I am going to begin thinking about what this talk is meant to be.
I’m going to give it both in Utah and in Texas, so a double-whammy.
General point (per the title) is to trace the process of v r 5 both for itself and to demo and reflect on the role and process of MDM.
Now it loads, but I observe that there is the typical irony when you don’t really plan things out: there are no shadows in that first build. Because there’s only a cube and nothing for it to case a shadow on. And I guess because of the angle of the camera none of the visible faces of the cube are shadowed either. So, haha.
These are some nice islands my friend, notably enjoyed island 4, so I brough that into the game and was immediately confronted by the fact that its textures added up to around 200MB. When I built the game for WebGL it was landing at 104MB with just the island and a character controller which is… just too big.
I spent a while trying to figure out which was which until I realized something important: they all looked shitty.
All kinds of questions to think about and experiment with
- How involved in architecture do I want to get? Some of this process is reminding me of the Quist chapter in The Reflective Practitioner in terms of all the complexities and expertise of architects - the site and all that. I want this thing to look… well nice and intentional, but I don’t want to labour TOO hard on that effect, so simplicity will be key.
And yeah I need to learn probuilder more fluidly - last time I used it I could only make stairs sideways and had to manually rotate them which felt… pretty stupid. Also: no grids? Whyyyy? Oh I found them. Okay I’m alright again.
Probably a good step would be to literally taxonomize what possible rooms/installations I should have. So let’s do that tomorrow.
Just a quick MDM aside: thinking about the differences between journals/todos and actual design documentation. As of right now the method doesn’t really include a formal spot to characterize the design of a project because… well it’s just the way I work. But I note that with v r $4.99 I had those “curation” documents to separate out a specific kind of work. For more complex games (maybe especially more game-y games) does it make sense to have the way the game works specified out in a text, in a … design document? Never really thought about it, but it’s worth parsing through.
Nature of shadows in Unity
A shadow “feels different” based on what you’re doing, the kind of place you’re in, the scale of the space, how you entered the space, and on and on
So, these are a large number of possible effects. And of course they can easily be combinatorial - soft shadows from a direct light on a large cube that moves in a circle versus hard shadows from a direct light on a large cube that moves in a circle versus…. And I don’t think the island setting is the right place for rigorous combinatorics as in v r 3, rather I want it to be an experience of shadows, and I suppose it needs to be curated, but I’d like it, too, to be an experience of the different kinds of shadows so that there’s a chance to think about it.
So the island is “in praise of shadows” which means it needs to “show off” Unity’s shadows. I want it to both provide an opportunity to enjoy shadows as they are (and as the book kind of talks about them - though in the book it’s more about dimness a lot of the time?) as well as to reflect on the technical marvel of implementing shadows in an engine, as well as probably some of the comedy involved.
One thought (and here I’m thinking a little bit of The Beginner’s Guide) is to have a single room type (corresponding to that game’s single door type). And there are instances of that room all over the island that all equally cut out entirely or mostly the exterior directional light so that you can focus on what is inside. Designing that space would be a very important aspect of getting started.
So then I’ve been literally importing my textures as 128x128 files which does lead to appropriate smallness in the build, but they’re a bit blurry as I guess the default behaviour in unity for (what, the shaders?) is to blur/stretch rather than render hard edges. Can I perhaps write a shader that doesn’t do that, would that work? Can look into that.
All of this isn’t that interesting but having the island settled just feels really important to me, which is stupid and annoying but true. Really I could (and should) also work on some of these enclosed rooms since they don’t strictly need the island for testing.
So my current worst case (which I still need to test step by step) is to build my own terrain with low resolution assets and texture it myself with the terrain tools and… well, just hope that it ends up being small. I suppose I’m “learning” something? None of this has a lot to do with shadows beyond the idea that context matters and there’s a strong feeling in my soul that it’s better to be casting shadows on more organic feeling territory than on something immediately pegged as “low poly”.
Today, per my previous commit, Jonathan Lessard managed to save me serious trouble/sadness by pointing out you can set textures to use a “point” filter which means they scale based on nearest-neighbour or whatever, preserving hard edges and that minecrafty look we know and love. So now it’s become possible to use my 128x128 textures, scale them up so they’re less repeated-looking, but to keep them crispy instead of blurry. The result being that I think the island looks pretty nice and it’s exporting at 9.2MB textured (though not textured well enough yet).
I don’t seem to be able to convince Unity to “just” use the original Island in a low-size way. Wait I’ll try something quickly…
I am trying to use the new point-filter thing to convince the “cool island” version of things to be smaller - let’s see if that works to drop down the texture siiii… nope.
Texturing the island ON MY DAMN OWN to try to make it look convincing enough (this is hard)
I even made these two images (one is the original island one is mine) to try to figure out areas where my texturing deviates (always assuming the people who made the original Island are texturing geniuses etc.)
