Last Post!

This will be my last post to this blog! I hand in my work tomorrow, and then its all over. I haven't used this blog as much in my second year of the project, mostly because my personal website became the dominant place to post things. I've also had another project to work on this year (with a website in the making) which I will be posting to from now, if you are interested.

So, in closing, this project has formed the majority of my degree work over the past 2 years, and I am satisfied with the outcomes I have achieved. The showreel/trailer will be up on my personal website by the end of the week, and should be on NUCA's iTunesU account very shortly after.

Thank you to everyone who gave me feedback and followed this project, I hope you enjoy the showreel.

Craft Apps: Trendy?

I have found various paper-craft wonders while searching the web over the duration of this project, and many of the related ones I have also posted about. While making my showreel/trailer the past couple of weeks, and reviewing the version of the Shop which I exhibited in the NUCA Christmas show, I have seen unintentional similarities between my work and handmade crafts that are for sale on websites like www.etsy.com. There are countless blogs and forums online dedicated to DIY chic and vintage handmade goods, showing there is a huge potential market for apps that utilise this trend.

A series of apps along these lines are Martha Stewart's Digital Living magazines for iPad, they are
full of beautiful ideas for the home. A lot of people, particularly young women, are obsessed with viewing, making and collecting pretty, crafty things. In my opinion this is something games should be tapping into more, and apps are the perfect place to start because of their necessity to be delightful to gain any popularity. There also a lot of this demographic who already own iPhones!

Title Sequence

I have been working on a title sequence for the trailer showreel recently, which featured the title of the game against a period wallpaper.

Then I was browsing Channel 4 programmes and was shocked to see the similarity between my title shot and the title image of the topical Meet the Middletons. Uncanny.

My title appears after a paper radio, which plays music of the era to accompany the trailer, and fades into darkness as the first scene is revealed. Today I also watched several training videos on After Effects about animating text, and other useful tricks. I may choose to animate the text if I find an appropriate way. As for now I like the effect it gives as static text.

Shop Font

I finally made a front to the paper shop, including cutting out all of the tiny windows (twice! Digitally afterwards).

I wanted the interior visible from outside and the front to lift like a curtain. After trying this digitally it might look better if it were to part in the middle like a curtain. At the moment I am undecided and need to play with it more in After Effects, but I am pleased with the shop front overall and hope it fits nicely into my showreel.

Tape on The Windows

One of the many faults with the rough cut showreel is that the pink-tinted shop looks as though it is the sweet shop. To change this I have done some research into the practice of taping up windows so they don't blow out with nearby explosions. This is a common occurrence in wartime for homes and shops, and a sinister reminder of danger while people go about their day.

Showreel: Rough Cut

Yesterday I made a rough cut of a showreel in order to spot any gaps so I can fill them now. I was quite amazed at how well some of it fit together, especially with the music I had chosen. Even with everything sort of shoved together it came to 1:30! Because of this I am inclined to plan another, possibly shorter, development showreel. This will take a lower priority at the moment while I iron out the kinks in the main one. I am aiming for more of a 'playthrough'/teaser-trailer kind of thing with it.

So far I have been using photoshop to make high resolution files, but used quicktime image capture and imovie editing for convienience. The image quality is very low as you may imagine, and I am not even going to export it in its current state as it is simply for experimentation purposes.

Music in the Public Domain

All the music we use for our showreels must be in the public domain or we have to gain specific permission to use it. Luckily for me, the main piece of music (at moment its a tough decision between a few songs) is going to be from 1930s. Hundreds of beautiful old tracks can be found on archive.org or jazz-on-line.com, both of which state they do not intend to infringe any copyright and all their tracks are available to download.

Another great source for dramatically different genres of music and music samples is Kevin Macleod's database on incompetech.com. I used a couple of his brilliant tracks for a showreel last year, and although very widely known and appreciated online already, I must say he really is amazing.

EDIT 15/4/11

I have chosen to use the song 'Love Is The Sweetest Thing' by Al Bowlly, as it is slow and melodic, and the singing starts sooner than my previous favourite 'Guilty' also a version by him. The song also has poignant references to feelings of love and uses the word 'sweet' fairly often. This is great, not because it is so cheesy, but because it goes back to my original storyline which was about a man who has lost his wife and remembers his younger years a lot better than recent ones.

Rationing Research

I have been looking for images to do with rationing, a great source has been BBC websites.

This particular section of the site is to educate children about shopping and home life in WWII, the 'fun facts' are quite useful.

"The only sweets not rationed in wartime were cough sweets. Sweet rationing lasted until 1953!"

"Even the moat at the Tower of London was dug up for vegetables."

"No icing on birthday cakes, after the government said no more icing sugar (1942)."

"There was lots of new meat-free recipes, such as turnip pie, or parsnip and carrot pie."

"The BBC 'Radio Allotment' grew 23 kinds of vegetables, with weekly radio reports on progress."

"Children helped 'Dig for Victory' by digging, planting and weeding. Some children worked on farms picking potatoes and fruit. "


Maybe I could make a level just about food.

Grow Your Own

Part of my visual theme in having stark white paper to form the sweet shop is rooted in the idea of WWII rationing: the lack of sugar and the paper rations were supplied in. The levels are bright and full of colour in contrast, being the land of pure sweetness, but similar themes like scrimping and saving or growing your own food could appear here through the illustration. I have started exploring this with the countryside themed level, leading into images of tomato plants which could be grown in a suburban garden.


