Now your playing with power

Nintendo's Commercial

Characters

Again regarding relations to games and experiences there was 1 particular link that stood out to me regarding characters. From Bruce Lee, we then have Marshal/Forest Law from the Tekken game series and also the fil KillBill, in which ALL wear a yellow jumpsuit, whilst in action.

Game Relations

For me personally, certain games that I have played, especially the earlier time, when I begin to think about them immediately my mind associates it with a particular experience, like music.
For example Double Dragon and Battletoads on the NES system, was a game I played during the times I used to stay in Swindon at my Godmothers house about 12 years ago. Fifa 99 reminds me of a time when I was still in school and it always reminds me of my Geography teacher, who also loved that particullar game.

Knowns, Known Unknowns and the Unknowns in Gaming - Week 3

Were were peresented with a range of subject areas regarding games. They were...

• Gaming experience is seamless
• Games and spaces
• Game time vs GMT
• History and memory gaming
• Gaming syntax
• Adversity in games
• Real world movement
  

Week 2 Workshop

During the week 2 workshop, we wer instructed to play about with the Processing software. This is something that I have used before and I am very familiar with so it was more just refreshing my Processing mind!

Our lecture showed gave us a simple code which was:
void setup(){
size(500,500);
frameRate(5);
println("helloworld");
}
void draw(){
background(255);
fill(0);
ellipse(mouseX,mouseY);
}

This gave us a box with a white background, that had a black circle positioned wherever the mouse was positioned.

We were also instructed to create our own environment, using lines to bring to the next lecture. Here's what I was able to come up with...


There wasnt any major difficulties, only the fact that you have to manually work out where exactly you want your lines to be placed as four X,Y points need to be declared (start and finish of line) and if you want to ensure the image is symmetrical you then have to do a bit of maths

Michael Chang - Manifest

Another resource introduced to us during the lecture. I had a chance to play around with the online version. its quite interesting, but at the same time simple. Her's some useful information...

Notes: The original project was intended to be used with the tablet. However the downloadable and online versions do not have this feature enabled.

Abstract: Drawing toy that produces parameterized organisms. Procedural animation allows the organisms to swim around in a virtual fluid environment interacting with each other.

Documentation: After a good critique from Golan Levin and Casey Reas, I've toned down my project to something more accomplishable within the three week period I was given.

The project now interprets strokes made from a tablet pen. When a stroke is completed (or closed into a loop) it manifests an organism based on stroke length, speed, and pressure. While not exactly gesture recognition, it was a quick and dirty solution to what otherwise might have been a nightmare to develop (gesture recognition).

Procedural animation drives all of the creatures, including the physics and kinematics. At the lowest level, physics runs everything from the fluid simulation, masses, and springs. One level higher and you get the autonomous motions of a creature such as articulation (moving the tail in opposition of the head).

At the highest structure you get the behavior level, the "AI" of the creature that drives them to go in particular directions, follow certain targets, and do certain things with their bodies. Everything is clamped down into a point of "interest", and the organism simply follows that. The behavior routine simply directs this "interest", and the rest of the body articulates itself. In addition, behaviors can change due to their orientation or distance between themselves and other organisms. I'll let you discover these behaviors yourself, since that's half the fun of this project.

Each creature is custom-built, meaning art and programming for each creature had to be construted individually.

The graphics are SVGs imported via a custom-built SVG importer I wrote for this project. It really sucks, so I didn't release it. You wouldn't want to use it anyway, it's really buggy. However, SVGs allowed me to draw interesting shapes that can connect to other shapes with code. Also, SVGs are a vector format so it allows me to zoom as far in or out as I want without losing resolution, keep file sizes down to a minimum, and it also allows me to do transforms and scales to them on the fly.

The art style drew inspiration from submerged microorganisms and presstube.

Future: Some things that I could improve include actually using gesture recognition to develop even more interesting shapes (try drawing a few loops to see what I mean). Writing a system that could morph in-between SVG would also be very awesome, as well as importing SVG with mutiple layers, or colors. I also learned a lot about behavior programming from this project. Writing behavior directly into the creature class became prohibitively difficult, so I should really think about a new way to do behavior programming seperate from creature articulation. Finally, I want to come up with a way to recycle the art more efficiently, so as to build a large library of creatures really quickly. Perhaps a creature-constructor interface? ...

Click here for internet applet of the work

Evolva - (Wiliam Latham)

Evolva is a third-person action game, released in 2000. The player leads a team of 4 "GenoHunters" exploring a planet; each of the GenoHunters can develop new abilities by incorporating and altering the DNA they've absorbed from the creatures they have killed. The GenoHunters will change their physical appearance (change colors, develop spikes or horns) based on the DNA they've used to mutate themselves. Your Genohunters can punch, jump, super jump, breath fire, vomit flammable liquids, shoot explosives, scramble enemies brains and spawn small alien offspring that injure enemies.

