3D: Fishing Village Contact Sheets

Some of the props I worked on for my level!

3D: Game Level Final Images vs Resubmits

Here they are! Images of my level! Huzzah! The first ones are the ones I submitted first for our crit, and the second ones are the ones I worked with my suggestions on to improve.
Before:

After:

GD: Digsite Heist Commercial!

Here it is! The final version of my commercial for Digsite Heist. Many thanks to Danny, Clarke, and Ryan Baker for their extremely appreciated help on this one.

GD: Digsite Heist: Board game final images!

Here are images of the final version of my board game, renamed Digsite Heist! The board and player tokens are wood, the artifacts Sculpey, and the IDs laminated paper. I quite like how it came out~

GD: Print and Play, Now Print and Playable!

Now you too can experience the joy, the wonder, the sheer back-stabbery of Digsite Heist! Download it here:

right here!

3D: Fishing Village Level Greyboxing

Hey! So I haven't posted in a while (we're still doing a lot of iterations on our boardgames, a lot of playtesting and working out kinks) so I thought I'd post some work from my other class, 3D Animation! We're all working together to make individual levels that reflect a concept, and the one for our class is that of a Chinese-styled fishing village in the mountains. We model everything modularly and throw it together in UDK to create constructs and go from there.
To start off with, we did a lot of architectural buildings, so our levels look a bit sparse. Here are some screenshots of the block outs I made using my modular kit:

Obviously I'm going to have to tweak around some things and throw in some props, but that's what we're working on now! I'll post those up once I'm done.

GD: Post-Playtest Blogging

The author and two friends playtesting Digsite Raid!

 Now that I've got the basic rules down for my game, it's time to playtest it. Playtesting is super important, as Jesse Schell says in his book on game design-- good games are made through playtesting and playtesting alone. Though it's painful, he admits, it's extremely important, like stepping back from a painting to realise you've got all the shadows wrong. So I needed to playtest my game, and badly. 7 o'clock on a Saturday evening, a night which on any other college campus would find me out on the town, met me in the Student Smart Room in Goldstein furiously rolling dice and taking notes as my friends and peers utterly destroyed my game.

Now, as my game is fairly derivative of a lot of other board games, I didn't have as many immediate teething problems as other games might have. The main problem for me was balancing-- were the Event Cards too annoying, did each player get enough Item Cards, were there enough opportunities to trigger the Combat mechanic? Were players frustrated too much, or not enough? Did players seem engaged enough to want to be competitive? These questions were the main ones I had in mind as I set out to playtest.

Event cards in particular were quite a thorn in my side-- either they were far too easy on the player, or the entire group was ruing even stepping on the second two layers. I have to come up with a balance of nice and bad cards, factoring in giving the player a sense of agency in the whole ordeal. So more 'choose a player' rather than 'go directly to,' if that makes sense.

Item Cards weren't that big of an issue, but it was suggested that I give them more of a sense of value by limiting their original number so people would have to work for them. This could also add more drama to the Theif Event Cards, as it gives a chance for players to rob others of their more hard-won Items.

Combat was kind of a huge issue-- no one wanted to use it! Or, rather, people were so engrossed in getting the items and avoiding event cards that they didn't want to attack people, or didn't have the opportunity to. Modding the Combat mechanic to allow for more ambushes could be a lot more fun, and add more agency to the gameplay. A suggested tweak could be that by passing a player you could challenge them, rather than directly landing on a same square. That way, you could attack people just leaving the Artifact tent and steal their items.

On the subject of Artifacts, though, the scores really need to be increased. Way too many people were just getting them like it was no big deal.

Another way to force combat, a friend suggested, was to make the final exit place have a chance roll as well, to let other people catch up and ambush them. I may also integrate this idea.

All in all, my game suffered from a complete lack of skill and a high dependency on chance. I'll definitely need to tweak some things to make it seem like the player has more agency.

GD: Board Game Rules

Digsite Raid!

In this game of digsites and landslides, grab fame and glory for yourself and sabotage your opponents!

