DeconstructionCraft: Luck of the Dice?

Another fun colab piece with Kevin. Again, Mr. Rickman is first half, I am second. A fun piece on the nature of luck and games keeping in the holiday spirit.

Lucks one of those things some people have where others just don't... or is it?

Click Leon

I have two more of these I want to wrap up but it's just.. it's bananas with midterms right now, so I apologize for my tardiness. Hope you enjoy my piece on luck while you wait. :)

[Ludonarrative] DeconstructionCraft.

These are exerts from the full article found here.

"Games do not necessarily need text, cut scenes, music, sound, or visuals at all to tell stories. They simply need a player's input and some unspecified means to show reaction to player input to articulate the game space and scenario. The process video games employ to tell stories, or describe what happens, is fundamentally in their mechanics. "

        "In the very act of playing we automatically assign narrative to actions. In board or card games traditionally not associated with story, the very rules are in fact bits of narrative that help players understand the theming, the pieces we assign narrative by naming them, and which functions as the story to their specific characteristics in play. Think of the game of chess in which the objective of the game is to capture as many of your opponent’s pieces and put them in a position to force surrender. A war game, a military theme, we've given meaning to moving small carved bits of wood around on a board by assigning a narrative. The rules dictate the manners in which the players can move their pieces. This piece is a Bishop and so it can move in this certain fashion. The narrative of the Bishop is in its name and its place on the board, these are used to explain its actions on the board.

            In video games, this is even simpler. There's a shape on the screen, and to explain its inter-activeness within its virtual space we assign it a name. The name explains to the viewer why it acts within the space as it does. This is a car, a soldier, a robot, a blob, a gun, a superhuman. Games help the player by contextualizing this narrative by other communicative forms of exposition through interaction; voices, pictures, text. It's important to note these are means of the process but are not the process itself. Similar to how literature uses letters, words, punctuation, thematic devices, and yet narrative cannot be found explicitly within any of those things. Narrative lacks an empirical component."

" It is through the action of the player through the avatar upon the world that allows the player to continue projecting a narrative upon the virtual space and the objects and characters within. "

            

Valentines DeconstructionCraft- Games and Romance

(click image to go to article)

So as this Friday-tomorrow- is Valentines day Kevin of NextLevelGamingOnline's DeconstructionCraft and I wrote a combined piece on romance devices as they're represented in video games. Unfortunately the site doesn't actually acknowledge two authors so we had to include that bit in text, but that's fine. My bit builds of Kevin's work and introduction but if you're just interested in skimming mine is the second half. Kevin references Final Fantasy 7 and 6, along with Second Life. I comment on relationship mechanics as they're used in the Sims, Catherine, DragonAge, Animal Crossing, Mass Effect, Harvest Moon, The Marriage, and Ico.

Gotta Walk before you can Crawl

Reverse That

So... learning pixel art and design. Code still looks like Russian to me. In what way can someone utilize and test their abilities in the design/writing/art section of game making without yet understanding the code, the very life blood of games? Well there are two possibilities, either A. you work with a team where the code is not your responsibility. This is good because you can hone your specific craft, the issue though is you are reliant on first a finished product to test your work in action and second forced to wait until a certain point of production. Games evolve as they are made and sometimes entire sets of art assets become useless if the design changes. What an artist or writer or designer wants, is to have something tangible to show their work. An actual game that functions as such to display their work, otherwise their craft isn't as well represented in portfolio (and obviously this is less the case with artists or musicians whose work can be appreciated separately) but design in interactive media needs interactivity. Even if it's just the menu buttons lighting up as your mouse hovers over them.

Option B. the artist/writer/designer can find a program that requires no code(or little) to create functional games and have at it. 

And that's sort of what we've been trying to do here. Find the easiest way to make games. Just to be clear, the truly difficult part -the area where a game becomes great or crap- is not in the tools but the creator. Card games are crated with paper and ink. Board games are cardboard, ink, and bits of plastic. The average Chess game is just made of bits of wood and cardboard, and yet that's been around for centuries. My point is the tools do not dictate the quality of the product. Someone can have the best equipment in the world for digital art and still come up with something that looks like junk. Back in the day graphic designers use pen and paper instead of illustrator and the existence of illustrator along with all of its tools have not lead to better graphic artists. 

