Creation Year: June

Despite a family vacation in the middle of the month, I've been able to get quite a lot accomplished.  A welcome respite from the last few months of spinning my wheels.

Spring is complete.  Summer is complete.  That just leaves two more micro-games and Seasons will be done(ish).  To be honest, I'm already reconsidering Summer and Fall.  But I knew that if I spent all summer thinking about the design, it would never get done.  Better something less awesome, but ready for ArtPrize than something well designed but completely theoretical.

The other day, I had a frustrating experience.  I finished Summer on Wednesday, but then realized I hated it.  The more I consider this piece, the more I am impressed by the following realities:

1. Seasons will be installed in a loud bar with plenty of other distractions. 
2. I am requiring something more from my audience than just to look, shrug, and move on to the next thing.
3. Players will not have time to spend more than a few minutes at my piece.

These realities are affecting my design more and more.  Because of them, it means that the player doesn't have time to be confused.  Goals must be clear and feedback immediate.  If I were to make some sort of meta-game that spans all four seasons, the rules would have to be explained ahead of time, but (1) and (3) limit the potential of them reading and understanding them. 

Most art games (that I love, at least) require a few play-throughs to really understand well.  I think of the many students I've watched play Passage  for the first time only to keep walking straight across the screen without exploring the maze beneath.  And that was in class!  My players won't have half that focus, probably.

So I went back and tweaked Summer, changing some rules and adding a few.  Thankfully, it was easy enough.  After playing Spring and Summer with some real-life (instead of testing) numbers, it's playing much better.


Very soon, I'll have a new website to launch.  You'll be able to play the demos there.

Creation Year: May

Continuing my attempt at logging my attempt at Creation Year...  May and June have been a little hectic.  Again, unfortunately, no fully completed projects, but lots of good momentum.

The biggest decision I've made the last few months has been that I would not only attempt to put my Seasons project into an art gallery, but to tackle ArtPrize.

For those of you who won't click on that link, ArtPrize is a massive art competition located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.   There are rounds of audience voting and a jury prize.  Overall, somewhere around $800,000 is given away in prize money.  While I don't expect to get any of that prize cash, ArtPrize is a massive community event.  Last year, I think we had something like an extra 500,000 people in the city or something.  Go big or go home, right?

Artists partner with local businesses that host their work.  Much of the city is turned into an art gallery, from bars and restaurants to real estate offices, museums, and churches.    So I set about trying to convince people to take a risk on an uncompleted project in a relatively little understood medium by an unproven artist.  I was beyond excited when the B.O.B., a local venue with multiple restaurants, nightclubs, and bars inside, accepted me as one of their artists this year.

The B.O.B.

This is pretty exciting news and let me tell you why: the B.O.B. has the highest foot traffic of pretty much any venue in the city.  People are there almost all day every day, both for ArtPrize events or just to enjoy the venue itself.  So my little arcade machine with my artsy little game will be playable by thousands of people over the span of three weeks.  Agh!

So May was spent setting up ArtPrize connections and continuing to plug away at Seasons.  Spring is completed (or, at least, ready to be put on the shelf until the rest are done).  Summer is underway.  And I have two and a half months to pull off.

Deep breaths.

Creation Year: April

After the busy-ness of March, April was a welcome respite and a chance to start working again.  I chose to start a fairly ambitious project...

One of the main ideas of Creation Year was benchmarking.  I had to create things and show them off to people so I could have an idea of how good I was at those things.  With my application to UCSC denied, it became especially important to get my work out there.  I decided to make a goal of showing off a game project or four in an art gallery.


Given that most of Grand Rapids is not terribly aware of the art game scene, I thought a simple premise would be best.  Something that everyone understood on a fairly fundamental level so that they can easily "get" how a game could express that idea.  I figured the seasons would be a good place to start.

Beyond just picking a subject, though, how would I make that happen?  For some time, I've been interested in Perlenspiel, a simple, abstract, web-based game engine.  Created by Prof. Brian Moriarty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, it's an engine that not only suggests abstraction, but demands it.  It forces both the designer and the player to think more about the systems of interaction than on art or world building or storytelling.  Its high degree of abstraction would, hopefully, help my players "get" the idea of Seasons even better.  Hopefully.

So April began with Spring.  As the trees were blooming outside, I sought to create a simple, game-like interactive toy that expressed the new life, unpredictability, and simple joy of that season.  I finished it just a few days into May.

Currently, the demo of Spring is available here, soon to be hosted on a new website designed by Jared Ransom.

Creation Year: March

I have not been terribly faithful about updating the blog this year so far.  However, my Creation Year experiment is, so far at least, a moderate success.  The next few posts will be exploring the projects and ideas that I've been trying to tackle in this process

March was (and always is) a horribly busy month.  Midterms are in full swing at work.  The Game Developer's Conference runs.  And, this year, I visited the University of California at Santa Cruz to follow up on my application to their MFA program.  Needless to say, not a lot of things were created.

However, my visit to the Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC gave me something quite tangible to bring back home.  While I was there, I had the opportunity to sit in on their graduate student pod meetings.  These were bi-weekly meetings where small groups of graduate students (both PhD and MFA candidates) get together for challenge, inspiration, and accountability.  At the beginning of each meeting, each member spends no more than three minutes 1) explaining what they've accomplished since the last meeting, 2) what they plan to have accomplished by their next meeting, 3) what current obstacles their facing, and 4) any topics for discussion among the group.

I was enthralled.  The meeting I sat in on, we discussed topics as disparate as one of the students' potential job prospects post-graduation, procedurally generated facial animation and its effect on player interpretation of text, and the #1reasonwhy/#1reasontobe situation at GDC this year.  These students pushed each other on, gave each other ideas, and discussed fascinating topics within their specialties.  Very cool and very inspiring. 

So I wanted to do it here in Grand Rapids.  The last several weeks, two friends and I have been gathering for our own pod meetings.  It has been, at times, difficult to schedule with our busy lives, but it's been worth it.  Already, they've helped me (in motivation and brainstorming) in my new project for the summer and, I think it's been helpful for them, as well. 

So, though no concrete thing was developed in March, I consider pod meetings an important step in the ongoing development of Creation Year. 

Also, if you're local to Grand Rapids, MI and interested in games, story, interactivity, and media work (in general), and want to join, drop me a line @thekemp on Twitter.  Or something.