A game by Justine Hamer

Up to 4 players, approx. 30 minutes

You are an archaeology student stuck in college hell, weighed down with loans and stuck with menial tasks like dusting down tiny old fragments of who knows what. You know fame and fortune await you if you can get just one big artifact into a museum, but how can you get one? 

There’s a hole in the fence at main archaeological digsite, and sneaking in could be so easy… But you’re not the only one with that idea! Make it to the artifact tent, steal priceless historical items, and get out of there before someone else beats you to it!

Game Components

You will need:

- One board 

- A set of Item Cards

- A set of Event Cards

- Four player tokens

- Four Archaeologist IDs

- Five Artifacts (Cuneiform, Urn, Skull, Votive, Coin)

- One dice

For the board, print out both pieces and glue them together with the tab provided.

Setting up the game

To set up the game, glue the board together, set the IDs in the ID tent, and the Artifacts within the Artifact tent.

They go in this order:

1. Cuneiform

2. Urn

3. Skull

4. Votive

5. Coin

Roll the dice to determine order of play. The highest number goes first, as they made their sneak check. Proceed counter-clockwise from this player. Separate the Item Cards and Events Cards, shuffle their decks, and deal each player eight Item Cards.

How to Play

Player one begins by rolling the dice and then moving forward. You may go around whichever side of the digsite you please, but you cannot go backwards and you must use your entire roll to move forward (i.e., no ‘dividing rolls.’) When you land on a square with an order, do as it says. 

The ladders act as a slide between layers, but they cannot be landed on. If you have a ladder Item Card and you land on a square with notches in it, you may use the ladder Item Card to go down a level onto the adjacent square. It can also be used to create a shortcut from either the Jail or the Hospital to the lower level.

If you land on the same square as an opponent, you may choose to initiate Combat. See the Combat tab for more information about this.

If you land on a darker square, take an Event Card. Event cards can apply to you, to an opponent, or to both, depending on what it says. Follow the instructions on the Event Card and then discard it.

Buildings

There are two main buildings on this map, the Jail and the Hospital. Landing on them normally will not affect you, but being sent to them will. If you are sent to the Hospital, you lose one turn but are allowed to leave after that. If you are sent to Jail, you must roll a 4 or higher or use a Fedora disguise Item Card to escape. If you have a ladder, you may use the ladder shortcut out the backdoor of either building.

Combat

When you land on the same square as your opponent, you have the chance to challenge them to combat. Combat is easy: select whatever number of weapon Item Cards you have in your hand and lay them facedown in front of you. Your opponent should do the same. At the same time as each other, turn over your cards and compare your attack scores. The one with the highest score wins. 

The loser forfeits their cards, whatever Artifacts they have on them, and their Archaeologist IDs if they have them. They also have to pay a visit to the Hospital, and miss a turn. The winner gets to keep whatever Artifacts the loser had on them, but not the Archaeologist ID.

Artifacts and Archaeologist IDs

On the ground level of the digsite, there are two tents. One contains the Artifacts, the other the Archaeologist IDs. Both are needed to win the game. 

Enter these tents by using the marked out entrance area, following the arrows. When you are in these entranceways and tents, you do not pick up an Event Card and you cannot initiate combat.

If you land on one of the numbers adjacent to an artifact, you may make an attempt to steal it. To steal an artifact, you use your burglary Item Cards. You add up the score of all of your burglary Item Cards and add that to your roll as you try to beat the scores of the Artifact. In this effect, each Artifact has a score, as follows:

Cuneiform: 9

Urn: 11

Skull: 13

Votive: 15

Coin: 17

If you beat these scores, you are allowed to take the Artifact and escape via the roped-off exit of the tent. You are allowed to stay by the Artifact as long as you like, but can only make one attempt per turn.

To get an Archaeologist ID, enter the tent via it’s demarked entranceway. As it is with the Artifact tent and entranceway, you are not allowed to fight in these areas. As soon as you are able to enter the main body of the tent, you are allowed to start rolling to get an ID. You must roll a 6 to get an ID, and once you get it you may leave the tent via the roped-off exit.

