Tips for implementing / coding an in-game options or pause menu functionality in Unity

October 13, 2015, 8:00 am

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I recently implemented an in-game options menu in Unity. Mine looks something like the thing above. A surprising amount of the required functionality is already implemented in Unity, you just have to write some code to hook into it. In the cases when Unity didn't already have a static variable for a particular setting, like mouse sensitivity or menu language, then I'd implement my own static variable that worked with a specific PlayerPrefs key.

Anyway, here's a bunch of workflow / specific API calls that I found very useful when I did it...

Create a separate UI Canvas for your options menu, then save that whole object as your menu prefab. You can now instantiate this menu prefab into every game scene with minimal mess.
For in-game master volume, use AudioListener.volume
To pause in-game sounds, use AudioListener.pause = true; don't forget to unpause the sound if you exit the menu or change the current scene.
To pause in-game action, use Time.timeScale = 0f; again, don't forget to reset it if you exit the menu or change the current scene.
For an in-game brightness / gamma correction slider, I used a simple fullscreen shader. The built-in color correction Image Effects were kind of overkill for this, so I went with the simpler implementation by willywill here. (I've also archived the files as a public Gist here.)
When detecting the user's screen resolution, be careful: Screen.currentResolution is the full screen resolution, but Screen.width and height is the actual window size.
I would recommend letting the user change graphics quality only from the main menu, and not in the pause menu, since it's expensive to call QualitySettings.SetQualityLevel( ) sometimes.
You can detect the user's OS language with Application.systemLanguage, but then you're kind of stuck with using Unity's SystemLanguage enum which doesn't have many options.
If you are using PlayerPrefs, you can call PlayerPrefs.DeleteAll( ) to give the user the option to easily clear all their game data.
If you're making something for Steam, the most used Unity wrapper is probably Riley Labrecque's Steamworks.NET here.

Got any other Unity in-game menu implementation tips? Feel free to drop some wisdom in the comments. (I'm going to delete any Asset Store ads though, sorry.)

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Radiator 1 notes, memories, and regrets.

October 18, 2015, 2:10 pm

≫ Next: "Psycho-material geographies" of 3D spaces, and The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden et al

≪ Previous: Tips for implementing / coding an in-game options or pause menu functionality in Unity

NOTE: This post talks about Radiator 1, and spoils much of what happens in it.

I've cleaned up and re-released an old single player Source Engine mod of mine called Radiator. It is free, and anyone with a Steam account (Windows, OSX, or Linux) should be able to play it.

It consists of three standalone chapters -- Polaris, Handle With Care, and Much Madness -- the first two chapters were released in 2009 on-schedule, but the third chapter has lingered unreleased for the past 6 years. Each passing year I've threatened to actually finish it, and today, I've finally made good on my threat.

What suddenly changed now? Well, I actually haven't finished Much Madness exactly... what changed was more my attitude. It proved ~~difficult~~ impossible to "finish" a game that I designed and wrote 6 years ago, from a very different time in my life. I don't have access to those moods or sensibilities anymore! So instead, I'm just going to release it in its pretty rough state, and accept how incomplete and unpolished it feels.

I originally started making Radiator because I was frustrated with how little work I had finished. I had been active in Half-Life modding communities since 2002, but in 2008 I still had nothing publicly released to my name, and many of my peers were working professionally in the game industry, a business where you must ship a game to survive. I decided I had to just make something and put it out there, and to do that, I gave myself tight technical constraints. Inspired by community level design challenges to build maps within certain bounds, I allowed myself only a 512 by 512 unit walkable area in the level editor. In this way, Radiator began as a purely formal experiment that blossomed into something more conceptual -- how do I make a roughly 42x42 foot walkable area interesting?

This led to the first chapter Polaris, a game that basically tells the player to stand in the middle of a small room and stare at the ceiling for 5-10 minutes. (My original liner notes for Polaris are here.) As you stare at the stars, your date talks about how constellations are imaginary, and then disappears without you noticing. Players are then faced with a secret choice, they can either go north using the constellations (using a real-life method that actually works in the northern hemisphere!) or just walk off somewhere else.

In the second chapter Handle With Care, the player must climb around a 42 x 42 x 80 foot room full of warehouse shelving to bring a crate to a specific space in order to "repress" it. To this day, it's probably the most difficult game I've ever made, an art game that requires very high movement fluency and knowledge of physics glitches, a "art game for gamers." At the same time, it also rewards failure if you haven't mastered crouch-jumping, which leads many players to suddenly "embrace" fucking everything up. You progress toward an ending either way, divorce or not-divorce. (In 2008, Prop 8 was passed in California, so gay marriage / divorce was on my mind.)

Then there's the third and newly released chapter, Much Madness, named after an Emily Dickinson poem around the same phrase. There's speculation that, in our own time, Dickinson would've been diagnosed as bipolar -- she was famously reclusive for much of her life, rarely ever leaving her family home, and speaking with visitors through a closed door.

Upon Dickinson's death, her sister discovered 1800 unpublished poems. It's almost as if her words can barely hint at what was really going on. Some of her most famous lines like "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" are super fucking bad-ass, but most people experience her in the wrong context (e.g. a random poem force-fed to them during high school English class) so they never really give her a chance. If you do give her a chance, you'll find that her voice is very versatile, sometimes death growling like Nordic death metal, and sometimes crooning like a pop country super star.

This was the main idea behind Much Madness: I wanted the player to give her their attention. So the initial setup was that Emily Dickinson is pissed off and has a shotgun, and to hide from her the player would have to listen closely as she recites her poetry, and avoid her. In this way, I wanted players to listen to her verse, and perhaps even memorize certain lines over time.

The player was to hide and run from Emily in a metaphorical sinking nuclear submarine. I wanted the narrow hallways and rising flood water to make the player feel trapped; I wanted the sonar echo to mimic a heartbeat. I was also reading Martin Amis' novel Time's Arrow, a book that's basically narrated in reverse. What if you had to rehearse game logic in reverse, to unsink the submarine that your character sunk? That means you could only walk backwards, and that you'd need to seek out Emily Dickinson so she would shoot you and "give" you health, so that you could "drop healthkits" and "lose" health. But this would only make sense if I had also had a more regular "forward time" section at the start, to establish some normalcy?...

There was just one problem: this was all really difficult to play. Even as the game's developer, I had to resort to a lot of cheats to dodge a shotgun-wielding Emily AI or avoid drowning, and tuning these values was really just a band-aid for how much I was conceptually loading onto the player. With great regret, I "killed my darling" and deleted the huge complicated submarine portion.

But I kept the house.

Originally, the house was to be a sort of "heaven" separate from the submarine, which you could only access through certain flashbacks. But without the whole sinking submarine thing, the house now became the main space of the game. I wanted it to feel surreal, so I planted it in a huge field of buttercups (at her request, Emily Dickinson's coffin was carried through fields of buttercups) that evoke the garish terrible Windows XP wallpaper imagery in Peter Jackson's film adaptation of The Lovely Bones (2009). I'm sure Dickinson would've agreed that heaven is its own kind of hell.

The house exterior is based on the actual Dickinson Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. I took quite a few liberties with the scale and proportions, and totally changed the interior floor plan, but kept it fairly similar to a sort of half-researched New England Colonial arrangement. There are public parlors downstairs and more private bedrooms upstairs, as well as a main stairwell in the front and a servants' stairwell in the back. I also only had time to populate one room with props (modeled off actual furniture and decor from the Dickinson home), so the fiction is that the house is in the middle of a "trash-out" for foreclosure. (Again, this design is contemporary with US current events in 2008 / 2009 like the subprime mortgage crisis)

I tweaked Emily's behavior for the house. I tried giving her a lead pipe instead of shotgun, but she was still way too dangerous, so I ended up making her fear the player and run away instead, which seemed more in line with her personality. Emily's behavior also has small other touches: she usually avoids servant areas (Dickinson was quite privileged), she will try not to leave the actual house, and she also patrols the key rooms the player needs to visit.

To "complete" Much Madness, the player must visit three rooms to retrieve three keys to unlock Emily's bedroom door. I use various techniques to draw the player towards this door: it is right at the top of the stairwell, it is isolated alone from all the other rooms, it is set unusually in shadow. I also scripted a constant erratic knocking sound coming from it, audible throughout the entire level, inspired by the knocking in Thief 3's Shalebridge Cradle level.

Originally I had planned a "re-decorate" mechanic, where the player must un-foreclose the house by bringing items and furniture back to their proper rooms (based on an archival photo) and arrange them correctly. The logic scripting for this proved unfeasible in Source though, so I ultimately scrapped all that and just let players experience the results of their actions directly: a mysterious opening to another dimension that defies the geometry of the house. This dimension is memory.

In one room, a ladder leads up through the ceiling to the forest from ch. 1 Polaris. In another room, a wall disintegrates to the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant. A different scene uses architecture from an unreleased noir mass-murder mod ("Flatlander Woman") that I showed only at one event, set at a nonexistent Brooklyn-area museum set on the East River. All the imagery is specific, but I kept the significance vague. The idea is that these three vignettes are memories of pivotal moments in the main characters' relationship.

Oh, yeah, the characters. If Polaris and Handle With Care are from James' perspective, then Much Madness switches over to Dylan's perspective. Much Madness begins with you (Dylan) stuck in a hospital bed, dying from kidney failure. (The scrapped submarine was like your sick body, and it was to have kidney-shaped ballast tanks.) You're stuck in the hospital room with the guy in your life who has treated you particularly poorly; it's kind of a shitty way to go, but when your body is that weak, you can't really call the shots anymore. As in most hospitals, you feel mostly bored and forgotten here.

(Brief note on the script and dialogue: 6 years later, I feel like the writing in Much Madness is pretty goddamn terrible, and I cringe at a lot of the lines now... I can't believe I made people say some of these things? But these are the narrative assets I've got, so I just sort of crammed them in and hoped for the best.)

As with the two other chapters, you can technically exit the game at any time. I don't want to waste anyone's time or stand in the way of speedrunners. In Polaris, you can wander off. In Handle With Care and Much Madness, there are literal exit doors that you can access at anytime.

But once you unlock Emily's bedroom, the level finally prompts you to leave. You wake up out in the field for the last time. You pass Emily, you pass your ex-husband James, you pass countless figures from your life, standing in the field outside. (I really like the end of the film 8 1/2, by the way.) The original plan was to have endless streams of all these people walking through the fields and to the exit door, but as I've said before, this is an unfinished game -- so instead they're all standing there, looking, waiting.

They're waiting for you to leave.

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"Psycho-material geographies" of 3D spaces, and The Beginner's Guide by Davey Wreden et al

October 21, 2015, 3:50 pm

≫ Next: The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

≪ Previous: Radiator 1 notes, memories, and regrets.

This post gives vague conceptual SPOILERS for The Beginner's Guide, and spoils a few specific moments. You really shouldn't worry about it, I mostly just talk about me in this.

I was one of the people who secretly played The Beginner's Guide long before its public release. Why was I given access, and not someone else? Well, that's kind of what the game's about: a "Davey" who is talking through his relationship with another designer named Coda. Who did Coda want to play their games?

In her own excellent post about TBG, Emily Short argues that the game has a very spare "personality-light" kind of style compared to what Short regards as more distinctive contemporary experimental designers like "Stephen Lavelle, Michael Brough, Pippin Barr, [... or] Robert Yang." That shout out (thanks!) is what stirred my memory...

I remember playing this seven months ago (back when it was simply codenamed "The Author") and suddenly thinking... wait, is Coda supposed to be me?

Screenshot from Radiator 1-2. (Not a screenshot from The Beginner's Guide.)

