Category: LookingOutwards-12

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Title: Nyan Cat

Year of Creation: 2011

Link to the Game: http://www.nyan.cat/

Nyan Cat is a name of the YouTube Video that was uploaded in 2011. It features a cat with a pop-tart body flying in the space forever while leaving a trail of rainbow behind. Although it may seem simple and pointless, Nyan Cat has been re-published in various games and apps that often allow the users to control how the Cat moves around in the space. Sometime it has to pick up the candies on the way, or sometime the user can even personalize the cat with different costumes (i.e. different types of the pop-tarts) and accessories. I love the idea of it being the friendly game, rather than the majority of the flying action game where you have to either destroy some aircraft or avoid the shooting that is coming from those aircraft.

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^Screenshot of the Nyan Cat video.

 

Title: T-Rex Jumping Game

Artist: Google

Year of Creation:

Link to the Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/14/technology/personaltech/chrome-dinosaur-internet-connection.html?_r=0

Link to the Game:

The T-Rex Jumping Game has been providing Chrome users with a source of entertainment and a way to relieve the frustration and the stress they may find when stumbled upon the ‘no internet sign’. It uses the randomly generated landscape with cacti and during the later stage, birds as the obstacle to the ever-running T-Rex. I appreciate Google’s intention of creating something that could help with our emotion, or helping us forget the brutality of the reality for a split second. Similarly, for the final project, I would like to create something that uses the similar mechanisms (using the keyboard to control the object, perhaps using a randomly-generated landscape as well) to create an interactive game that would boost the user’s mood.

Old unable to connect to the internet page

^Message that shows up on Chrome when you don’t have an access to Internet.

Google dinosaur game

^ But you can still play the game!

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One project I really admire is the puzzle game Monument Valley, developed by Ustwo Games. It was based on concept drawings by company artist and designer Ken Wong. Monument Valley‘s visuals were inspired by Japanese prints, minimalist sculpture, and other indie games. Looking at their clean, simplistic visuals makes me happy. I also really love their color schemes, and I like that their game gives people a sense of delight. I also appreciate the game’s meaningful visualization of the relationship between mother and child, and that it illustrates a metaphor for the “ever-evolving relationship between child and parent: one that shifts from reliance, to mutual respect, to a reversal of caregiving.” Monument Valley came out in 2013, and Monument Valley 2 came out in 2017.

In contrast to this game of puzzles, I also really like another phone game called Neko Atsume. It was developed by Hit-Point Co. and came out in 2014.  This game allows you to play with cats who visit your virtual backyard, and take pictures of them and “collect” all the cats. I like this game because there are simple interactions to allow me to feel delight and become attached to the cute cats, such as feeding them or taking “snapshots” of them. And although there aren’t any puzzles for me to solve like in Monument Valley, I still find myself attracted to the game and enjoying the simple, cute interactions. These two projects also have very different aesthetics, and I find myself enjoying both.

A screenshot of one of the puzzles from Monument Valley. I really like the color schemes and geometric aesthetic.

Monument Valley 2 Article

A screenshot of Neko Atsume. The cats interact with objects you set up in your yard.

What Neko Atsume is

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Since my project is a sound-based DJ-type game, I searched for other games that are similar in terms of building and creating music. I’ve already talked about Patatap in a previous Looking Outwards (my very first one – almost like I’ve come full circle!), but it isn’t as close to my idea as I’d like it to be. So, I searched for other things that were more music-based and had more of a DJ feel rather than something freeform. In doing so, I found Incredibox and Beatmaker.

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A video showing one of the most popular songs created with Incredibox.

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Incredibox is a music app and site where the player can create a song by managing a band of people. You can drag icons – various types of clothing or symbols – from the bottom bar and place them on each person, which each icon producing a unique sound. Each sound can either be percussion, instruments, voices, or sound effects, and combining these various sounds can create really cool and unique mixes. The project was initially released in 2009 by French company So Far So Good, a company composed of a trio of friends named Romain, Paul, and Allan. What I really admire about this project, and what really inspired me was the actual sounds the player can work with. It’s a good range of sounds that includes both music-related (like instruments and percussion) as well as some sound effects, and they all work really well together. Even though you can combine any of these in any order, they are still cohesive and maintain the same rhythm. The one thing about this game is that you can only play a limited number of sounds at a time, and each sound is limited to a select number of options. As amazing as the game is, it is limited in what is available to use (but that hasn’t stopped people from creating really awesome music!).