Winning

To win the game, all you need to do is gather an Artifact and leave via the cave. A particularly unobservant guard guards the cave, but he won’t let you pass unless you show an Archaeologist ID. So, to win, escape past this guard with as many Artifacts as possible. You can either count the first person to cross the exit line as the winner, or the person who escapes with the most Artifacts.

GD: Board Game Brainstorming Part 2: Theme

So now that we have an idea, we have to solidify it and bring it all together with a theme.

So what kind of theme should we have?

If we're choosing the archaeological excavation board game, then the theme should be pretty simple: archaeology. But that by itself isn't that interesting, isn't it? (well, ok, it's interesting to me. But we have to make it interesting to a lot of people!) So what about archaeology and breaking into an archaeological dig site is interesting?

Let's ask Steven Spielberg.

Heck, let's just make an Indiana Jones board game and get it over with! Sneaking into temples, trouncing evil Nazis, "that thing belongs in a museum," and getting the girl, well, what else could you want from an archaeology-themed game? It's got thrills, chills, and morally depraved opponents, so it should make the perfect game for anyone.
But that's still not enough! Indiana Jones is just one person, and this game needs to be multiplayer. There isn't room enough for more than one Indie in the world, let alone a small board. But what if this was a game of egos, pitting presumed Indie against presumed Indie? A lot of temple-robbing, tomb-scavenging films feature other treasure hunters acting as opposing forces to the main fellow, so why not integrate this into our game? Each player starts off thinking they're the swashbuckling protagonist and everyone else doesn't deserve the fame and glory of rescuing priceless items from the hands of the enemy, and acts accordingly.

So, for a concept statement, how about this?

In this game of tombs and temples, grab fame and glory for yourself whilst sabotaging your opponents!

Or, better yet,

Your personal progression is sped up by hampering others'.

I want to make this an extremely competitive game, with lots of opportunities for sabotage and outright confrontation. A lot of the mechanics will serve to send your opponents back, or stop them in their tracks, or even make them lose their place entirely! The board itself should have room for adaptation and change as each card is played, and the layout should be reasonably mutable to suit the player's whims. There should be a combat mechanic and serious consequences to losing. All in all, this game should be annoying as all get out, and super cathartic if you don't like the person you're playing against.

Let's get a feel for the aesthetics theme as well. The best place to start is with your traditional pulp-fiction-y movie posters. Take these, for instance:

Can you see a general visual theme?  There's a lot of papery, old textures that reference the posters of 1930s treasure hunter films. The fonts are, for the most part, bombastic and overly dramatic to emphasize the romantic nature of treasure hunting. The colour scheme is a whole lot of warm, dusty tones to bring to mind exotic places with hidden reliquaries and deadly temples.
This carries on into the films themselves, which primarially have a lot of earthy tones.

We can solidify our archaeological theme by mimicking these colour schemes. A particular theme that works could be this:

GD: Board Game Brainstorm

After all that intense soul-searching analysis, now it's time to brainstorm! I haven't played that many board games (or games at all) but I have a few favourites I tend to return to when I'm at home.

Games I've enjoyed (or, rather, my family enjoys):

Outrage! Steal the Crown Jewels:
My brother was a particular fan of this board game because it was competitive and belligerent with serious conflicts but didn't drag on like Risk or Monopoly. The basic essence is break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels from the White Palace using tools you pick up along the way. It has a very basic combat system using weapon cards with numeric values, but you can also improvise by using the tools you brought with you to steal the Crown Jewels. It has a lot of English history built into it as well, which gives it an air of realism that makes it more serious. The only problem was that you could find yourself playing it for two or three hours: if it were shorter, it would be much more fun.

Cranium:
I'm not sure how we got this game, but it's the only game my family can all agree on. It mixes charades, pictionary, number games, and general knowledge into a game that's varied enough to interest anyone. That way, your team can plan on exploiting their strengths to move forward and hinder the other teams. It's a pretty long board game, though, and a lot of the charade prompts are out of date. It could do with a revamp.