In TBG, Davey goes to great pains to establish the game's timeframe as 2008-2011, with constant reminders in the menus and loading screens -- he wants to firmly situate Coda's work within this time period. My own art mod Radiator was a Source Engine "art mod" contemporary with the original Stanley Parable and Dear Esther in that period of 2008-2011. While me, Dan Pinchbeck, and Davey Wreden were all aware of each others' work circa 2009-2010, I was the odd one out who never found any huge commercial success or anything. Instead, I kind of just kept making small weird mostly unpopular things for no one in particular. (Much like Coda, I even first got into 3D level design by making half-finished Counter-Strike maps that no one played.)

TBG also has a lot of sensibilities that remind me of my own mods from 2009, like rendering humanoid Source Engine characters as smoothed silhouettes, sustained scripted activities in constrained domestic spaces... or even one short section of TBG where the player is only allowed to walk backwards, which reminds me of a Radiator prototype I built in 2010 where you could only walk backwards.

I'm not trying to argue "I did it first" or something, because I didn't. Instead, I'm trying to express the weird "uncanny" feeling I had, that this was stuff I did but also never did. What made it even weirder was that the game narrative was about this exact dynamic, and it was set in the exact time period and creative community where I worked.

That didn't bother me as much as the walls. The walls were talking to me.

If you play Wolfenstein3D enough, you can feel the difference between a John Romero level and a Tom Hall level. Or when I played The Ship, a ceiling girder would remind me of Duncan Blair. In Quake 4, the rhythm of pillars made it feel like an Andrew Weldon hallway to me. Every inch of a virtual space represents countless decisions by its designer(s), and mostly only high-level players and/or fellow designers have sensitized themselves enough to how a space can feel like a person.

The choice of Source Engine 1 -- a very old engine from 2004, now finally sunsetting in 2015 -- feels very intentional here. Source 1 is basically the end of an era of level design when designers still did their own construction, the last generation of 3D design before the near unanimous modularization of everything but Minecraft. TBG knows this, and even devotes a few in-game minutes to discussing the engine and its idiosyncrasies.

But this is also where TBG broke for me, in a "ludonarrative dissonance" equivalent of 3D construction and production value. (Maybe call it "material-narrative dissonance"?) As someone who's seen hundreds of community Source levels through the years, none of this looks like the work of a "lone amateur" who's messing around. All the 3D carpentry here is very clean and trim; there are almost zero construction flaws in the entire game; the whisper of the walls here is extremely confident and experienced.

In particular, "The Tower" chapter wouldn't stop screaming at me. It is basically the work of a Source / Quake veteran showing off, pairing some very well-done slanted forms with gloriously wasteful details, leaving no edge unbeveled, no ledge without a lip. (This work also strongly reminds me of the golden age of 3D level design in the early 2000s, epitomized by the GeoComp2 levels. I don't think that's a mere coincidence, I feel like this level's designer(s) remember that era too.)

This is not the work of an isolated reclusive outsider. Rather, this is the work of someone who's fully plugged into level design communities and what is considered good building practice. (Maybe "Davey" did all this? But then why is he still surprised by some of it?)

But what really got me was The Tower's "combination lock" setpiece, the section where there are 6 huge numbered dials and we're briefly asked to guess the correct combination to progress.

"Davey" asks that we read it as an impossible-to-solve obstacle placed by Coda. He wonders why Coda would do such a thing, but at this point we know he's a fairly unreliable narrator, and Coda has put it here to purposely require hacking and violation of boundaries, to setup a direct confrontation.

A technical reading suggests something very different, though, especially in relation to the Source modding community. These kinds of combination lock setpieces are actually pretty annoying to implement in Source's entity I/O scripting system, which has no very easy way of cycling variables or evaluating equalities. It is a classic kind of show-off gesture from your local neighborhood 14 year old tween modder who's just read a tutorial on how to do it, to prove to everyone else how complex their scripting technique is.

Below is a screenshot of the actual combination lock setup from the level editor; each yellowed icon is roughly like one "function" in the logic scripting system, so you can see the swarm of cubes / icons implies the sheer technical complexity of building this thing. It is not trivial to make.

The joke here is that only an inexperienced level designer would ever want to make something gratuitous like this, especially with 6 different digits... yet the setup here is also actually quite elegant, with each combo wheel section neatly segmented in its own VMF instance. Technically, this is well-done in a clean way that's better than any modder's tutorial, but conceptually this is more or less "beneath" The Tower's designer(s) at the same time.

It's kind of like fancy expensive junk food, gleefully stooping to conceptual "trash" but at least exceptionally well-crafted trash. It's a Dorito dusted with truffled caviar, accompanied by a very self-aware shit-eating grin, and I couldn't help but count all the teeth. It's clever.

(Boring nerd story: To get this editor screenshot above, I actually had to edit all of TBG's map source files to work in my version of the Hammer editor -- specifically, all the VMF's I/O CSV delimiters had been replaced with U+001B "ESC" characters instead of commas, which would crash my editor. At best, this means the offer of TBG's map source files is ultimately useless and inaccessible to most end users; at worst, the map files have been purposely obfuscated to deter the curious... But then why bother including them at all? Why modify the file format like this? A third possibility: the developers had to do some sort of batch processing or generation of entity I/O in a different tool, and preferred U+001B as a delimiter for ease of parsing, so then they modified their version of Hammer to use it this alternate file format? But if you need so much systemic logic, why not just use Source's "Squirrel" Lua bindings, and just code the scripting logic? It's a very minor, very unimportant mystery that I don't care too much about, but I still found it charming.)

The only possible construction flaw I saw in TBG. It's a weird twisty angular inclined ramp, which is hard to do. That crack is most likely a floating point error from CSG-BSP conversion that no doubt infuriated the builder.

All this thinking about how levels talk, and the limits of that talk, reminded me of the ways I built my own levels back then. Why do we build things the way we do? In 2008-2011, I kept my reasons secret, and never really told anyone.

Well, OK: there was a guy.

I was getting over someone who I could never be with. It was a doomed romance, but my first doomed romance, and I didn't really know what to do, so some of my Young Adult Feelings bled into my level design. For my mod Radiator, I built a rather dingy apartment with a man sitting alone on the floor, among a dozen cardboard moving boxes bathed in toxic orange sunlight. The man is either moving-in or moving-out, but it's more the idea of this huge transition in his life that's making him anxious... or is he relieved?...

... Yeah, some of it was some really melodramatic overt symbolism like that, but those obvious symbols were there to hide the real symbols, the symbols I didn't want anyone else to perceive.

I would place a couch against a wall in a way that reminded me of his couch, or I would build the apartment to have the same exact floorplan as his real-life apartment. I liked the idea of "hiding" so much personal significance out there in plain sight, in the tiny details or in the entire structure, in a way that was invisible to everyone except for maybe one other person in the entire world.

Of course I never told him I did all this -- I didn't want him to know that he had this power over me. But privately, I had found the process pretty therapeutic, how I could put pieces of him into the game to make him less real. (And if he was less real, then I could get on with my life?)

Yet, I also kept this sad faint impossible hope that he would someday play my level, and that he would recognize all these invisible whispers in the walls.

So much of it was for him, but at the same time, I wanted him to never ever know that.

By the time I finished playing The Beginner's Guide, I decided I wasn't Coda and that I was mostly imagining all this, and didn't really comment on it in the (mostly unhelpful) feedback I sent back.

Why awkwardly ask about such a self-indulgent notion? I could never do that. Assuming my supposed "evidence" was actually evidence, it was all fairly circumstantial and coincidental at best.

So instead, I mostly sent back some boring feedback about broken cubemaps or collision errors (at one point in "The Author" I fell inside an invisible glass tube and was trapped forever) and I ended with some nitpicks about production values or building style.

... I mean, why would Coda be based on me, even just a little bit? Impossible.

The ending dedication in TBG, "For R"? There's more than one R in Davey's life, assuming I'm even an R in his life. I'm probably the #79th most important R in his life, which seems pretty high-ranking, but that's also quite a few Rs to know, I don't think I even know that many Rs myself! (What's the over/under on this?...)

I don't even know Davey very well, I can't even remember the last time I saw him. GDC 2013? I mean, it's definitely not true. I'm not Coda. If I were Coda, then where's all the bright orange light in TBG? This is a silly outlandish theory, I have an overactive imagination, I'm overstimulated, I'm not feeling myself. (But wait: "BEgiNner's Guide... H-A-Z-I..."oh my god...)

I mean, how breathtakingly arrogant would you have to be, to imagine something like this?

... to even imagine that someone would make a game that's secretly about you, and never ever tell you about it? Who would ever do that?

(DISCLOSURE: I didn't pay for my copy of the game.)

PS: don't interpret any of this as Davey's intent, this is all me bringing my shit to the table

PPS: no, really, I'm not Coda, I just wanted a rhetorical device that would let me write about the game in a specific way

PPPS: no, really --

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The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

October 31, 2015, 1:14 pm

≫ Next: "Rinse and Repeat" technical post-partum / how to do over-complicated wet skin shower shader effects in Unity

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The internet has been abuzz about "8:46", "a narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, which makes you embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events."

The game itself suffers from a lot of problems. If I were to ignore the politics, there's plenty of production values to critique -- the characters have blobby sculpts, inconsistent lighting, and stilted voice acting -- the particles are really really awkward -- and the one thing I like is the floorplan, especially the cramped corner office you begin in, which feels like a pretty authentic detail of old NYC office buildings.

But who are we kidding, this game is totally a political work, and it is much more generous to the developers to interpret it that way. Most people are just going to talk about this game instead of actually playing it, which is OK, and that's what compels me to write about it: I think this is a very flawed conceptual work, and I want to talk about why that is.

(1) TECHNOLOGY. Using virtual reality was not a good idea for this project, especially in this early generation of VR where it is mostly positioned as a nascent platform and consumer market that desperately needs to prove itself. Anything using VR in these early years is, inherently, saying, "look at me, I'm using VR!"

That's an OK thing to say, but it centers the technology instead of what you're saying with the technology, which is probably not what you want to do for a 9/11 game that's supposedly about respect for the dead rather than how this cool new peripheral? To be clear, I think you could make a game that powerfully critiques Western attitudes toward the dead and who is allowed to talk about the dead; I don't think this is that game.

(2) METHODOLOGY. Can VR function as an "empathy machine"? Many others, myself included, argue against this idea -- but the opposition, other artists and nonprofits, at least try hard to let "the empathized" speak in their own voices. In Machine To Be Another, you are performing with another real-life human next to you; in Clouds Over Sidra, the artists worked with the United Nations to make a Syrian refugee camp VR documentary, narrated and guided by a girl living there. These works are still about tech, but they are arguing that tech can mediate meaningful direct conversations.

The developers of the 9/11 game are a group of young 20-something French game development students at ENJMIN, and I doubt they have any working relationship with any 9/11 organizations or survivors, who probably would've told them not to make this game. (If the team did collaborate with a subject expert, they certainly did a good job of not mentioning it to anyone, anywhere.)

If you want to make a game about someone else's real life pain, at the very least, you must talk to them and work with them! Yes, September 11 is, in many ways, "everyone's tragedy" -- but I don't think that is the game they tried to make.

(3) PURPOSE. This is a student project. That's important -- if it were a commercial project, it would clearly be disrespectful to profit from a national tragedy, but as an amateur artistic project, we judge it differently.

However, students projects usually exist to showcase technical skills, and this one is no different. That's why this game waits about 5 seconds at the end before locking you in its credits room, which feels really tactless here. And, I think, that's the problem.

Student showcase projects are usually about the students; we are supposed to marvel at their mocap implementation, the vastness of their 3D skybox, and their knowledge of VR usability design -- this functions as a portfolio piece, not a research project. (If it was a research project, then they did very little research, and barely discuss their methodology or research on their own website.)

The tactic kind of worked. They certainly got a lot of attention, but these students have also essentially banned themselves from a lot of the game festival circuit and game industry employment they were seeking. Every US studio is going to see "9/11 game" on their portfolio and CV, and go "uhhhh..." It doesn't really make for a good impression. Also, very few North American curators would put this in their show or festival. (An exhibition of 9/11 games would be really interesting, but, um, really dangerous in the US.)

