Showing posts with label get better. Show all posts
Showing posts with label get better. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Rinse and Repeat as cup runneth over

This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Rinse and Repeat. It discusses in detail how some of the game systems work and what happens in the end, and IT SPOILS THE GAME. You are heavily encouraged to play the game and draw your own conclusions before reading what I think.



(Again, SPOILER WARNING...)

It started with Le1f's music video for "Soda." In it, two hunks spray themselves with gushing fluids, suggestively shooting up from the bottom of the frame.

The scene begins as a sort of aggressive competition of machismo and staring down each other, but then one hunk can't help but submit and opens his mouth to try to swallow some of the frothy fluid. I think what makes this "funny-sexy" is how the soda gets everywhere and how messy it seems. It's pretty brilliant and got me thinking about how sexy a fluid dynamics simulation can be, and how I could put such technology to use.

Friday, August 14, 2015

"Bodies, I Have In Mind" at ZEAL

My piece for Aevee Bee's micro-games-e-zine ZEAL is out. It's called "Bodies, I Have In Mind", and it's about my body, other people's bodies, video game bodies, gay marriage, physics, and a bit of Ovid quotation for good measure.

It actually took a pretty long time to write, because when I write about games I usually maintain some distance and don't include too much of my personal life, so it was challenging (but fun) for me to try to change my usual mode. I hope it's not too terrible of a read.

If you like my writing for ZEAL, and want to support more work like it by diverse authors, then please consider donating to the ZEAL Patreon, which commissions this work.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

"Succulent" as hypnotizing homo hop homage


This post discusses my game Succulent and it completely spoils the ending, if you care about stuff like that. You should probably play it first.



There's a few scenes in the film Inherent Vice where you watch a man eat a frozen banana. They were unusually entertaining and not at all arousing, which got me thinking -- what if I made a game where you just watch a dude stick stuff in his mouth?

So for Succulent, I've put a fair amount of work into making this interaction feel "juicy", hooking it into particles, sounds, facial animations and "cheek physics"... here, the physicality of having his own arm do it, instead of a floating disembodied invisible player hand, was crucial to establish that he was doing it for himself and enjoying it. Inverse kinematics was finally good for something!

I borrow a lot of visual sensibilities from late period "homo hop" music videos, specifically those by Cazwell and Le1f. Both artists emphasize sweaty bodies glaring vacantly, bright backgrounds with intense lighting, and flat compositions focused on the center, evoking the go-go boy gay club / pin-up imagery that's thoroughly ingrained in US gay male culture.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Notes on sex, consent, and intimacy in games and tech


This is adapted from the talk I gave at NYU Poly about my free spanking game Hurt Me Plenty. It kind of "spoils" it a little, if you care about that sort of thing, so I recommend you play it before reading this post... Or watch Pewdiepie play it, I guess.

You can imagine Hurt Me Plenty with its realistic representational graphics as a critique of the sex in contemporary Western video games with similar graphics, such as in Bioware RPG games (Mass Effects, Dragon Ages) which regularly feature "romance" storylines that climax in a cutscene of two virtual dolls glaring at each other for a few seconds, with cold unfeeling eyes devoid of human warmth, before tastefully fading to black. (My game hides your partner's face as much as possible.)

These kinds of representations are dangerous more for their structural properties: players understand these romances as puzzles to be solved where sex is the reward -- and the idea that sex is a puzzle reward feeds directly into a pick-up artist (PUA) culture built on manipulation and perceived entitlement to bodies. This is essentially the "kindness coins" critique, that the logic of training players to expect sex, based on a series of so-called strategic actions, is super gross and perpetuates damaging ways of thinking about relationships.

Instead, sex must be more than a node, it should be simulated as a complex system in itself. Sex must not be some sort of reward or foregone conclusion. What if we represented sex in games as an on-going process? What if we actually did sex?

Several games have explored this already:

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

new game: "Hurt Me Plenty"


"Hurt Me Plenty" is a short game made for Leap Motion Jam 2014 where you spank the heck out of a dude and learn about how BDSM communities attempt to formalize consent / caring. I was really interested in how we can make games about intimacy without a "kindness coins = sex cutscene" trope, and how we can use expressive gestures to roleplay / think about pain and intimacy. (For the record, I don't think my game gets it right, and it has a lot of flaws... this stuff is hard to design!)

