Doox

I’ve just watched academy award nominated short animated films at Landmark theatre - this is by far my favorite one. Really good thing about short film is about the diversity of it. Diversity is the spice of life. I found that written on the wall of the theatre. Interesting coincidence. Short films are amazing since you can see the creator’s explorative spirit on it. Usually it doesn’t have verbal lines and focuses on visual story telling with music on it. It makes audience listen more carefully to the music. Pixar’s Presto is one of the most obviously good ones but I really liked the octopus’s love story. Very tight well paced and brilliant camera works! Also liked lighting and rendering style. I found human character design and rendering style has simiarity to the game team fortress 2. Only 2 min but every second was awesome. The one Aka studio’s one with city and nature contrast was also impressive. Loved the one withca polar bear and penguin.
I’m a about to see live action one

If you can estimate the time you need to finish a work and the benefit(or price) of the work, you can calculate the value of each hour in a more tangible way. We usually forget the simple fact that the most precious thing we have in our life is time. It’s rather appalling to realize that it’s another Saturday after one week has just been swifted away. Whenever I feel gloomy and feel myself started getting into the state of so called ‘waste of emotion’, I think about what kind of more productive thing I could possibly do using that time. And most importantly, and seriously no more thinking. I should act.

There are some quite obvious things that interactivity can offer to audience. When the game design is loyal to the key benefits of interaction, it naturally has good playability that means giving real-time experience that is impossible to happen in life or quite expensive to make it come to reality. This all sounds like a convoluted expression about ‘interaction’ itself but that’s pretty much it. If the experience itself is ‘different’ then it has major advantages in this media so called ‘video game’. But still being different in a meaningful way is a genuine win. You can make a game that has somewhat differently ’stylzed’. A game that has very similar mechanics to other games but totally different ’style’ or ‘art direction’ that can possibily lead the game to bring ‘different’ emotion would be a good example. Then there are other factors that are not much ‘designed’ rather than naturally ‘implied’ by abstraction. Abstraction is powerful since it loses control to audience since it could be interpreted by their own imagination or putting empathy on it. It’s very close to the key features of ‘interaction’ since it’s giving space to audience for their own translation. ‘Design’ and ‘Interactivity’ sometimes clashes since too much of designing or planning is actually forcing audience from their free will. Well if you say designing things not to be designed too much is also designing then it could be a rhetorical comment. Anyways, what I want to emphasize is, though, one of the most important thing about ‘desigining’ game is that it should be intended by the creator. It should be carefully organized to deliver the creator’s message. You should be able to tell how you intended the interaction to devote on the message you eventually wanted to pull out of it. Eventhough the interpretation is still the audience’s part and that’s the joy of this medium and sometimes the audience interpretation could be superior than that of the creator, if the creator didn’t do his homework - the struggling countless days and nights in designing - the work is just coincidence and the creators cannot improve themselves.

So, continuing from my last post, in the premises that we are trying to make more meaningful experience out of our interactive media by delivering certain messages out of our work and there are certain type of messages that are best communicated through linear media and then there are others. When you have chosen interactive media then you’ve got to know what’s the tools ready for you to use. I think most of all just the fact that giving the space to participate to audience itself is already a win and major attraction. That’s good but not enough. In fact it could be more interactive in the experience of so called ‘linear media’. For example, many good movies always make people think what’s going to happen in their own way. The quality of interaction like this is actually a lot more sophisticated then that of a not well crafted so called ‘interaction’ in an interactive media. The reason why puzzle games are often one of the most well crafted games is that ‘puzzle’ gives perfect excuses of constantly moving/jumping/exploring the game world. Controlling your protagonist in game is mostly very low level interaction when it’s just for sake of controlling. Sometimes puzzle gives pretty good reason to keep shooting, avoiding obstacles, jumping around and so on to solve . Since puzzle is still part of the gameplay mechanics( close to the nature of interactivity ) it’s more likely considered better drive for player interaction compared to that of linear narrative. Apparently game designers are eager to find ways to deliver narrative perfectly fused with the core mechanics of gameplay. Recent articles from gamasutra also deal with these and we definitely have so much unexplorered free space for narrative in games. Also music games have pretty good match in their game mechanics with the interaction. Button matching makes perfect sense in music game since it’s how we actually interact with original instruments. Musical performance through musical instruments is one of the most naturally interactive experience that we don’t really have to ask why. Music games are really successful and often easily delivers high quality of interaction because of that. Then we have this big assignment that how to bring the natural linearity of the story telling into interactive media? Most of the obvious attempts in this are focusing on the illusion of it. What I mean is that trying to make audience feel like they are controlling the narrative. Sometimes it is quite enough to just create the ‘feel’ of participation in the narrative. It is in the same idea of that the more important thing is the ‘process’ of the story not the ‘result’ of story. In this kind of ideas, stories have number of waypoints that have finite result but try to make players get through certain interaction to reach there. And then there are more downright approach to actually manipulating the narrative by audience’s choice. Games with multi-ending or different character development affecting story itself would be in this category. Fable would be a good example of this. Then there are games like sims that don’t have any explicit story verbally written but the story itself comes from the somewhat symbolized interaction between characters. It’s kind of a procedurally generated story when you play the games along. Then there are meta games that has all the interaction on top of a not-so-much narrative games from the interactions in people of the community talking about the their game experience…
// TODO: More thoughts… later.

