Brian Crick

That’s What it’s All About

(…and you spin yourself around…)

I was working on the content for my Tinselfly project page the other day, and I was having trouble expressing my goals for it. Largely because, with work-work and all the drudgery you have to do to get any kind of project like this off the ground and have it look professional, I’d actually forgotten what exactly those goals were.

So while I’m taking a short recharge break in the middle of my work day—yes, it’s 4:00 and that feels kinda of middle-ish, the way things have been going — I thought I’d try to write this up as best I could. Because sometimes just restating this stuff can give me new insight into it.

* * *

It’s all about school.

Consuming a story isn’t so much different than sitting in class. Character exposition is where you learn about characters. A story has to communicate a plot in clear, efficient terms, the way a history professor might talk about real events. If this is science fiction or fantasy, you have to be taught the rules of the story’s universe so that you can apply that knowledge to exploring the moral, ethical, and societal implications of fantastic ideas.

Novels use the same medium as textbooks, and movies aren’t structured so much differently than documentaries.

Of course, I’m talking about just one kind of class here: I’m talking about lectures. Where you read a textbook, and listen to a professor talk, and maybe there’s some group discussion, but frequently there isn’t. It’s very passive. Just like a movie or a novel, where it’s a very one way sort of thing.

In addition to lectures, most of us have attended labs. They’re also educational; they also have a set curriculum where everyone who attends each lab is supposed to come away having learned the same things. But they’re more hands-on than lecture classes, and many people enjoy this style of teaching more than lectures, and will respond better to it. Some students will internalize more from these types of classes.

If movies and written stories are like lectures, then I think games can be like labs. I don’t think games can be just as good at telling stories than a movie or a novel. I think they can be better, because it’s a better way of learning and internalizing the important parts of a story—at least for some people. They can still have linear, author-controlled narratives, and I believe some players will find these hands-on stories more engaging and moving and meaningful than the storytelling styles they were previously used to.

Of course, some people will still always find the average movie more emotionally satisfying than the average game, just as some people today prefer novels to film.

So there you have it.

I don’t know if I’m the person who’s going to succeed at pulling off this approach to storytelling.

But I’m sure going to try.

Totally Backburnered Stuff Update

Since work has been really busy, I’ve been doing very little in my free time besides keep Tinselfly alive. But here’s the state of some of my other stuff, which I’m posting largely so I don’t forget about them all:

Electric Tea

I finally figured out some more details for turn-by-turn game mechanics and how they tie in with the overall mystery. Still having trouble getting the non-violent bootlegging theme to work; I’l still thinking of everything in terms of gang warfare.

Also got this book which is an actual diary of someone doing bootlegging last century. Hopefully that will give me some ideas.

Celestial Stick People
Made some test boxes for a different project a while ago, and they turned out ok. Not amazing, but adequate. I think the plan right now it to do the boxes and books by hand and have the cards professionally printed, once I have the time and budget to get that moving again.

Super Lilly
Not much movement here. Marie and I have talked about it a bit, but I still need to figure out how to quickly do art for it.

The Itty Bitty Galaxy
Not much movement here either. I need to get the Android development tools set up on my new computer.

Other
Despite the whole being swamped thing, I’ve been following the art & design message board on this board game community, and jumping on any opportunity to make art for other people’s pet projects. Got one bite so far.

I miss freelancing, but kind of despised working with web sites, so I wonder if I can do some freelance illustration. Not for the money; just because I miss working with people. And I’d like some good portfolio pieces out there, with the goal of eventually doing art for a professionally published game some time in my life.

Annoyance

Yesterday, I unsubscribed from the only game design blog I’ve been reading for a while. Mostly because I thought the author was coming off as a bit smug and condescending and it was making me cranky.

I feel kind of bad about this.

Sure, I disagreed with most of what the author had to say, but I frequently enjoy and learn a lot, reading things I disagree with—as long as I think the author isn’t being pushy about their opinions. We all think this industry can be better. We all have different strategies for doing that. But to me, it’s all about exploring possibilities. As soon as someone says anything about how games should be made, or worse, played, I’m gonna tune them out completely.

But there were some good thoughts in this blog, and like I said, I feel kinda bad for bailing. Like I should just put up with the annoyance and bear it for the sake of being exposed to ideas different than my own. Like it makes me a more narrow-minded person for doing this. I know this author doesn’t mean to come off as a jerk. I’ve seen him actively seek out advice for how to sound less jerky.

Then again, who means to come off as a condescending douche? Who wakes up in the morning and decides to write like that? There are lots of bloggers out there, and I don’t see too much nobility in being patient with those who haven’t figured out how to sound approachable yet. I haven’t actually tried very hard to look for warm, friendly game design blogs, but I’m sure they exist. It’s not a blog per se, but Extra Credits is quite good.

