Here is a place for me to paste in blog posts I write about the game, just so they’re also in the repository.
Although I almost never work on more than one thing at the same time, as of now I find myself working on three games. The aforementioned It is as if you were making love is one, and Chogue (a Chess-Rogue mashup) is another (which I’ll perhaps introduce later this week), and then in the weekend I suddenly found myself setting of on one more project…
While I was in Berlin at A MAZE recently (something else I should write about), I got a verbal agreement from Thorsten (Wiedemann, the festival’s director) to make a Bitsy game with me. Bitsy (created by Adam Le Doux) is something I’ve had in my mind to do something with every since hearing about it from Enric Llagostera, a Ph.D. candidate in the TAG Research Centre where I work. It’s a fascinatingly simple piece of software that does one kind of thing (explorable, pixelly worlds) very well, and just that. Definitely worth your time to look at and play around with it a little if you haven’t run into it. (Not to mention that some very clever things are being made with it, see for example Lorenzo Pilia’s list of favourites.)
My first attempt to work with Bitsy ended in failure because my only objective was “make some kind of Pippin Barr-ish game with Bitsy”. That is, I came at it thinking very abstractly about how I would like to make something that was an examination of the tool itself or subverted its nature in some way blah blah blah. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s not a great way to actually approach a design process because it puts a lot of pressure on you and simultaneously has no real content to it. So I bounced off it pretty quickly.
However, the other day (maybe last Friday?) I found myself thinking it would be funny to try to remake/demake the first three v r games I made with Unity in Bitsy. So that would be v r 1 (a game based on Gregor Schneider’s u r 1), v r 2 (a game based on Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa and also on Schneider’s ideas around hidden objects), and v r 3 (a museum of digital/virtual water in the form of Judd’s Marfa installation). In their different ways, each of those games is about the underlying nature of the engine (Unity), whether it’s about the malleability of space (v r 1), the existence/non-existence of virtual objects (v r 2), or the aesthetic properties of unnatural/natural elements in game spaces (v r 3).
Importantly, each of those games already has a specific stance toward the engine beneath, and more general questions/ideas about the nature of games and their constructedness. They’re kind of Unity-specific at some level, but also perhaps not so specific - they’re more ideas about representation and virtuality and, if I may, metaphysics. The idea of re/demaking these games in Bitsy is really interesting to me because Bitsy is both really different from Unity (it’s 2D, it has incredibly low resolution graphical abilities, it allows only three colours at once on screen, it’s hugely limited in terms of the possibilities of interaction, etc.) and kind of the same as Unity (its forte is in making worlds that you inhabit, move through, think about).
As such, what I am calling v r 4 (and yes I do love just how far away from contemporary and popular and sexy uses of “VR” this gets us) is going to be an attempt to recreate the first three v r games with Bitsy, and all the trouble that entails. Like the rest of my kind of translation-oriented projects (e.g. Indie Bungle 2, SNAKISMS, Sibilant Snakelikes), the distinctions between source system (in this case Unity but also the game designs of v r 1, v r 2, and v r 3) and the target system (Bitsy) tend to raise questions and challenges that are, I think, usually pretty interesting ways of looking at and thinking about game design, game technology, game experience.
I’ve written enough at this point I think. As with my other work, I’m developing v r 4 using the “extreme documentation” method we’re trying to work with in the TAG Research Centre, which means you can follow my progress far more closely than you could ever possibly want at the v r 4 code repository, read my v r 4 process journal, read my v r 4 manifestos and even play the current state of the game if you so desire (good luck with that).
Ciao for now.