Object-oriented programming really does change a lot of things for Processing. It’s not that the concept of something that is object-oriented was hard for me to understand, but that all of a sudden, there are so many options for where to put a bit of code, and on top of that, the methods in my code need to be called somewhere, and where I call them can make them work, or not. It’s pretty different from just having “setup()” and “draw().” Going forward, on top of learning how one actually does different things with different functions and techniques, my work will be learning about where to place my code. And there’s no right or wrong way of doing that – just ways that break everything and ways that don’t.

The other interesting thing about defining classes and objects and calling methods and all that, is that the error messages in Processing are no longer as accurate as they were for the more basic stuff – Processing no longer necessarily knows where the problem is. So, when calling a new method, sometimes all of a sudden Processing says that my class/object isn’t defined.

So, essentially, when I tried to make my first “game” after redefining my cat drawing as an object (thanks to Gersande for talking some stuff through with me in regards to the constructor), everything broke! And it stayed broken until I spoke with Pippin — together, we rewrote an example program that did everything that I wanted, and then I took that and fixed my broken code.

I’m kind of in love with it. Here’s a .gif of me playing with the cat:

Before moving onto arrays and the rest of the book, I’ll be making another object-oriented interactive thing. I’m trying to stick to things that I have learned in Daniel Schiffman’s Learning Processing so far, rather than jumping ahead so that means that I only have limited resources at my disposal (why, why, why is text so far away? — I may have to break this rule). That has me thinking about what kinds of stories and mechanics I can create (within a reasonable scope) using just what I know so far. One of the things that immediately came to mind was visual metaphor and simple “procedural rhetoric” — which, in turn, reminded me of The Marriage by Rod Humble. By Humble’s own admission, it is a game that “requires explanation” and honestly, it’s a game that I just don’t like. It comes onto my radar every now and again, and the last time that I encountered it was without explanation at IndieCade East as part of the love and rejection arcade at the Museum of the Moving Image, and it reminded me of how annoyed I felt by it. I also don’t really relate to the “meaning” of the game. Which is fine – it’s a personal game.

Anyhow, because of its use of primitive objects as containers for meaning, I thought about it for this next project that I’m planning. I think I want to use bright colours and balls that are repelled away from the mouse…Or something like that. Something about shoving/jostling through a crowd, perhaps? Or about taking space and making space?

Meanwhile, our discussion (this week between Rilla and I) has shifted to game-making softwares. Our first discussion focused heavily on Twine, and we discussed what it might look like to make a platformer in Twine, and what the essential qualities of a genre are, and whether they are important. Eventually, this lead into a discussion of the relative perceived value of some of the different elements that might go into making a game. For example, on forums, people post example code for each other all the time. But then, nobody wants to take your example poem and put it in their game (probably) – but most writers might not offer either. Writing somehow feels personal while code doesn’t quite as much. And writing somehow feels like something that “everyone can do for themselves.” For audio, there’s no shortage of free soundbanks and CC0-licensed items. For art – people are willing to sell 3D models on asset stores, but it also feels personal. But people would definitely be willing to put your free art in their games. Not your poems, though…not your poems…

That’s a big abbreviation of a much-more nuanced and far-reaching discussion.

PS: Here’s a 3-year-old poem you can use for free in your game, based on how I think the animated adaptation of Swan Lake should have ended:
“The bird was sumptuous; finger-lickin’
Para chuparse los dedos
Meat sucked off bones like fingers, wings,
And what’s this but a shred of silk
Like the colour of Odette’s dress
which was the colour of her eyes
And we knew she’d been missing
for a while
but forgot until the silk was caught in our teeth
Forgot that no good deed goes
unpunished by that magician that
yes, it’s true, you banished
just about fifteen or twenty years ago.
He had a thing, didn’t he,
for swans and also wanting your kingdom
but oh, sorry, we ate it,
and it was sumptuous, and probably
maybe
Well, where would a bird pick up a scrap
of a dress except that maybe
maybe
Odette patched it up!
when she was lost (didn’t you, Odette?)
She’s a kind soul.

The swan should know.”

Surprisingly empowering. These are words I’d use to describe the beginning of my odyssey into learning Processing this semester as a part of a directed reading course about platforms and processing with Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr.

I started “seriously” making video games in January 2013, and in that time, I’ve been using programs like Stencyl, Construct 2, Twine, Unity and others that are meant to facilitate game-making for those who don’t program. I am finally taking the leap into learning to program more “seriously” – what an awful word.

