Resting and Seeing

No posts for a week or so because I've been having a nice restful holiday to New Zealand.  It was a chance to rest my brain, and allow myself to really see stuff again.  To see stuff, I draw - photographing stuff is good, but you don't see what is there or get your mind working on it until you draw it.

When you make a game you need a premise.  OK - we're shooting a bunch of bad guys - and why are they bad again?  They're evil zombies from a scientific experiment gone wrong?  OK - that is a premise, and without one even the most obvious game idea won't work.

My game concepts are all driven by fairly rich premises and I need something to work from to build those.  Bad guys need a back story, and good guys need one too - if players are to care at all about your game characters they need some dimensions.

Sitting in a cafe is great - I find I can easily make up stories about the folks having a coffee two tables over.  But travelling to another country, sitting in airports and travelling on ships and helicopters: hell, it doesn't get any better than that for topping up my creative reserves.

Here's some images from my trip and a few words about each - maybe it will give you some insight into how my imagination sees the world and creates a story out of it.

I flew into Wellington, NZ and started there with a trip to Weta Digitals "Weta Cave" for their "Window into Workshop" tour.  This was an absolutely amazing insight into the creative people behind movies like "Lord of the Rings" and "District 9", and I have only my memories of it as we were not allowed to take pictures.  As it was a guided tour doing drawings was not possible either, not that Weta would have been all that keen on my "taking notes" of what they were working on.  

I went to the Southward car museum and managed to strike up a conversation with the curator there.  The Corvette Stingray and Jaguar E-type next to it were pretty nice too.

Clearly you need to lend me this De Lorean so I can save the universe from evil

I went up on the Wellington Cable Car to a great vantage point and checked the harbour views.  In this picture I'm in front of an older cable car in their cable car museum.

From Wellington I went across to the South Island on the Interislander: a large roll-on, roll-off ferry.  It was a few hours so I got to relax and sketch.  My favourite activity is ninja sketching random people and making up stories about them.  I hold my sketchpad down out of sight and draw them quickly hoping I won't get sprung.

Guy on the Ferry

Guy on the Ferry: he was sitting a few seats over and had a very game-worthy face.  Strong potato of a chin and kind of a solid demeanour.  He could be like some kind of SAS guy, trying to get away from the memories of his last tour in Afghanistan.  He actually smiled a lot, but when his friends pointed at something out the Ferry window he kind of got the "thousand yard stare".

These guys were clearly spies travelling to complete an assignment.  I'm not convinced they really were human.  Maybe SAS guy was going to take them out.

As the Ferry neared the South Island there were some lovely views of the peaks of the fjords reaching up out of the water, and a few tiny yachts gliding across the water.

View out Ferry porthole

There was something about the way portholes framed the views that made them more poignant, more dramatic.

Queen Charlotte Sound

I think it is the way whoever is watching the view becomes part of the frame itself, their black silhouette and that of the ships window being a surround for the scene sliding past.  Ninjas and assassins are like that - you don't see them because they become part of the darkened frame.

Coming into Picton

The ferry itself was pretty enormous - and as it approached the South Island terminus of Picton the buildings seemed tiny compared to it.  One of its sister ships was tied up at the wharf.

We spent a few days in Picton doing the wine district and driving around the Nelson & Marlborough area, then headed down to Franz Josef Glacier.

 Our cabins in Franz Josef were right next to a miniature horse place and one of the cute little guys stuck his head all the way through the wire fence to where I was set up on a chair with my sketch pad.

The goal of Franz Josef was to get up on the glacier itself which was acheived by helicopter.  I would love to own one of these things.  Lots of game memes here.  :-)

Landing up on the glacier we met up with our guide who took us through the ice caves and crevasses.  Glaciers are very very big.  And powerful.  This is a shot of me carefully listening to the safety briefing - "Don't fall into the ice caves as we won't be able to get you out".

The ice caves can go all the way down through the glacier to its bed, but they quickly get too small for us crazy humans.  Here's me doing my best Bear Grylls/Crocodile Dundee impression as I head down into one of the crevasses.

The mountains of the Southern Alps - which featured prominently in the Weta Digital enabled "Lord of the Rings" - were pretty spectacularly beautiful too, swathed in dense green from sea-level and soaring up to snow capped peaks.

From Franz Josef it was back via the scenic Arthur's Pass national park to Christchurch.  This city of 300,000 people has been plagued by earthquakes for the past few years.  Locals have responded by deploying shipping containers as makeshift barriers to prevent rocks from nearby mountains plunging through their houses.

Post apocalyptic doesn't get any better than this.

The city itself is amazing too - shop owners have moved their businesses into shipping containers and a new cafe district is thriving in the container mall called "Re:START" in the city center.

Here a once proud landmark of Cave Rock is fenced off due to earthquake damage and this rather inexplicable steam-punk pumping device is playing some role in that.

After a couple of nights in Christchurch at a rather Agatha Christie style guest house called "The Grange" it was time to head back to Australia.

Game Mythos

Working on the intro animation for my game has led me to do a bit of development of the game mythos.  What I mean by mythos is basically the rules and background that governs what goes on in the game world - other than normal world stuff which we already know.

When it comes to normal stuff like "how big is a loaf of bread" - that is certainly the rules and the background, but where it does not differ from our  normal world you can just take it as read.  Where your game world is different - magical, super, silly or just plain weird - that is where you need to start work to figure out just how different.

Think about any game that features vampires for example (no vampires in my game by the way - this is just an example).