Bananagrams:
Not exactly a board game, but it's certainly a bored game (haha). My mother and I play this all the time when I'm at home, as it's a bit like DIY Scrabble. I like the timed aspect of it, as everyone's rushing themselves against the other player, but I always feel like it could be a lot more organised. My sister never really liked it because she could never get the words right, so maybe there should be a Bananagrams for the word-challenged?

Ideas for games:

Bananagrams but mixed with Bioshock pipe game
Given a 6x6 grid and 10 tabs of straight or curved pipe tabs to start off with and you have to get from the source to the depository. As you finish one line, you have to take another tab with a pipe on it and integrate it into your layout.
I tested this one out and it works to a degree, but I'm not sure how fun it is. I think I'd need to add different shapes of pipes, or maybe make the whole thing a different shape?

Psychological benefits/detriments developmental game
Psychosocial or psychosexual? Withdrawn or outgoing? Dependant or independant, trusting or suspicious? In this game of chance and inflicted pain and suffering, who will make it through the developmental stages to adulthood with minimal damage? Probably a rather complicated board, as you make moral choices based on psychiatric tests, and these choices dictate which dark path you go down.

Adjective/verb/noun charades game
Pick an adjective card, a verb card, and a noun, and act it out entirely without saying it.

Dante's Inferno narrative board game with concentric circles of Hell
Roll a 5 to summon Geryon!

Board game with board shaped like motherboard (players as bytes?)
Pick up an information card and make it back to your microprocessor before the others do!

Darwinism: The Reckoning (evolve by picking up certain biological traits)
Pick up biological traits and then someone pulls a card that states the style of the next epoch and then either your creature survives or it doesn't. Very much a game of chance.

Moebius Strip-shaped board, maybe based on reincarnation

Papercraft catapults assault on a papercraft castle

Archaeology-themed board game
not unlike Outrage!; acquire important parts and leave for the museum with your name on them for fame and glory. Shaped like an archaeological dig, with landslides and cave collapses.

Robot building workshop

2D Sidescroller-themed game, reminiscent of Mario or similar platformers

Cake shop themed game, get ingredients and head back to the kitchen before the others

Pokemon-themed battle system that's more like the video game (turn based, with dice)

Art History revision game to help study for Development of Art and Ideas

Racing game with personalised cars with specific stats (power, turning, durability, tires, engine)

Pirate-themed game with a continuous board and hidden treasures, gathering resources and taking down opponents

Titans vs Humans, a game of slow attrition and patience
Build a wall, break it down. Build it higher, break it down again.

Deliver the mail! fighting obstacles like dogs, trees, government shut down, and tornadoes

3D construction game, building bridges to cross rivers, very popular with engineers

What if the board looked like a public transportation map and you're trying not to crash trains?

GD: Print-and-Play Step Two: Deconstruction

Space Junkyard

Goal of the Game
The goal of Space Junkyard is to harvest resources from space, fix old spaceship parts, and fit these fixed parts onto the helm of your ship. Each spaceship part has an assigned value which is counted up at the end of the game to give you your final score. You add up the points on each part and take away points for every open path a part has. The game ends when you run out of cards to place on the grid. Up to four players can take part in this game.

Core Mechanics
The core mechanics of Space Junkyard are movement, acquisition/storage, building, and tile placing. A turn is usually broken up into these four actions.

•  Movement

Each player has a ship that they use to move around. You can usually only move between one and three squares in a turn either horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally. You cannot move off of the grid, nor can you occupy the same square as another spaceship. If a Radioactive token is used, you may make a second turn in which they can again move anywhere between one and three squares.

• Acquisition/Storage

At the beginning of each turn, you can harvest one Radioactive token and store it in your spaceship helm. As you gather more spaceship pieces and attach them to this helm, you can harvest more and different kinds of tokens according to the symbols on the part's card. You can also only carry as many tokens as their current ship build will allow; with just the helm, they can store two Radioactive, two Scrap Metal, and two Mechanical tokens. This storage space also will change as the you adds more parts to you ship.
Tokens can be used to repair spaceship parts and fix them onto your helm. Radioactive tokens can also be used to give yourself an extra turn.

