10/19

This week I have taken all my sprites and music and have put them into place for the first part of the first level. I am still having trouble with the buttons, and after getting everything set where I wanted when I tried to replace one of the preexisting button sprites, it crashed my game and lost some of the data. After plugging it all back it I am once again at a spot where the player can go to many different scenes and can have options when interviewing the musician; however, I am going to keep elaborating on it. As of right now, I have Gladys Bently started. Later I'm going to add it where when you are talking to her if you push her on the right subjects she will slip up and say something that gives you a clue. I want to do that for all my characters. The song I choose for Bently is her song "Worried Blues". I am still trying to find the lyrics to this piece but if I can't find it soon I will ask my teacher for my music class. If I can't get the buttons up and running soon I will switch everything over to game maker because I am a little more familiar with that and I don't want to get hung up on this problem for too long.

Progress 10/12

This week I got a few more sprites done and I started playing around with the game. I got the pictures done for some of the backgrounds and the objects. The backgrounds that I have done are the chief's office, the desk of level one and the interrogation room. I have started working on how to route everything to the spot it needs to go, and it seems like I will have to have different scenes for everything. I have started writing some of the dialogue as well for each area. I'm still looking at how to get the buttons to work, so for now I still have the default white ones. My goal is to have it to where if you click on the phonograph you can play music, if you click on the notes you can look at the lyrics to the song, if you click on the folder you can look at the person's profile who you are inspecting and if you click on the book you can view some key things to look out for in the music. I have also decided that on the profile for each character there will be a real life picture of them.

Update from 10/5

Since I have started getting the basic outline of the game going I spent this week making sprites. First, I sketched each one, then I put it into Adobe Illustrator and finally colored them in Adobe Photoshop. I know how to do coloring better in Photoshop which is why I moved them to there; however, I feel that outlining them in illustrator allows me to go back and slightly change their poses so I can animate the sprites in the final versions.. Last class we had talked about how I was going to transition between the different era's of time and I decided to have each ear be a level. Level one will be the 20's, two will be the 30's and so on until the 60's. At the end of the 60's, early 70's the Stonewall Riots happened and so I think my game will end with those. Here are pictures of the sketches and final version of the characters I have chosen for level one. There is Gladys Bentley, Gene Malin, Douglas Byng and Ma Rainey. For each of them I will pick one song they were famous for and have information regarding their arrests.

progress 9/28

For the past two weeks I have spent my time learning Unity. At first I was looking into different programs that make visual novels, so I wouldn't have to learn coding from top to bottom. I found one called Vinoma, which has been very useful so far. It works out most of the coding for you but is very simple. I know that later on I will have to start to get into it more and make some of my own changes manually. This last week I spent learning unity and how Vinoma works with it. I watched quite a few tutorial videos just to get me started, and then began making a test of my own. I came up with some sketch graphics as place holders until the real sprites are done, and I wrote up a quick script that is also not final but just for testing purpose. In my demo there is a start menu, which I have not figured out how to change yet. From there you go to the first scene where the chief greets you and tells you to go to your desk. Then the options appear on the screen where you can choose where to go. Most of it is click based action so far, but I'd like to look at what I can do once I have the mechanics of the game figured out. My next steps are to watch the more complex tutorials and start making the real sprites and script for the game.

Update 9/13

For the past two weeks I have mainly been focusing on research that I will be using for my video game. The research I have done has given me a good idea of when and where I would like to place my game, which will make it easier in the upcoming weeks to start creating artwork and game mechanics. In my research I have looked at several articles and artist to figure out what I would like to do. After looking some of my sources, I would like to place my game in a 1920-30's setting. At that time, homosexuality in America was starting to be defined, and become illegal. People could be arrested for charges such as "loitering" when truly it was that too many effeminate seeming people were hanging out in the same area. At the time however, there were a lot of homosexual artists who were able to perform because they pretended their life was just apart of the act. There are a lot of good acts, both male and female from America and Britain. For my game, I want to use real world examples, but I want to set it in a fictional place. In Papers Please the atmosphere is well presented even though it is a made up country. I don't necessarily want to be limited to just the information from the 20's and 30's, but if I mix other examples in I can make it seem natural. I also would like to use the different terminology, specifically anything that never says anything that we would refer to homosexuals as today. Throughout time different words have been used to describe gay people. (inverts, faeries, queens, pansies, ect) I feel these will help create an atmosphere, but also give people a different mentality to those who they are looking at. I tend to use examples such as Gladys Bentley and Douglas Byng for audio and visuals. As mentioned in class, I wanted to use polari in my project. While the language has been around since the 17th century, it got very popular in the 1960's as a radio joke. If I make my own world in the game I can use it without it seeming out of place. For the game itself I wanted to make the main character a cop who has to sift through different media to try and find if someone is gay or not, and present enough information to back it up. I did some research into it and Unity has a graphic novel maker which helps you put together stories and such. I feel using this will be a good start for me, since I'm very new to unity, but I can start with the basics and edit it after I've gotten more use to it.

Attached is the story bored I also came up with this week. It features some ideas for the game. I would want it done in a pixel style, so thats why everythings drawn more with squares. The first frames are the police chief who you'd be reporting to. Then the next two panels are what you would be presented with as your gear. Files for looking up codes, a phone for calling either the chief or the accused, and your badge. The next frame is your desk you will work at. The game will be in a first person mode. Next is the process where you are given a file on someone and some background information. The bottom panel shows how you would listen to the audio, and from there you can view things such as the lyrics sheet and the case information. The last panel is an interview with the person being charged where you can ask them questions or not. I want to leave it open so you can end up sending an innocent person to jail or also not send the correct guy. After I get working with unity I will know more about what is or is not possible.

Art 451 Project

For my Art 451 Project I want to make a video game. I am very interested in learning Unity and I figure since we have an entire semester to work on the project, it would be a good time for me to learn the program. Because I am taking a few gender and identity courses this semester I wanted to relate it to that. After thinking about it for a while I decided it would be interesting to make a game based off of my Gender and Identity in Music course. In this course we are looking at homosexual music and the history of it. One of the most interesting topics we will be discussing is how some music use to have code words in it to talk about LGBTQ people without others knowing. I want to make my game similar to Papers Please where you get information and you have to decode it. I will be using a mix of music, art and dialogue depending on what I find in my research. In the past I have made games using Game Maker, so I think learning unity will be a fun experience.

Jackpot Grant

Here is the link to the Jackpot Grant I wrote:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwlFOBm1GWWFdjgwSFVHSGR2LXM/view?usp=sharing