• Do the vampires get to go out in the sun?  
• Does garlic or crosses work on them?  
• What about their powers - are they super strong, or super fast or both?  

When you ask those questions for any game, about the characters, the world and so on you are defining the mythos.  I chose vampires as an example because it seems like almost every game, TV show, movie or book that deals with them has a different mythos.  Just saying "this game character is a vampire" doesn't answer all the questions - and its always good to answer them upfront.

Pragmatics also comes into it.  Sometimes in your game you want a particular mythos element but it is just not practical for the development of the game.  If your vampires (to extend the above example) cannot go out in the daylight does that mean absolutely all your game scenes/rooms/levels have to be at night?  That might be a bit limiting.

It's important for any game to nail down the mythos elements early on to avoid continuity problems.  This is especially the case if you are building the game with help from others.  Keeping and updating a mythos document can help do this.

In my game, EthEx 2080, the setting is a near future planet Earth.  At this time, medical technology has advanced so far that almost any ailment or weakness - real or imagined - can receive treatment, at a price.

Many of the problems this brings about exist today in 2013: trafficking in body parts, illegal sales of medicines and therapies, illegal or ill-advised cosmetic and surgical enhancements.  And of course performance enhancing drugs and therapies - such as blood doping, and steroids.  You don't have to look far to see this stuff in the news today.

The hero of my game is an Agent in the Ethics Executive - she is an Eth-Cop.  Their motto is Dignitatem tutando Hominis which translated from Latin is Defending the Dignity of Man.  The dignity of man is a key idea in the field of Bio-Ethics.  I came up with the ideas for the crest above, and the motto from my reading.  Then working them up like this using my tablet and a vector drawing program starts to make the idea of the Ethics Executive come alive.  By the way the above is just the basic design - I have not added any color or lighting to this - but you can see the idea.

I used Google's translate service to go through a few variations on the English version of the motto until I got one that came out sounding good in Latin.  I'm planning for one of the cut scenes that the camera will zoom right in and come to rest on the crest so the detail is not just an exercise.  And likely it will also probably feature on an Eth-Cop's badge which will be an inventory item in the game.

Working on some elements for this globe-spanning bio-ethics justice group has involved trying to nail down who they are, what their powers are (legal rather than super) and what kind of an appearance they have.  In the crest you can see some of these elements: the UN style globe & wreath - symbolising peace and international reach; the medical profession (although the staff of the Caduceus is replaced with a sword) - also the hand (symbol of human rights) and the scales (for justice and the legal system) appear here.  Interestingly there is some history around whether one snake or two should appear - one snake is actually correct for the original Greek mythology, but recent history has led us to use the two serpent version.

It's good when looking at mythos to examine other great mythos makers in the same genre.  For the dystopian sci-fi near-future you can't go past Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which was realised in movie form as "Blade Runner" by directory Ridley Scott.  I've been watching a great documentary on sci-fi writers which has a good discussion of Dick and his writing.  In particular the paranoia and ethical conflict that Dick was trying to portray.

The thing about the future world of Blade Runner is that there was no new special group of cops, or legal framework for dealing with the massive scientific advances it depicted.  Dick's hero Rick Deckard was an independent; a bounty hunter, although he took his work from the Police department.

I will need more structure in my game.  For EthEx 2080 I want collecting evidence to be an important game mechanic.  Also I love procedural cop dramas and wanted to capture some of that too.  So I needed to know more about the Ethics Executive and what they stand for.

So far I'm thinking of some thing a bit more like the real-world FBI, but with a bit of the British MI6 thrown in for good measure.

I took the above shot of the MI6 building from the Lambeth Bridge when I was in London in 2004 on holiday, and this building has captivated me for ever since.  Looks menacing, secretive and bunker-like doesn't it?  It's pretty impressive in real life.  Makes you wonder what goes on inside.  I'll probably never know for sure, but soon I plan to lift the lid on the Ethics Executive and give us all a view of the life of an Eth-Cop.  :-)

I am hoping to have the title animation done this week with any luck so stay tuned for updates.

Primal Scream

Right now I'm bogged down trying to get some infrastructure stuff done for my game and its very frustrating.

Later in January my time will be mine to schedule as it suits, but right now I'm still working days and coding on my game at nights.  It means I'm tired and not as on top of my game as I should be.

Things that seem conceptually simple and had looked like being fun to do, turned out to be a real pain in the neck.

And literally, as my home work setup is not ergonomically great.  Now I'm walking round like Quasimodo.

Its discouraging.  Why with all these amazing productivity tools can the simplest things be so painful to achieve?

I have a bunch of stuff hard-coded in the game and I'm trying to make it data driven.  The theory is I change a few values in a file, and hey presto the game springs to life with a whole new scene.  Minimal coding, just drop in the artwork and away we go.

Nuh.  Not so much.

To sum it up I've crossed a watershed in Objective-C where I know enough to start coding up things beyond the bounds of the tutorials and example code - and I absolutely have to do that because none of the things I want to do fit neatly into those examples.  So I can see what I need to do, but don't know it well enough to quickly write and debug the code to achieve it.

Things that ought to be simple - wiring up a few data structures to some UI elements - are painful beyond belief.  CoreData's magic binding stuff is not doing what I want, and even where I thought I had it nailed its not working how I thought.

There are a few API's and languages I know really well - those I am used to being able to express myself in quickly.  I can get stuff done fast.

And I will get to that point sometime with Objective-C but right now.... I want to throw the whole thing at the wall!  Grrrr!!!

Oh well.  Hopefully by the next blog things will be better!