Ptp: Reframing the Question

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on Calvin Yang – it’s coming down to the end of the quarter here at college and I’ve been busy with class work and projects for a while now. With the Thanksgiving Break literally a day away, I may finally have some time to work on my personal game project again. However, before jumping right back into development, this is a great opportunity for me to take a step back and take an objective look at the current status of the project and decide exactly what I want to do with Calvin Yang.

Here’s my project’s thesis:

– I want to create an enjoyable platform game focusing on the main character, Calvin Yang, his abilities and the colourful world he lives in.

Said in another way:

– I’d like to create a fun, complex platformer that stands out from the others by expanding from simple running, jumping and attacking, where the player has access to a variety of unique moves and actions to explore and complete the game’s many levels.

My main goal for this project is to create a fun, unique platformer that focuses on the main character and highlights his unique moveset and tools (a yoyo and some crazy acrobatics) that stands out as more than just another indie platformer game. By focusing more on Calvin’s toolkit and all the moves he has at his disposal, I can build the game and its levels around him and his skills rather than just build a variety of themed obstacle courses for the player to run through.

Cognitive Recognitions: The Power of Olfactory Mnemonics

“Three experiments with a total of 113 college students showed that, in a paired-associate paradigm using odors as stimuli and pictures for multiple-choice responses, the 1st of 2 associations to an odor was retained far better than the 2nd over a 2-wk period. Results suggest that the persistence of first-learned associations may be responsible for the long-lasting nature of odor memories. Ss reported constructing mediational schemes for mnemonic devices to link the odors and pictures. Latencies for a task of naming odors indicated that although naming odors is difficult, labels could be generated sufficiently fast that they could be employed as mediators in the paired-associate task. A 3rd task investigated the phenomenon of knowing that an odor was familiar but being unable to name it. Ss in this “tip-of-the-nose” state were questioned about the odor quality and the name of the odor and were given hints about the name. These Ss were found to have information available about the odor quality but none for the name as found in the tip-of-the-tongue state. However, as in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, hints given to the Ss in the tip-of-the-nose state often led to the correct name.” –  (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

I never really payed attention to it much, but your sense of smell can actually be an extremely powerful tool in triggering and retaining memories. As this study shows, in the population tested subjects’ memory retention was far greater when linked to particular odors than pictures. As a primarily visual learner, I didn’t pay much attention to the idea of smells and memories, but the other day while I was walking along the road, I suddenly felt this incredibly relaxed, homey sensation, completely out of the blue. I didn’t notice it at first, this sudden feeling of belonging, but then I noticed that something felt…different. It was only then that I realized there was the smell of tropical fruits and Caribbean spices in the air, and looking to my right I saw the answer to my phenomenon – I was walking right next to a Caribbean Food Truck. Soon after, various childhood memories came flooding into my mind, memories I hadn’t recalled in a long time from when I was a child, all because I happened to walk through a cloud of tropical smells. It was at that moment I realized that olfactory mnemonics were far more potent than I thought and could be something to look into in the future if I ever need to retain information, such as studying for exams or preparing a presentation.

Rebus – Part 2

Your name is now Rebus

Cognitive Recognitions: Calvin Yang and ‘An American Tail’

I’ve been hard at work on my game whenever I have any kind of free time between classes and homework, and I realize now that I may have been a little too ambitious thinking I’d have enough of it done by now to have a complete test level. My professor pointed this out to me, and I realize that there’s a lot of things I feel I should prioritize and finalize first before moving onto the programming aspect, such as story and designs.

And speaking of story, I decided to re-work the story into something different from a generic ‘collect the magical macguffins’ story. Instead, I decided to go back to an older concept I had for the game, where the story revolved around the Yangs as a family of geniuses and their rivals who want to see them fall. As of now, the story is that the Yang family are a family of brilliant rats and are the wealthiest and most powerful family in their fictional world. Curtis Yang, the patriarch of the family runs Yang Works, a technological giant, and lives with his family on their own personal island-theme park where visitors from all over can experience the wonders and genius of the Yang family through the many high tech attractions available. One day, however, the Yang Works Theme Park is attacked by an enigmatic group of villains calling themselves ‘The League of Shadowed Intelligence’, comprised of geniuses who all hold a grudge against the different members of the Yang family. Now it’s up to Calvin, the eldest son, to take down the evil prodigies and save the park and all of its guests with the help of his family and their various talents.

So……why rats? Well, no deep, overarching reason to be honest – Mainly as an ode to many movies and cartoons I enjoyed as a child, many of which starred cartoon mice going on adventures such as ‘Tom & Jerry’, ‘Speedy Gonzales’, ‘The Secret of NIHM’ and the movie of my childhood, ‘An American Tail’ – or ‘Fievel’ as I called it back then. The movie was about a young mouse whose family emigrates from Russia to America, but unfortunately gets separated from his family along the way. He spends the rest of the movie searching for his family while experiencing many hardships and adventures along the way. I don’t know why I loved this movie so much as a kid, but I watched it countless times to the point where I can remember the lyrics to some of the songs to this day. Looking back at it now, that movie dealt with surprisingly heavy issues I never noticed as a kid, such as child labor, the stresses of living in a foreign country and the persecution of Jews. Now that I’m older and can understand these issues, I appreciate the film a lot more than I did before – especially the part about living in a foreign country, something I’m still adjusting to as a foreign student in college.