The game has 12 large, linear levels populated with alien insect-like creatures known as the "parasite guardians". There are different types of these alien creatures. In some of the levels there are "Bosses" at the end which your team of genohunters must defeat.

The game was praised by critics as very innovative, without any major criticisms, other than the high hardware requirements (for the time) and weak multiplayer support.

The Thing - (William Latham)

The Thing is a third person survival horror game, and sequel to John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing. It was developed by Computer Artworks. PlayStation 2 version of this game was released in North America on August 19, 2002, and in Japan on February 27, 2003. ^[1]The Thing is set after the film's ending, when two United States military rescue teams, Alpha and Bravo, are dispatched by Colonel Whitley to investigate the loss of contact with U.S. Outpost 31. Alpha Team, headed by the unit's second-in-command, Captain Pierce, is dropped at the nearby Norwegian Outpost. Bravo Team, led by the unit's Commanding Officer, Captain Blake, is then dropped at the American research station. The player assumes the role of Captain Blake, and must learn how to coordinate and command his Bravo Team colleagues while investigating the ruins of Outpost 31 and locating clues and messages detailing the incident for players who are unfamiliar with the film. The mission supervisor, Colonel Whitely, will offer sporadic assistance and relay objectives via radio. This section serves as an in-game tutorial and training level and offers some insight into the events which transpired following the end of the movie.

During the player's investigation of the ruins of the Outpost, they will find the UFO from the film. They will also find the body of Childs, one of the survivors from the movie. Upon securing the facility, Blake is airlifted to the Norwegian research station to locate and reinforce Alpha Team after Whitely informs him that they have lost contact with the team. There Blake and his group encounter swarms of Things that slowly dwindle down his team as Blake rescues Colin and learns of a government conspiracy with Gen Inc in conducting experiments on the alien lifeforms before they began to infest the research facility. Blake learns that Whitely was behind it the whole time and even injected himself with a Cloud Virus B4 Strain. With a new group, Blake fights his way through numerous black ops and creatures before killing the transformed Colonel Whitley. The player has the assistance of a helicopter pilot, revealed to be R.J. MacReady, the hero from the original film.

Wiliam Latham - Week 2

Wiliam Latham is another artist introduced to us during the Week 2 lecture. This artist is related to our Experimental Gaming module as he developed software that was used in games such as:

• The Thing (2002)
• Evolva (2000)
  

Here's a brief biography on the artist:

From 1987 to 1994 he worked for IBM in their Advanced Computer Graphics and Visualisation Division at IBM Hursley near Winchester , and his Mutation work achieved world wide recognition at SIGGRAPH and other events and a number of IBM patents were published. He was co-author with Stephen Todd of the book “Evolutionary Art and Computers” published by Academic Press which is still recognised as a key work in this area. His organic artworks and films were shown worldwide in major touring exhibitions of the UK , Germany , Japan and Australia

William was CEO of computer games developer Computer Artworks Ltd from 1994 to 2003, hit games produced included The THING (Playstation2, Xbox and PC) which sold in excess of one million units world-wide, and was Number 1 hit in the UK and Germany . The Thing was published by Vivendi Universal in USA and Europe, and by Konami in Japan and the Far East . (The Thing game was the sequel to the cult John Carpenter Film The THING starring Kurt Russell).

He has a wealth of experience in games development and games business and has managed (and closed) contracts valued $200K to $5m with Microsoft, Nokia, Atari, Vivendi Universal, SCi, Sony SCEE and Virgin Interactive. He has direct experience in film rights negotiation, copyright issues, games negotiation, digital assets management and games technology development.

In 2004, recognising the ongoing increase in games budgets and increasing new investment from financial organisations outside the games industry William founded Games Audit Ltd. Games Audit Ltd is a project management and audit operation for the games industry and offers a wide range of services. Clients include Ingenious, Add Partners, IDGVE .

From 2005 to 2006 William Latham was Professor of Creative Technology at Leeds Metropolitan University and a Research Fellow of Goldsmiths College ( University of London ).

In 2007 William became full Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths. He continues to remain CEO of Games Audit.

William has an MA from The Royal College of Art and a BA from Oxford University

Paul B.Davis

Some interesting work from Paul B.Davis.

In my opinion, Mario is the face of games as a whole, and i find his work interesting because of the manipulation techniques used by Paul B.Davis on something that is so ancient in terms of the gamining world. To me Paul B.Davis's style is simplicity and now we see that like the Giant Joystick, were size has made it that much more interesting. Simplicity or a simple change in imagery has made the Marion game more interesting.
I like to play sports simulation games, especially football games, such as Fifa and Pro Evolution. For many years i've played both games and seen their development(from Fifa '96 to Fifa 10 and ISS Pro to Pro Evo 10) and to be honest, the game doesnt really change drastically (year by year), but when the next years game is due to be relaesed, the question on gamers hearts are "whats new?"

Click here for a video I found on Paul B.Davis

And Yet It Moves Wii Teaser

Another interesting resource:

And Yet It Moves