For this reason, even if I really liked this game concept, I still would've advised them against making it, because it has a good chance of hurting their careers and prospects. (Maybe do it later in your career.)

* * *

If I were these students' teacher(s) I would've discouraged this concept as something they were not ready for -- and even if they were ready for it, they should spend more than just 3 months on it!

But even though I consider it to be ultimately a failure, at least it is an interesting failure that is very instructive. It provokes questions about art and spectacle, documentary, virtual reality, and the relationship of "student projects" to the game industry / what it means to be a game development student today.

I also believe a "better" 9/11 game is possible, it's just that this game isn't it. What would a "better" 9/11 game look like, to me? If I were forced to make a game about being in the towers, then I'd set these formal requirements upon myself:

Screen-based, with conventional hardware and peripherals / "normalized technology"
Made in collaboration with 9/11 organizations and/or survivors, the closer the relationship the better
Ideally, don't even try for a realistic 3D art style, don't pretend to be "reality"
Spend more than 3 measly months, ideally more on research than production
Don't frame it as a student project, de-emphasize your identity as a developer, don't make it about you in the end, never show a developer credits screen except via a small button in the main menu.
Document your research and methodology on your website, and show that you did the work of thinking about this

Or, (recommended:)

Make a game about 9/11 that doesn't take place in the towers?
Basically, discuss 9/11 from any thousands of other angles and perspectives, rather than the most obvious / literal / direct / unsubtle one?
(Maybe make a game about the institutional failure of US healthcare systems to care for 9/11 survivors and their families? The "Dust Lady" lived as a powerful intersection of race, class, public health, and geopolitical events. Interview the angry, the dispossessed, the ones who fell through the cracks, and incorporate their stories, about how 9/11 is still killing so many people, years after. What is our relationship or responsibility to anyone who is dead? How do you face death, cope with death? Can video games even meaningfully talk about death, given how we have so thoroughly normalized it in games culture? What does it mean to die? What did it mean to die on 9/11?)

To the game's developers: you clearly have some talent and you worked hard, but you still need to think much more about what you're actually making. Good luck.

(Also, from the blog archives: my (flawed?) thinking on this, 4 years ago.)

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"Rinse and Repeat" technical post-partum / how to do over-complicated wet skin shower shader effects in Unity

November 9, 2015, 5:51 pm

≫ Next: That's why they call it the Diamond City Blues

≪ Previous: The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

This is a technical overview of how I built certain parts of Rinse and Repeat. It spoils the game, so you should probably play it first if you care about stuff like that.

Rinse and Repeat took about 1-2 months to make. For these sex games, my development process can basically be summarized as "art first" -- my very first in-engine prototypes are usually about establishing mood and texture, and setting up the character you'll be staring at, and these are by far the most important parts of the game.

As I mentioned before in my more design-oriented write-up, R&R began as a technical test for fluid simulation. The water droplets are physically simulated Shuriken particles that collide with certain mesh colliders parented to the dude's body. (So, each of his butt cheeks were individually modeled in Maya, as well as his pecs, etc.)

To help the particles "cling" to his body and follow the contours, I coded simple particle attractors that push or pull the particles as long as the particle's Y position is higher than the attractor's Y position. But then I started running into problems where the particles would get pulled "inside" the colliders, as if his body were absorbing the water, so I removed the ZTest in my refracting water particle shader so that the particles always render, even through his body. (The refracting particle shader base came from the Fluvio pack in the asset store.) This is technically incorrect, but there's so much happening that the "overall image" reads correctly anyway.

I also have several other water particle systems going: some mist particles on top of his head, some mist particles for his shoulders, and two small waterfall particle systems for his elbows.

I quickly realized, though, that the water particles weren't enough to sell the idea of "wetness." Real-life showers proved surprisingly disappointing in this regard -- from what I can tell, most real-life "wetness" cues are about matted down hair and water dripping down from your silhouette. On the surface of the body itself, water is surprisingly static and boring, sitting and accumulating on your skin before occasionally rolling down.

It's important not to let your realism be constrained by reality, so I set about exaggerating this wetness. My two main shader inspirations were the sweat shader from the NBA2K1x series, and a kind-of-weird shower scene in Life Is Strange. I couldn't find a technical breakdown for either, so I hacked my own basic implementations together, which are all about animating the body's normal map to distort the cubemapped reflections.

My "sweat" trickles are basically a normal-mapped cubemap mask that scrolls downwards based on a planar projection (my model's UVs weren't uniformly upright, so I had to reproject.) You can see here that it doesn't exactly run down the contours of his body.

The result isn't nearly as sophisticated or realistic as in the NBA games, and in fact it almost makes it seem like he's being slathered in thick honey or oil, but combined with other conceptual cues it reads like water, and most players won't really notice the strange distortion going on.

I also have a separate "droplets" layer that scrolls a high-contrast perlin noise cloud mask vs. a static normal-mapped cubemap mask. As this cloud mask scrolls past, it selectively reveals certain droplets and hides other droplets, as if they're selectively scattering across the body. They use the same planar UV projection as the sweat trickle.

None of these three effects (particles, trickles, droplets) was good enough by itself, but when you layer them on top of each other with some shower sounds, then they can mostly get the job done.

Here's the scene setup in the editor. Notice I only bothered modeling the showers and the visible part of the hallway, there's literally nothing else beyond what the player can see. Also notice how the NPCs begin in their final positions; this is easier to tune and pose them, and when the game starts I just teleport them out of sight as the screen fades in. I follow the same rule for the ending sequence with all hands that appear on his face; I keep the hands visible in-editor to help me pose them, and simply toggle them on and off when the time comes.

The one exception here is the disco ball, which I keep hidden by default. The disco ball reflections, as you may have guessed, are just a point light with a 6-sided cubemapped light cookie.

Most of the other specific details are based on techniques I've used in previous games...

The intro title dissolve is the old alpha test cutoff trick I also used in Stick Shift, except timed closely to the dude's walking pace. To go into slow motion, I set Time.timeScale to 0.1f, and then from there I just did some trial and error with tuning the exact timing. I built my own custom patrol-path system to manage all the dudes' movements and choreography, and their walking speed runs on a lerp, to ensure consistency -- using CharacterController, Rigidbody, or NavMesh movement seemed like overkill and too little at the same time, given how specific my needs were.

I track the showering schedule using the player's system clock and ample use of TimeSpan, much as how I tracked real-life time spans timer cooldowns in Hurt Me Plenty and Stick Shift. I talk about how to do it in this post.

One of my big coding regrets is overengineering this system by storing the schedule generation seeds via Szudzik pairing, because I wanted an easy to tie-in a possible "Midas Gym" website. I also had plans for Google Calendar integration and .ICS file export support, so people could potentially enter the shower schedules into their personal calendars, but ultimately scrapped all that stuff. Figuring out OAuth procedures for Google Calendar looked annoying, and the .ICS file format specification looked like a mess. Szudzik pairing was meant as an easy way to synchronize the game and the website without manually storing a database, but the fact that it involved implementing my own time / day format means there's still all these little edge-case bugs with the scheduling, even now. Ugh.

Because I have the lights switching on and off in the game, lightmaps were not ideal. However, I still wanted some nice occlusion along certain edges, as well as subtle shadows. To achieve this, I relied on a pretty old game art trick: manually placing semi-transparent "shadow cards" to paint specific shadows where I wanted them.

This "shadow card" is basically a quad with a very faint Particles/Multiply material. It proved very versatile... I use it for blob shadows beneath the NPCs, I use it for the edges of the cylindrical pillars (I really love shiny tiled 3D cylinders by the way), and I even use it beneath the towel table and on the bulletin board to make certain elements pop a bit more.

My "lip sync" solution is very rudimentary, based partly on how Valve did it in Half-Life 1 -- in LateUpdate(), I lerp the model's mouth bone position based on the voice over audio's overall volume. It isn't terribly expensive-looking, but I felt it was important to have some sort of mouth movement to accompany the voice over. Having worked with more sophisticated methods, like Half-Life 2's MSAPI phoneme extraction to WAV metadata with blendshapes, convinced me that a complex method was a lot more work than it was worth. (Besides, I imagined this bro dude shouting most of the time anyway.)

My implementation is mostly based on Wil Giesler's volume-based lip sync code, except I replaced the blend shape weight with my own mouth bone lerp %.

The audio files are randomly stitched together at runtime. The result is a stilted inhuman rhythm / cadence to the thing, which I'm ok with -- the idea of an obviously computerized hunky shower stud is more more funny than a completely flawless 3D-photoscanned shower stud who speaks perfectly.

* * *

If I had to articulate a common thread in my techniques here, it would involve understanding a particular"AAA" phenomena (sweat, dynamic GI, lip sync) and then approximating my own "AA" solution (scrolling cubemap masks, hand-placed shadow cards, volume-based mouth flaps)... what's important is the gesture, the idea, the fact that these details are here at all. When you're working on details, don't get caught-up in the details... (or your own inferiority!)

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That's why they call it the Diamond City Blues

November 25, 2015, 9:33 am

≫ Next: "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" at GX3 on December 12 in San Jose, California

≪ Previous: "Rinse and Repeat" technical post-partum / how to do over-complicated wet skin shower shader effects in Unity

WARNING: This post "spoils" an early quest in Fallout 4 and a later quest in Fallout 3.

The "Diamond City Blues" quest, one of the better quests of Fallout 4, begins at an upper-class bar in Diamond City. Most of the bar patrons are snooty rich one-percenter caricatures who will categorically refuse to talk to poor people like you, even though you're richer than God and they literally sleep on filthy mattresses in trash shacks, so you basically kind of hate these people from the beginning.

Over at the bar counter, a woman is drinking to forget her unhappy marriage, while the grizzled bartender-owner dude implies he's having an affair with her. Suddenly, her weak jealous husband tries to confront the two but he ends up getting humiliated.

When you run into the jealous husband again, outside of the bar, he wants to hire you to help confront the bartender. So you go back to the bar...

The game really doesn't want you to kill the bartender. The husband doesn't want to kill anyone, and the conversation gives you many opportunities to let the bartender explain himself. The bartender offers a deal: go with him to his scheduled mafia drug deal and help him kill everyone, and you can have some of the money / drugs as payment to you and cuckold-restitution to the husband.

If the husband isn't there and you confront the bartender alone, then the husband won't know about any of this, and later takes ownership of the bar.
If the bartender dies, you'll find a note on his body that details the drug deal anyway. (The game really wants you to go to this drug deal.) If the husband wasn't there, you can still tell him about the note and involve him.
If the husband is there, he will agree for a cut of the contraband.

On the walk over there, the bartender and the husband will talk and kind of reconcile. (Well, if a nearby super mutant doesn't kill them first.) The bartender says he's sorry and it was nothing personal, and the husband is skeptical but accepts the apology. Domestic drama resolved! (The wife doesn't get a say in this.)

... So you go crash the drug deal at the dock...

The fight is not trivial. It is two named NPCs and their henchmen, about as much work as clearing an entire enemy base. As a reward, you get 1000 bottlecaps and x50 of each basic drug, which is a lot! 1000 bottlecaps is maybe what you'd get from selling all your equipment, and most kill-stuff quests will pay out 100-200 bottlecaps on average. Also, 50 of each drug is more than you'd pick up across 10-20 hours of playing Fallout 4. This is an unusually big quest reward.

If you brought the husband in on it, you can:

Make him take nothing.He'll whine about having been screwed for his entire life, and he hopes you suffer for this betrayal. This is kind of mean, and I imagine a lot of players will fear their companion will disapprove strongly of this option.
Agree to the 50-50 split. He will say "this seems fair to me," but most players will think this is really unfair -- he's a weak fighter who barely did anything in the fight AND he's lucky you even brought him in on it.
Easily make him take 70-30 instead. In this case, he'll insist on most of your 70 being the drugs, because it will be annoying to sell it all. (He's right, it's annoying to sell the drugs -- each vendor has so little money and buys only a fraction of the drugs from you, so you have to individually shop the drugs around to all the vendors in the entire game.)

