All posts by Jazlyn

Has 30 stuffed toys. This one's a grumpy cat like me.
Perfect Pitch

Assignment 3: Two Ideas.

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Project 1: 椿 | tsubaki.

For my individual project, I would create a visual novel. It will have multiple endings, a true ending and is choice-based.

Premise: 18 year old Aki lives in an unnamed modern city, where there is a huge shopping mall with a world-famous sky garden known for its camellias. But this sky garden has been closed for the last decade after a series of horrifying incidents. One day, it’s suddenly re-opened to the public, and Aki realizes she has been to this flower paradise before…

The VN’s mood and feel will be semi-realistic and done mostly in monochrome with limited tones, to reflect the themes of waiting, memory and death.

Budget:

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Timeline:

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Project 2: Re: imagine

For my group project, I will work with Peng Cheng and Faye to create a 3D hack-and-slash game.

Premise: you are a child being bullied in school. One day you decide enough is enough when the bullies steal your belongings and hide them around the school – it’s time to get back at them.

WBS:

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Budget:

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Timeline:

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Perfect Pitch

Pitcheroos 2.

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Pitch 1

 

For an individual project, I would develop an isometric pixel horror RPG based on the theme of escapism. Would definitely include gore.

Funds for the idea would be used to purchase commercial licenses for required assets, as well as any commercial plugins that may be needed.

Pitch 2

 

If I had a budget of 5 million, I would start up a PC game development company. Singapore has a market for mobile game development, but not for console or PC.

I would hire a team to develop an indie game for Steam and PC.

Pitch 3

For a paired project, I would develop a 3D puzzle game set in a space station. You play as an astronaut trapped in this space station.

The budget of $500 would be used to outsource the 3d modelling (if possible, as that is too little). If not, it will be used to purchase commercial licenses for necessary assets.

Perfect Pitch

Pitcheroos.

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Pitches:

Individual: I would like to make a  story-heavy 2.5D pixel role-playing game (RPG) in the horror genre, with escapism as a central theme.

Pair: Install a customizable recognition system into all school dormitories that will welcome you home in a voice of your choice (sexy girl, black dude, or John Cena. Or Tom Hiddleston, if that floats  your boat).

(featured image is  a screengrab from The Crooked Man, by Uri)

Fifty Shades, My Work

Hyper-essay: the ephemeral

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Selected projects: Ice Hotel & The Fragility of Time

The first thing that strikes me about both of these projects is the ephemerality of the artworks. Weeks, months, and maybe years of careful work and planning have been put into these projects, only for them to last perhaps a month or two at best.

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The Fragility of Time 

Designer Ignacio Canales Aracil created these frail flower sculptures by pressing, drying and weaving wild flowers. No adhesive was used. The process is rough, compared to the fragility of the final result, and an adhesive is used to protect it from moisture.

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Ice Hotel

This hotel is created by more than 50 people every winter.  Artists from all over the world arrive at the end of November to sculpt hotel decor from ice. In spring, the hotel melts away and returns to nature.

Both of these works clearly require meticulous handiwork and attention to detail. Ice Hotel also has a time limit, unlike The Fragility of Time. Artists have to finish their sculptures before the hotel is due to open for tourists to arrive. This puts their planning on a tighter limit than Aracil’s artwork.

Comparison

We can put them both into Ramroth’s five phases of project management. They have a starting point – in the case of Ice Hotel, especially, it’s when winter comes around – and in both cases, the how and the what takes up the bulk of planning. What should they sculpt flowers or ice into? How will they do it?

Then there is the design phase, where they would have brainstormed and discarded various ideas before settling on a final concept. Finally they would begin sculpting under a time limit.

It is apparent that much planning has gone into both projects. Both projects have limited resources, and have some form of time limit, whether it is in the passing of seasons or in the fragility of flowers.

I can be sure of one thing: neither the Ice hotel nor Aracil’s flower sculptures could have come to pass without some form of project development and planning.

Case-studies

House of Leaves

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House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, is an unconventional novel that makes use of typeset, page layout and style to tell a story. It’s classified under a bunch of genres including horror, postmodernism and romance. The book took ten years to plan and write.

On the surface, it seems to be about a family who finds their house is larger on the inside than it is on the outside. But it has three converging stories presented in the format of an academic research paper.

It started from Danielewski’s theoretical essays and philosophical ideas. The book was released on the Internet, page by page, for over a year leading up to its publishing date. The planning involved in writing such a complex book and also to market such an odd concept was extensive.

Today, House of Leaves is studied in universities as a satire of academia and a form of ergodic literature. It is a cult classic.

Case-studies

Hacknet

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Hacknet is a terminal-based hacking game released in 2015. It’s created by a single game developer, Matt Trobiani. He encountered many problems while planning the game, as hacking was not something all gamers knew. But he overcame it and made a game that has received rave reviews.

Read the interview here.

Execute

Execution.

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The one project I was fairly satisfied with was a series of digital images back in my foundation year. Having the threat of failing a core module helped in getting me off my lazy ass and whipping me into action.

I have countless ideas, but without a slave master, these ideas never make it past conceptualization.  I’m just too lazy to do things. Or critique things, for that matter. Too much work.

Is there a reward for completing a project? Sure, I guess it’s satisfying. But that’s it, really. If I complete something, it’s because someone – or fear – forced me to.

Time

Time…

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… is a construct of the human imagination. Time enslaves us. We are the only creatures to live and die by this idea of a 24-hour clock.

Time passes. Time slips through our fingers like sand, and we can never get it back.

Time is useful, I suppose, in the grand narrative of a story. Even then we do not allude to time as often as we do in real life. It is, however, often necessary to have some kind of timeline with which to organize our series of unfortunate events, so they can play out nicely like frames in a film.

Same goes for projects, really. Time has consumed us. We are nothing without time.

Pity.