Tag Archives: ideas

FYP Ideation – Update THREE

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For my Fyp, I’m looking to simulate an immersive experience of isolation in an oppressive and terrifying environment. The story revolves around a man who wakes up in the middle of a facility, only to find that everything around him does not look right. I’m looking into lovecraftian or Eldritch horror-style survival genre that is explored in games like “amnesia” and “penumbra”.

Before any of these concepts can even be considered, however, I’ll have to figure out if the scope of the work is even feasible, or artistically coherent and consistent enough to reach out to people. As someone who is inspired by the artworks of Gustav Dore, Edward Gorey and David Macaluay, I feel that my strength is in rendering with crosshatches. However, when translated onto a game engine, a few issues begin to emerge. First of all, crosshatching looks fantastic on print, but scales rather poorly when ported to other monitors with their respective screen resolutions. The main reason for this is because the renderer interpolaties between pixels, causing blurring or aliasing . The remedy would be to arrange the scenes as tilesets. However, the issues start to compound on the design side, as tilesets are extremely time consuming to align, and would take away from any programming that I would have to be involved in. Diagonal tileset pieces with a resolution of 126X126 are also very hard to get right in a short amount of time.

The second method would be to simply paint with the default brush tool in Photoshop, and then import them into Unity before rotating the individual pieces. The issue here would be to solve Z-fighting, which is a flickering effect caused by two intersecting 3D planes that are in the exact same Z axis position. To solve this would require a lot of 3D modelling and optimization, which also takes up a lot of time.

Another thing to note is that I was considering to make a point and click adventure game. Although this genre is niche, it has also managed to remain relevant throughout the years, with games like Franbow, Dead Cyborg and Machinarium making considerable sales figures. ( check steam sales for listed games) The downside here is that point and click games are not only story intensive ( I would be extremely busy getting Game User Interface, Raycasting and Physics2D to work), but would also require a lot of animation time, which is something I calculate to be in extremely short supply.

This is where the genre of first person survival horror shines. Not only will I be able to increase the level of immersion ( due to the fact that you are in the shoes of the main protagonist), but I would also be able to cut the animation time of the main character entirely. There are a few major issues with making the game this way, however. The first being that the art style for the FPS game has no unifying art style that I feel stand out. (I’ve looked into Art Deco, Brutalism and the Bauhaus school. However, art Deco has been used in games like “Prey”, and “Bioshock”) The only art style that isn’t used as much in video games is German expressionism , something along the lines of “The cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. However, the risk in doing this art style is the fact that surrealist/ expressionist environment design, if done wrongly, would downright look incoherent, and could potentially mess around with the enemy AI colliders and NavMesh.  Games like “we happy few”, “dishonored” and “NaissanceE” have managed to use the unique art style as a selling point to their concept.

I shall continue to do my research on the kinds of art styles I can use, and how I can fix optimization issues.

inspirations from Neverending nightmares, Penumbra, Amnesia and Bioshock respectively.

Semester Project proposals

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I was initially thinking about doing a giant cockroach suit and moving around in public to film their reactions, but I guess someone else had done it already, so there goes that idea… However, in my defense I was just thinking of getting a giant suit rather than filling up a suit filled with actual cockroaches. The niche field of cockroach reactions have already been filled.

I was less certain that my second idea would be free for the taking afterwards, and sure enough, there were numerous art exhibitions where there was nothing being presented . I was initially thinking about doing this as a joke, and although there was an instance where Pat Kelly and Peter Oldring put such an exhibition to prank gallery visitors, (Link) this idea had been taken seriously by Andy Warhol in his artwork titled: Invisible sculpture, and John Cage’s noiseless 4’33, where he just sits in front a piano and does nothing. It was at this point where I was beginning to simultaneously lose faith in humanity and increase my motivation to try something more worthwhile.

 

IDEA #1:

To approach the third idea, I had three rules that I wanted to stick to. I don’t think that everyone needs to follow this method, but I feel that it helps me to focus on what I want. The first was to ask how much the project cost, and the second was to ask if this installation is going to be practical and easy to make. The third was to see if audiences are more than willing to participate or interact with it.

Hence, I came up with a third idea of making a string sculpture that everyone can contribute to. Since this isn’t entirely a novel concept in an of itself, I decided that this idea should have some form of twist, or include an additional element like papers, plastic bags or pieces of different colored fabrics. Another idea would be to soak each one of them in different brands of soaps and act as a sort of aromatic trail for the viewers. Not all of them are going to be scented, so they’ll have to figure out where they would like to go. Another idea would be to demarcate the region with tape and create an “empty” space that is also filled with annotations.

IDEA#2:

Another idea I had was to basically freeze as many ice cubes as possible before placing them on a metal framework, which would in turn be affixed to the person. The idea would be to create a small pocket of cold air around the person. I had the other idea of fusing multiple ice cubes together with a little bit of water before placing them back into the freezer. The only problem with this idea is the collection of ice cubes, and the construction of the framework itself.

Constructing a seamless dome shaped helmet by fusing the ice cubes together might work, although I feel that this would most likely be a one-off project that can only be shown as a recording, and not something that can be demonstrated in-class afterwards.

Update 20/2/2018 I’ve added a framework for the ice rack. My approach was to weave together a helmet mesh using only steel cables. Instead of welding them together, i decided to loop every section of the wire onto each other, creating a mesh that resembled more like a barbed wire fence. I made sure to avoid cutting myself, while keeping the cables in tension, while checking to make sure that there weren’t any sharp edges facing inwards. Once the framework was complete, I decided to go for a more freestyle approach, weaving in any direction and seeing where it would take me. Although this particular project was meant more for the next assignment, I thought it would still be noted as part of my research as I could carry over aspects of spacial navigation.

IDEA#3:

The frame could also be looked at as a miniature for something much larger. It could be a space where cold air is blown in a small dome through the use of fans and ice cubes (like a reverse sauna), or it could be the framework for hanging together coloured strings. The idea would be to create a space where people can cool off after a hard day at work.