So now the husband is not only arguing for a share of the quest reward for his own damn quest, but he's also aware of Fallout 4's terrible inventory UI and annoying vendor-barter system, and wants to humiliate me with it? At this point, I shot him in the face, but pretend I didn't.

After the ambush, the mafia lieutenant begs for mercy.

If you let her live, she will tell you about the secret mafia drug lab. She says they'll kill her if they find out she told you, so that's why she won't rat you out to the mafia.
If you promise to let her live, she will tell you the secret password too.
If the bartender is alive, then he will try to kill her anyway because he wants no possibility of any mafia witnesses.

So now the quest enters a third stage, telling you to travel far across the game map and fight through a lot of zombies and then solve a puzzle to get into the secret mafia drug lab.

It feels like it's going to be an epic finale... but the reward is relatively nothing, just a few more drugs and some random items. Look at what your greed got you! At this point, you hear some triumphant music play and the quest is now over. What the hell?

The game never says, "haha the mafia lieutenant was lying," and this disappointing payoff was probably a fluke on the part of an overworked Bethesda level designer. But from a narrative perspective, she was clearly lying to try to save her own skin, and telling you whatever you wanted to hear... Or is it a bug? Is the quest over now?

That lingering ambiguity and doubt and disappointment -- usually nonexistent in most AAA design, by the way -- is what makes this quest unusual. Plus, the quest actually keeps going.

After a few in-game days, the consequences of all your actions keep playing out, with even more options and opportunities to screw people over.

If the mafia lieutenant survived, she totally rats you out to the mafia boss, who will send thugs to lean on you and demand the drug money back. 2000 bottlecaps. (That's a lot.)

You can negotiate him down to 1000 bottlecaps.
You can beg for a week to try to get the money together.

If the rich son died, the father will ask if you know who killed his son.

If he thinks the mafia did it, he will pay you to kill the mafia boss.
If he thinks you're lying and you did it, he'll send thugs after you, or make you pay him a lot of money to stop.
You can also implicate the husband.

No matter what, the bartender's daughter will come to town and ask about the bartender. If she thinks you killed him, she will try to kill you. (Or you can kill her.)

If you tell her the husband did it, she will kill the husband.
If the husband is still alive, he will get nervous that she'll find out about everything, and want to get rid of her. You can tell him to do it, or you can offer to do it.

If you made him take the 70-30 split, then he'll tell her you did it, and she'll try to kill you.

If the husband died or otherwise disappeared, the wife will ask if you've seen him around. So far, the wife has had so little agency in this story that you've probably forgotten it was all about two men fighting over her in the beginning. (A noir trope.)

If you blame her for sleeping with the bartender, and imply that this is all basically her fault, she'll snap back at you: "don't judge me, you murderer."
If you tell her about the husband, she will (after a week) give you a photo that incriminates the mafia boss and the rich family. You can use this photo to pay-off your debt to the mafia or the family... and with her, the quest is finally over... or is it?

Yeah, it's finally over. As far as I can tell.

What I like about this quest is that it's a "slow quest" that actually does the work of world simulation over the course of several in-game days. Imagine completing this quest by raiding the mafia drug lab, then doing some other unrelated quests for a few real-life hours, and then suddenly all these NPCs are wondering what the hell happened. In most RPGs, NPCs accept NPC deaths with supernatural stoicism and everything is instantly resolved. In this quest, stuff keeps happening. It reminds me of the complex Tenpenny Tower quest from Fallout 3, where you can convince wealthy humans and sentient zombies to peacefully coexist, but if you revisit the location days later then you'll find out the zombies eventually killed all the humans anyway.

Diamond City Blues also plays with Fallout 4's game systems in critical ways. An NPC basically admits the game's inventory UI and barter systems are annoying, then uses that to negotiate with you. The Quest UI lies to you and says the quest is over, waits a few days, then ropes you back into everything.

It's also a bit difficult to kill the mafia boss or rich father, once they start sending thugs to murder you. To the game's faction system, these NPCs are still safely non-hostile in the city, and the entire city will attack you if you attack them to their face. They have a strange sort of "invincible passive-aggressive NPC privilege" here which is really fascinating, the game is systemically fortifying organized crime and the rich who can just spawn NPCs to go hostile after you, instead of getting their hands dirty.

Notice that there's no "big choices" here. You can't go to the cops at any point in this quest, because in a pulpy noir crime parable that never happens. It will all pretty much play out the same way, no matter what, and it's rigged to do that. What's different is the details in how these consequences spill over everywhere. You can lie to so many people about everything! NPCs actually have some concept of memory, interiority, and autonomy! Instead of being a clear branching narrative with a big eye-rolling "ethical dilemma" at the end, this is bushy and mushy.

The result is a very expressive quest that drags more and more characters into the orbit of this messy noir drama, haunting everyone with their complicity and lies, including the player. One of the few open world quests that actually needs an open world to pull it off.

(SOURCES: this YouTube video for screenshots; Nukehub guide for referencing all the other outcomes that I didn't personally witness.)

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"That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" at GX3 on December 12 in San Jose, California

December 3, 2015, 7:35 am

≫ Next: Sex Games, part 0: the sex games awaken

≪ Previous: That's why they call it the Diamond City Blues

I'll be in San Jose next week for GX3, a video game expo, to deliver a talk entitled "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" about my recent gay sex video games as well as many other peoples' gay sex games.

The talk is motivated a lot by my experience as an independent game developer who sees countless players plead for more diversity from the triple-A game industry. Mainstream representation is important, but why limit your support only to the mainstream? Also, my industrial peers are good at many things, but gayness is definitely not one of those things, so why should people look to them for artistic leadership on this? Answer: they shouldn't, but they might because they're not aware there's an alternative...

You don't have to beg for gay scraps. You don't even have to settle for a game with a gay side dish, with some token gays sprinkled on top -- real people are already making real games where gayness is the center-stage MAIN ATTRACTION, and these games exist right now in the present, not in some distant future dream utopia.

In my talk, I'll be talking about 20+ different games that think about sexuality outside of a standard cis-hetero-monogamous-missionary paradigm. If you follow me or my peers, you'll probably be familiar with some of them -- but I'm betting I'll discuss at least a few hidden gems you'll have never seen before -- and to the majority of the GX3 audience, I'm guessing a lot of these games will be mind-blowing.

See you there, and feel free to say hey.

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Sex Games, part 0: the sex games awaken

December 16, 2015, 1:48 pm

≫ Next: Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies

≪ Previous: "That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" at GX3 on December 12 in San Jose, California

This post is part of a series adapted from my talk at GaymerX. No, I don't know when the video recording will be uploaded, sorry.

So, let's talk sex games. As a possible "GAYmer" at GaymerX, maybe you're thinking of games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, or hot Ryu, or Mario and Luigi, or maybe even some games like Fallout which have specific game systems that support gay roleplaying.

These are OK, I guess, but none of these games are primarily about sex. In fact, they are mostly about jumping around and killing shit... which isn't bad, but it's not gay sex. Now, where am I going with this?...

Take something like Dragon Age, which is very popular for its gay characters and sexuality. But the sad truth is that 99.9% of Dragon Age is NOT gay sex! All these BioWare RPG games tastefully fade to black just as soon as they're getting hot and ready. But what if we just cut out all those kinda boring not gay-sex parts? What if we made games that were just 100% pure gay sex? What would those games look like?

Another world is possible! And that world is SEX GAMES. Because if you are so damn thirsty, you don't settle for a tiny thimble of water -- if you are thirsty, you should chug the whole damn bottle.

A sex game is a game primarily about sexuality. They are games where sex isn't just a brief cutscene or foregone outcome. Instead, these are games where we actually perform some aspect of sex, or the game asks what it means to perform those aspects of sex. Where Mass Effect fades to black, these games begin.

Personally, I've made a bunch of free gay sex games this past year, and you can totally check them out here:

Hurt Me Plenty, a simulator game about spanking a dude
Succulent, a musical game about helping a dude fellate a popsicle
Stick Shift, a driving game about giving your gay car a handjob
Cobra Club, a photo studio game about taking dick pics
Rinse and Repeat, a grooming game about taking a shower with a beefy dude

But I also don't want to pretend I'm the only one doing this. I'm not! My games are just part of this much larger shift by many designers around the world, especially many women / queer / trans designers, to try to imagine what a "sex game" can even look like.

The sex in my sex games is just one idea of sex, constrained by my own artistic background and personal experience. When there are so many diverse ideas of sex and ways of thinking about sex, it's important that we learn about and enjoy all these different flavors. So now let's hear about 25 more sex games!

Keep in mind that my list is by no means exhaustive. (Right after I finished my talk at GaymerX, so many people came up to me excitedly told me about even more sex games that I had completely missed!) I'm also definitely not the first to think about "sex games" -- for instance, Cara Ellison had a great "S.EXE" column at Rock Paper Shotgun, and Merritt Kopas wrote about sex games in The State of Play book and curates the occasional sex game at Forest Ambassador.

As for me, here's my personal taste / what I was looking for:

look outside of mainstream AAA game industry output
limited only to Western-made games, in English, from the last few years
explore sexuality in some way beyond typical commercial studio pornography
try to be gay, or at least avoid typical cis-hetero-monogamous-dad-missionary sex aesthetics

Across the next few weeks, I'm going to publish some additional "chapters" that loosely organize and discuss these games under some general themes. These categories are not intended as rigid classifications, but rather they represent just one way of thinking about these particular games, and I felt like these games were sort of in-conversation with each other in an interesting way.

(Links will be added as I publish more posts.) These posts are:

SEX AS BODIES, games that focus on the shape and space of sex.
SEX AS POKING, games that are specifically about small brief sexual touches.
SEX AS AUTHENTICITY, games about whether the sex was meaningful or real.
SEX AS POWER, games that emphasize the power relations between participant(s).
SEX AS IMAGE, games that are about sex as a concept or object to behold.

Again, I'll periodically update this main post with links to those future parts.

Or, just follow my Twitter (@radiatoryang) and/or bookmark this blog for those updates. See you soon!

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Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies

December 19, 2015, 4:18 pm

≫ Next: Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking

≪ Previous: Sex Games, part 0: the sex games awaken

This post is part of a series about "sex games", based on a talk I gave at GaymerX3.
(CONTENT WARNING: these posts have sexual images and content.)

One definition of sex that I'm going to use here is "a negotiation between bodies." The shape and form of that negotiation will obviously vary, but so can the shape and form of the bodies themselves. Which bodies do we sexualize, and which do we de-sexualize? And if we are sexualizing a body, is it with the body's consent and knowledge?

To a certain extent, every game in this entire blog post series is about bodies. Just because I put a game in this category doesn't mean it doesn't belong in other categories. I selected these games based on the story I could tell around them, and in this post the story is about how these different games think about bodies. Because bodies are made of carbon and water, but they're also made of ideas.

Let's start with the amazing game that inspired the name of my talk ("That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve") ...

SABBAT, by Eva Problems, cactusbee, stationlost

Sabbat is a game where you turn into an awesome monster by imbuing different body parts with demonic animals -- so you can imbue your head with the power of demonic goats and grow some horns, or you can imbue your vagina with demonic wolves so that your vagina constantly gives birth to fully grown wolves.

Character creator systems in games are often kind of boring, and fussy about certain details that don't really matter in the end. How big is your chin? how high are your cheekbones? Do you have eyebrow type 2 or eyebrow type 9? None of these decisions matter to the game system. No one in Fallout 4 will say, "gosh, you have great cheekbones", or even"hey we inherited racial politics from the 1950s and wow your skin is dark!"

