Fez and perspective in gaming

April 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Fez is creating quite a stir.

Prior to it’s official release, it received several prestigious awards in the gaming community, generating a lot of hype.

The most attractive feature of Fez is it’s usage of 16bit art to create a completely new style.  The developers combined stylistic techniques from classic games and translated them to fit newer technology.  With this merging, a completely new sort of game is born.  Fez shows us that a 2D game combined with 3D game elements creates a totally new perspective for the player, one that had not really been recognized: the idea of a hidden dimension.

The Paper Mario franchise did work with this idea a bit, as you play on a flat surface (think the original Mario games) that you can turn sideways (3D) to reveal hidden secrets.  However, Fez forces you to interact with both dimensions on a level far beyond what Paper Mario tried to do.  The amount of time you “hop” “dimensions” in Fez is much greater than the times in Paper Mario.  Paper Mario also knew of it’s inherent existence on both levels; the characters (some of them) were made aware of the presence of a third dimension and accepted it as part of their reality.  The characters in Fez appear blissfully unaware of the amount of complexity that exists in their world.  This creates an important discourse for the player.

Fez asks us to challenge our notions of reality, it creates a plausibility for things that cannot be seen.  In the game we are forced to use this knowledge in order to advance.

One can only assume that the code behind this game goes far beyond what it appears.  To take a flat surface and turn it sideways every five seconds or so would definitely be a challenge for anybody.  After reading some of the lead programmer’s blog entries on the topic, my suspicions were confirmed: there is a LOT to take into account when you’re shifting 2 dimensional planes around.  It took the team a good five years to fully complete it, which says a lot about it’s complexity.

But what makes Fez so intriguing is that it really doesn’t look all that complicated on the surface.  It’s very tongue-in-cheek about it’s actual complexity, a lot of which I think has to do with it’s retro look.  Fez’s unique style combined with it’s frankly insane code creates a whole new landscape of opportunity for gaming.

Check out a little bit of gameplay and also, even though I didn’t bring it up in this post, the soundtrack because it’s just absolutely incredible.

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Code Movie 1

March 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Okay, so Code Movie 1 is a very interesting and kind of seductive form of electronic literature.  I found it in here under the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1.  As soon as I pressed ‘begin’, I was captivated with what seemed to be a text movie.  What I mean by that is this: Many authors and artists working in electronic media are exploring the concept of codework, interrogating the nature of digital artifacts as products of multilayered transcription beneath the surface level of the computer screen. Without using any words, Beiguelman’s Code Movie 1 treats the hexadecimal code of JPG images as a signifier in its own right.  That is the description taken from the page linked previously.  Here are a couple screenshots of what the text looks like.

 

Obviously the stills don’t do a justice, but the text is literally dancing around the screen as the music plays in the background.  You see, I LOVE movies.  This takes the element of a movie down to it’s roots.  This is literally moving text and numbers and that is exactly what a movie is.  When we watch a movie, we see pictures that are moving.  Instead of the pictures though, the artist has taken a new spin on the movie aspect.  I guess that is why I enjoyed this so much was because of how involved I found myself so quickly.  I know it’s a little short, but it seems to really speak volumes to what electronic literature is to me.  The other Checkpoints that I have done focus on a story or some sort of crazy and abstractness.  This, however, really shows what the beginning of electronic literature really means.  Instead of just seeing the text on a page, this is literally moving around and dancing on the screen.  To me, all of the other checkpoints that I have made are really flashy and showy in terms of the content.  This is the most basic form that can possibly be created.  There is nothing to click on and there is nothing that you do other than watch the different forms that the letters and numbers create.  I love how simple and yet how elegant it is.  I must have watched it six or seven times before creating this just because how interesting it was to me.