Also, I just noticed that Fievel’s red & blue colour scheme somewhat matches Calvin’s colour palette:

A bit of a coinkey-dink, huh? Then again, red& blue’s a pretty common colour palette as well, but I like to think that some part of my brain remembered Fievel’s look and was like: “Hey! You should use the same colours as that Fievel character!”

CreativeExercise: StoryTitle

Inspiration – Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Hirohiko Araki

About 2 years ago, I came across an oddly colourful and extremely outlandish anime series called “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”. I remember hearing that title a few times in the past, but never really knew what it was all about, but the unique art and flashy style definitely caught my eye and attracted me to the series.

The Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Opening Cinematic:

What I’d discovered was a rich, decade spanning franchise full of style, flair and uniqueness that not only stood out from the usual crowd of media (not just anime/manga), but also realized that this series also influenced many aspects of popular franchises that exist today.

Jojo is a series detailing a multi-generational storyline following the different members of the Joestar bloodline and their respective bizarre adventures. The name ‘Jojo’ is a moniker applied to the protagonists of the different story arcs, since the nicknamed can usually be formed from their actual names (e.g. Jonathan Joestar, Joseph Joestar, Jotaro Kujo)The author of the series, Hirohiko Araki, was heavily inspired by western music, Italian culture and the artwork of Paul Gaugin, all of which can be seen in his manga and his signature, flamboyant artstyle. Very notable is the fact that the colourful, seemingly arbitrary use of colour in Gaugin’s artwork has transferred over to Araki’s work as he often uses random, arbitrary colours for his coloured pieces – in fact, most of his characters don’t have a set colour-scheme and he often draws them with different palettes each time.

http://s1079.photobucket.com/user/Plusme7234/media/jojo.jpg.html

While I love the series to death and it serves as a major inspiration for me and my own works, what I found most interesting about the series is how much it has influenced other, more well known series. For example, in the Street Fighter series of fighting games, two prominent characters clearly drew inspiration from two prominent Jojo characters: Guile was inspired by Rudolf von Stroheim, and Rose looks near identical to Lisa Lisa:

In addition, from the third story arc onwards, the a major ability featured by the main characters is the ability to project ‘astral visions of their psychic energy’, which usually take the form of warriors who stand and fight by their users’ side, earning them the name ‘Stands’. Jojo can be seen as the precursor to the ability to summon and battle using projections of oneself seen in various other franchises, most notably the Persona series of video games.

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is a long running series and is still going strong today and is now currently in its 8th story arc. Recently it’s become a little more popular in the west, with the release of an acclaimed new anime series and a new video game. It’s a highly entertaining series to follow, and I don’t regret the day I happened to stumble upon that colourful opening cinematic.

The Stranger

A secret ISIS agent plays innocent when he drops a paper bag full of seemingly adorable items onto our table.

The baby rat was developed in an underground lab in madagascar, ISIS’ super secret hideout with airborne Ebola.

Jordan picks up the rat. “Oh what a cute baby rat! Oh no, it’s coughing, the poor thing.” Jordan is suddenly overwhelmed with his own coughing fit. He dies instantly from fast-acting Ebola.

Blasé picks up the adorable vacuum. “Why is this called a Dracuum?”he presses the top of the miniature vacuum and the Dracuum wakes up, blinking innocently at Blasé. It then attaches its hose to his arm and whirrs away. Blasé screams in agony as his life force is sucked out of him through his arm. He falls onto the ground, and old emaciated man, dead.

Aviva, completely oblivious to the dead Jordan and Blasé, picks up the tiny man. “so sweet.” she says to herself. “Ow!” Her finger begins to bleed, the tiny doll was covered in minuscule thorns. A sickly green venom is now running it’s course through her veins. Bam. Dead.

The three police arrive to the scene too late. Everyone is dead from Ebola.

“Damn.” They say. Then they steal three frappachinos from the empty barista counter and carry on with their day.

Calvin Yang: Game Engine Built!

The basic engine for my game project, which I’m going to be calling ‘Calvin Yang’ for now, is pretty much complete! Here’s a few screenshots showing the hero in action:

Here you can see Calvin showing off some of his moves in a test area, fighting against some place-holder robot enemies. The first screen shows him using the ‘Cerulean Cyclone’, a move where he creates a whirlwind by spinning himself and his yoyo, before propelling himself into the air. The second one just shows him hanging around, grappling onto the ceiling using his yoyo (we can discuss the physics of that later, :P). The third shows him kicking a robot into oblivion. There’s more to this move than meets the eye, however I’ll talk about it more later. The next shows the most recently added move – The Ground Breaker. Calvin throws his yoyo straight downwards and propels himself towards the ground (and anything else unfortunate enough to be in the way) and delivers an earth-shaking punch. The last screen shows Calvin performing a classic platformer trope – the slide. He spins his yoyo behind him to propel himself, and kick away any enemies in his path.

By next week, hopefully all the placeholder stuff should be gone and I’ll try my best to have a fully playable test level. I’d planned to have that by the end of this week, however college homework did not agree with my plans. If all goes well, I should have a video up instead of screenshots next week, so you’ll be able to see how the game looks in motion – fluid and fun!