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A video showing an example of what you can do with Beatmaker. (Sorry about the title of the video, videos were few and far between!!)

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Beatmaker, on the other hand, is exactly what’s named: a beat maker. It is less of a game and more like a DJ-oriented music production site. There are 8+ channels for various types of instruments, and the user can click on each row to fill in space to indicate beats and play the instruments. The user can edit the track, and utilize the full library of samples Splice has available, resulting in an enormous range of possible beats and sounds. I really admire the versatility and functionality of this project. It is easy to use and figure out, and there are tons of different tones and types of sounds you can use to create something really cool. Although it does have this wide range of sounds, it is mostly focused on the EDM/electronic pop genre of music, and I think there’s untapped potential to utilize sounds and instruments from other genres as well! The website was created by company Splice, which was founded by Matt Aimonetti and Steve Martocci.

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Loved is a browser based platform game by Alex Ocias, a graphic designer and artist. Written in Adobe Flash and released in June 2010, the game is a slightly sadistic exploration game where the player moves through a pixellated world and chooses to obey or disobey commands from a mysterious abusive narrator on the screen. The game is psychological in nature and thought provoking, and features a minimal landscape which becomes more and more complex as commands are disobeyed (the world gets more colorful). The other project I chose to write about is Limbo, a puzzle-platform video game developed by independent studio “Playdead” and released in July 2010. The game is a 2D side-scroller, and contains a physics system which controls objects in the environment and the character. The players job is to guide a mysterious little boy through dangerous environments and traps as he searches for his sister. The game was built with the expectation that the player would fail many times before finding the correct solution. The art in the game is made in black and white, and uses many effects including sound to create the eerie atmosphere of the world. I seriously admire these projects for their ability to immerse the player in the world built by the artists. Both of the games contain a sort of sadistic aspect which interests me, and Loved touches on really interesting themes of power and control, and abuse. What is really amazing is that both of these games turn games into a sort of art form, through both sophisticated visuals and complex concepts. People complain that limbo, however, could have had a more complex story line, and while I partly agree, I think the game suffices as one that paints a convincing environment and forces the player to overcome puzzles to survive.

 

 


Limbo gameplay


loved gameplay

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo_(video_game)
limbo wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loved_(video_game)
loved wiki

Looking Outwards – 12

Two pieces of software that are precursors to my project are Google Keep (keep.google.com) and Todoist (en.todoist.com). Google Keep is an awesome program for recording thoughts, but it is not great for organizing, integrating with a calendar, or holding documents. Additionally the interface as a mosaic of “keeps” can be difficult to quickly review. My interface takes a stronger active design voice by following strict guidelines. Todoist is an app centered around productivity. While this is a good approach, the app is still disconnected from a person’s files and internet resources. One dream I would like to include in this project is the ability to pull up bookmarked websites. Although these are not art projects, they are heavily designed computer programs that have the potential to increase the efficiency of working/paper writing. I enjoy this category of product because I am interested in knowledge generation, organization, and research.

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Due to the way that my partner and I are planning to split up the workload, I’m more focused on the generation of the quotes. I looked for random quote generators online to see what other people have done. The first one I found, http://www.manythings.org/rs/svoc.html, is a random sentence generator. It was created in 1998 by Charles Kelly for a collection called “Interesting Things for ESL Students”. I like this project because it’s very good at breaking down the parts of speech and being consistent in the generation of words so that the final sentences actually make sense. Unfortunately, the sentences themselves are not very fun.

Random Sentence Generator 

The second project I found is http://inspirobot.me/. It is described as an “artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes.” I like this project because it creates funny and unique quotes that still have the special “inspirational quote” flavor. It tends to be more engaging than the first generator, partly because of the random photos the quotes are displayed on. My one complaint would be that pressing the “generate” button over and over is not particularly fun.

Inspirobot quote 

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^Jay van Cleef – A Minimal Love Story

For the first project, I looked at a student’s project which was a very simple concept of combining minimal graphic concepts with different visual attributes and noises to give a short minute long story that represents every romantic movie, story, tale, poem, etc. In the story he has a male and a female figure represented by coloured squares, a barrier that comes in between them as a literal barrier that stops them from meeting each other and the process that the ‘male square’ goes through to break that barrier, with the final outcome being the squares reuniting.