• Building/Scrapping

When you move onto a square, you can flip that square over and see what it is. Asteroids can be scrapped and will yield one token per each asteroid of the same colour. So, for instance, if you get a card with one blue asteroid and one red, you will get a Scrap Metal token and a Mechanical token.
However, if you land on a spaceship part, you have two options: you can scrap it and get the respective tokens as marked on the card, or you can attach it onto your spaceship helm if you have enough tokens to spend.
Once a card has been turned over and you chose to scrap it, it is placed in the scrap pile and cannot be used in the game again.

•   Square Movement

Finally, at the end of your turn, you are able to pick up a square from the pile and add it onto a row or column on the current board. In doing so, you move all the existing squares down a rung and knock the last square off. This square then is lost in space and is placed on the scrap pile where it cannot be reused. If a player is sitting on this square as it is knocked off, they become stranded in space and must use their movement ability the next turn to get back onto the board again.

Space of the Game

 Figure 1: A layout of the board with spaceship counters in beginning position

The game takes place on a 6x6 grid constructed out of the asteroid/spaceship part cards flipped over. These squares are 2D discrete areas on which the player can set their ship, though as the game progresses and more cards are removed from the grid the player may find their ship 'floating in space' with no strict square to be placed on. Each player also has a space where they store their resources and build their ships.

Objects, Attributes, States

• Spaceship

Figure 2: The four spaceship shaped counters used in the game

Now, the spaceship is technically two things: the spaceship shaped counter you use to navigate the space of the game, and the spaceship you construct with your helm and all the pieces acquired from the grid. 
The spaceship counter itself has a move attribute in that it can move anywhere between one and three squares in any direction that isn't diagonal. It can either be on the board or off the board, but when it's off the board it has to move onto the board within the next move.

Figure 3: A spaceship helm with three fixed pieces attached to it

The spaceship construction has the building attribute: it will grow when the player adds pieces to it. It also has a scoring attribute, as the scoring system is based off the final spaceship assembled at the end of the game. Each spaceship piece has a numerical score on it, but for every passage that isn't attached to another piece the score goes down. 

• Resources

 Figure 4: The three types of resource tokens.

The resource tokens are used to fix spaceship parts and attach them to other pieces on your spaceship. They can either be Radioactive, Scrap Metal, or Mechanic. There isn't much of a difference between these, except that spending a Radioactive token can give you a second turn. The state of a token is either 'I have this' or 'I don't.'

• Asteroids

 Figure 5: Various types of asteroids

Asteroids are part of the grid, and their locations are usually unknown to you until you discover them. Each asteroid card has a different configuration of asteroids on it, and the number/colour of an asteroid will dictate what kind of resource tokens you can harvest from them. So an asteroid card has a known/unknown attribute, a colour attribute, and a number of asteroids attribute. The state of these attributes will inform how you will harvest them.

• Spaceship parts

 Figure 6: A spaceship part. This particular part can be scrapped for two Scrap Metal, one Radioactive, and one Mechanic. It can store two Scrap Metal tokens, and gives one Scrap Metal token to you per turn. It has three open paths to connect to other parts.

Similar to the asteroids, spaceship parts are part of the grid and share the same known/unknown attribute. When you uncover a spaceship part, you activate the scrap/fix attribute-- you can scrap the part to take its resource, or spend resource tokens to fix it and add it to your ship. To add it to your ship, you need to pay the resource tokens shown on one side of the part, as well as the resource tokens on the part that you want to attach it to. Every spaceship part has a score attribute, a scrapping attribute, a resource-storing attribute, a path attribute, and a resource-giving attribute. Given these attributes, you will consider whether or not it's worth scrapping or fixing. Some parts, considering their scores, may make no sense to fix.

Operative Actions/Resulting Actions

• Moving Spaceship 

With every turn, you can move your spaceship either once or twice. Moving your spaceship twice means removing more squares from the board, which quickens the gameplay and potentially denies an opponent a chance at getting resources. Once the board becomes more empty, you can remove squares nearest to your opponent by claiming them first, leaving them with nowhere to go.

