Tag Archives: game dev

Brendan Keogh’s Putting Adventure

Posted on by

forest_15

This past weekend I released a new game, Brendan Keogh’s Putting Challenge. The title is both a reference to that Simpson’s episode, and also following the excellent 2018 tradition of Australian gamemakers putting their name on their games (Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, Grace Bruxner Presents The Haunted Island, A Frog Detective Game).

This project started with me wanting to return to Unity to make a large map that you could explore and just find a whole bunch of stuff in. Like an enchanted forest where you just walk forever in one direction and then just find some kids smoking at a skate park or something. After a little while I realised I really wasn’t in a position to return to Unity, that any Unity project was just going to be too intensive for me at the moment, and also that such a project, even if I was to use ‘bad art’, would still need art way better than I could produce.

So then I decided I’d just make a big world to explore in Pico-8 because at least that’s doable for me. I can figure out 8×8 pixel art. But then I decided to take a small golf prototype I already had sitting on my computer and combine the two together into a ‘golf game with the boring bits left in’. So essentially the world is a golf course, you can play a full round of golf, but you have to walk everywhere yourself rather than getting teleported to where the ball landed on your last swing, and if you wanted you could just wander off and see what else is out there. Continue reading →

Student expectations, course marketing, and the invisible labour of game development.

Posted on by

There’s been a lot of discussion this past week about how universities should approach teaching videogame development and even just what the basic responsibility of game schools even is. This started with this Twitter thread by Danette Beatty from ustwo. Robert Yang wrote these good reflections in response about some of the challenges of teaching game development. Innes McKendrick wrote these good thoughts in a thread. I wrote this thread about how lacking a broad knowledge of game development disciplines is a problem in countries without large studios. Anna Anthropy wrote this good thread about balancing soft/hard skills in games education. The point across these responses: teaching game development is hard and educators and institutions alike are still trying to figure out how the heck you even do this while, at the same time, the global game industry is dramatically restructuring itself.

There’s one side of the discussion I haven’t really seen come up yet that I encountered first hand in the classroom: the fact that the overwhelming number of students who enter game development programs have no idea what the everyday work of game development actually entails. Worse, many of them have wrong ideas about what one does day-to-day to make games. I want to talk a bit about how this happens, how the marketing for game dev programs often exploit this ignorance, and how the responsibility typically falls on teachers to ensure these students know what they are actually getting in for.  Continue reading →

Australian Game Developers and Skills Transfer: Diary 1

Posted on by

Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 1.59.45 pm

I want to get in the habit of writing semi-regular public updates about my current research. I feel like this is an important thing to do in part to help me work through my evolving ideas and in part because I’m using a large chunk of public money to do this research so some public reflection on it seems fair.

I mentioned previously in my general life update about the new project I’ve started. I’ve received funding through the Australia Research Council to undertake a three-year research project titled “Informal, Formal, Embedded: Australia Skill Developers and Skills Transfer“. The idea is to paint a more nuanced picture of what videogame development is, who does it, why they do it, and how it is contextualised within the broader Australian culture and economy. The focus on ‘skills’ is in part to get away from a focus on ‘jobs’. There are more people using ‘videogame development skillsets’ than there are people employed in ‘the videogame industry’. So focusing on skills and experiences is a way to draw that out.

I’m now about four months into the project. So far it has been a lot of project design, planning, and general administrative processes like sorting out ethics approval and budgeting. Most of that is pretty boring. Here’s some of the more interesting methodological/theoretical stuff that I’ve been working through: Continue reading →

Views

Posted on by

tvonoff

This week, my Studio 2 class have been working on their ‘Art Game’ brief. This is one of my favourite briefs of the trimester. My students must visit the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, choose an artwork that speaks to them, and adapt this artwork into a videogame work over the course of a single week. I assess the term ‘adapt’ pretty loosely. They might consider how the meaning of the artwork is altered by the medium of videogames. They might find something interesting in the artist’s intentions or story that they want to draw from. They might find something in their own response to the artwork they want to explore. They might try to simply recreate the experience but in an interactive or navigable manner. All I really want from the project is for them to consider how art expresses ideas broadly and the relationship between videogames and other creative media. And for them to make some weird, experimental stuff. In the past, the brief has produced some really great works. The combination of the short turnaround and the ‘arty’ tone of the brief allows the students to just take risks and make something really out there. Here’s a collection of what they made.