To be clear, I don’t mean to undermine the artists and creators who make games using these sorts of programs, which are amazing and empowering in their own rights. These programs are excellent! They’re powerful! They’re accessible! I want all sorts of people to make games, not just the ones who are interested in learning a programming language.

Nevertheless, as an artist, maker, photographer, creative-type, writer, sculptor, painter, academic, etc… I felt a bit of a chip in my shoulder (and that’s my problem, nobody else’s) about not being able to write code “from scratch” (but I mean, these programming environments are really excellent at predicting things, have plenty built-in already, the libraries are excellent… Is it really from scratch – and who cares?). Thinking about this from a software studies-inspired perspective, I also felt like I learned to do certain things in these programs and it was really easy to do them, but then that there were kinds of actions and things that I wanted to do that they didn’t permit. For example, I want to play around with chatbots, or with having people draw with their mouses. I’m sure it’s possible to do that in Construct 2, but I couldn’t have done it. That drawing stuff is one of the first things that I learned to do in Processing.

I guess, learning to program is also just something that I want to learn to do for myself. I love learning languages – the human ones. I’d say that I’m practically a native speaker for French, an intermediate speaker of Spanish, and a beginner in both German and Italian, with a smattering of the Japanese that I learned from watching subbed anime as a teenager. It’s not that I have something to prove to myself or anyone else, but that I still felt like this was something that I need to do to further my skills and abilities as a game creator – partially just for my own understanding.

The book that I’m learning Processing with, “Learning Processing” by Daniel Shiffman, is excellent. It’s friendly, accessible, and gets you going (nearly) right away. I am surprised at what I’m already able to do after just a few chapters. The truth is, though, that those two years working with WYSIWYG-ish/”not-actual-programming” tools taught me a whole lot about how computers think and about the logic of programming. And really, that feels like about half of what this book is teaching me. So, that feels pretty empowering too. I feel encouraged and eager to go on.

There is, too, a connection between platform studies and learning to program – one that I’m still forming and thinking about. In a way, the basics that I am learning, the somewhat labourious way that I am currently drawing things shape by shape and line by line in Processing, feels connected to the labour of early games, shaped by the affordances of hardware. I said limitations at first but erased that. There are limitations, for sure, but it isn’t as if there ever won’t be a bigger, faster, better SOMETHING coming out on the market that will make older tech feel limited. But, then again, “I AM ERROR,” the book we’re currently reading, talks about how Nintendo deliberately damaged the chip they decided to use to make sure that anything proprietary to Coleco (who owned the patent) wouldn’t be an issue. So that and value-for-money on these chips are two limitations that Nintendo placed on themselves.

Well, these are just a few thoughts for now. More to come as I continue learning processing!

[This post was written as part of a class assignment, but I thought you might be interested in seeing it as well. If you want to play Lone Wolf Commando Assault, you can find it here.]

OVERVIEW

“This game would explore what it feels like to have non-combative options in digital spaces that are ostensibly ideal for combat. From dungeon-like caves to hills to canyons just perfect for an ambush, what kind of disruption, even momentarily, happens when game designers program in actions or objectives that go beyond our horizon of expectations?”

This is the question that I set out to answer based on the initial game design document for this project for Digital Games Theory and Research. The explanatory text at the end of Lone Wolf Commando Assault summarizes the message of the game thus “In games, it isn’t just that the design of a space determines its use, but also that only certain actions are programmed in for the player to have their avatar perform.” That, of course, isn’t the whole picture, or it wouldn’t have been necessary to make a game about it.

Lone Wolf Commando Assault is a three-level prototype where the player inhabits the role of Major Biefkake, “one tough mother who has seen the horrors of this world and fights to make it a better place.” In the game, the player navigates across sidescrolling (and in one case downscrolling) levels that lead them to various locations where, if this were a mainstream AAA game, there would be some kind of combat-oriented action to take, such as making a sniper’s nest, setting up an ambush, or entering into combat. Instead, those expectations are subverted — there are no combat-oriented actions programmed into the game, so the player has to choose to do something else instead.