• Acquiring Parts

When you land on a spaceship part, you can choose either to scrap it or to fix it. This is an exercise in opportunity cost-- does the amount of resources you can harvest outweigh the score of the piece? Sometimes a piece has three potential pathways and is only worth one score point, making it senseless to fix unless you have three other parts to fix onto it. Some parts will only have one open path so that when you use them, they will essentially close off your potential to build. 
There aren't any resultant actions from acquiring parts that affect your opponents, besides perhaps challenging them to get more parts to compete with your obviously superior spaceship.

• Moving Squares

At the end of your turn, you have the ability to change the layout of the grid. You can move along one column or row by adding in a new square, knocking off whatever was at the other end of the row or column. There are two strategies here: either you're trying to fill the grid with more squares and fill in the empty spaces left by the scavenging, or you're trying to get rid of resources near your opponents by knocking off nearby squares. You can also knock your opponent off the board, but usually the penalty for that sort of thing is less than the benefits. If you're knocked off the board, you can enter again along whatever column you were nearest. So, essentially, if you're knocked off, you can move three extra squares than usual. Some may try to knock themselves off the board specifically for this reason.

Rules
I think I've already pretty much covered the operational and foundational rules of the game. The actual written rules themselves come in a nice little packet with diagrams in case you get confused. It offers three optional game modes you can play-- a two player game in which 16 squares are already moved from the grid, a 'more junk' game in which you can add a second square at the end of your turn if you scrapped two asteroid squares during your turn, and a 'less empty space' game in which you don't move the gaps when you add a new tile to ensure there is no free space on the grid. The rules add that these games can be combined as the player sees fit.
We couldn't think of any house rules when we were playing, as the game itself is already pretty complicated.
An advisory rule I can think of is try not to fix ship parts with three or more paths. There's almost no way the benefits outweigh the eventual cost. 

Skills
A lot of this game is about weighing costs and handling resources intelligently. Understanding the cost-benefits of fixing a certain piece and acknowledging the inherent chance built into the game are also skills that will help.

Chance
Chance plays into this due to the unknown nature of the grid. Will you land on an asteroid? Will you land on a spaceship part you can afford and will help you store resources? Will the resources you harvest be the ones you need in the next turn? These kinds of uncertainties will plague your playing experience ceaselessly.

I really can't reiterate enough how much I enjoy this game. The graphics are crisp, the gameplay fresh and interesting, and it's just competition enough to give it an edge without getting people too worked up. I would highly recommend it.

GD: Print-and-Play Extravaganza

To start my foray into understanding basic game design, I and a few friends decided to try out some print-and-play board and card games. These are games which are freely available online to print out and assemble yourself to play either by yourself or in a group. What a concept! We discovered, however, that finding a good game amidst all this clutter is pretty difficult. Here are some of our findings.

Space Junk
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/26747/space-junkyard
Type: Board
Goal: Build as big a ship as possible by scavenging old parts from a space junkyard.
Time spent playing: 30 minutes
Time spent setting up: 45 minutes (the spaceships themselves were pretty fiddly to put together, and there were a lot of resource tokens)

I think we all agreed that this was the most fun and most successful game of the session: the aesthetics were clean and consistent, the gameplay interesting enough that there was some serious competition, and the print-and-play version was very well put together (note the absolutely adorable 3D spaceships). There were some mechanics that didn't quite synch up, though-- for instance, a trick that gave you a chance to gather two resources in one turn meant that we ended up having an almost empty board very quickly. A structured grid on which to lay the cards also would have been beneficial, as it became a game of randomly guessed layout very quickly.

Bad Grandmas
http://www.goodlittlegames.co.uk/games/02-bad-grandmas.html
Type: Card
Goal: Have the highest score by the end of the round by beating the opponent's grandmas (subject to change)
Time spent playing: 15 minutes
Time spent setting up: 20 minutes

This was an... interesting game. Judging from the site, it seemed like it was more of a conceptual game rather than one that focused on the mechanics. The drawings on the cards themselves were amusing, as was the descriptions, but the game itself seemed rather uninspired. I've played a number of versus card games of a similar style, and though this game does spice things up a little bit with it's 'take a card at the beginning and follow it's instructions when scoring' idea, it's not that impressive. The games themselves are short, and overall this game could benefit from having more cards and being play tested more. 2/3rds of the games we played ended in a tie.

