These guys move fast! The group of hackers including David Holmes from the U Alberta GRAND/Play-PR research group along with Ian Morrison, Susan Wright, and Erik Johnson have released the demo for their addictive gameLife Goes On as a free download for PC and OS X. This game was first presented at the 2012 Global Game Jam in early January this year.
Life Goes On is a puzzle platformer game where the death of your character merely paves the way for the next guy. Sacrifice an endless stream of fearless knights into the arsenal of spike pits, flamethrowers, sawblades, and lava to make progress through a deadly gauntlet filled with elaborate deathtraps!
David Holmes, a member of the GRAND Play-PR group, participated on a team in the 2012 Global Game Game at the University of Alberta and created a very cool game that was demoed at the wrap of the game jam. This is David’s report of the event:
On 27 January, 2012, game developers from all over the world gathered together to participate in Global Game Jam 2012. Split into teams of four or five, each team would have 54 hours to create a playable game based around a theme. In an effort to discover more about the ideas of rapid prototyping in game design, GRAND HQP David Holmes participated in the event.
On the Friday evening at 7:00PM, the attendees gathered at the University of Alberta’s Computing Science Centre to be given the theme, paired off into teams, and to start working on their project. In Edmonton, the format was different from other cities. People would have the ability to make a pitch of their project, and interested parties would attach themselves to the project. In total 23 proposals were given for a variety of projects, and at the end of the event, 18 completed projects were presented. In total there was about 90 participants to the event, with skill sets ranging from art and audio, to coding and design. Of the multitudes of proposals given, I opted to go for the vaguest, in an effort to get the full GGJ experience. The presenter was U of A computing science masters student Erik Johnson whose proposal was short and to the point, “I want to get a team together to do Global Game Jam. I’ll need coders, artists, sound guys, and designers.”
Once the proposals were finished, I went over to Erik’s area and we were given the theme for the competition – the ourobouros. Erik, I, and some other participants started firing ideas back and forth about possible ideas for the game, ranging from mechanics to narrative. The discussion quickly focused in on the symbols spiritual roots and its place as a symbol of renewal and the cycle of life an death. After 20 minutes of ideas, the call came out asking if we all had our teams. We looked at the group that had gathered and been bouncing ideas off each other and nodded. The team ended up consisting of Susan Wright, Ian Morrison, and Adrian Nieto. Our newly formed team went off into a side classroom and started to further hone our idea. We would create a game based around the mechanic of dying in order to solve puzzles within the environment. We would use the Unity3D engine, as the company Unity Technologies had offered a week long license for the software for participants in GGJ12. Sizing up our strengths, we realized we had a coder heavy group – all five of us had solid coding experience, so many of us would have to use our other strengths. Susan was to be the dedicated coder, Ian the artist and 3D modeler, Erik to be the producer and an associate coder, Adrian to be a level designer and scripter, and I was to work on the audio of the game and be the lead designer. We adjourned for the night with the task to familiarize ourselves with the Unity engine (as none of us had extensive experience with it), and to come up with more ideas for the next day.
We met on Saturday in the same classroom at 9:00AM, and stayed there for 13 hours of coding. We finalized the workable ideas for the game, threw out the ideas that were unrealistic given our time frame, and set off to complete our game by 5:00PM the next day. Despite our familiarization with Unity the night before, there were many areas of the engine that we had to learn before we could start off running. The first few hours were about getting the development environment set up, a source control system set up on a server, and deciding what our primary tasks for the day would be. We resolved to have a “workable prototype” by the end of the day.We were aiming to produce a 2D side scroller, so we decided that this working prototype would have to have a character that could jump from platform to platform, and our core mechanic of death and respawning would have to be implemented. This was Erik, Susan, and Adrians primary goal. Ian would start creating art assets in 3DS Max that could be used, starting with a main character and progressing to models for the environment. Because we had no dedicated art assets for the most of Saturday, Unity’s default art assets were used before Ian’s models could be implemented in the game. As for myself, I would be working with Ian in order to determine the primary “feel” of the game (a dark, but cartoony atmosphere with an emphasis on humour), as well as starting to produce sound effects for both the Knight and the environment. To do this, I used open source sound effect and mixer software as well as public domain sounds, and the once I could produce on my own. By 5:00PM we shifted tasks a bit to help get our engine set up properly and by the end of the first day we had achieved our goal. We had a character (who was no longer the default asset) who could run around on platforms, die, and respawn at the beginning checkpoint. Default sound effects had been changed to created sounds, and we had the beginning of some background music. By the time we adjourned we had 38 commits on our subversion repository, and the beginnings of a good idea. We assigned tasks for the night that would have to be completed (mainly based around finalizing engine, and physics bugs), and went home.