Here is the author description of Code Movie 1: Code Movies are made with hex, ASCII, and binary codes extracted from JPG images. Saved as simple text, they are reworked and edited in Flash. They are part of a larger project I’ve been working on since 2004 (//**Code_UP). The submitted work (Code Movie 1) is made of hexa code. The project interrogates the role of the code in meaning construction and the new forms of translations that digital languages embody. It questions: Now that the Cybertext confuses itself with the notion of Place (a web address, for example) and that Image only reveals itself through a “hyperinscription” (a URL), can we think in a poetics of transcodification between media and file formats? Can we keep talking about “WYSIWYG” utopias? How does it affect our ways of reading, seeing, and perceiving?

Obviously this is extremely important to electronic literature as a whole and I believe that people should watch it because of how down to earth and straight to the roots this is.  There is nothing other than what it is.  There is nothing that you need to focus on other than what is on the screen and I find that very important to understanding electronic literature.  You can’t appreciate something without knowing the basic elements of it.  The 3D like effect of Code Movie 1 is extremely important as well because it not only shows the text moving around on the screen, but in different dimensions as well.  I believe that the creators of this are extremely intellectual.

I don’t think that the other electronic literature examples in the volume either 1 or 2 are as simple as this one.  They all seem to be the same to me.  Trying to find something that really stood out was difficult.  In my opinion, each of the different ones that I clicked on all had a different premise but they all seemed to follow the very abstract and crazy style to get to the end.  It just seemed like I wasn’t finding anything that really stood out.  To me, that is very important when talking about electronic literature as well.  You need to find something that stands out from all of the other piece and, in my opinion, this did JUST that.  I hope that you are getting as much out of this as I am because I really think that this is very important in trying to determine what electronic literature is.

Also, if you found this interesting, there is a whole Code Movie project that can be found here!

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Optimizing room descriptions and object lists in Inform 7

February 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

Once you start building games in Inform 7, you may notice that the basic process of describing a room and then putting things in it will default to a somewhat rigid or mechanical output. So a common question I get is, “How do I hide things”? Or, “How do I get rid of that long list of items?” I’ve given various bits of advice for different games and situations, but since this is such a common question, I thought I’d summarize some common situations I’ve seen and methods for dealing with them. In preparing these snippets, I’ve put together a small game in my Playfic account, so if you’d prefer to skip to the final product you can play it there. Otherwise, read on!

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CSS & Undum – Making your work (more) unique

February 23, 2012 by 1 Comment

So as we’ve learned in class there are these really cool things called stylesheets that change how your website looks.

Because the Undum engine runs on HTML (and Javascript, but all the formatting stuff is HTML) you can add your own stylesheet and customize it.

Using CSS as a customization tool can be extremely important to your story.  I’m going to demonstrate some of the ways you can edit the stylesheet given to you with the source code.

I’ll be using the game I made  to show what I did :)

Also, I did make a video of all of this, but then colourlovers.com had surprise NSFWness that I wasn’t expecting and it showed up in my video. It’s really not THAT bad so if you don’t care about that sort of thing you can watch it here.  The slightly NSFW stuff is at the end anyways.
So the file that comes with the undum source code that contains the CSS code is called undum.css (pretty straightforward).

That code will be linked to in your javascript file (which I talked about in my last video) towards the top.  Simply change the link where it says “stylesheet” to wherever you plan on uploading the css file on your server.

 

I only changed the background and the title background.  In all honesty, Undum doesn’t have too many features that allow for customization.  But by changing these two elements you’re creating an entirely different look.

The background is located in the body tag.  You change the URL there to wherever the image you want to use is uploaded, or you delete that tag and change the hex code (which makes colors!) to what ever you want.  The background of the title is located under the ‘title’ class (which looks like #title in your code) and simply repeat the same steps there that you did for the background.

A great place to find color schemes and patterns is colourlovers.com.  I use it for almost all of my projects that need a little extra something.  It’s pretty self explanatory, and I do explain it a bit more in my slightly accidental NSFW video.

The biggest way to learn is to play around with the code.  Try changing numbers.  If you use firefox, check out firebug.  Firebug will let you mess with the code without committing any specific changes.  It’s a great way to learn.

 

 

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