I’d love to see more things like that.

Here Comes the Sun

It’s crunch time. I’m going to be spending much of today doing work-work, but before I dive into that, I wanted to babble a bit about lighting. Yes, I’m still keeping Tinselfly moving; that’s kind of essential during crunch time.

[fergcorp_cdt]

In the past few days, I’ve added some mostly cosmetic things. They all revolve around lighting and going beyond the obvious solutions for setting this up.

The Sun

The sun won’t ever move. I want it to stay in a fixed position to help you navigate. I could, then, just have set up a directional light for the sun and walked away, but I would never have been happy with that. While the purpose of said directional light is to simulate the sun, the purpose of lighting in general is to sculpt your scene. The sunlight isn’t going to do that if it’s in line with the camera or directly behind it.

So there’s some logic in here to try to keep the sunlight close to where it would naturally be, but at a reasonable angle to your point of view so you get nice highlights and shadows here and there. I’m not quite done, but generally speaking I’m liking the results so far.

The Stars

You’re on the night side of the planet, and can see a brilliant starfield. You start walking towards the day side. What happens?

My instinct was to have the stars fade out while the sky faded in, and while this was easy to implement, it just didn’t feel right. Stars don’t fade. They appear to twinkle, one by one, out of existence. So I wrote a special shader that would allow that to happen.

The Sky

Daylight is a funny thing. When you’re standing outside, you’re not just lit by the sun; you’re also lit, in large part, by the sky itself.

I thought I’d simulate this by adding some logic to have my sunlight appear higher than it naturally would be, but that’s not really working, and it’s screwing up the no-head-on-lights thing mentioned earlier.

So I think what I’ll do is have a blueish ambient light whose intensity varies based on your position instead.

Silly Photoshop Tricks: Backlit Clouds

I was trying to make a nebula texture for Tinselfly, and discovered a neat trick for doing that in Photoshop.

I used to do this sort of stuff all the time, making textures with nothing but builtin filters and effects and whatnot. I’m a little rusty now, but I thought this was worth sharing.

Step 1: Start with some difference clouds. Those are always great for making textures.

(Random tip: if you make your image width a power of 2 like 256, 512, 1024 or 2048, the texture you end up with will be tileable.)

Step 2: Make a new layer and just slap a black & white vertical gradient on it.

Step 3: On top the regular gradient layer, make a Gradient Map adjustment layer. My gradient map looks like this:

You want something that slowly ramps up from black to white, and then abruptly goes to black again. That abrupt change is going to define the edge of our cloud.

The effect it has on the layers underneath is like this:

Step 4: Now, here’s where it gets fun. Go back to your regular gradient layer you made in Step 2. Slowly lower the opacity to 0 and watch what happens.

What you’re doing is changing how straight your clouds are going to be. If the gradient is too opaque, you just end up with a boring wavy line. If the gradient is too transparent, you end up with these funny blobs with no real structure. But somewhere in the middle, you’ll find something that looks kinda like the top of a large cloud, with light shining through it.

And once you’ve got that, you can add more effects to bring it to life.

I’m not done with this yet; it looks strangely flat still. But I think it’s an interesting start. And it took less time to do that than writing this post. 😉

Hole in the World

I wasn’t planning on posting a Tinselfly update today, but I thought this was too nifty not to share.

(click to enlarge.)

There’s a bug right now where one—just one—face of my 20-sided world is displaying incorrectly. I thought this looked kinda eerie and beautiful.

I may have to make a level in my story mode of the game that looks like this. 🙂

Anyway, I also added a randomly generated starfield, moonlight, and blue sky when you’re on the day side of the planet.

Progress

I’ve slowly been updating my web site, adding pages for my projects and web sites and whatnot, and it got me thinking about progress.

Take web sites, for example. It would be tempting to think that, given more experience, I’ll consistently produce better and better work.

It certainly doesn’t feel like this, though. While I love my most recent design, The Peacock’s Paintbrush is still one of my favorites — and one of my first; it was made around ten years ago.

It’s tempting to feel like I haven’t made much progress at all. Which, sometimes I do. I worry that I’m not improving as a designer or a programmer or whatever here.

My output is really more like this:

Kinda random.

But really, it’s not as random as it looks. Experience does not make my work consistently better. It increases the probability that my work will be better.

The quality of my work will tend towards the darker red areas here. Without question, my work experience has made my average better.

However, under the right circumstances, I am still perfectly capable of producing crap. If I don’t get along personally with my client; if I hate the work itself, the work will suffer.