 Shape Up
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/142068/shape-up
Type: Card
Goal: Match up your given card to as many adjacent similar shapes on the board (we weren't actually entirely sure what this meant)
Time spent playing: 20 minutes
Time spent setting up: 10 minutes

Out of all the games we played, this one was the one we were least enthusiastic about. It could have been that we were all operating on minimal brain power by that time and were looking forward to going to bed, but for some reason it just seemed to complicated for us. The rules didn't cover all the possibilities of card movement (was replacement legal? what did the little numbers mean in the corners?), we weren't sure what the exact endgame was, and it seemed to require the same knowledge of type pairing as poker did. In the end, we gave it up for dead and went back to playing Space Junk.

GD: Skinner's Box and Portal

“At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about 15 minutes of silence, and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.”

—	Erik Wolpaw, writer of Portal.

Games can be considered a series of test-reward situations. You are put in a situation in which the goal is reasonably well articulated and you are rewarded when you reach said goal. Sometimes you're even rewarded when you fail: a bad end may still reveal information to you, or another storyline will become open to you. This idea of a game as an environment for goal achievement resonates strongly with B.F. Skinner's theories on human free will. In some ways, a game can be an exaggerated version of Skinner's principles of reinforcement and reward and his Operant Conditioning Chambers. The name Operant Conditioning Chamber sounds like it's directly from the gameplay dialogue of Portal. "Now entering the operant conditioning chamber. Please mind out for errant electrical currents." But it's not! Skinner originally created the Operant Conditioning Chamber to show how animals will respond to outside stimuli in ways that essentially effect their own reasoning and will, using reward and aversion therapies. Rats and pigeons would be trained to pull levers by associating them with either pain or food. After a while, the animals associate certain stimuli with good or bad things, and react in an appropriate manner. To this degree, Portal is almost like a human-sized, human-oriented version of an Operant Conditioning Chamber. Let's consider how Portal starts. You start off in a fairly bland room, so of course your first instinct is to explore it. Human beings in a game, almost a rule, will try to figure out all the ways they can break it. Pick up the clipboard, jump on the bed, look around; how can this room be broken, escaped? You respond to the voice (GLaDOS) as she's the only external stimulus available, and because she has the ability to supposedly create these portals that let you escape the room. The test in the first room is easy enough: place the cube on the button and you're allowed to go on. But why do you want to go on? You get a reward by way of affirmation from GLaDOS, but that's not enough. It's the promise of more things to interact with, more ways to solve puzzles and finish tests, that makes you go forward. In Portal the Operant Conditioning Chamber doesn't reward you with food or punish you with electric shocks; instead, you are rewarded with more knowledge about the strange facility and the shadowy figure of GLaDOS with more opportunities to prove yourself, and you are punished by failure and having to repeat the puzzle. In this way you feel compelled to finish more tests, because you want to get this mental fulfillment and sated curiosity. This is probably why I marathoned Portal and finished it within an hour: because I felt compelled to do so. It wasn't by my own free will that I finished the game, however; it was the clever programming and writing of Valve that steered me in the right direction, externally manipulating my own desires to make me feel like I needed to finish the game. To that extent, Portal and most video games are excellent examples of our complete lack of free will. Skinner would be proud.

GD: Assassin's Creed Trailer ReCut

To show my newfound ability to use Premiere Pro at a reasonable level, here's a bunch of Assassin's Creed B Roll shots spliced together to make a cheesy Romcom trailer. The idea was to make an advertisement for Assassin's Creed, and I'd figured everyone would do a pretty similar job, so... I deviated slightly.

