Cargo Interactive

Another request for an answer.

This film contains the first animated short by one of the great comic artists in history, Windsor McKay. It shows film of his line drawing technique, which uses no construction lines. Something which is baffling to me, considering its quality and consistency. The real interesting stuff starts at about 8 minutes into the film, if that doesn’t interest you.

McKay was responsible for the Little Nemo Adventures In Slumberland funnies from over 100 years ago. He also created Gertie the Dinosaur, which pioneered the keyframe technique for animation (something I use even now, working the Flash environment). His work is still quite astonishing, and serves as a goalpost for myself.

For fun, I’m also including links to the 1989 adaptation of Little Nemo. It wasn’t very well recieved, which might have been due to its slow pacing. The quality of the animation here is still top notch. Again, a goalpost for myself, as I’ve been spending a lot of time on drawing and animation lately.

I really love this video. Can’t find much on who made it, but clearly a lot of care went into it’s creation.

I put this video together, which is just a quick run-through of the first 16 puzzles in Word Vine. Hopefully this will help out people who are having trouble early on.

I just happened to pass this game the other day. Prince of Persia Classic for the PS3 and Xbox 360 is a remake what is in my opinion one of the best games ever made. Jordan Mechner brought a completely new expirience to puzzle game design, inspiring a new sub-genre of platform games (to name a couple: Abe’s Oddysee, and the cinematic Another World by Eric Chahi).

I had heard that Mechner video taped his brother as a visual aide when designing his character animations. This was the key to creating fluid jumping, falling, and climbing sequences, and brought the game to life. This would be a precursor to motion capture. Here is some of that footage.

Prince of Persia Animation Reference 1985 from jordan mechner on Vimeo

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about convergence. I see it as one of the main ingredients in creativity, and we see it everywhere when we look for it.

By convergence, I mean, whenever you take two concepts and put them together to create one concept. Joseph Campbell, for example, has referred to the dragon as a serpent and an eagle. It’s a very comon property of mythical creatures: a mermaid is both a human and a fish, a centaur is both a man and a horse, pegasus is both a horse and a bird. These creatures are not a patchy mish-mash of concepts. They take the best of each half to produce a meaningful whole. Birds are associated with flying, so a creature that inherits the characteristics of the bird should fly, it shouldn’t inherit a birds legs, for example.

Sometimes meaningless hybrids are produced for the sake of confusion and horror. The Chimera is the classic example, a creature which usually is comprised of snake, lion, and goat parts. What makes the Chimera interesting is how strange the combination is executed - often starting the the prototype of a lion, then swapping out the tail for a serpent, and then having a goat’s head jutting out of the lion’s back. This certainly offends our sensibilities, and it’s meant to. So it’s clear that the choice of, let’s say, ‘ingredients’ changes the taste of a mixture.

I recently watched a number of 80s cartoon intros on youtube, for nostalgia’s sake, and I was struck by how often this method of combining ingredients is employed.

Here’s a video I saw a while back, but felt it particularly inspiring. It’s a discussion among some of today’s most recognized independent game designers.  Pioneers, showing that small teams can make truly enjoyable and innovative games.

For a long time people have been very critical over the use of “lives” in video games. In fact, using them seems to be a relic left over from the arcades which is slowly becoming extinct. It used to be that a quarter would buy you with a number of fatal mistakes, metaphorically called “lives”. Often you would loose a life when your character died: rolled over by a barrel; crashed into a mountain; shot by a laser, etc. Lives work in the opposite direction of points, while you perform well in the game you are rewarded with points, meanwhile if you perform poorly you will be punished by losing lives.

Now this has worked extremely well for a long time. In fact, it was a staple in home consoles for well over a decade. It worked on the premise that once you reached a point where the gameplay became too difficult, and you would run out of lives. This means it starts slow, and builds your skill over time. As you learn to deal with the challenges of the game, tension increases as the enemies move faster, or become more aggressive. The near misses become closer and more frequent, and you know that a wrong move will mean its all over.

And that’s where the problem comes in. Often, a game that has finite lives is going to have to end before you want it to, and chances are you are going to be frustrated by that. Especially if you have to start the ball rolling again. Like Sisyphus, you start at the bottom once more and work your way up toward the peak. To combat this, game developers began to make quick ways to get back to where you died, curbing frustration. Warp pipes, level selects, or infinite continues. Unfortunately this can dampen the thrill of an encounter: If you know you can just try again without any severe punishment, you will not be nearly as frustrated, because you won’t feel like anything is at stake.

I think, however, that this frustration comes from failing to achieve a goal. You just nearly reached the summit, only slip and have to start all over. But this is not as much a problem if you really enjoy the task you’re involved in. If the game provides you with pleasure from moment to moment, and your goals are simply something to focus your attention on, failure will be much less frustrating. Starting over can still be pleasurable, especially if the game still presents a challenge to you where you start.

I think lives can be a very valuable currency which allows the player to push themselves to their limits, allowing them a few missteps along the way, if however, losing your lives means being plunged into agonizingly slow and unchallenging gameplay, they can be of very little help at all.

It seems a bunch of people are getting stuck on certain puzzles in Word Vine. I’ll occasionally post the answers here, and if anybody has a puzzle they found particularly hard, let me know.