6400 Final - Recollection

Recollection from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

We are now at the end of the semester.  My final project, which I have decided to call Recollection, is more or less complete.  A few of the items the player can collect are still placeholders.  I plan on replacing them with the final objects in the week or so after finals, at which point I will make the playable game available online.  Until then, there is the above video which is the deliverable for the class.  

This project began with Neil Gaiman's poem which outlines what to do if one finds oneself in a fairy tale.  I was particularly interested in the end, when the fairy tale is over, and the hero(ine) returns home to find it is now smaller somehow.  I decided to set my game in the backyard of my childhood home.  The story is based off my own memories of walking through a gap in the hedge behind my neighbor's house to get to my friend's backyard.  Along the way, the player find various objects that I remember owning; things that were important to my child-self.  With each object, the player's view changes.  When the player returns home, they will find it seems much smaller.

Other games that have provided inspiration for me include Antichamber, Gone Home, and oddly enough Assassin's Creed.  Antichamber is an excellent example of using a simplified visual style, and creating unreal spaces as a metaphor for life and thought.  Although not yet released, Gone Home is shifting the focus in first person games away from combat and towards exploration.  The story in Gone Home is told entirely through the artifacts left in the virtual space.  The player must sift through those artifacts and piece the story together themselves.  As I worked on Recollection, the game became more and more about my own process of reconstructing memories.  Although it is not all that obvious, Assassin's Creed is, in many ways, about reconstructing memories (in this case, ancestral memories).  I was particularly interested in the memory walls which cut the player off from parts of the game world.  This was one of the influences on how I chose to deal with the edges of the world in Recollection.

I hope that when I finally post the game online some of you will play it.  It is frustrating to be only able to show the documentation.  Videogames cannot be reduced to cinematic shots without a great deal of loss.

When you're born in the Bayou...

1927 - The Animals and Children took to the Streets from British Council on Vimeo.

I was initially interested in 1927's The Animals and Children took to the Streets because the animated portions have a visual style that is similar to Machinarium.  The environments are all rendered with shaky line-work, muted colors that almost look like stains, and beautifully incorrect perspective.  So, when two of my professors, and my dad and step-mom recommended I go see this play, I figured I probably should take the time to do so.  I was most certainly not disappointed.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets uses a mix of live theatrical performances and projected animation.  Mixing live theater performances with animation is not a new idea.  It is in fact a very old idea.  Many of the early animators were popular Vaudeville performers, and it was not unusual for them to include their animations with their acts.  Winsor McKay's early animation Gertie the Dinosaur was specifically animated to be part of a theatrical performance.  From what I understand, stand alone animations won out as Vaudeville began to disappear and animators realized it was more financially sound to make a film they could copy and sell rather than to do repeated live performances.  The use of projection and animation is of course, much more sophisticated now.  The mixture of performance and animation had the interesting effect of making the play seem to be somewhere between theater and narrative dance.  The actor's movements needed to be precisely timed in order to match up with the animated projections; thus the movements became dance-like.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets focuses on poverty and the systemic structures that prevent people from improving their lot in life.  The children who terrify the adults are reacting to legitimate injustices. The children know there is something wrong with their living situation, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is.  So they do the only thing they can think of to do; they act out aggressively.  The adults in the slum known as the Bayou understand the problems that keep them in their miserable conditions, but they also understand their own powerlessness.  Agnes Eaves is the one exception.  She naively thinks that she can change the Bayou for the better, but she is not from there and does not truly understand the problems and doesn't have the power to facilitate improvement.  The Mayor arguably does have the power needed to help the people of the Bayou.  However from his point of view, the only real problem is that the children in the Bayou have yet to learn their place.  The problem with the society in The Animals and Children took to the Streets is that the people who have the power to create positive change don't care to do so, and those who do care, lack the ability to cause change. 

Near the ending of the play, the lone male protagonist stands at a cross roads.  To one side is an idealistic ending, and the other is a realistic ending.  Audience participation is called for as the protagonist contemplates his paths.  In the performance I attended, the audience cheered most loudly for the idealistic ending, but the actor took a perfect 'why bother' posture just before walking down the idealistic path then ran down the realistic path.  I suspect there is only one ending to the play.  The moment is about asking the audience to consider what they want and expect out of the story rather than actually offering a choice to the audience. 

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the visual style of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets reminded me of the game Machinarium.  It may seem surprising, but the stories are actually quite thematically similar as well.  The main character in Machinarium is so far down on the social ladder that he is literally treated like trash (and I do mean literally - the game starts with him being thrown in the town dump).  The game itself is a find-the-object puzzle game.  The player spend the entire game scrounging around for any discarded object that can help the protagonist get the better of the three bullies who personify the social forces keeping him powerless.  However the endings differ between Machinarium and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. Machinarium has a happy and unsatisfying ending.  It feels as though Amanita Design didn't really know how to end the game, and as a result the ending was unrealistic.  As much as I may have preferred an idealistic ending in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, the realistic ending was obviously, and unfortunately, more realistic.

Ohio Shorts

My short animation, Tale Type 510A, has been selected to be shown at Ohio Shorts. The screening will be at 7PM, Saturday April 20th at the Wexner Center.  I'm looking forward to seeing all the great work included in the show, especially the film produced as part of a new class at CCAD, where I completed my undergraduate studies.

Jobs and Opportunities

Many of the opportunities for conferences/festivals center around the Game Developer's Conference (GDC), which takes place in March.  Since we are supposed to focus on up-coming opportunities for this assignment,  there are a limited number of game-related conferences I can write about.  However there are a few such as the following:

IndieCade - an "International Festival of Independent Games" IndieCade takes place in early October.  The deadline for the call for submissions is May 31st.  In addition to the showcased games, IndieCade features workshops, master classes, keynotes and more.

TWO5SIX - gaming culture group Kill Screen has recently organized their first conference.  The one-day conference is "devoted to the spaces between games, play, interaction and creativity."  Although it is not always convenient to make a trip down to New York for one day, a live stream of the conference is available to people who purchase a livestream ticket.


Twofivesix: A Videogame Arts + Culture Conference from Kill Screen on Vimeo.

As for distribution of my work, the obvious answer is the internet.  It is fairly easy to get short-form games out into the world.  The ideal situation for someone to play a videogame is on their home computer, which makes online distribution perfect, particularly if the designer is not all that concerned with earning money.  Steam Greenlight makes the steam online distribution platform more available to independent developers, although it seems to mainly be appropriate for fairly well-established designers with a motivated fan-base.  iOS and Android market places offer another avenue for game designers, although designers will need to be able to navigate the approval processes and the curation of mobile markets does limit the issues a game can address on mobile platforms.