So it's refreshing when a character creator system asks something interesting, like do you want this amazing rack of demonic wolf boobs? And then there are actually times in the game when you can use your wolf boobs to scare away men, or when you want this really cute witch to finger your wolf vagina but she understandably does not want to put her hands in a snarling vagina full of fully grown wolves. (While you're a monster, you're also not a monster, so you respect her right to not feel safe in doing that with you.)

It's a kind of body-horror monster-sex game, which I think appeals to a lot of queer people. We grow up with society telling us we're monsters -- well, what if we actually were monsters? And then our monstrous queerness was a source of awesome powers?

HOW DO YOU DO IT, by Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Joni Kittaka, Decky Coss

The idea of sex as "bestial" is pretty old -- the beginning of Shakespeare's play Othello begins with some sex jokes about a "beast with two backs." When bodies touch, they become a new body.

How Do You Do It is a game about a young girl who smashes two dolls together in various positions because she finds sex to be utterly baffling. I think we can all relate to this because, to an extent, maybe sex never stops being baffling? We often think of sex as this very serious and adult thing, but this game is also a reminder that sex is a weird and funny and unknowable thing as well.

But here's what I think a lot of people don't get: Yeah, sure, this girl is very young and doesn't know what sex is, so that's why she's just trying all these random poses and arrangements. But does that really mean she's naive?

If touching someone's foot gives you sexual pleasure, then that means you're doing sex. We all have different turn-ons and ways of doing sex. In this sense, this girl is actually a master of sex, because she's actually imagining and inventing all these new types of sex and arrangements between bodies!

So I feel like the game kind of comes full circle. This girl probably has a more open mind about sex than her parents, because she has a freer relationship with bodies and she's open to how bodies can touch.

LUXURIA SUPERBIA, by Tale of Tales

What are the ways in which people touch? When do you forcefully jab at someone, or tenderly caress their shoulder?

Luxuria Superbia is a game that basically transforms your tablet into a rainbow vagina vortex. To progress through a level, you have to gently rub all these crevices and folds, and be really tender with this complex beautiful thing. As you "rub it out", you gradually arouse your device until it eventually climaxes. Did you rush it, or did you take your time? Your device won't hesitate to tell you what it thinks.

There are certainly other touch-based games about intimacy, like the excellent Fingle and Bounden, but in those games the device is more a mediator between two human players sharing a space. There are also text games, like Reset and .error404, that think about what it means to have sex with a computer.

I like how Luxuria Superbia does not rely on an overtly humanistic or technological metaphor for a technological body -- instead, these are basically interactive Georgia O'Keefe paintings, and there's multiple different stages for you to try. In a way, your iPad gets to try on all these different vaginas, and maybe you two will have a favorite vagina? It's a very fluid kind of technological body that's constantly changing and surprising.

TRIAD, by Anna Anthropy, Leon Arnott, Liz Ryerson

Bodies can combine to form new bodies. How do these bodies operate as a system?

Triad is a puzzle game about three women who had a bunch of awesome sex but now they need to go to sleep, and you have to fit them all on the bed. Each woman has a different body shape and different sleeping preference, and it's your job to accommodate them all somehow.

This game imagines the bed as a grid, and usually a grid isn't very sensual, but here the physicality is really beautiful. As you move the pieces around the women occasionally fidget and animate in-place within their bounding box. Also, if you're not careful with moving the pieces, they can actually collide and bump each other -- so this is an unusually tender kind of puzzle game, that celebrates how all these different bodies harmonize as a whole system.

Like Luxuria Superbia with its different stages, I feel like this game speaks to the fluidity of bodies, as you constantly rearrange these different parts to figure out what works. You definitely won't get it right on the first try, but these women still won't give up and they'll try again the next night. It also speaks to a similar problem in How Do You Do It -- it's always going to be hard to figure out how to fit bodies together, but it's also important that you're trying at all.

BIENTOT L'ETE, by Tale of Tales

Triad organized the "space of a relationship" as a grid. What else can we do with a grid?

Bientôt l'été also takes place on a grid, yet also ignores it. Here, you basically play chess with a random stranger over the internet -- except it's not really chess, because all the moves are random and do not conform to the typical rules of chess.

Is a chessboard still a chessboard if you're not using it as a chessboard? If you're moving these chess pieces around, but you're not playing chess, then what does each chess move mean? You're two half-naked cryogenically-frozen super models getting drunk and playing chess, so it's kind of a sexy conceptual chess that isn't about winning in the sense of a traditional chess. If you both agree that chess is something else, then is that still chess? What does it mean to move a pawn here, or a bishop there?

More generally, it's about the ways in which we organize intimacy between two people -- like chess, it's kind of regimented and structured, but this meaning is also something secret and psychic and unknowable. (And personally: this treatment of chess as intimacy was pretty profound to me, and informed my own chess-as-intimacy section in my game Intimate, Infinite.)

* * *

NEXT TIME: part 2, sex games about sexy poking.

« Go back to the main "Sex Games" post.

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Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking

December 26, 2015, 11:39 pm

≫ Next: Radiator Blog: (belated) Sixth Year Anniversary

≪ Previous: Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies

This post is part of a series about "sex games."

There were so many games about sexual poking that I had to give them their own category. I mean, poking is a very distinctive gesture. It's a very brief moment with a very small surface area, but we place so much significance on it anyway.

Early Facebook was witness to "poking wars" where Facebook friends exchanged pokes with each other -- but you couldn't just poke anyone, right? There was just something so so wrong about parents poking their children on Facebook. Instead, poking seemed tailor-made for situations like when you poked that cute boy from your biology class, and then he poked you back, and now you have to decide What All This Means. ("Well, he waited two whole days before poking back, so I guess he hates me?")

Poking is immature, yet also tantalizingly ambiguous and demure. It's the stuff that meet cutes are made of. But the sex-poking games I'm going to discuss now? They're still immature, utterly rolling around in their immaturity and silliness, but they are definitely not ambiguous -- instead they are gratuitous and deliberate gestures all at once, like some exaggerated caricatures of poking.

I LOVE YOU BUT YOU KISS LIKE A GIRL by Marek Kapolka

This 2 player game was made as part of an amazing design community called "Glorious Trainwrecks", where the goal is to quickly make small short simple games with very little polish or concern for "quality". That said, this is a very high quality game. where you can move your tongue up and down, and kind of joust with the other player, and if you can touch the back of their mouth then you can push the other character off the screen. You're kind of balancing offense (a longer tongue) with defense (a thicker tongue) in a weird funny way.

What I really like about this game is the randomization -- sometimes you're a dog, sometimes you're an anarchist punk. Sometimes you're kissing in a wrestling ring, sometimes you're kissing in a park. It celebrates poking / kissing as something quick and relatively impulsive.

REALISTIC KISSING SIMULATOR by Jimmy Andrews and Loren Schmidt

This is a similar game about kissing, but it's also very different. In this 2 player game, you don't necessarily battle your partner. Instead, you move and extend your flexible tongue around. There's opportunities to be very tender and expressive, but there's also opportunities to poke your partner in the eye.

It also has a great attitude about the consent of kissing. Before you can play, you and your partner must consent to kiss each other. It's the opposite approach of I Love You But You Kiss Like A Girl. There, "kissing" happens even without any user input, while here, kissing is something very deliberate with clear consent.

Note that if you end up saying no, the game is totally fine with that, and you don't kiss, and the game is instantly over. It "celebrates no", much like how Merritt Kopas explores more in her game Super Consent.

LO-FI DICK FIGHT by Pippin Barr

This is a very different kind of poking, a poking of dicks instead of tongues. In this competitive 2 player game, you and your partner try to hit each other dicks with your dicks. When you hit their dick enough times, their dick literally falls off and you win the round.

The game is styled like an early 0-bit Atari-era game, with blocky graphics, limited animation, and few colors. Your dick is just a barely scrutable line of pixels, which makes the punchline work.

Specifically, the timing on the animation of your dick, dropping to the ground with a dull thud, is perfect. It wouldn't have worked nearly as well if the dick were incredibly representational or photorealistic. Imagine an equivalent of Scott McCloud's "big triangle" of representation and design abstraction from "Understanding Comics", except for dicks -- this game would be found approximately in the top-middle of the triangle.

Oh, and make sure you try the "projectile dick" mode.

SWORDFIGHT by Kurt Bieg and Ramsey Nasser

In this real-life 2 player physical game, you strap two Atari 2600 joysticks around your waist with a BDSM harness, handcuff your hands behind your back, and then try to poke the other player's button with your erect joystick.

In this game, people usually get pretty rowdy and run / circle / tackle. This game basically follows the same premise and tone as Lo-Fi Dick Fight, even down to the Atari-era nod toward simplicity and abstraction -- and when I played it once, my "dick" even snapped off when I played a little bit too rough with my partner.

When this happens, you are at once entertained and mortified; breaking the joystick possibly means a waiting spectator will not be able to play, or at the very least you just cost the game-runners some money. (It was not your dick to break, you dick!) So, in a twist of events, you end up feeling a bit responsible for this dick... or at least I did.

* * *

When you celebrate the importance of poking, you also end up celebrating the deep meaning of every gesture -- if a poke can be tender or competitive or meek, then imagine the depths of meaning inherent in the brush of a knee or the momentary turn of the head.

It's almost as if sex, much like brief gestures, does not have a fixed meaning and is highly contextual depending on the situation?...

(By the way, my favorite game about non-sexual poking is Cat Poke.)

NEXT TIME: part 3, sex as authenticity.

« go back to part 1, "sex as bodies."

↧

Radiator Blog: (belated) Sixth Year Anniversary

December 30, 2015, 8:00 am

≫ Next: New years resolution, 2016: some more gay sex, and "Maven"

≪ Previous: Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking

In keeping with tradition, I do a round-up of this blog's "notable" posts from the past year, and offer a bit of reflective commentary. This year, it arrives about a month late, because I forgot. (Oops.) As always, past years' roundups are accessible here.

For 2015, I promised myself I was going to blog more regularly than in 2014. I started pretty strong for the first half of the year, but then my output began plummeting toward the end. (Oh well.) Here's to a bloggier 2016!

TALKS / PUBLICATIONS

"We Are Drugs: on speculative dev tools and psychedelic hologram futures"
(IndieCade East 2015) This talk surprisingly went ok, even though it involved live-demoing more than a dozen different weird tools for the audience. At the end, I combined output from all of the tools into a horrible cacophony, which was pretty fun to do.
"Bodies, I Have In Mind"
(ZEAL) I usually don't write in such a directly autobiographical / "personal" way, so this was a bit of a change for me, but it was an honor to write for ZEAL, which is chock full of really great design analysis and critical essays.
"Local Level Design, and a history / future of level design"
(GDC 2015, Different Games 2015) I got to be part of the Level Design in a Day track at GDC 2015, which was an amazing experience. I later drastically edited down that talk for a much shorter theory-focused talk for Different Games, which I now treat as the authoritative version.
"That One Time I Repeatedly Gave Birth to Fully Grown Wolves, and Other Gay Sex Games That We Deserve" ("Sex Games")
(GaymerX3) I delivered a keynote about indie gay sex games to a diversity-focused fan convention, where I discussed 25+ different non-mainstream games that are actually about sex, rather than sex as a brief outcome or mini-game.