CRITICAL DECISIONS

Somewhere along the way, the game began to critique elements of heteronormative, patriarchal masculinity. This started with my choice of avatar, I think, and blossomed out from there. Usually, I would deliberately avoid having the main character of my game a white male – not because white males aren’t good or anything, but because we’ve got plenty of them in games already. I thought about who the main character of the game ought to be instead, but decided that, in order to set the horizon of expectations for my players, considering that I would be working with limited resources compared to the lush 3D worlds of AAA games, I needed to highlight what that horizon was in other ways. So, I decided to make a character that could have walked out of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, with large arms, a white tanktop highlighting exaggerated muscles, and a soulful red bandana reminiscent of Rambo. Friends encouraged me to consider making levels that would also involve classic RPG characters, but given time constraints, I decided to focus in on the story of Major Biefkake, and I also made the decision to be kind to him. In writing the introductory text for the game, I tried to make use of the rhetoric of “fighting for peace” that exists in games (and around war more generally) where the word fighting usually means literally and peace as an end goal is used as a justification for violent action. This is how Major Biefkake came to be fighting to make the world a better place, looking to leave it kinder than when he was born into it. His possible actions are at least as effective if not more so than violence in making the world kinder.

From there, the very fact that Biefkake was a Rambo-Street-Fighter dude with big beefy arms who was not committing acts of violence, but flying kites, having picnics and exploring nature instead somehow made him humorous. Which, I guess, as a critique of how the patriarchy hurts men, is pretty scathing in and of itself.   

CHALLENGES

One decision that I made probably created quite a bit of extra work for me and may have made my critique of space slightly less effective: it was important for me that, other than the large “LET’S DO IT” and any UI considerations (such as the grenades on which the player’s options are written), all objects in the game be diegetic. What I mean by that is that I wanted to design levels where any items that I placed within them could reasonably be found there and feel natural. This made creating the platformer aspects of the game far more difficult, and in the end, I did have to make some concessions. The level that I am the least happy with is the third one, the Canyon level, where I had to put rocks sticking out because canyons don’t exactly have platforms and I didn’t want the player to just jump to the bottom of the canyon. That’s pretty much what happens anyway, though, and while I liked that this level changes the pace of the game, I’m unhappy with how short it feels and what the descent feels like.

Another major challenge was the amount of art assets that I set out for myself to create. I chose a fairly detailed style, and so each object was fairly time-consuming. The most time-consuming art assets, though, were the multiple-choice visual novel endings for each level. Although they have varying levels of details, having three levels meant drawing 12 manga-style pictures that had to feel like a visual reward for finishing the level. That meant paying quite a bit of attention to consistency across the drawings and that they had to be as good as I could make them. Also, since designing space was a key aspect of this game, I didn’t want to reuse objects from other levels. The number of art assets that it was necessary to create to make each level feel unique definitely made me limit the number of levels more than I would have liked. Thankfully, the programming for this was relatively simple, and I could reuse most of the code between levels. I’m glad that I decided to use Construct 2!

I arrived at most of my design decisions after careful consideration, and I think that what I would have changed about the game if I had to do it over is primarily time-constraint based. If I polished this game further, it would be to re-design the canyon level and add more levels. Perhaps there’s also more of a reward that I could give players at the end of each level – in a visual novel, this would be a photo album or something of that nature where players could review images that they got from getting particular endings or reaching particular points in the game. Maybe, in this case, it should be something like a comic, or maybe I should push the visual novel elements further and have players make more choices after the initial one.

FEEDBACK

The feedback that I received from my peers and other playtesters for the game was positive. Many people appreciated the tone of the writing involved – one person noted that it managed not to be too preachy while still getting the point across. The critique that I was aiming for in the game seemed to come across, and that allowed people to engage with critiquing that critique – nice!

One person did note that it was at times difficult to tell an object in the foreground from an object in the background. That’s something that I would definitely work when polishing this game further – playing with lighting and perspective is a challenge for me as a visual artist.

One playtester noted that, “while [the game] critiques expectations about actions possibly in a different space in games, it doesn’t really offer the player more freedom, but simply replaces the static choices traditionally associated with the spaces with other choices, which (while refreshing as a subversion of standard tropes) are just as constraining.” My thoughts are that this is absolutely true – this is not a game that increases player agency. Instead, the inability to perform the expected actions is part of the point: we do what is programmed into the game for us to do, and we can’t really do anything else. Ultimately, I think constraining what a player is able to do in a game is part of a designer’s tool kit: if we could do anything – everything – that we wanted in games all the time, any time, then I think games would be a lot less interesting. While I enjoy emergent gameplay, I am especially pleased when a game supports my subversive play when I least expect it – it is a moment, mediated through the game, that a designer is sharing with me. “Yes,” that designer is saying, “I thought someone might want to try that in the game.” I don’t think that the point is for a game to give players every option that they might think of (because it probably won’t), but rather for games to start giving us more varied decisions overall to make in those spaces.