Post 6 - Wander - Creating a Visual style

This week I focused on making the aesthetic of the entire game fit together. I decided to change all the lighting to a soft blue to create a calm evening atmosphere to compliment the calm feeling of the ambient sounds. I also managed to make the grass change color from green to blue and to purple over time, it adds a surreal element and makes the landscape more fantastic. Efforts to apply this effect to any other object didn't work. Creating clouds was also very difficult as they wouldn't move and all had the same shape. Darius and I also painted in the grass which required us doing it by hand to avoid placing it on too steep of hills and mountaintops as well as placing more around water but not in it.

Artist Talk: Kevin B. Chen

Kevin B. Chen is a Bay Area curator and artist. He curated the student art exhibition this semester and gave a talk while he was on campus. He is based in the Bay Area and focuses his work on the city of San Francisco as well as big cities in general. In his curatorial work he was showing, he focused on how maps and cartography could create art. The works were about San Francisco and how maps showed aspects of the city that people might take for granted or be completely unaware of. I really enjoyed the procedural nature of the work, using software and statistics to create attractive visual art with a solid and powerful concept behind it. Kevin said he found maps were one of the most powerful means of visual communication. He brought up a picture of a map from the 16th century with dragons and other monsters on it as if to say modern maps have lost their sense of wonder or adventure and well as being clinical in their devotion to accuracy rather than user experience. Chen stressed how maps can be the greatest means of individualization and fantasy.

I really enjoyed the work of the artist Eric Fisher in Chen’s show. Chen said Fisher hardly considered himself an artist. As a former Google programmer, he used programs to create maps centered around data and visually representing that data. In one of his pieces, he used Flickr data and geotagging to see where photos in SF were being taken by locals, and where they were being taken by tourists. It was incredible to see how much work must have gone into creating his algorithms, to figure out by the regularity of people's photo posts in an area to figure out if they lived in the location or not. You could tell where landmarks were as well as local hangouts just by the colors of the map. The pieces were very visually interesting as well and offered more as abstract art than glorified infographics. Philip Roth was another interesting artist showcased by Chen, he created sculptural maps from a specific media. In his San Francisco centered piece, he used DVD cases from a movie set in the city, then burned the cases in the places of the map where the 1906 fire burned.

Chen’s own work was just as exciting and interesting. He showed an ongoing series of miniature drawings of cityscapes. These detailed skylines never exceeded the height of a penny thought they retained the detail as if they had been drawn at a much larger scale. Chen even lays out magnifying glasses with the works when showing them. It’s the attention to detail which is what I think the strength of these pieces are, the concept behind them has to do with increasing population and megacities, though the audience, I believe is attracted to the immense amount of work put into them. I also find it fascinating that his work was so physically demanding. Chen hurt his arm and wrist repeating such precise strokes, as well as straining his incredibly nearsighted eyes. The contrast between the monumental physical endurance and tiny size of the work is fascinating. It seems like the opposite of the abstract expressionists in terms of physicality, his work is meticulous and defines itself in its small size. Chen was incredibly interesting as well as inspiring to see a young artist carve out a niche by doing whatever he could in the art world.

Post 5 - Music/Sound Exploration Game - Recording sound

I have a background in music, which was part of my interest in making this game, so I have been tasked with creating the sounds in the game. I play drums and guitar and also have a somewhat working knowledge of electronics and have a couple circuit bent instruments. I have been working in Audacity to create some sounds for the game. I have mostly been working with atmospheric and ethereal sounds so far as I want to get a sense of the overall atmosphere of the game before working on specific sounds. I want the game to change someone's mood while playing so I've been wanting to create some dreamlike sounds, I have been making heavy use of some editing effects especially the pitch and time shift controls. I will begin implementing these in the game as well as recording more.

Post 4 - Music Exploration Game - Creating the Environment

After a few weeks of going through the Unity tutorials I felt comfortable enough to begin creating the environment for the player to explore. I looked into how to procedurally generate terrain so I wouldn't have to create complex landscapes by hand. This will also allow me to focus more time on getting sounds in the game rather than 3D modeling. I also figure out how to add trees procedurally and hopefully I can soon add other elements like rocks and grass. I have given some thought to the aesthetic of the game and would like to try something low poly in the vein of Journey

I was able to create a test environment that the player can walk around in, I also created wind to make the world more lifelike. I will continue to work on the aesthetic of the environment as well as begin implementing sounds. I want the sounds to be unexpected, such as the wind through leaves is a guitar sound. Hopefully by adding sounds in a formulaic way to the coding, they will begin to play off each other rhythmic. Unfortunately I have been having trouble with bugs and implementing sounds and need more time with the program.

Post 3 - Music Exploration Game - Unity Tutorials

I have started working in Unity and learning the basics and coding from Lynda tutorials. Unity is an industry standard program and Darius and I have been interested in getting into it for a while and this project has given me a reason to. We began working through the 2D tutorial since it was the most basic, neither of us had coding experience or used Unity before. We created a side scrolling game that generated obstacles and destroyed them once of the screen.

Post 2 - Music Exploration Game Project - Inspiration and direction

I have been watching Daniel Cook's talk on game design and theory. I have realized that my game will be most effective as either a first or third person experience, preferably on console, or at least using a console controller.
His chart on loops show how the exploration itself needs to be the objective that keeps players playing. The sound has to create a unique experience and must also be different each time a player picks it up.

I also attempted to contact Thom Judson, an artist featured in the Clicks and Pops show on campus. He is practicing at the nexus of where art and games meet. I was interest to hear his insights into this largely under-explored art medium. I am awaiting a response.

Post 1 - Music Game Project Concept

For my project I am interested in working in Unity to create a video game. More specifically, a game that deals with sound and music. Since Darius's idea and mine are similar we have decided to collaborate.

I was inspired by games like Seaquence, Impulse, Auditorium, and Incredibox (links below). I like how these games make music and sound accessible and fun without being overly complex or in jeopardy of playing anything "wrong".
The essence of my idea is a game that provides a unique experience to the player without necessarily having objective based game play. The player should be immersed in the audio of the game and be allowed to explore the world, and find new things whenever they play.

Seaquence - http://seaquence.org/
Impulse - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShBm2jWQDlY
Auditorium - http://www.cipherprime.com/games/auditorium/
Incredibox - http://www.incredibox.com/