Call to Arms 2008 - “Peace”

A game of interactive vignettes set in and around Gaza, showing several different non-chronological perspectives in 1st person, not unlike Call of Duty 4: a Palestinian child throwing rocks at a tank, an Israeli soldier on patrol, a paramedic, a Western journalist, and others…

It begins and ends with a suicide-bombing in a cafe. The first time you are a mother with her daughter. The second time, you are the suicide-bomber. Cut to black at the crucial moment, or fade if you walk away.

Open on a crowded cafe. You are sitting in a wooden chair on the far side of the room, sunlight hitting the checkered floor through the door behind you. Still morning. You gently sip your coffee. Next to you is a little girl playing with the ice cubes in her empty glass. With the glass in her hand she looks up and smiles.

CUT TO BLACK

Putting the player in the shoes of different characters might inspire some empathy for the people actually living through this conflict and reflect on the grief it causes to both sides.

Gameplay varies with each perspective: mother interacts affectionately with her little girl, kid tries to throw as many stones as possible without getting hit by stray bullets, paramedic tries to keep a bombing-victim alive for the duration of an ambulance ride, soldier explores cautiously, journalist tries to get coverage of a shoot-out without getting killed, and so on…

Would be a fairly linear affair, with specific interactions up to the player. There should be choice when it matters, but never transparently so. The player should do what he thinks he has to within the confines of the game mechanics rather than press A for ending 1…

The game should be no more than 30 to 60 minutes long so as not to diminish its impact. The Nintendo Wii could be a good platform as it’s shown itself well-suited to extremely varied interactions, though more conventional control-schemes could also apply and some degree of production value would be necessary to sell the character empathy.

…

Obviously not entirely unrelated to the theme of my short film. In fact, it was while watching Death in Gaza (the documentary that was one of the key inspirations for “Teddy”) that I got the idea for this. Having just played Call of Duty 4, the idea of toying with differing perspectives in a Pulp Fiction-esque manner seemed a perfect fit. If you could take the same epic set pieces and take out the shooting, you could go places.

Walter Murch - Transom Talk

Randy Thom - Designing A Movie For Sound

Gamasutra - Audio Features

Obviously I’m not going to come to a full understanding of sound design overnight, but at least I feel like I’m not totally stumbling around in the dark now. The end result certainly will be better for it.

The new microphone also helps.

If you’re going to make a really bad pun, by choice or by accident, you have to own it. Saying “no pun intended” is like admitting literary defeat. Not only did you just make an especially bad pun… you’re aware of, even embarrassed by it, yet instead of going back and changing it to something better, you add:

(no pun intended)

If you didn’t intend to make a pun, WHY DIDN’T YOU CHANGE IT?! The fact that someone would actually go back to a text and add excuses instead of improvement just boggles my mind.

If you’re too lazy to rephrase it, can’t think of anything better, or (more likely) you’re secretly proud of your terrible pun, own up to it!!

Let puns be puns and stop apologizing for them.

In other news, I sent my film “Teddy” in for a critique at Animation Mentor and got some solid feedback, so I’ll be getting back to work on that.

CarlosBaena.com - great stuff on acting, composition and storytelling.

The Art of Braid - an interesting look into the process behind getting art and gameplay to work together.

Sounds of the Snow - an interesting article on capturing the sound of winter.

Nice crunchy-sounding snow has always been a pet peeve of mine… very few games get it right. When they do (Outcast, Little Big Adventure) it really adds to the atmosphere…

Also, this month marks my first year in Lyon! Good times.

Nevertheless, I found this an interesting read.

Intriguing ideas with regards to NPC interaction through dialogue. In particular the RPG prototype mentioned towards the end has a great deal of potential well beyond text-only interaction, tying in neatly with my personal pet subject of exploring communication through body language (in this case illustrating trust).

Speaking of which, Cecropia has this wonderful little experiment on their website which I think exemplifies the kind of stuff animation can bring to gameplay.

* And yes, I appreciate the irony in stating this on a blog. Just don’t talk to me about ebooks.

Some pictures from my recent trip to Paris: ate the food, saw the museums… the touristy thing.

Finally finished watching all the Warren Spector lectures and interviews mentioned earlier. For me the highlights were the intro with Spector himself, Harvey Smith, Marc LeBlanc, Seamus Blackley and Richard Hilleman, but really every single one made fascinating viewing. I hope they keep doing these.

Also I came across this hilarious webcomic…

Sweet Disney concept art on this blog… comments in French, but you don’t need ze language skills to appreciate ze pictures. Also included is Pixar, which is its own flavour of awesome. I still don’t really count them as being part of Disney - corporate takeovers being high on the list of things I make a point of not caring about - but they’re on there…

Incidentally, as the blog points out the French got a much better DVD of Ratatouille than everybody else. Putting aside the obvious that this movie should only be watched *in French* with subtitles - seriously… French rats with American accents? - there’s a whole extra disc with behind the scenes extras and the like. Basically all of it’s in English and even the original audio for the main feature is still there if you want it. Worth importing, online if you’re not in the area. PAL obviously. Sorry, region 1.*

* unless you have magic region-defeating devices