Secret Passage

Well here it is, four movies and ten hours later, my final illustration for the clue mechanic use secret passage.


ms. scarlet in the study with the knife.

still some things I want to add/fix, but I think I need a break from it for a while. I'm really starting to like using Painter, however :).

Clue Mechanic Sketches

These are the three sketches I did for game design class to describe the mechanics of clue. They're really rough and basic but I'll be doing a finished version of one of them here soon. The first is the use secret passage mechanic, the second is make a suggestion mechanic, and the third is the accusation. I was trying different techniques while learning how to sketch in both corel and photoshop so my skills are anything but honed yet, but this was good exercise. I used my roomies for reference too so if you know them maybe you can tell. My personal favorite is the secret passage mechanic.

well I'm back

at Ringling that is. so that means I'll probably start putting things up here.
So far so good...class-wise that is. Game design is awesome, I'm starting to get the hang of CA.

One project I had a lot of fun with recently was creating my own poker mechanic. I played it with my roomies and they all seemed to enjoy it. Here are the rules to my game:

Royal Suicide

Main Rules:

- Must be played with 6 players
- Each is dealt 5 cards
- If you are dealt the king of hearts your hand is ‘dead’ and must be discarded.
- This effect is nullified if you also have the queen of hearts in your hand or if you pick up a joker (to be explained below).
- If you get a dead hand each of the other players then gives up one of their cards to you as a ‘condolence.’
- They are then each dealt one more card, so everyone has five again, but different hands than they started with
- If someone folds or is out of the game the dealer provides the condolence in their stead.
- If the king doesn’t show up in anyone’s hand (since there are 6 people, times 5 cards and there are only 52 cards, there is a good chance of him popping up but it won’t always happen) it is played like normal 5 card stud.
- Then either way, whenever everyone has his or her final five card hands, whoever has the highest hand wins
- The highest hand in this game is a royal flush in hearts (10 J KQ A)


Jokers:

- Played with 2-4 depending on the deck being played with
- Laid face up on the table
- Can strategically replace the king of hearts in your hand
- Example: if you have a good 4-card hand and don’t need the fifth that would be a good time to use it rather than losing your whole hand.
- Jokers should be used sparingly because each can only be used once in a game.

Betting:

- Betting is basically done as it is in regular poker with some exceptions
- Each turn before the deal there is an ante, but this goes into a separate pot called ‘the condolence pot.’
- This pot goes to the person who had the king of hearts, only if they lost their hand, unless someone has the queen of hearts then it will go to them.
- Then there is a primary a round of betting
- After the first round of betting the person in possession of the king of hearts must announce suicide.
- There is a round of betting before the announcement to throw people off and make it more interesting, to keep with that, the person with the king of hearts may not fold during the first round of betting, they don’t know what their final hand will be yet anyway so it would be pointless to fold.
- After everyone has their final hands, there is another round of betting and so on.

Final ideas:

The idea I had behind this game was to make poker tell a simple story. While play testing my friends and I had a lot of fun with that concept. It was also interesting seeing the ways that the king of hearts’ suicide could be used to screw someone over, not just the person with that card in their hand, but the other people with good hands that had to give up a card. It works well both ways.



Another thing we've been working on is observing real world mechanics and altering experiences with those mechanics. So far I've been looking at the crosswalk that goes from the bayou to main campus across old Bradenton and the lock on my door, because I have been locking myself out quite frequently and would rather blame it on a design flaw than my own stupidity. Just for the sake of this post having an image, one of my quick sketches illustrating opening a door:



Next post I'll put up my sketches for 3 mechanics of Clue, the board game I chose to mod for this semester. Should be cool.

oh, and also, my hobby for game design is costume design so I'll be putting up process work for that as well, as soon as I find time to work on it that is. My first endeavor will be to create a feminine jack frost costume to go with the hat I made over the summer. I'll put up some sketches of my ideas as soon as I get around to scanning.

Just as a side note, a friend told me the other day that the way I try to incorporate my art into my everyday life, most times as a means to make it better in some way or just to better understand it, makes me original (which is not something you hear very much at all in art school). That made me pretty happy and instilled in me a new sense of faith in my work. I think art is something that should make life better, I've always looked at it that way, and that's why I do what I do.

So on that note, I'll end this post with my favorite quote of all time, from F. Scott Fitzgerald's book, The Beautiful and Damned:

"Art isn't meaningless. It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so."

I Really Want a Cloche Hat

I love the 20's era and I really want a Cloche hat, I think they're so cute...I keep seeing them in games like Devil Summoner and movies like Changeling. But for now I just did a speed paint of one. I guess that'll have to do til I get some monies.