Anyway, previously in a discussion I had heard Construct 2 mentioned. Previously I hadn't head of this program and at first glance figured it to be the same as MMF2, which dispite all of it's pros is still an expensive bit of machinery and therefor out of our running for "easiest to start making and learning about game making" contest. Ags is great and I'm loving the community, but there's still a decent amount of code required. It's inescapable. 

Or is it?

The reason I advise people use programs like MMF2 and (as far as my limited understanding) programs  like GameSalad, is because they have this sudo-code. Underneath it's the same code that makes any other game work, but it's broken down into symbols and an easily approachable interface. This teaches code logic, which if isn't later used to understand code in it's true raw form can at least bridge the gap between you and your coder when communicating in production. GameSalad is one that's free, but right now we're going to take a look at Construct 2. Or at least I am.

Here are a few games from a person I follow made using Construct 2

http://supajackle.tumblr.com/backlightbig

(personal favorite of his work)

http://gamejolt.com/games/platformer/hero-quest/16821/

(I get a bug with this one but idk, maybe it's just my computer)

http://supajackle.tumblr.com/PixelGame

http://supajackle.tumblr.com/post/45430588965/porterminus-a-spooky-rpg-by-supajackle

 Here's the link to their site where you can download the program. 

Great things one, the interface is easy to understand, it comes with it's own paint image editor which is also easy to grasp. Great things two, it starts out offering a list of templates to chose from, not just get a head start templates for making top down shooters, path-finding, physics, or platforms, but templates to make your game work on Facebook, mobile devices, ect. 

Personally I'm hesitant to jump onto another program, I'm trying to figure out two different programs at once. But really few of my designs are actually complex. Most of the ones I have now are just platforms or beat-em-ups, the big ones.. The ones that are going to take a while use Ags, and it'll probably take me the twice the amount of time to do the art then it will take learning and coding the thing. And with school and work, if I were to throw out a number of when I'd finish that game it'd be someplace in the years category, even if I weren't doing the coding. And while the payoff will be awesome until then the work will be rather slow. Not to mention this blog, besides the DeconstructionCraft notices how much can I say about a background having a bit more shading or a single line of code being added. Development on.. I'm just going to call it 'the Island' project will be slow, and I'd prefer if I can have more regular activity on here. I think I'm at a point in my "career" I just need to make games. Yes I have a group project going on and this big project of my own, but I need something consistent and easily completed. Ags would be my tool if it was more oriented for platforms or the like but it's not, and C2 is. With school coming up and other messes that require my focus irl I'm going to be posting for a while about Construct 2 with the intermittent updates on Ags and what I've learned there. Soon as I can figure out fraps(this is the kind of simple you're talking too) I'll start putting up let's draws or tutorials or speed production vids. But for now I'll just be written bits with the occasional screen-cap. 

Until then, good luck with your projects, and goodnight. 

DeconstructionCraft #2

Alright, here's to completing a second. I'm still new and getting the hang of this, "actual writing" thing but I think I'm improving. Slowly but surely. My second contribution to DeconstructionCraft, here I discuss the multifaceted discussion of the interpersonal and social identification that surrounds the label of "Gamer". What defines a gamer and how do we see and treat this label in our culture.. Geh, honestly there is so much that could go into this, the gang at NextLevel could basically write a book all about the label "Gamer". I just brush over theories; Sumner's theory of in group favoritism, Bulter's performance theory, Watt's on personal identity, and Hume's philosophy of taste, which is where my thesis is. If you're interested give it a look, if you don't like what I have to say, next week part two written by my cohort Kevin will go up to show a different perspective on the topic ^^.. That's really what I like about this project, we both kinda have a tendency to over-think things :P When we do our research it's fun to see the two trains of thought branching from the same topic.

MOTHER OF GOD YES

Oh lord.. That was painful. 

Alright, so DeconstructionCraft is the Bi-weekly column I'm contributing to, and that first argument was a pain. Not just because it covers philosophy of language, and philosophy is something I have limited experience in, or because Wittgenstein is both difficult to grasp and brilliant, and therefor hard to argue.. But because I both procrastinated and had little expertise with the site... last minute finding banners and stuff is irritating. 

 That's all good though, best way to learn. I've gotten one of the most difficult ones checked off the list. What defines a Game. I feel like that should be etched in gold on a varnished board someplace for any game culture journalist when they really dig into the philosophy of that question. Because games really don't exist you know... same with art.. or stories.. They're just made up. Here's my post if you're interested.