Some of the old works from DS colors free home brew software…
With Colors DS’s like a little tablet computer with the functionalities pretty close to basics from Painter program.
I need to do at least one a day just not to lose the sense of it.

The most important skill in code reading is the ability to catch what is the purpose of it. Black-boxing the part of the code into input/output is always a good start. All the engineering problem can be solved by introducing another layer of indirection is the fundamental theory of software engineering. The power of abstraction.

Especially when we read books, we easily notice that the speed of turning the pages is getting slower by our falling into the thoughts digressed from the book’s contents. For me, I found myself easily distracted out of the book’s main contents into my own imagination when my personal experience was projected by specific words from the book’s sentence. When it comes to stronger emotional experience, it tends to go deeper into re-generating the situtation and try to simulate it in a better way or more rewarding way.

Mixing things… is dangerous. Reading is one thing and projecting my personal experience which apparently doesn’t have anything to do with the actual keypoints of the book’s paragraphs is another. Also, there should be full of ‘purposeful’ tension when we read books, especially if it’s a technical book. Without that, we’re just lazy readers seeking certain entertainment out of a wrong book.

Detaching myself from me… is also trying not to mix the fact and the interpretation of it. I’ve been considering myself as an imaginative person but I realized that truth is I was having trouble in being fully lost in the imagination process because of self-recognition in the middle of it. Constantly having this self-awareness doesn’t really help to accept something as it is. Myself should be thrown away to fully appreciate the moment of learning and enjoy it. It’s joyful not because it’s related to myself but because it is truely free from myself.

Reading books or learning something is in the same line of this mechanism. While you’re inputting something in yourself, you should not be interrupted by your egotistical instinct to translate whatever you’re learning into something actually related to the result of it or application of it. It should be a pure process not blocked by any contaminated thoughts which is usually driven by self-awareness.

I need to do a little bit of everything everyday. Apparently it’s more effective to do something little by little over a period of time than to finish it putting a long time in a day. When we keep doing just one task for a long time we’re usually locked in ourselve and easily got lost and fall into manerism. Everyday, or at a different time of a day, we are a little bit of different person and have chance to look at the work in progress in a different perspective. It helps to see objectively with fresh eyes what’s good and wrong in our work.

What you do everyday makes what you are. 

Whenever we’re putting certain amount time on a task, we often don’t realize how much time is actually used for the task. I tend to find myself digressing from the book’s contents to my imagination. It’s actually interesting to track back what part of the book I started branching out to my own deep thoughts. Time extends itself to use up whatever it’s given. I should also keep in mind that the purpose of reading book is to get the information not to study the English expression or read it line by line. It’s often more effecient to read the book trying to find what the author is trying to say rather than literally follow the way he wrote in sentences. I find it also useful to read through contents and start from the chapter of my interest or at least trying to have questions to myself on the buzzword in the contents. Questioning is the best way of learning something because it clearifies what I don’t know and what I need to focus when I’m reading.

I remember when my school collegue, Vincent Diamante, once mentioned that “To make the result beautiful , the process of it should be beautiful, too.” I don’t recall where he actually quoted it. As game creators we need to focus on the joy of making something rather than the hype of the result. We need to focus on the process of making something and actual quality of it rather than thinking about how it would be received by people. That’s why we should be totally truthful to ourself when it comes to making something we believe.

I want to live my life enjoying and feeling proud of every moment by putting honest efforts on my work rather than thinking about how to be successful out of it. The crazy hypes spoil the whole experience. Isn’t it enough by itself to create something you truely believe in? I mean really!

But , whether it is from the desire toward fame and fortune or not,  worst of all is not doing anything. There’s no excuse on being lazy, man!