COMMUNITY

By far, the "most viral" post of the past year was when I called out Twitch for blanket-banning my games, when they could easily accommodate it with better moderation policies like YouTube or Vimeo. We claim games are art, but at the same time our game culture platforms insist on "protecting the children", without even any cursory hand-wringing about free artistic expression. I can begrudgingly accept banning Cobra Club, a game about staring at penises, but then I went to the trouble of obscuring the penises in Rinse And Repeat and they still banned it! #smh
When the #altgames tag on Twitter finally attracted the attention of the wider game dev community, it exposed how some devs simply reject the game industry's traditional publisher system, while others reject commercialism and mainstream aesthetics in games. I was basically already feeling this at GDC 2015, that there was a growing fissure between indie-biz culture and everyone else. My argument was to embrace the separation, because we're both miserable together.
The road to the indiepocalypse involved an early discussion of what "minimum sustainability" looks like. Chiming in with other posts at the time, I wrote about my experiences as someone who doesn't rely on commercial game development for a living. My colleagues later chastised me for "willfully misunderstanding" the intent of Dan Cook's original post, but I still feel like I understood the subtext better than they did. (grumble grumble capitalist realism grumble)

DESIGN THEORY

Oh dear, this not-manifesto about games as culture / games as conceptual work made me quite a few theory-enemies who were mortified by the idea of play being a less-than-necessary component of games culture. I even took care to placate the play-police with a preamble about how this is just me thinking about how my own games "work", and I'd hesitate to apply it to anyone else, but I guess even a disclaimer isn't enough anymore! (see also: games as conceptual work, as in Limits and Demonstrations, from 2013)
I started (but haven't finished) a series of posts about lighting theory and lighting design. I wanted to ground it in the technical reality of lighting for real-time 3D games. This kind of writing is either non-existent or overly prescriptive, so I wanted to outline a body of thought that was useful for criticism as well as design.

part 1, on fixtures (a cultural reading about light and a brief history)
part 2, light as formal tool / material (about what light is, and what we use it for)
part 3, the heresy of three-point lighting (which is pervasive among 3D artists, but pretty wrong for game designers)
part 4, how to light a game world (talks about how "game lighting" is just a bunch of random effects put together)

GAME CRITICISM

The Loch is a small open world game about fishing in a remote Scottish village, and I liked how small and anti-busybody it was. It's kind of inspiring me to think about making a small open world game myself...
Invisible Inc. is one of the best stealth games / tactics games ever made. It's full of so many smart ideas, and the procedural level generator is exceptionally well-tuned. The best part is how much fun it is when shit hits the fan, which is very unlike any other stealth game, which usually falls apart the moment you're detected.
Massive Chalice is basically a strategy game about the inevitable demise of indie game industry. Someone (I think Matthew Burns?) mused on Twitter that every game is fated to be about the story of its development, and I think that rings even truer here.
Hylics is about molten rituals, which is to say that I wanted an excuse to post a bunch of Hylics GIFs. One of the best RPG games in years, extremely refreshing design, amazing visual aesthetic. If you haven't played Hylics, you really really really should.
The Beginner's Guide inspired a torrent of essays, but as someone who's practically a character in this game, I felt like many of the takes were missing a level designer's perspective on this game about level design -- so I still found the game meaningful, for very different (and rather personal) reasons from everyone else.
Fallout 4 has a bunch of stuff, but I feel like it's usually implemented in a shallow way that doesn't take advantage of the game's open world structures. Here, I summarize and analyze "Diamond City Blues", which is one of the few quests that actually does use the open world.

GAME RELEASES
This past year was the year of the gay sex games for me...

Hurt Me Plenty, a spanking game
Succulent, a sucking game
Stick Shift, a hand job game
Cobra Club, a dick pic game
Rinse and Repeat, a shower game

I also did a couple mod re-releases / got a certain bugbear off my back...

Level With Me, vol. 1; originally made for an interview series I did for Rock Paper Shotgun, a playable journalism mod for Portal 2
Radiator 1; five years in the making (kind of) but now complete with third episode about sneaking around Emily Dickinson's house, a gay divorce mod for Half-Life 2 / Source Engine 1

... anyway, thanks to all you loyal readers out there, and see you next year! xoxox

↧

New years resolution, 2016: some more gay sex, and "Maven"

January 6, 2016, 2:06 am

≫ Next: Two 2016 NYC games conferences to submit talks to, like, right now

≪ Previous: Radiator Blog: (belated) Sixth Year Anniversary

@mooonmagic @mousefountain played Thief 4, thought "stealth is dead"; Invisible Inc, "stealth is real"; AssCreed London, "huh I can do that"
— Roberto Yanga (@radiatoryang) January 1, 2016

... so, my 2016 New Years Resolution is to make a double-A 7/10 open world stealth game. It is tentatively called "Maven."

Part of my motivation involves wanting a break from my current cycle of sex games, part of it comes from wondering what if I made some gamer-pandering stuff for half of the year and then fiercely not-gamer stuff for the other half of the year and that's a funny contradiction... also, a bunch of stuff has suddenly aligned in my head to make this feasible.

I'm basically blending together elements from a bunch of games I've played:

Thief's medieval "steampunk" bullshit
Invisible Inc's use of global alarm levels and procedural levels
Assassin's Creed's scale and demarcated restricted / unrestricted areas
Metal Gear Solid 5's pokemon guard capturing / helicopter stuff

I'm also interested in various historical settings / themes:

The rise and fall of organized labor in Butte, Montana
Medieval Cordoba, European life under a hyper-educated caliphate
Climate change, resource / material scarcity
Women in positions of power

Some technologies and workflows and assets that are now coming together:

Dynamic global illumination in Unity, dynamic cubemaps, dynamic skybox, pretty robust deferred renderer
NavMesh carving in Unity, allows for some procedural generation / mutation without trying to develop my own navigation tech
Acquired an obscene amount of decent medieval-European-themed 3D models
Procedural generation for stealth games -- academic research at McGill University about assessing sneaking risk and automatically generating guard patrols for good coverage -- not really using their algorithms, but approximating similar logic and reasoning and metrics for my own systems
Hundreds of free animations at Mixamo; sword combat animations, torch holding animations, etc.

Don't worry, I'll still keep working on gay sex games as well. I just got permission for music to use in the upcoming gay bar sim Attract Mode, and the next game is already half-done from a previous prototype. I'm planning on pushing those out, along with a Steam release of the first gay sex trilogy, in 2016.

But I'm also interested in pushing myself as a developer. Right now, I know I'm good at making small gay sex games that are really good at getting press and YouTuber coverage and zero money. What if I tried doing this other thing instead? If I fail, at least will I fail for different reasons from before?

↧

Two 2016 NYC games conferences to submit talks to, like, right now

January 15, 2016, 6:32 pm

≫ Next: Spring 2016 semester in game development

≪ Previous: New years resolution, 2016: some more gay sex, and "Maven"

What kind of games conference do you run after an IndieCade conference co-chair confesses that games conferences aren't "working"? Well, uh... let's do a bunch of conferences to try to figure it out!

Different Games is a diversity-focused games conference in the beginning of April, run by organizers based in Brooklyn and Atlanta. DG, in particular, holds a special place in my heart for administering the original arts grant that began my current track of gay sex games, so you could say they were kind of on the bleeding edge of indie sustainability. This year, Different Games 2016 (April 8-9) has several different tracks / themes:

Affective Play (i.e. feelings, emotions, bodies)
Video Games in Latin America
Video Games and Indigenous Culture
Accessible Game Design (i.e. making the field more accessible to new designers)
Participatory Game Design (i.e. game design as a workshop process, Freire?)
Race and Culture in Games
Player Agency, Mods, and Glitches

~~DG 2016 session submissions close on January 22nd. They also accept more traditional academic paper submissions, and game submissions for their arcade as well.~~ (Huh, turns out they were all closed already, and only game submissions are open now? That was fast!)

IndieCade East, held in the sinister shadow of the academic-ish NYC games scene, has always been the slightly less chill / more intense of the twin IndieCades. (More ideas! More e-sports! More beer!) Its relatively young age also means that it's more open to experimentation. This year, IndieCade East 2016 (April 29 - May 1) is trying out some very interesting changes with their format:

It's now in the middle of Spring instead of the middle of Winter. (Yay!)
The conference chairs are Jennie and Henry Faber, developers and community leaders from Toronto (!) which is in Canada (!!) and NOT in the United States (!!!)
The three conference tracks recognize a post-indiepocalypse world: (a) design lessons from fields outside of games, (b) economic sustainability for games, (c) future tools and technology.

Of course, you aren't necessarily limited to those themes, and the only real criteria is that you can say interesting things about games -- either way, session submissions close on February 3rd.

* * *

Hopefully you, dear reader, will be at one (or both) of those events? See you in April!

↧

Spring 2016 semester in game development

January 29, 2016, 10:08 am

≫ Next: Radiator World Tour, spring 2016

≪ Previous: Two 2016 NYC games conferences to submit talks to, like, right now

Hey, what's up, long time no blog -- I've been busy prepping game development classes for the Spring 2016 semester. This season, I'm teaching four (4!) courses across 2 different universities, which is considered a really heavy teaching load in academia. (Full-time professors usually teach maybe 2-3 courses a semester, on average.) So I'm dying a little. But I'll be ok. I think.

Here's a bit about the courses:

"INTERMEDIATE GAME DEVELOPMENT" at NYU Game Center.
This is a studio class for the undergraduate BFA in games, and I've been teaching this for years, tweaking the structure as I go along. It is kind of a "bread and butter" course where students dive deeply into Unity, writing more C# code than they've done before, and mastering important technical concepts like raycasting, instantiation, and for/while loops. For many, it is also an introduction to 3D modeling and texturing in Maya. This cohort will be interesting because it's the first set of students to come out of the "Introduction to Game Development" course, which we didn't have before, so we'll actually be able to see the curriculum in action. Since I anticipate we'll be able to move faster on some concepts, I'm adding some lessons in character animation back into the course.
"CORE LAB COLLABORATION: GAME" at Parsons School for Design.
This is a lab class for the undergraduates specializing in games at Parsons, to help prep them for larger group projects, and give them more practice before they try to tackle their senior capstone projects. The lab is intended more as project work time to focus on technical issues, while the studio class (not taught by me) is for evaluating their designs and setting development goals. It's the first Parsons BFA class I've taught, so I don't really know where they're at or what they know already, so I'm taking a cautious approach and doing a lot of Unity review anyway.
"VR STUDIO"at NYU Game Center.
A studio class primarily for the MFA in games, and it's the first MFA class I'll be teaching at NYU. The program traditionally focuses more on general game design than hardware, so this is sort of a small nudge in the other direction, as well as an opportunity to put a horse in the VR race and help prepare the students who are interested in VR. As an optimistic skeptic of VR, I try to do more than just technical instruction, but also assign some readings about VR as a media culture -- I want to critique the rhetorics that make it possible, such as the "holodeck" or even philosophical readings concerned with sensation.
"RECURSIVE REALITY" at Parsons School for Design.
This is essentially the VR class I teach for Parsons, except my school has a policy of avoiding technologies in course titles, hence the more fanciful name. While the NYU students are more skeptical of VR, because of their games focus and the lack of really great VR games, the Parsons students tend to be more optimistic because they don't necessarily have a games focus. In this sense, VR is possibly much more transformative in film, experimental art, advertising, healthcare, therapy, manufacturing, the military, and social media. There's also a lot more interest in video as a VR medium, which I want to try to address in the class, but it's difficult given the lack of available VR video recording equipment. (Professional rigs are thousands upon thousands of dollars, and the most rudimentary entry-level rigs are hundreds.)

↧

Radiator World Tour, spring 2016

February 4, 2016, 4:00 pm

≫ Next: Oculus Rift DK2s kind of (secretly) do work on laptops (sometimes) and you can make VR stuff in Unity (maybe)

≪ Previous: Spring 2016 semester in game development

Here are my current games event plans for the upcoming 2016 games event season. It's pretty packed. If you'll be around too, feel free to say hey if you see me.