Ten years ago, under the right circumstances, I was perfectly capable of creating amazing things. The Peacock’s Paintbrush was a fascinating challenge. I was excited about getting portfolio pieces out there, and I had just the right amount of creative freedom.

The true measure of my progress is, I suppose, to look at the jobs that I neither love nor hate. The ones I just do because they have to be done. They’ll tend towards that nice dark red stripe, and I’ll forget about them the moment they’re over… but that’s the sort of stuff I should think about, when I’m thinking about what I can reasonably expect to accomplish next.

Fun with Symbols

Lately, I’ve been amused by certain similarities in two recent movies, Super 8 and X-Men First Class—and how this relates to what I want to get done with Tinselfly.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

Both Super 8 and X-Men have leads who carry around small, inanimate objects of great personal significance to them. Both movies have wordless scenes in their climaxes where said inanimate objects abruptly take on a life of their own, and the audience is presented with a simple, clear, visual metaphor for the resolution of the leads’ internal struggles.

I love it when movies do this sort of stuff. I wish more movies spoke their own language like this, and get frustrated when I think a movie is missing an opportunity to tell stories through objects. I saw Midnight in Paris recently too, and I thought they could have gone in this direction with a pair of earrings a character possessed, and I was sad they did not.

Of course this is just one specific way of having a movie communicate things visually. The Tree of Life, another new release, is overflowing with visual symbolism, and those visuals did absolutely nothing for me.

So I’m trying to relate this to storytelling in games, this sort of formula. And yeah, you could argue that it can go into visual cliché territory, but storytelling in games isn’t really there yet, and we need formulas that work.

The nice thing here is, this isn’t so much different than the way I’d envision storytelling through game mechanics working. These objects already have mechanics. They’re made of metal; they’re affected by magnetism. This doesn’t matter most of the time for most metal objects you’ll run across, but in one case there was a giant electromagnet being constructed by an alien, and in the other we had a character with superpowers revolving around magnetism. The big difference I’d see for games is that, for this sort of symbolism to work, it has to kind of catch you off guard let you see it as just another thing to plan strategy around.

I don’t have any concrete ideas for translating this to Tinselfly or whatever, but it’s not too far of a stretch to imagine a video game starring X-Men‘s Magneto, and you’re having fun using your toss-metal-around powers when suddenly you find yourself using new powers in an old location for the first time, and previously non-reactive bits of character-significant scenery come to life for the first time…

Jump Down Spin Around

Set some very small, but concrete goals for Tinselfly this weekend, and hit them all, and still took time out to see friends and stuff. Feels good.

[fergcorp_cdt]

Most of what I’ve been working on has been getting all my math to work now that you have the ability to run around and have ‘up’ mean something different for different parts of the spherical world you’re traveling on. Specifically:

  • Made the camera correctly follow your character around the world.
  • Made your character point in the right direction while moving.
  • Made gems spawn in a plane around you, regardless of your position on the world.
  • Abstracted everything away so that things like gem producing and movement have no knowledge of the shape of the world. You could be walking on the surface of a donut, and the code for these sorts of mechanics wouldn’t care. Used some stuff from the design patterns book I’ve been reading there, and I’m glad I had a chance to apply some of these strategies.
  • Made a system to randomly generate mazes of placeholder obstacles all around the world. Re-used my Gemslinger code for that.

I guess there’s not anything cool I’ve learned lately, but I’m getting better at breaking this sort of stuff into manageable parts and working efficiently in Unity.

Keep Your Head Up

Just a quick Tinselfly thought today.

[fergcorp_cdt]

Been working on getting my character to stick to this round world I’ve created, and made some good progress last night.

I was flailing for a while though. When you moved, the character would kind of do cartwheels and eventually settle on the right orientation. It was kind of amusing, but I was all like, omg! I’ll never get quaternions! And I kept changing my math around and reading Wikipedia stuff on quaternions and watching Youtube videos about quaternions, and none of it helped.

But it turns out my understanding of this was fine. The issue was that I was writing a script to make sure the character’s feet were always pointing towards the center of the world, and I had a separate script made a long time ago that was trying to make sure that she was always pointed in the direction she was moving, with her feet pointed down in absolute coordinates. So the scripts were fighting with each other.

So it’s just a reminder of how important it is to know what you know, and know what you don’t. It’s sort of the opposite of the whole if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will look like nails thing. I convinced myself my problem was a nail, and refused to use any tools on it that weren’t hammers.

I don’t know, mathematically, how quaternions work, but I do know how to use them in Unity. I should have realized that and looked for other sources of my cartwheeling problem sooner.

This week, I’ll work on refining my maze generation and high-level world building system.

Copyright © 2017 Brian Crick.