Monday, December 1, 2014

"Cheeky Designs: How to Make a Video Game About Spanking The Heck Out of a Dude" at NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, December 11


I'm giving a short tech talk about making my hunk-spanking game on December 11th at the NYU Poly School of Engineering's "Game Innovation Lab" in Downtown Brooklyn. Here's a description:

This talk will discuss the design development of "On Your Knees" "Hurt Me Plenty", one of the very few video games ever made about spanking men. How do you adapt concepts from BDSM culture into a game? How do you translate the politics of consent and power exchange into game code, 3D animation, and motion interfaces? What if video games imagined sex as an interactive process instead of a cutscene "reward" dispensed by a talking vending machine?

I'll talk how each part of the game works / why I made it the way I made it / interesting questions this kind of work brings up. Hope to see you there if you're in the New York City area!

December 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM
5 Metrotech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Thursday, November 20, 2014

I've never made anything viral before

At this time of writing, this Vine now has 540,000+ loops and 19,000+ notes on tumblr... and my life is pretty much exactly the same. It's so exciting -- the numbers are so big! On the other hand, they're just numbers.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Postcards from: "Discipline and Punish"

Here are some work in progress images / footage for "Discipline and Punish", a BDSM spanking game using the Leap Motion. It'll also go into questions of consent, and it'll be mildly educational for those who know nothing about BDSM culture. Character model by Kris Hammes, character shader by James O'Hare.


Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Get Better Soon, dev diary #4: conceptualizing input in virtual reality.


This is a development diary series for "Get Better Soon", an NEA-funded gay club VR simulator game I'm making for Different Games. You can check out previous dev diaries here.

Virtual reality is weird and terrible for a lot of reasons: "simulator sickness" is the frequent sensation of nausea that attacks many players, simply from trying to exist inside virtual reality. (There are lot of complex reasons why that happens.) There's something fascinating about that -- a reality where existence makes you want to throw-up. A lot of that bizarre beauty is going to get smoothed-over and destroyed as the technology improves, which is unfortunate.

One of the more upsetting developments in VR progress is the specific user flow and use-cases that the two biggest VR influencers (Valve and Oculus) are prescribing for VR games. They imagine every VR user is going to be seated in front of their computer, with a positional tracking camera on a desk in front of them. The idea is to seat the player so they always know which way is "forward" by their dead reckoning, which simplifies how head tracking will combine with controller or mouse input. That way, it matters less whether you're blindfolded with a screen strapped to your face.

I think this is kind of a conceptually lazy way of solving the "input" problem.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

"Get Better Soon" dev diary #3, skin and light iterations


This is a development diary series for "Get Better Soon", a commissioned game I'm making for Different Games 2014. If you want to see it and play it, then come hangout at Different Games next weekend in NYC!

Kris Hammes is finishing up the character. The 3D model geometry is basically "done" so now I'm just waiting for the last texture tweaks like chest hair. In the meantime, I've rigged the model with a standard "HumanIK" skeleton in Maya (so that I can easily re-target animations in Mecanim) and I've configured the shader so I can start figuring out how to implement these characters into the game.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

"Get Better Soon", dev diary 2: character art and production value.


This is a development diary series for "Get Better Soon", a commissioned game I'm making for Different Games 2014. If you want to see it and play it, then sign-up to attend Different Games in April in NYC (for free!)

Bodies, much like video games, are routinely commodified -- there are "cheap"-looking and "expensive"-looking bodies. Society devalues and discriminates against certain body types, while affording privileges to other body types. We read video games in much the same way, based on the shape of the game's body... the packaging and production values, and/or "paratext", of a game. Production values are a relatively quantifiable way to impress people and convince them to pay $60 USD for a set of mechanics that have remained virtually unchanged for decades.

What if "queer games" weren't popularly characterized by the do-it-yourself gumption of personal stories, expressed predominantly through webpage text, by artists with few resources? What if Electronic Arts directed their next-gen AAAAA commando-developer divisions to build big budget romantic comedies about time-travelling transgender witches who critique Foucault?...

Saturday, February 1, 2014

"Get Better" dev diary 1, idea and notes

I just got news about an arts grant that I was part of -- and it turns out we now have some funding! Hurray! I'll talk more about those details when the exhibition organizers announce it, but for now, I want to start documenting my process in making this game -- which I am tentatively calling "Get Better" as a direct challenge to the rhetoric of the mainstream gay-industrial complex.

(Well, originally it was called "Ludonarrative Disco-dance." But that makes it sound too much like a game about games, and this game isn't primarily about games.)

In terms of actual prototyping and production, I'll probably be building on top of my existing first person framework, but I haven't actually done anything yet. Mostly, I've been sending e-mails to possible collaborators and contractors. (The small chunk of arts grant money is making the asset contracting possible. Yay for having a budget and paying people for their work!)

Instead, I'm trying to sketch out the structure of the game first. So here are my actual game notes, along with some remarks on my notes...