GDC 2016 in San Francisco, California (March 16-18)
Originally I wasn't planning on going (I've attended GDC for the last 4 years straight!) but then I got invited to give a microtalk, so I couldn't pass that up. My micro talk will be entitled, "Are Games Art?" The answer may surprise you!!!!!!
Different Games in Brooklyn, New York (April 8-9)
I've always liked the eclectic mix of artists, community activists, and academics here, it's like the east coast version of the Queerness and Games Conference in Berkeley. I'll also always be grateful for the arts grant they gave me, which more or less jumpstarted my current gay sex games streak.
AMAZE in Berlin, Germany (April 20-23)
I'll be presenting my recent work and research on gay sex games... I think? I've never been to Amaze, or even Berlin, before, but I hear many good things about both, so it'll be nice to finally see what all the fuss is about.
IndieCade East in New York City (April 29-May 1)
I put in a talk submission, about video game lighting and Magic Mike / male strippers, which I think many people will enjoy on multiple levels. Even if I don't get in, it'll be nice to just float around with no responsibilities. I usually try to make it for Night Games, at the very least.
Games for Change in New York City (June 23-24)
I put in a talk submission to G4C as well, a more basic primer to video games and sex games, a bit like my talk at GaymerX3 but shorter and with less assumptions of the audience -- traditionally, tech industry types and "social innovation" entrepreneurs... we should give them at least one last chance, right?

↧

Oculus Rift DK2s kind of (secretly) do work on laptops (sometimes) and you can make VR stuff in Unity (maybe)

February 12, 2016, 11:15 am

≫ Next: In-progress: Radiator 2 for Steam

≪ Previous: Radiator World Tour, spring 2016

This is a rant + technical guide about how to get an Oculus Rift DK2 to work with Unity 5 so that you can make stuff with it. Maybe.

I'm teaching two virtual reality classes this semester, and I was dreading having to tell all my students that Oculus (in all their wisdom) has a public policy of no longer supporting Mac OSX, or any laptop, for the foreseeable future. Even now, when I tell my colleagues about this, they react with incredulous shock. With this single move, Oculus basically alienated the entire creative coding / technologist community, and basically 99% of the design / programming community in New York City.

The core of the issue is in how Oculus wants to synchronize (a) the image in the VR HMD (head-mounted display, or headset) with (b) the very subtle motions your head makes. If these two sensations aren't synchronized, then people usually suffer "simulator sickness." So, the VR industry generally wants to make sure these two things are synchronized as closely as possible, to make sure people don't vomit when using this glorious new technological medium.

In order to synchronize those things as fast as possible (90 frames per second is the minimum, 120 fps is the ideal) the HMD needs "direct access" to your graphics card.

Most laptops are engineered purposely to cut-off direct access like that, mostly because they have two different graphics processors -- one weak energy-efficient GPU, and one higher performance power-hungry GPU. For day-to-day non-VR use, the weak one is more than good enough, so that one is in charge.

From a VR developer perspective, we were early adopters and happily making Oculus prototypes for years, and our "weak inadequate laptops" were good enough. Then around runtime 0.5, Oculus discontinued OSX support and began insisting that all laptops were just inherently inferior and didn't deserve any attention. From our perspective, Oculus basically took away something that seemed to be functioning fine, for basically no good reason. It's really really really annoying.

If you search "oculus laptop", it's mostly going to be forum posts from the Oculus community manager telling people that laptops aren't supported... so I was pleasantly surprised when I was prepping to teach these VR classes and it turns out runtime 0.8 actually does work on my Windows laptop! My suspicion is that the GPU vendors Nvidia and AMD both updated their drivers to give Oculus what they wanted... well, kind of.

First, the bad news about developing for Oculus VR on your laptop:

I'm guessing it is using your integrated GPU, bypassing your discrete GPU entirely. That's the workaround the drivers provide.
That means it's pretty low performance. Your framerate will usually sit in the 30s-60s at best. Fillrate is a huge problem. It is much worse performance than in runtime 0.4.. BUT AT LEAST IT WORKS!
It's hacky and it's mostly for developers who want to work in virtual reality. This is not for general audience gamers or customers. Most games aren't very playable in this setup. If you are a developer who has to give a demo, you'll want to lug a desktop PC to the show.
Unity 5 has made a point of supporting the old 0.5 runtime for OSX; as far as I know, Unreal Engine 4 only supports 0.7+ runtime, which is not available for OSX.
In my experience, the OSX workflow is surprisingly stable and reliable. Most problems are usually with Windows laptops.

DISCLAIMER: You do this stuff at your own risk. When doing this on Windows, make sure you backup your files and enable System Restore. Some of my students have bricked their computers while trying to get it to work, because it does some funky stuff with your GPU settings. Be careful.

VR INSTALLATION FOR WINDOWS (runtime 0.8)

If you have a Geforce GPU, install the latest nvidia GPU drivers https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworks-vr-driver-support ... If you have a Radeon GPU, install the latest AMD GPU drivers http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx
Restart computer.
Install Oculus Runtime 0.8 (uninstall and reinstall if you already installed it before) https://developer.oculus.com/downloads/
Restart computer.
Proceed to "VR TEST PROCESS" section below to make sure it's working

VR INSTALLATION FOR MAC OSX (runtime 0.5)

Download and install Oculus Runtime 0.5 for Mac https://developer.oculus.com/downloads/
Open the Oculus Config Utility (shortcut is on your OSX desktop), plug in your DK2 USB and HDMI, and verify that it is being detected.
Go to OSX System Preferences > Display, enable "Mirror Display"
Click "Gather Windows", then in the "Rift DK2" window go to Arrangement tab and set it to rotate 90 degrees.
Do the full "VR TEST PROCESS" section below to verify the VR display is correct.

VR TEST PROCESS

plug in the DK2 USB and HDMI (you don't need the camera yet)
open Oculus Configuration Utility, make sure it detects the DK2
if it detects DK2, create a user profile (press "+" at bottom of the window)
when you have a user profile, you can now click "Demo Scene" button in the lower-left.
put on the DK2 and make sure it's working.
if you made it this far, you are now ready to do VR stuff in Unity, have fun http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/VROverview.html

MAC OSX TROUBLESHOOTING:

If you can't find your Oculus Config Utility, check your desktop.
If only one eye is working, make sure you rotate the display in the OSX System Preferences. See "VR INSTALLATION FOR MAC OSX" section above.
In Unity, the Health and Safety warning does not disappear when playing. You can disable this warning entirely:
1) in MAC OSX terminal, type:
launchctl setenv Oculus_LibOVR_HSWToggleEnabled 1
2) then in Oculus Config Utility, click "Advanced" button and disable the Health Safety Warning checkbox
3) do NOT close the Utility window, or the setting will reset! Instead, minimize it.

WINDOWS TROUBLESHOOTING

installation order matters; make sure you installed the new drivers BEFORE installing the Oculus runtime
if you have any "DisplayLink" drivers installed, uninstall them
if you have any Nvidia 3D / surround settings enabled, disable it
try plugging the DK2 USB into different USB ports on your computer
do not unplug / replug the DK2 too fast, it might blue screen you
restart your computer one last time
if you still can't get it working with these simple workarounds, my advice is don't try anything else, it probably won't work and you'll just end up bricking your computer -- instead, give up on the DK2, and use Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR, or the HTC Vive.

One last note: I AM NOT OCULUS TECH SUPPORT.

Comments will NOT be monitored. Good luck!

↧

In-progress: Radiator 2 for Steam

February 16, 2016, 9:37 am

≫ Next: Identity, camerawork, and time in games; on "Into" by Charle Taylor Elwonger

≪ Previous: Oculus Rift DK2s kind of (secretly) do work on laptops (sometimes) and you can make VR stuff in Unity (maybe)

I'm putting Attract Mode (the gay bar game) on hold to re-think the core social sim system, and Maven (my open world Thief-like) is on hold until Unity 5.4 ships (I tried bringing it into the 5.4 beta and that was disastrous) -- so now I'm trying to get this Steam release for the first three gay sex games out the door instead.

I'll hopefully finish development in a week or two, and then ship this on Steam before GDC. We'll see how all that goes...

Current TO DO List for Radiator 2

finish initial port to Unity 5, fix up all lighting and shaders
redesign input and UX for Hurt Me Plenty, remove most / all words
add gamepad support
fix up language localizations
do Steam storefront stuff

↧

Identity, camerawork, and time in games; on "Into" by Charle Taylor Elwonger

February 29, 2016, 9:35 am

≫ Next: A history (and the triumph) of the environment artist: on The Witness and Firewatch

≪ Previous: In-progress: Radiator 2 for Steam

This post spoils Into, which is about 5-10 minutes to play. You should probably play it first, if you care about spoilers and such.

Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966) is about two people who kind of merge into each other. Maybe this happens because you share a lot of interests or temperaments, or you're in love, or you're family, or whatever. In Persona, this merging process is often difficult, confusing, awkward, and/or painful. It inevitably takes on sexual overtones, but this sex feels violent.

Into (2016), by Charle Taylor Elwonger (Animal Phase), pushes the opposite tone. It is a short "interactive" about two people who are kind of joining into one another, but the joining is not particularly unsettling. There's a risk to it, but it also feels right to take that risk. Why does it feel more right than wrong?

Let's think about how Persona makes "merging" with someone else feel wrong. One of the most famous shots in Persona is these two similar-looking women gazing into the camera -- their facial expressions and performances make it feel kind of unsettling. You could say it's because they're breaking the fourth wall or whatever ("are they implicating us, the audience?") but I think it's more about their intense eyes. They also have unequal height in the frame; the woman on the right is gripping the other woman's head, as if forcing her to look that way. There's an unequal power dynamic here. It doesn't seem entirely consensual.

Into dodges a lot of these unsettling features just by having its characters face away from the camera. We only get momentary glimpses of their eyes, so their relative lack of facial expression (humanoid 3D characters suffer from lifeless "uncanny valley" effect in general) doesn't really get a chance to jar us. Elwonger also positions the camera in between the two characters as they face away from us. We're part of their group, we're spatially aligned with them, and we roughly see what they see.

To reinforce this sense of shared perspective, there's some subtle screenspace textures overlayed onto the scene. Now we're not just looking at the same thing, but we also look at it in the same way, and see the same non-diegetic features and meanings. These characters never have to say something obvious like "I love you" or "I feel like I'm a part of you" or something (instead, they talk about other things) because that emotion is already established by the visuals and shared controls / player inputs.

This dynamic leads into the very well-executed ending sequence, when we're watching both characters face each other naked in a shower. Elwonger blurs the entire screen throughout this scene, which to me, made the scene feel hotter and steamier, but also feels kind of like a concession to this couple's privacy. We're not part of them, we can only watch.

At first, you assume they share the same camera and camera-space in the shower, because that's what the previous scenes have done -- but then they reach up to join hands... and their hands suddenly disappear, cut-off by an invisible screen split down the middle. The result is a mirror-like composition as they finally "merge" into each other. I actually found this a little unsettling and moved my mouse cursor a few times to make them hesitate and pause the process.

In the end, of course, you have no choice but to continue. But by letting me hesitate at all, I felt like it was saying, "this is good, but it's scary, so it's ok to go slow." Where Persona (and its grandchild Mulholland Drive) uses a lot of muddied plot chronology to reinforce the effects of losing yourself as a total loss of time, Into just wants to make time felt. It's ok to go slow.

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A history (and the triumph) of the environment artist: on The Witness and Firewatch

March 7, 2016, 9:24 am

≫ Next: GDC Microtalks 2016: "Everybody Loves to Play", March 17 at 4 PM in Room 135, North Hall

≪ Previous: Identity, camerawork, and time in games; on "Into" by Charle Taylor Elwonger

This post vaguely spoils random bits of Firewatch and The Witness. I wouldn't worry about it.

Only a few years ago, hiking games (first person games with a focus on traversing large naturalistic landscapes) were rather fringe. Early indie masterpieces like Proteus and Eidolon abstracted the landscape into pixelated symbols, with a special interest in simulating weather and wildlife to make it feel real. But it took "mid-period" hiking blockbusters like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and Dear Esther (2012 remake) to monetize the genre with all their glossy near-photorealistic graphics.