We met at 9:00AM on Sunday morning. By this time the subversion repository had reached 60 commits, and we had resolved some of our physics issues, as well as the problems we were having with our character ragdolls. More models had been imported into the game, we had sketches of what sort of levels we wanted to implement, and more working sound effects. By noon on Sunday we had no levels implemented, a working engine, good models, sound effects, ambient noise, and a possible background theme. We decided to scrap music all together, as it was unrealistic to get a working sound track ready by the deadline, stop the production of new art assets, and focus on engine polish, animation polish, and the creation of levels. Over the next five hours, we created six levels, a main menu, credits, further tweaked controls and physics, and polished existing art assets. By 5:00 it was as good as it was going to get and we left for the project presentations at TEK Edmonton. We arrived late, got some of the pizza that was offered, and waited for the presentations to begin. While we were waiting, we did some final polish for our demo.
Overall, the event gave a good overview of the concept of rapid prototyping. The team decided its own goals and priorities, and this approach made it very easy to change production at different times to focus on different things. The downside to this model of team dynamics would probably be the bottleneck of work at certain individuals to produce assets, as only one person on the team had art asset experience and only one person had sound experience. This could be minimized by having members of the team be proficient in other production areas, as we found that the abundance of coding experience made it easy to implement and tweak features directly. Communication was incredibly important, as we had to know what each team member was working on, so we didn’t accidentally erase someone’s work in the commits to the subversion repository. Thankfully, because we were very open about who had what assets, it made it easy to do. In retrospect, we probably should have placed ourselves in a more accessible location, as we discovered during the demo that some participants were essentially “floaters” – they went from team to team offering expertise in areas that some teams might have a lack of. If we managed to take advantage of this it would have reduced the bottleneck for asset production.
Sync or Swim is an interactive sound installation that is also a simple audio game. The object of the game is to find the “sync point” of several melodic/rhythmic layers that are operating at slightly different tempi. Turning a knob on the interface changes the tempi of the various layers by slightly different amounts – and finding the “sweet spot” brings all layers into synchronization.
The player must listen carefully to determine how far out of sync the layers are, to try to find the one point on the dial where the layers are in sync. Once the sync point is located, the sound will “bloom” after a few seconds, indicating that the sync point has been discovered. The player will then be presented with a new challenge. There are eight levels of challenges, and upon completing the final level, a special “piece” will emerge out of the final soundscape before the game resets back to level one.
This piece is an examination of ways to create audio games that are also interactive sonic art-works. The challenge was to create an aesthetic sound experience that the user can interact with, but that “reveals” itself to the listener as a game, opening up the possibility of changing the state of the composition in significant ways, and to discover the possibilities of the compositional variables. At its core, it is a simple algorithmic sound piece that is made up of a series of looping patterns that are randomly generated and juxtaposed, within specific aesthetic characteristics.
For this Friday’s Interactives group we will have a special guest who is in town to perform at this weekend’s Sea of Sound Festival. His name is Dr. D. Andrew Stewart, and he will be talking about his work, and specifically about his interactive musical instrument/interface, the T-Stick.
Dr. Stewart, with others, developed this instrument while pursuing doctoral work at McGill University. He has currently taken a position at the University of Lethbridge, and is thus now one of our new Alberta colleagues.
For this special interactives session, we will be meeting in the FAB Choir room on the first floor, room 1-29, at 3 pm. Anyone is welcome to come hear his talk. We hope to see you there!
University of Alberta Professor Scott Smallwood presented an overview of the practice, screened a short film by Louis McCallum and Davy Smith called Show Us Your Screens, and demonstrated live coding audio performance using the programming language ChucK.
This was followed by a demo/performance by Colin Labadie using the patching language Max/MSP, followed by a demo/performance by Dan Brophy of live circuit construction.
Scott Smallwood, a CIRCA Scholar with the Interactives collaboratory, is giving a paper on Solar Sound Arts: Creating Instruments and Devices Powered by Photovoltaic Technologies at the upcoming NIME 2011 conference. Here is the abstract:
This paper describes recent developments in the creation of sound-making instruments and devices powered by photovoltaic (PV) technologies. With the rise of more efficient PV products in diverse packages, the possibilities for creating solar-powered musical instruments, sound installations, and loudspeakers are becoming increasingly realizable. This paper surveys past and recent developments in this area, including several projects by the author, and demonstrates how the use of PV technologies can influence the creative process in unique ways. In addition, this paper discusses how solar sound arts can enhance the aesthetic direction taken by recent work in soundscape studies and acoustic ecology. Finally, this paper will point towards future directions and possibilities as PV technologies continue to evolve and improve in terms of performance, and become more affordable.
Every year, the graduate students at the University of Alberta host a conference to showcase current graduate research being conducted in the field of Humanities Computing.
This year’s conference will take place on Friday, March 11, 2011, in the Prairie Room at the Lister Conference Centre, here in Edmonton, AB. This will be an all day event, and is open to the public. It is also a free conference. Please consider attending and finding out what current research in the field is covering!