RL: Steve Hickner and the Importance of Timing

Last weekend, Ringling had the pleasure of welcoming Steve Hickner, Dreamworks director and storyboarder, on campus. As a Game Art and Design Sophomore, I attended his lecture about ideas, films, and storyboarding with a little trepidation. What use could storyboarding be for me? We were doing a cinematic breakdown of an Assassin's Creed trailer in our Game Design class, but I still couldn't quite understand what the importance was. You can't storyboard a video game, I thought. This seemed like a lecture for the CA majors, not for GADs. I knew we had to make a trailer for a game as our eventual thesis, but that seemed so far away, and the focus would be more on the gameplay rather than the cinematography, I had hoped. Perhaps I was missing the point?

But as the lecture went on, and we viewed more and more instances of re-storyboarding and re-storytelling, I formulated a differing opinion. In all of the storyboarding, as much as the shots and the cuts were important, it all really came down to timing to really tie something together. A lot of the thesis ideas presented by the CA students had, while not perhaps jokes in and of themselves, a progression and a punchline that needed to be realised in a way that resonated with the audience and didn't fall flat. To maintain the balance between anticipation and appreciation was a serious task. Like a comedian prepping for a joke, setting up a scene and pacing things just right are integral for a game as much as any other media. You can't just straight-up barge into a boss fight first thing in a game (unless you're something like Dark Souls, then you can do what you want. But the point is knowing the rules before you can break them).

Later on I found an article written by Warren Spector named The Commandments of Game Design which seemed like a perfect addendum to this thought process. A veteran of the industry who has worked on Deus Ex and System Shock, Spector has written a series of essentially Do's and Don'ts that are applicable to most areas of game design. He addresses the idea that a game is more like a dialogue than a movie: it's something to be spoken to, and interacted with. With these things in mind, we can't just storyboard our way into a good game: we have to consider things from a variety of different shots and angles, not just a one.

DA: Summer Concept Work Con't: Internship

  This summer I had the great privilege of interning at the London office of Albourne Partners Ltd., a hedge fund advisory group. I was tasked with redesigning their iconic Village, a unique website idea which sets Albourne up as a quaint English village complete with their mayor, Sam. The site layout had remained approximately the same for the last ten years, so it seemed about time for a bit of a makeover.
  Of course, getting the right shape down and keeping the same iconic feel of a village was an interesting challenge. I researched and documented as many village buildings as I could and tried to stick with a colour scheme that was rustic. Here's the creation process behind the village pub, the Bridge Inn:

  In the end I drew about 17 or so buildings to put together on the final village map.
  I had a great time working with Albourne, and I can't wait to see what the final website will look like when it goes up! I learned a lot about working in a serious business environment, and about working on a time sensitive project.

3D: Fishing Village Concept Art

For our GAD 3D class, we had to come up with a concept for an 'alleyway;' that is, a space that can be inhabited and surrounded on all sides by architectural features. I found myself drawn to the village of Fenghuang in China, and so took that concept and bolted with it. Here are some original sketches, as well as the final concept sketch and a visual I used in my presentation.

DA: Freshman Year Recap (NSFW)

For those unfamiliar with my older blog, you may not know about the kind of work I was doing last year. I am not forced, per se, but rather heavily advised to show you. Brace yourself, please. It's not going to be a pretty ride (also not safe for work, due to nudity).

Figure
Figure class was arguably one of the most important classes I took when at Ringling. Not only was it a great way to practice observational skills and get formally acquainted with human anatomy, but my teachers both semesters imparted all sorts of wisdom, whether it be about maintaining a professional demeanor in the workplace or dealing with an accidental concussion. Truly, Figure class was an education in all sorts of topics. These pictures are samples of a few works done in my second semester.

 
3D
Arguably my most anticipated class, 3D for Game Design was a brilliantly-taught class where I learned a great deal about maintaining scale, keeping a watchful eye out for detail, and the name for almost every muscle in the human body. I was also allowed to create a 1-to-12 scale miniature Bedouin tent, which was brilliant.

 Perspective
Technically Drawing 2, this class was a blast to learn about architectural drawing and lighting. James Gueney's book Color and Light is a masterpiece and anyone interested in learning anything about colour and light should get it. Seriously.

There we go! Here's to hoping I improved somewhat over the summer...