MA Game Design
The following represents some general research on narrative, involvement, player role and game information that underpins my paper. I found Calleja’s work particularly fruitful, and will try to order a copy of his book In-Game to the library in time for my thesis. The cognitive, emotional and kinaesthetic feedback loop that is formed between the …
Continue reading “Understanding Gaming Experience: Research Log 1”
Our lecturer Maddy led us through a series of preparation exercises and presentations to help us formulate our research question for this paper. The first was a mind map of areas of interest. As you can see, my initial areas of interest included: VR Theatre (towards emotional / expressive inputs for actors and audiences) Tabletop …
Continue reading “Understanding Gaming Experience: Forming a Research Question”
Further tweaks to the generator I created a ‘printText’ function which would run through the generator for as many times as Jacky had set the levelCount to (6 at the time of writing, plus one ‘end’ scene), and dump the generated text into an empty game object. I could then, with a few clicks, export …
Continue reading “Experimental Development: Writing with a Text Generator”
Input language Taking my cue from the construction of both Perchance and Tracery, I chose to use the following symbols the signify variables and options: [variable] and {option|option}. A [variable] might represent a call to another structure, or a randomly chosen item from a list. An {option|option} represents an either/or choice – the generator will …
Continue reading “Experimental Development: Building a Text Generator”
When I had finished planning what I wanted my generator to do, I assumed I would be able to jump straight into building it. This was far from being the case – I quickly realised that I would have to define the scope of the generator more clearly if I were to have any hope …
Continue reading “Experimental Development: Scoping a Text Generator”
As per last devlog, I started by answering some of Kate Compton’s questions for defining a generator’s ideal output, its properties and its constraints. What am I trying to make? I would like my generator to create an epistolary horror story – told through the medium of a developer commentary – about developing a 90s …
Continue reading “Experimental Development: Planning a Text Generator”
Identifying a Project In my experimental mini-devs I had mostly focused on procedural text generation, researching VR, and messing about with shaders. I enjoyed working on procedural text, so was keen to push that further, but didn’t have a clear starting point for what I wanted to create. Luckily, Jacky shared the beginnings of his …
Continue reading “Experimental Development Project: First Steps”
Denizens of the Dying World (abbreviated from now on to DDW), by Brian Yaksha, is a small character generator, ostensibly designed for the dark TTRPG system ‘Mork Borg.’ Brian is a game designer who both writes his own games and works on others’, as well as blogging at https://www.rakehellzine.com/. DDW is written using Perchance, and …
Continue reading “Experimental Development: Case Study (Denizens of the Dying World)”
Having identified exposed systems and UI feedback as areas to explore, I set to work in two directions: developing feedback around text and UI, and learning how to rig a humanoid 3D model for procedural animation. Text & UI My initial designs for the scenes didn’t change much – I think subconsciously I was already …
Continue reading “Critical Play Project: UI, Text and 3D Animation”
When researching different dialogue engines / narrative scripting languages for this project, I came across three: Fungus, Yarn and Ink. I had already used Ink before as my first step towards understanding scripting last Spring, so I decided to stick with it – learning a new language for the purposes of this project would have …
Continue reading “Critical Play Project: Working with Ink + Unity”