I stumbled across a relevant source of information on self-sufficiency in wartime Britain through Channel Four's series SuperScrimpers: Waste Not Want Not, where wasteful families are shown an alternative lifestyle by frugal women who have been practising it for years.

"70 years ago scrimping and saving was a point of national pride, there were countless news articles and broadcasts helping Britons dig for victory and make do and mend."

One of the things mentioned was that families used to keep chickens, rabbits and pigs during wartime and after to provide food for themselves more sustainably. "If you kept one or two chickens you'd have free eggs… during the war years everybody had chickens, rabbits and pigs."

Seat Cover Patterns

This banner is part of True of False game on the London Underground website, this question of course is true. I am intrigued by the choice to show the questions emerging from old and current seat cover patterns. Its a wonderful way of tying in several aspects of the underground's heritage, and to me feels like they could be from an exhibition. I wonder who made them.





I am currently back to working on some final level paintings/designs, and my next one will be about the railway/the underground. I may try and incorporate a seat cover design...

Zen Brush

Heres an app that paints beautifully.


There are lots of drawing and painting dedicated apps, but this one in particular is a pleasure to use. Lovely digital paint simulation, designed to replicate authentic ink on a variety of surfaces.

What's Next?

This week I am going home, which means I have access to paints etc, and I'm taking my camera. I hope to film some shots of paint, marbling inks and other things to use in compositions in After Effects when I get back. Lots of other important things are happening at the moment, but this project is always on my mind. Working on the showreel should be satisfying.

Digitial Paint Bucket

Currently at the British Design Museum in London, there is an exhibit where you throw a bucket of virtual pain at an LED screen to create effects like this.

I have no idea who made this exhibit, I have been trying to find out but haven't got very far... very clever way of using creating digital paint interactivity though.

BBC Four: The Beauty of Books

This evening I found an interesting series currently on BBC Four about the beauty of books, one episode in particular, Illustrated Wonderlands, about the relationship between illustration and text through the 19th Century to present. "Illustrated books set out to provide a fuller reading experience, to access deeper meanings through a synthesis of words and pictures.What a picture adds to a story and what the words leave out is key."


When talking about the illustrations to Lewis Carrol's 1865 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland it was emphasised how important Carrol regarded the illustrations to accompany his writings. Employing John Tenniel as illustrator, Tenniel's characters were much more sophisticated and naturalistic than Carrol's original drawings, but still true to being absurd. In these ways they invited adult interpretation, allowing the book to be enjoyed beyond childhood. They even included small in-jokes between author and illustrator, such as a monkey thought to the hotly debated Charles Darwin, which the Victorian readers would also enjoy. The character illustrations in  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are vital to accompanying the text because the characters are not much described in detail.

A modern interpretation of the illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (of which there are countless examples) by John Vernon Lord was discussed. He explained that by not including Alice in his illustrations you, the reader, let yourself become Alice. He also thinks Carrol would be furious at this as she is the heroin of the story and would have wanted her depicted. These are things I am directly concerned with in my game design.

The programme also discussed Mervyn Peake, originally for his Alice illustrations, but mainly for his passionate belief that illustrations were important for serious adult fiction, including his own books aimed at adults. Best known for his Gormenghast series, published circa 1950, where the illustrations were drawn before the descriptions were written so that he had something formed which he could describe. His characters were described as having their souls on the outside of their bodies.

"Picture books can be very deep and often more universal and more adult than the next age group [of books] up.… They can be about life and death and fear and all sorts of things." - Julia Donaldson

I enjoyed this episode very much, a great trigger for thinking about my own story and animation again after such a long break. Now that I have playtested my game (documented offline, sorry!) I am going to attempt fitting in some work on the animation around the other projects I have taken on recently. I hope I will have something to show for it within the week.

Life Size Cardboard House

Artist Luise Valdes made a replica of their own apartment out of unused cardboard, its called Casa de Karton or Cardboard House.



They whitewashed everything before re-drawing details on to give the effect of a drawing come to life.



I think the effect is brilliant, and a complete contrast in scale to my project. I am not aware of the scale when looking at these photos, I half imagine a huge hand coming in at the side to rearrange the furniture like a model. But I think this is in the photography mostly, there are give aways to the scale in the characteristics of the boxes and the tape fixing it together.

Paper Playtest Ideas

Ideas for the paper play test! Initial ideas are to print each of the level designs in full (I will make two or three possibly) and print each of the menu screens. These can be pinned on the wall or displayed on a table, and people can rearrange them as they see fit. That is the whole idea of course! Seeing what a user would prefer to play with, or understand better.

Another idea I just had is to make a iPhone frame, to slide up and down the printed levels. This way I can test whether the game would work better portrait or landscape. 

 

A further idea is to let people draw onto the level designs, to see what people would expect from a maze/path building gameplay. This way I can see what people would find fun, difficult, or easy, and try and make it more exciting. 

I will need to develop level ideas now, to have them printed for February. I was planning on doing the animation first, but this is one of the things I was referring to in my last post about rescheduling.

Update: Week 2

Its the second week of the new term and my schedule for the remainder of the academic year is to be re-assessed. This is to accommodate a few more things I have added, and to compensate for the storyboard I have not managed to do over Christmas. For the next couple of weeks I will be finishing my research report, but then I will start on some paper play testing for my game! I want to spend time working with players and seeing how they would use what I present to them. This will help with gameplay design, saving a lot of time that could be wasted programming things that might not work. I want to focus a lot of energy on this part, and try to understand the transition between design and production a lot better.