Now we are entering a later period of hiking games, epitomized by The Witness and Firewatch's less realistic visuals. It represents these environment artists finally asserting their control over a project and their identities as artists, within older traditions of gardening and landscape painting. To better understand this latest shift, let's think about the social and technical history of the environment artist in 3D games.

What we notice: Hot Ryu, ass-slapping. What we ignore: the background.

The rise of the environment artist is kind of recent. Consider the pre-indie-moment days of early-mid 2000s, when the vast majority of popular threads on Polycount (arguably the biggest and most popular game art community) were by 3D character artists. Pretty much everyone wanted to be a character artist. The more aspirational character artists usually got this advice from the experienced artists:

"study more anatomy, bodies don't do what you think they do"
"don't rush into detail, fix your basic shapes, your design makes no sense"
"you may never get good enough to get hired in AAA as a character artist; consider becoming an environment artist instead, which studios need more of"

Character artists occupied a special place of prestige. Games culture fawns over Hot Ryu's ass, or Nathan Drake's detailed stubble, not the authentic scratches meticulously etched on DirtyGreenMetalDumpster #16 behind Mr. Drake. Per asset, developers generally budget much more processing power and resources to characters. Character artists are allowed to show-off, and their work prominently features in marketing materials. Developers and engines further institutionalize this bias with "cinematic effects" like depth of field, which conveniently blurs the background behind characters in cutscenes -- or consider "competitive" games that let you turn off the environment entirely and play in a basic spartan stage. This is all part of a conscious branding strategy by AAA, to require characters at the forefront of their branding. The environment cannot be the "star." We wouldn't want that dumpster to overshadow Nathan Drake's dynamic chest hair physics flapping in the wind!

This is the conventional wisdom: characters are "expensive" and deserve to be, but environments aren't and don't.

To a certain extent, I think the 3D game art community's bias against "environmental art" as "lower" than character art stemmed partly from Polycount's tradition and history as a Quake character skins website.

But this bias also came from the division of work in the game industry. Environment art was treated like an odd-job that random artists did. More often, level designers made environment art as part of their jobs. Many of the most successful level designers working in early 3D engines like Doom / Quake / Unreal did their own modeling, texturing, and lighting, using integrated in-engine building systems like sectors or BSP. That was simply how those game engines worked.

While I'm sure some studios employed dedicated environment artists, the role wasn't really widespread until game engines and better hardware let level designers ignore the specifics of construction. 3D game engines began moving toward a "modular" pipeline where dedicated environment artists built prefabricated "modules", and then level designers would slot the modular tiles into place. As this happened, many level designers I know from that generation, like Philip "Blaz" Klevestav, Thiago "Minos" Klafke, or the legendary Nicolas "Sparth" Bouvier, were suddenly forced to pick whether they wanted to be artists or designers, and they decided to specialize as artists. (Though some level designers known for their art, like the famous Doom modder Iikka "Fingers" Keränen, have also stuck with level design.)

(For more info on this, see my GDC 2015 talk about "Local level design, and a history / future of level design" -- and to hear complaints about this workflow, see Joe Wintergreen's "Hypothesising Negative Effects of Ubiquitous Modular Mesh Based Level Design")

But I feel like character art is getting a bit less prestigious these days, and we can blame the new AAA technologies and workflows for character art emerging around 2014. Why study how to sculpt a human arm and how cloth drapes on an arm, when you can just grab some body scan data and simulate the garment in Marvelous Designer and texture it in Substance Painter with a few clicks? And now it might get even easier -- I'm having a lot of fun with Mixamo Fuse, which is a free MMO character creator without the MMO. (Anyone can now look like a 2014 FPS very easily.) Basically, character art was so expensive that a lot of people wanted to make it cheaper, so now a lot of tasks can be automated. The generated results can still be pretty substandard compared to the handmade work of a master, but the fact that you can compare them at all, is kind of shocking. There's always been jokes about a "Make Art" button on tools, and this isn't that far from it.

Meanwhile, environment art has been pretty comfortable with automation for a while. Very well-known tools like World Machine can generate entire continents within minutes, and the popular SpeedTree middleware can cover that world in forests. So much environment art in your average realistic FPS from 2000-2010 involved going to CGTextures.com (now just "Textures.com"!) and downloading copious amounts of photosource to tweak in Photoshop. The best environment artists, of course, were still skilled at painting and sculpting, but for a long time this production work hasn't always felt like traditional painting or sculpting -- it hasn't felt like "Art" for a while.

Well, until now.

If I had to sum up The Witness and Firewatch, it would be, "these games give a shit about trees."

We can unpack a lot of techno-capitalist reasons why environment artists like trees in games. Rocks and houses seem kind of like solved problems, but complex foliage always requires some imagination, enough to merit its own "fuck yeah video game foliage" fan tumblr. There are so many different schools of thought about making 3D foliage, and this always has to be balanced with sharing performance with characters and AI. (Fortunately, both games have neither.)

Sculpting trees is also the kind of skill that demands a lot of classical observation and skill. It's still pretty difficult to 3D scan a whole tree, due to the sheer complexity and scale, versus having a person walk into your specialized studio setup and try to stand still. But once you sculpt and finish a few of these trees, then you can copy-and-paste them to make an impressive forest. (In contrast, you can't make endless copies of a house, it'll feel too obvious and cheap.) If you want a pretty reliable indicator of what year a game was released, just compare the technique and technology in the trees. Trees are basically the Nathan Drakes of environment art.

So, these games without characters are about letting the environment artists show off. The character art, what relatively little there is, acts as support to ground your presence in this place.

So here's a question -- what are these games' attitudes toward trees and nature?

I think Firewatch yearns for a studied effortlessness. It takes place in a slightly overgrown wilderness that isn't really wild if you think about it, but wild enough to let you humor yourself that you are in an untainted pocket of nature preserved in its natural state. There's a concern about authenticity and realness here. "This is what being in a remote watchtower feels like!"

Every space in Firewatch must feel lived-in and real, but in that weird game-y "environmental storytelling" kind of way. The clutter feels arranged by a professional clutter designer, a pile of poignant junk posed just right, in that peculiar way that we're supposed to notice and mark as "Narrative" -- but much like the implausibility of Gone Home's characters constantly pouring out their deepest thoughts within countless letters and tapes in a fever of ludonarrative hysteria, we players suspend our disbelief and accept this all as a mode of Video Game Storytelling.

Basically, Firewatch's world feels fake in a way that contemporary players are pretty accustomed to, so we don't mind.

But unlike Gone Home, where all the events have already occurred and the player must trace a chronology after the fact, Firewatch invites the player to personalize the story. Players can keep clutter objects of their own, customize other items (journals, letters, maps, broken windows), and take nature photos with an in-game camera. It makes sense as a natural-feeling progression in design from Gone Home.

(One possible idea for future advances in clutter storytelling: have disembodied NPCs, in turn, react to your selection or assemblage of objects. "NPC: dear player, I noticed you put my gift in the trash can. I don't like that." Complete the interactive loop; the narrative equivalent of Zendo.)

Firewatch even mixes in some procedural storytelling AI tech I've been yelling about for a while, as well as a short Twine-inspired prologue, some subtle feminist commentary, and hints of Gay Stuff(TM), all enabled by some modest tech industry funding (co-publisher Panic Inc.) and ex- dev expertise (ex-Telltale, ex-Double Fine, ex-2K, ex-ex-ex...) working on widely available game engine middleware. Did I mention it's only 2-4 hours long?

Firewatch is a game that only could've been made recently, circa 2015 - 2016, conceptually / creatively / economically / technically.

And The Witness... kind of isn't.

Want to read any defenses of Thomas Kinkade's boring art? I'd recommend Joan Didion's -- she argues every window is glowing as if on fire. She means it metaphorically, but I'm more persuaded by the idea of literal fire.

The Witness, with its artificial segmentation of different areas, feels more like a garden or a theme park. In fact, many of the spaces in The Witness are specifically presented as cultivated gardens. Every branch and leaf is an instrument for Jonathan Blow's purpose, his island that he is graciously allowing you to visit. It feels like a puzzle-resort (there's literally a section of the game that is a resort area) and you are just a visitor in this virtual Versailles.

But a lot of that ideology just feels so "tacky." No one builds gardens in spirals anymore, no one plants 20 different colors of trees within the same vista. It's unfashionable. To be very uncharitable, the Witness is basically an explorable Thomas Kinkade painting filled with hundreds of hidden object puzzles and sudoku puzzles, right down to the countless glowing windows and panels.

This conceit works until it loses its nerve, and makes the huge mistake of compromise -- of trying to bring a human element back into this thing that isn't about people. It does this in the least subtle way possible, literally with YouTube videos and podcasts of Scientific Rational Men talking about science and Spiritual Emotional Women talking about meditation. For all of Jonathan Blow's talk of letting players put it all together for themselves, it's weird how this aspect of the game begs to explain itself. In a sense, these voices are some of the worst character art in the history of games.

Rule number one, of Thomas Kinkades or hiking games, is to avoid close-ups of people. The dozens of statues in The Witness feel desperate for meaning and importance, and worst of all ignorant of the lukewarm attempts at "statue storytelling" in AAA games. Only the oldest sculpture gardens have classical stone statues of people in them; if you are trying to build a new kind of sculpture garden but use old techniques, it's going to feel very kitsch and irrelevant.

Firewatch felt fake in a natural way. The Witness feels fake in a jarring way.

Myst used to seem impossibly realistic; now it looks cartoonishly clean, like Team Fortress 2

This feeling, of being unplugged from contemporary game culture as a whole, is probably on purpose. The Witness is the same core concept from 1993's Myst, packed with 20 different puzzle mechanics that demand at least 25 hours of play to achieve a "first ending", self-funded for years from the excess of an indie business model that no longer exists, hand-built on a homemade game engine and toolset programmed in C++, with a supposedly "apolitical" narrative agenda that doesn't care about race, gender, or sexuality. It even sells for $40, the standard US retail PC game price from the 90s. The Witness is profoundly Uncool.

So let's be nice and judge it more on its technical merits: this game impressively functionalizes environment art and technology. Tree models are puzzles, real-time projected shadows are puzzles, specular masks are puzzles, additive color light sources and blending modes are puzzles... UVs, shaders, and screen space are puzzles. The environment artist basically functioned as a game designer here.

It's kind of a beautiful reversal from before, when environment art used to be a secondary thing that designers did. Now in The Witness, level design is more like a secondary thing that environment artists do. In Firewatch's case, much of the storytelling is tied up in the environmental assets, so that the environment artist also doubles as a narrative designer and writer.

Who decides what a game is? Traditionally, we've bestowed auteurship (of, say, Doom) upon lead programmers (John Carmack) or designers (John Romero) but rarely the artists ("Adrian Carmack", whoever that is?)... with The Witness and Firewatch, that thinking increasingly makes no sense, considering all the weight that environment art is made to carry.

The Witness: a game by Luis Antonio, Orsi Spanyol, Eric A. Anderson.
Firewatch: a game by Jane Ng and Olly Moss.

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GDC Microtalks 2016: "Everybody Loves to Play", March 17 at 4 PM in Room 135, North Hall

March 13, 2016, 11:20 am

≫ Next: "The game industry needs to get laid and just chill already" @ GDC 2016

≪ Previous: A history (and the triumph) of the environment artist: on The Witness and Firewatch

It's GDC season again.

I'm going to be delivering a 5 minute microtalk on Thursday as part of MC Richard Lemarchand's impressive lineup, alongside Jenn Frank, Bennett Foddy, Steve Gaynor, Mathew Kumar, Christina Norman, Henrike Lode, Brian Allgeier, and Aleissia Laidacker. If you're busy around that time, don't worry, I'll probably put my slides up at some point, and you can also check out the video recording later too. For more info, see the GDC session scheduler -- "GDC Microtalks 2016: Everyone Loves to Play"

I'll also be around at various places / parties, so feel free to say hey.

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