; or I would leave gaps to be addressed or filled in at a later time. For me, it’s important that the narrative and interactivity metaphorically intersect at as many points as possible as coherently as possible, because if that’s not happening, that just seems like a waste of inherent opportunity video games as a medium provide.

The epiphany I had today has led to a third, simpler iteration of the narrative that I think will allow for the braiding of more meaning. It’s also more personally relevant. The story of my current circumstances and the creation of the game becomes further intertwined with the actual story of the game, I think.

Terra

Terra is a new low-level system programming language that is designed to interoperate seamlessly with the Lua programming language

I like the name, because it is in fact the terrestrial, lower-level counterpart to the lunar, higher-level Lua. Some things about it:

  • it’s a statically-typed, compiled language, hence the low-level part
  • can call Lua functions from Terra code, and vice-versa
  • can use Lua to metaprogram Terra programs (conditional compilation, templating)
  • it’s trivial to import and use C functions/libraries (as well as Lua)
  • like Lua, can be relatively easy to embed in applications

I think this thing has a lot of promise. Ever since I heard about it I’ve been a bit excited. Although I’m sure there is, I can’t recall off the top of my head two or more languages with this kind of synergy.

For the past month or so, I’ve been helping out on the open source Polycode project. I’ve posted a few times about it previously. After taking part in a quick public beta, I decided to take the plunge and get actively involved. This is basically the first open source project I’ve become a part of, and it’s been a good and valuable experience so far. I’m creating Project Timeline with it. Polycode, in case you’re wondering, is a 2D/3D creative coding, MIT-licensed framework that also includes its own IDE. It’s built in C++, and has Lua bindings. The heavy lifting is done by a guy named Ivan Safrin. I jumped into the project without that much relative C++ experience, or experience building large projects from source. There’s been a definite learning curve, but I’m getting better at it all and gaining more knowledge in C++, building from source, and git revision control. The code above is an API feature I added, to allow scrolling and navigation of tree widgets in the UI module with the arrow keys. It’s from this feature commit. Some other stuff I’ve worked on so far: added a console command history, navigable by up/down arrow key added copy/cut functionality to a line of text the caret is on (without selection) a few bug fixes added ability to indent/unindent blocks of code/text Anyway, we’re getting closer to an official release of the new Polycode + IDE. It’s taking longer than I or anyone else anticipated, but it’s getting there. Stay tuned.
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For the past month or so, I’ve been helping out on the open source Polycode project. I’ve posted a few times about it previously. After taking part in a quick public beta, I decided to take the plunge and get actively involved. This is basically the first open source project I’ve become a part of, and it’s been a good and valuable experience so far. I’m creating Project Timeline with it.

Polycode, in case you’re wondering, is a 2D/3D creative coding, MIT-licensed framework that also includes its own IDE. It’s built in C++, and has Lua bindings. The heavy lifting is done by a guy named Ivan Safrin. I jumped into the project without that much relative C++ experience, or experience building large projects from source. There’s been a definite learning curve, but I’m getting better at it all and gaining more knowledge in C++, building from source, and git revision control. The code above is an API feature I added, to allow scrolling and navigation of tree widgets in the UI module with the arrow keys. It’s from this feature commit.

Some other stuff I’ve worked on so far:

  • added a console command history, navigable by up/down arrow key
  • added copy/cut functionality to a line of text the caret is on (without selection)
  • a few bug fixes
  • added ability to indent/unindent blocks of code/text

Anyway, we’re getting closer to an official release of the new Polycode + IDE. It’s taking longer than I or anyone else anticipated, but it’s getting there. Stay tuned.

Source: proj-timeline

On Bioshock Infinite

As good as this game is, I still wish they could have made it without you ever having to fire a gun. Thinking back on my experience, the best parts to me where when I wasn’t shooting stuff: the exhilaration of jumping on and off the skyline, the conversations with Elizabeth, curiously studying the varied environments and all their narrative richness. And there is of course a precedent for these kinds of non-shooting first-person experiences: see Portal and Mirror’s Edge, both of which are brilliant experiences.