Summer Musings Part I

I've been reading a lot of opinion articles on morality in games, realism in games, virtual murder ect. and it's made me realize more than ever that the line between games and reality is becoming very thin and blurry. It's fascinating and almost a bit scary, but it makes me even more excited to be a part of this industry.
Obviously, creating a realistic game world can only be done if you have a deep understanding of the real world. By analyzing our world and attempting to recreate it we may find things we may not have noticed before. It allows us to see ourselves, the way we live and the world in which we live in a new way. The human experience is a confusing thing, therefore hard to replicate, but the harder we try to do so the better we may be able to understand it. (Taking this route in trying to understand life has almost been like a personal therapy for me.) By making a 'realistic game' we are taking our world and turning it into something artificial, something changeable and understandable to us because we built it. Its almost like a science project a child would do when observing the behavior of ants.
But what happens when we look at life as something artificial? something we ourselves have created? Is it the point of view of a god we have granted ourselves or a completely jaded view of the meaning of life? Maybe life as we know it is only that, a game. Soon the question will be 'which came first, the game or the player?'

This almost goes hand in hand with my P4 morality rant.

Anyway...I never thought that my response to "So why do you want to make video games?" would be, "To better understand the real world" but its seems that's where I'm at right now. I think at the beginning of last semester when I was asked that same question my answer was "to create a new world." Funny how things change. Although that still doesn't seem like a completely undesirable thing to do. Maybe I'll do both.

Jack Frost Hat

I made this hat completely from scratch and my obsession with Atlus. :D

Its made of fleece so its warm and cozy. Modeled by yours truly.

If you make it purple and change the smiley face it can be Black Frost's hat too.

I will do a commission for any other Atlus fans out there, just contact me at:

elandis@c.ringling.edu


HEE-HO!

Morality

Ok, so I haven't put any work up here yet but that doesn't mean I haven't done any. I'm just lazy.

But one thing I have been doing is thinking. A lot. So much in fact that my insomnia has gotten to an unhealthy level and I'm pretty sure that's why I'm sick right now. But on the bright side, at least I have something to say now, instead of being a completely dull waste of space.

Another thing I've been doing is playing games, I wouldn't be me if that weren't true.

So, I read this blog on Gamasutra today about morality in games and it made me think about none other than my favorite game atm, Persona 4.

(many a spoiler here so if any reader is interested in playing the game I would suggest reading this later.)

Never while playing a game, even when shooting people without reason and stepping on poor defenseless turtles, have I felt so horrible about my moral code as when I threw Nametame into the TV in Persona 4. Since I don't really know of anyone else playing this game right now I'll explain a bit. This occurs during a scene near the end of the game, where you confront the man believed to be responsible for the murders in Inaba . At this point I was feeling exactly the same way as the characters in the game were about the situation. I was blinded by how pissed off I was at the guy for 'killing' Nanako, a young little sister like figure in the game, killing two other people and putting all of my friends in danger. These feelings resulted in me chosing, instead of thinking things through, to hastily throw the man into the TV, thus ending his life. This action lead to Nanako's true death and a horrible ending to the game where nothing is really solved and no one is happy. Right then and there as I watched the credits rolling by I realized my mistake and felt like a horrible person. I should've thought about things more instead of letting my emotions dictate my actions. Thankfully in a game, unlike real life, you can go back to your last save point. So I went back and chose to think about the situation and be calm, and low and behold, the man was innocent, Nanako lived after all (due to my good karma) and I found the real culprit leading ultimately to the salvation of the world. Though this is probably a more extreme cause and effect than we see in most real life situations it really makes me wonder; if a situation like that came up in real life would I do the same thing? Maybe I didn't think as hard about the consequences of my actions because it was 'just a game'. But, it was 'just a game' I had invested much time energy and emotion into that I really did care about the outcome of.

This really impressed me. The game forced me to think and make meaningful choices and most importantly, to see the negative effects that can come from a bad choice. It somehow made the game experience more personal to me, that I could have such an effect on the outcome. Not only that, but it made me question my own morals. So I really do think that a sense of morality makes the gaming experience a lot more meaningful and satisfying. Maybe not to every form of gamer, such as my father who will only play games in which you can shoot stuff and has zero interest in a story, but to those of us who have evolved past the whole violence = fun mentality and are looking for a little more out of a game.

Come to think of it, another of my favorite games had a very strong theme of morality, and that is Darkwatch, an old shooter I used to play on the Xbox. You play as Jericho Cross, an outlaw, recently turned vampire. Throughout the game there are many "good" and "bad" choices that effect your morality and in turn your morality effects your powers throughout the game. I've seen things like this in many games since then, its definitely not a unique mechanic. In the case of Darkwatch and other games with a similar morality system however, I think being bad is more fun and theres really no negative outcome to chosing the dark side, unlike in Persona 4. Those rage like powers are really more rewarding. And that is the problem with a lot of the morality systems in games these days. They make the player think they are getting a choice but really when it comes down to it, most people chose fun over morals, especially in a game world.

I guess at the end of the day, sometimes people just wanna kill things to unwind, and there's nothing wrong with that. So I guess it's good to have both types of games out there. I really wasn't trying to prove any type of point here, just thinking out loud, so to speak.