As I did with Edge in a previous trimester, I also wanted to do this project myself. When we IMG_1753went to GOMA, there was a small exhibition on perspective that included a range of interesting video works. One in particular really captured my attention: The Fall From Raiatea by Denis Beaubois, as part of the Terminal Vision project. For this work, five cathode-ray tube televisions sat side-by-side with fuzzy, distorted VHS footage on them. Each television shows footage from a different camera capturing the same event from different angles: the cameras themselves being hurled out the window of the 27th floor of an apartment building. At the start of the work, each camera is turned on, each TV flickering to life. Then Beaubois just sort of holds the rig of cameras out the window for a while, giving a real blurred look at the surrounding suburbs. This footage is already low quality, I assume, because when the cameras impacted the ground, the existing footage was affected as well. I like this idea of the future event impacting the current footage. Eventually, Beaubois flings the cameras from the window and we get this kaleidoscopic, vertigo-inducing sense as the cameras plummet to Earth, each facing a different direction. Continue reading →

50 Games in a Year: The first 14

Posted on by

games

As I’ve previously discussed, in 2017 I have set myself the goal of developing 50 videogames. I’ve played around with Unity here and there in the past, but never really committed to actually just doing the hard yards and learn how to make videogames. The best way to get good at something is to do it a lot while you’re still bad at it. You need to play a lot of bad piano before you’re good at playing the piano. You need to write a lot of bad poetry and stories before you’re a good writer. You need to make a lot of bad videogames before you are good at making videogames. The goal of 50 games in a year is an attempt to force me to do just that: to prioritise quantity over quality and make a lot of bad videogames in order to get better at making videogames.

It’s something I regularly tell my game design students: no one really cares if you have a degree in game design, they care if you can make videogames. Or, flipped the other way: don’t wait until you have a degree in game design before you start making stuff. Just… make stuff.

I chose ’50’ so I could more-or-less make a game a week with a fortnight of breathing room. At the time of writing, we’re at the end of the 16th week of the year and I’ve released 14 games, so I’m going well! I also meant to blog about the games as I released them, and I’ve been less good at that. This post thus serves as a summary and reflection on the quarter-and-a-bit of this experiment.

All the games listed here are available on my itch.io page, here.

Continue reading →

Edge

Posted on by

My Game Design Studio 2 class is currently working on a short, one-week project. On Monday, we visited GOMA, the Gallery of Modern Art. They were tasked with finding an artwork that spoke to them, and over the following week they are to create a videogame adaptation of that artwork. I’ve left what I mean by ‘videogame adaptation’ pretty vague. They can either try to explore themes similar to what the artwork explores, or perhaps try to replicate the sensorial experience of engaging with that artwork. The brief I provided them with is available here (pdf).

I’ve never used this brief before in Studio 2 so we’ll see how it goes. Ideally, there’s a few things I want them to get out of this exercise. First, I’d like them to have to think about what creative works ‘do’. So thinking about things like craft, form, materiality, process, and things like that. Second, I’d like them to start thinking about what videogames do in such a context; what do terms like ‘craft’, ‘form’, ‘materiality’, and ‘process’ mean in a videogame context? Third, I just wanted my students to have to go to an art gallery.

Since I’m currently trying to make a bunch of small games this year, I’ve decided I’m going to make my own game to the brief as well. So while we were at GOMA, I walked around and had a look at the different artworks to see what stood out for me. There were a few for which I had a really immediate and corporeal reaction to. One which was an almost pitch-black room was disorientating and claustrophobic, another work played with scale in fascinating ways that made my perception incapable of grounding myself while I looked at it. Except, I realised that if I tried to replicate either of these artworks I’d end up just making a digital version of them: a black room with hardly any lighting, or a really big object next to the player. I want my students to go beyond just creating assets that look like the artwork, so I need to do the same. Continue reading →

Countryside Postmortem

Posted on by

countryside2

So in 2017 I’m making a bunch of videogames. The plan is to make 50 of them in 52 weeks. Most of them won’t be very good, but that’s not really the point. I just want to set a goal of a certain quantity to try to force myself into an actual rhythm of creating and learning and maybe getting better at it. Then, after a year of that, hopefully I’m in a position where I can confidently decide if Actually Making Games is something I actually want to keep doing. I’ve already made six games, and you can find them on my itch.io page, here. I’m particularly happy with Fetch and Flightboy.

One of the reasons I am doing this is, in part, to be a better game design teacher. I don’t need to know how to actually make a game in Unity to be able to do my job, but it wouldn’t hurt. And it’s interesting to try to put into practice some of the things I keep telling my students to do. And to lead by example when I tell them to just make a bunch of shit to get better at making. Since my students also have to write postmortems about the games they make, now I am going to try to do that as well.  Continue reading →