My gut feeling right now is that if they took the resources poured into the shooting stuff, and devoted it to other things, Infinite could have been revolutionary instead of evolutionary. They had a really good framework to do just that: Elizabeth’s tears. Expand that concept some more, and you don’t even need to constantly hide behind cover, exchange fire, and rummage through a billion containers looking for more ammo. The creative solutions for navigating through the environment go up exponentially.

However, to achieve a return on investment in the current gaming environment, I suppose shooting had to be the main gameplay hook, statistically speaking, as opposed to, say, creatively running for your life or navigating the environment. And there was, no doubt, a huge investment made to allow the vision of an elaborate and nuanced world of Columbia to be realized. I could be wrong, but it just feels like there was a fundamental tradeoff made. Ken Levine and company still did a good job integrating the gameplay and story, though.

The OUYA works, it’s here, and it’s heading your way: our first look at the finished system

Still, the fact that [Ouya] exists, is finished, and is running working software with a store you can already browse is in and of itself amazing. “Nine months, under 20 people, hardware product, a software platform and ecosystem that people are super-excited about,” Uhrman said. “We’re leaders of this new ‘un-console’ movement, and we just want to deliver and include people in the process.” 

Finished Ouya system. The names on the top image are those of the kickstarter backers who pledged $10,000. The early/backer launch is today (28 March 2013), where thousands of Ouya consoles are being rolled out worldwide. I should be getting mine soon.

Source: penny-arcade.com

would there be such a thing as non-system fields? These would be fields that don’t fit into a component, and are instead bestowed to an entity directly; and they are probably never used inside systems. Where would they be used, though? Maybe internally as param to stored function? It would have to be some super-specific property of something that basically needed to have a component created just for it. What would be an example of such a field?

Sometimes I try to reason out tricky details of complex game/software systems by engaging in a dialogue with myself. The first and most important function of that process is to address the problems and express possible solutions—to reify, somewhat, the situation at hand, through the simple act of expression. It’s basically a  cheap and dirty sounding board method. The second function is to have a record of that thought process for future reference and revision of course. A lot of the time, I just end up deleting these dialogues.

Reasoning about design decisions in general—whether they be technical (like above) or more creative in nature—is an interesting thing to me. It’s a sort of preoccupation, actually.

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Architects and Gaming - the serious architecture of The Witness As with design in real space and time, site lines were, perhaps, the single most essential tool in organizing the virtual space. Creating focal points that guide the viewer towards other zones, screening the superfluous, establishing a hierarchy of visual characteristics–the choreography of these elements influence the player’s spatial perception, just as it would in reality. The “picturesque” in historic landscape architecture is highly contingent on the treatment of views: the foreground, middle ground, and background are all treated for the utility of specific visual effects–from habitable geometries to the serpentine meander, and eventually diminishing into the untouched wild. From Repton’s Blaise Castle to Olmstead’s Central Park, the picturesque landscape follows a painterly composition, framed, narrative, and perspectival.  The grounds in Witness, by the nature the virtual medium, is an illustrated space, flattened by the screen view and removed from multi-sensory experience. To achieve a spatial understanding of the island (and to generate the narrative), the viewer must be coaxed through visual exploration.
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Architects and Gaming - the serious architecture of The Witness

As with design in real space and time, site lines were, perhaps, the single most essential tool in organizing the virtual space. Creating focal points that guide the viewer towards other zones, screening the superfluous, establishing a hierarchy of visual characteristics–the choreography of these elements influence the player’s spatial perception, just as it would in reality. The “picturesque” in historic landscape architecture is highly contingent on the treatment of views: the foreground, middle ground, and background are all treated for the utility of specific visual effects–from habitable geometries to the serpentine meander, and eventually diminishing into the untouched wild. From Repton’s Blaise Castle to Olmstead’s Central Park, the picturesque landscape follows a painterly composition, framed, narrative, and perspectival.  The grounds in Witness, by the nature the virtual medium, is an illustrated space, flattened by the screen view and removed from multi-sensory experience. To achieve a spatial understanding of the island (and to generate the narrative), the viewer must be coaxed through visual exploration.