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Discussion
For Red Dirt’s discussion and process, I’ll try to focus more on the aspects relative to the game’s design and less on the tools developed while creating it. For that, please check the discussion page of the Sensing Gestures repo.
The major inspiration for the game is probably We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine [2]. I am definitely interested in how listening to a story is also about performing specific gestures needed to remember it. The unfolding of stories as intentional acts is a powerful idea, and it was an important reference when designing Red Dirt and its visual and gestural aspects. This is a personal game, telling a story about memories that are relevant topic to me, particularly the way that they relate to me as a migrant being away from family, friends and the places in which I root my personal and family history, as time flies by. Other references Jess Marcotte’s TRACES project, the idea of time-travelling and memories as moving and attending to objects, while Kara Stone’s Ritual of the Moon [3], its attention to time, memory and tracking one’s relationship with them is also relevant.
Another aspect of Red Dirt’s design that I’d like to highlight is why the focus on magnetic fields and magnets. From an HCI perspective, there is significant research in using magnet for human-computer interaction, leveraging its wireless and no-power characteristics, as well as its ease of access (see [1] as example). However, a larger part of my interest is related to how magnets are also associated to compasses, path-finding and with a certain possibility of mystery and magic in interacting with forces that cannot be easily perceived by human bodies. This helped to further the design of the narrative progression and choices, and while the scope of Red Dirt as an experiment limits how much this was explored, it is definitely an area I want to work more in the future.
Here are some notes on the design process. Some of the notes related to Red Dirt’s design are also written about in the Sensing Gestures repo, where I talk some more about the different tol-design related decisions and aspects of the project.
[2019-03-27] Based on the tech studies on using magnets and gesture recognition, I had the idea of making an audio-centric game where the player walks in the woods / wilderness looking for a specific thing they lost. In order to navigate this space, they draw symbols on the ground that lead them into different areas / moments.
1st moment: the entrance
In a first moment, the players have to point their phone towards the south. This acts as an entrance to the game, and also as a way to establish a more firm basis of reference for the previously calibrated drawing patterns. This is because the phone’s magnetometer is influenced by the Earth’s magnetic field, so the data recorded for each pattern gets basically scrambled every time the phone gets rotated/moved.
I think that in an audio-centric game, this moment of alignment / introduction can be useful to establish both the game’s atmosphere and its pace.
2nd moment: drawing decisions
After entering the woods, the player will listen to the narration talking about what they are looking for / describing the environment. When a decision needs to be made, an audio cue (white noise? rain?) will increase in volume, indicating that the algorithm is now detecting the drawings in the ground / active area. Another possibility for that would be checking the microphone loudness: if there is sound above a certain threshold, then the gesture recognizer is run, so players need to make noise / speak while drawing. As a last format, maybe just touching the phone’s screen while drawing could work. I’ll have to test these out and see what feels more interesting.
The process of actually implementing and rethinking the game’s narrative using the Ink tool highlighted to me the importance of integrating different libraries not only as technical possibilities accumulate, but also in how they reshape the constraints of the design space. Ti’s getting clear to me that this is one of the aspects that interests me the most about thinking of tools as creative partners in design processes.
[2019-03-28] I’ve been hearing good things about ink as a tool for creating dialogue and narrative in games. It is quite flexible and exports files for both integration in Unity and as web-based text game. This sounds like a pretty cool workflow for games that are meant to be moddable or easily changeable, so I’ll try to use it for creating the dialogue and small narrative structure of Red dirt.
Using Ink and the Inky editor worked very well. It really matched my way for thinking story and choices, and after having created a similar system for Cook Your Way, adapting this one to the flow of the game was easier. Also, it was more direct to adopt a deeper ues of the tool instead of extending it right away (which was a big mistake in terms of productivity for Cook Your Way).
So, I created a basic visual UI for the text, as a way to guide me through the development. Later I’ll change this into the more audio-based UI. I also tried to organize the different features into a GitHub project on the repo, just to keep track of things more easily.
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Sungjae Hwang, Myungwook Ahn, and Kwang-yun Wohn. 2013. MagGetz: Customizable Passive Tangible Controllers on and Around Conventional Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’13), 411–416. https://doi.org/10.1145/2501988.2501991
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Hope Erin Phillips, Raoul Olou, and Nicole Pacampara. 2015. We Are Fine, We’ll Be Fine. Retrieved May 3, 2019 from http://wearefine.ca/
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Kara Stone. 2019. Ritual of the Moon by Kara Stone. itch.io. Retrieved May 3, 2019 from https://karastone.itch.io/ritual-of-the-moon