I found this really interesting because he conveyed every emotion that these ‘graphics’ would be feeling through the use of the correctly placed sound, and I would really like to look into something like this for my work.

^Carlo Vega – An Expansion

Going on the same line of looking at artists and motion designers that combine simple graphics with sounds to bring about a different emotion and create a compelling animation, I came across the work of Carlo Vega, a motion designer. He takes a much more experienced are artistic approach to this entire concept of combining coding and sounds to bring about beautiful animations that I would love to use as an inspiration for my project 12 work.

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I used one of the advertisements of Apple’s commercials as one of my Looking Outwards examples since there are a lot of relevant elements with this video and what I want to create with this final project. The simple movement of the shapes accompanied the sound so well despite the total simplicity. I like how this example considered not just new shapes appearing on the screen, but also how some shapes blend into new ones. Also, the video primarily utilizes circles to create the shapes and motion and yet is still able to convey so much movement and meaning.

My second example for this week’s LookingOutwards is Jono Brandel’s patapap video. Another example of motion graphics accompanying music. What I liked about this video was the incorporation of color, creating enough contrast between the foreground shapes and the background. When creating my project I think it is important to consider that the shapes must be distinct from each other and should all be noticeable.

abradbur – Looking Outwards – 12

For this Looking Outwards post I specifically wanted to find projects that integrated writing or storytelling, since I already knew that that was the direction I wanted to take my project. The first work I found is actually a simple point and click style game which you can download for free at the the artist’s web page here .

Since an extremely simple(as in far more simple than Desert Fox’s work) point and click game struck me as something I could conceivably accomplish for my final project, I admired the developer’s simplistic art style and their way of conveying the mood of the scene. In the “Bad Dream” series by Desert Fox, published in its early stages back in December of 2013, the player walks through a morbid dreamscape and attempts to wake up. One of the challenges of a point and click is to make the story interesting even though for the most part images are stagnant and pacing is entirely dependent on the player’s ability to solve a puzzle. For this purpose, intriguing backgrounds, good writing, and interesting puzzles are necessary. Desert Fox accomplishes most of these things, but though I enjoy their simple art style, it can become a little bland to look at after a while, even with gory details. As a result I would like the visuals in my final project to be just a little more dynamic.

The second work I found is “Fabulous/Fabuleux” by Heather Kelley. It debuted in 2008.

Here is Heather Kelley’s web page.

This project uses interactive software to tell a story according to the movements of the people who participate. I admire the use of sound, motion, and simple game mechanics to communicate the story, as well as the enchanting visual effect of creating a constellation that forms key objects in that story. However, if I were to change the project, not necessarily for improvement but to be more suited to my tastes, I would make the system of interaction itself relevant to the story, so that if you just replaced the story they used with a different one, it wouldn’t work as well. For this project the story itself doesn’t matter as much as the technology behind it, and I would like the writing in my project to have more of an impact.

 

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For my final project, I want to make an interactive game so for my Looking Outwards, I researched the top games on market for inspiration.

For the first project of my Looking Outwards report, I researched the game Rider. I think Rider is a great source of inspiration for my project because the obstacle changes every round, every level, and as the car moves throughout the track. The player has to face new challenges each frame. I really admire this game’s interaction with the human because it creates a frustrating, but ultimately entertaining experience. This game was released by the company, Ketchapp, in July of 2017.

      

Caption: Above are some screenshots from the game, Rider.

The second project I chose for my Looking Outwards is Monument Valley. Monument Valley runs a player, princess Ida, through mazes of optical illusions and “sacred geometry”, which refers to impossible objects. The player goes through the mazes and finds hidden passages  while in pursuit of the map’s exit. The player must overcome moving platforms, pillars, or spontaneous bridges. Monument Valley was developed by Ustwo, a digital design firm, and was officially released in 2014. Again, I think game is an excellent source of inspiration because the landscape changes continuously and gives the user a surprise edge to face. In addition, I really admire this project’s design and visual graphics. In fact, it was awarded as the Apple Game of the Year and Design Award in 2014.

    

Caption: Above are screenshots from different levels in Monument Valley.