Also a quick MDM note: I’ve been noticing that a frequent flow at this stage of the project is to try out some tech solution (e.g. all my to-ing and fro-ing about how to get smaller builders, interestingly crunchy textures, etc.) find that it doesn’t work at all, and then Discarding Changes in VS Code to get rid of the evidence. Should I be including every step in the repo? It doesn’t strike me as an interesting part of the process, just trying to settle very fundamental tech issues, and I am reflecting on the process in fairly fine-grained detail here in the journal, so I think the “thinking” part is still there. The bit that’s not there is mostly just dissatisfying results in the unity build that don’t necessarily communicate much and might just “take up space” in the repo.
Then ran into the draw distance for the details meaning that the grass is constantly “teleporting in” as you walk which looks distractingly stupid, so found the setting to essentially make it always visible.
Compare this before and after, which I’m somewhat proud of (and which also includes the draw distance setting being ramped up now that I look at it):
Dear diary, I finally made a dark room. The island itself seems to be in sufficiently good condition that it felt time to move over to shadows.
Actually, in the weekend I was showing it to Felix as well and we made a really tall square pole kind of object and I was then stunned by how long its shadow was going downhill - hills and shadows eh, who knew.
And that word “floorplan” makes me think of the fact I did a bunch of drawings last Friday on that subject, so let me get them in here too…
Going on from those sketches of floorplans, as I said, I finally used ProBuilder to make a sample room, which ended up like this:
Which is to say I did manage to get a room that’s a reasonable first draft of a setting to observe a shadow in a more or less controlled environment. A few things on that process:
Which also brings up questions of labelling and wayfinding - do I want a map? Do I want to number or letter or something the buildings to distinguish them?
But yeah if all the buildings are the same does that kill the mood a bit? Or am I just making myself trouble? I suppose to the extent that I become “extremely good” at probuilding this kind of simple, brutalist, concrete form building I can make custom ones as it pleases me - maybe even “in conversation” with specifics of the landscape.
Shadow acne, 5 o’clock shadows, shadows everywhere
And NONE of that looks naturalistic. And I think one of the problems I have with that is I’d like the exterior environment to look kind of “normal” and to keep the freakshow experiments inside the rooms in more controlled environments?
Which ALSO is a thing because the behaviour of all this in WebGL is another issue that appears separate. For instance when I “solve” the acne with hard shadows and a high resolution shadow map for the real time shadows, the WebGL version still exhibits what looks like a tiny line of texture fighting at the seams of the building. Maybe I can beat that with vertex welding? So many shitty little things to think about.
And again I stress that this is also funny and maybe an opportunity because it’s NOT MY FAULT that all these things happen: THIS IS THE TECHNOLOGY AT WORK and to some extent THIS IS WHAT I AM EXHIBITING. I thought it would all be beautiful and “aesthetic” but maybe I will also be demonstrating how shit things kind of can be?
The most troubling trouble for right now is that when I put a (separate cubes) roof and floor onto the walls of the room the seams are visible in WebGL - though not in the editor (and maybe not in the app). I cannot for the life of me understand why. Is it a texture thing? Is it an “edge-fighting” thing between the meshes? Do I microposition them separate? Do I then run into some other bullshit? Is “edge-fighting” a thing…?
And on top of all that shadow acne is back in WebGL probably because of some other setting I added perhaps to do with the hard shadows or other stuff I was doing to try to solve … shadow acne. Fuck me.
Here’s an image:tThe left building is blender, the right is probuilder, shadow acne on both at a certain distance. Whee!
In amongst all this and as I think I’ve remarked but haven’t yet dived all the way into reflection-wise, is the ways in which all of this (well maybe not the UV unwrap and the seaming) is a part of how Unity renders shadows - what shadows “are” in the context of this engine. Shadow acne is shadows. That is, it’s a reflection of how the engine tries to render shadows - yes it’s “wrong” in the sense of not being naturalistic, but it’s also “right” in the sense that it’s the engine’s idea of shadows in these circumstances. So…
And it also means that I need to let go (somewhat) of the idea that the island and its shadow will be by default beautiful as in the essay that inspired the work (In praise of shadows) and maybe I need to remove that from the title for that reason. It’s more about “in reflection on shadows” or something along those lines right because we’re trying to see the shadows as the engine understands them, not in some “artificial” (ahahaha, this is so weird) way where it’s only about naturalistic effects. It’s all about engines and realism and shit.
In principle I think this could allow me to return to a modular structure, but for now I just have the room as a single unit. Interestingly (?) this does make for an experience where I have to install/experience the curation of the interior light works from inside the room - no lifting off the ceiling and floating on high. On the one hand this is going to be cramped and inconvenient, on the other hand I kind of like the reference it gives to really doing this in person and the kinds of perspective you’re forces to have – a classic tension in making games versus playing them in terms of how you’re situated relative to the world, god or person.
And of course it’s a continuing reminder that the shadow acne looks kind of cool and Moire-ish. And that I’ll want to do that on purpose. But I ultimately want the exteriors to have as little non-naturalistic lighting and shadows as possible as a default. I like the unnatural stuff to be at least somewhat under my control. Control control control.
Anyway just wanting to remind myself of and give a sense of the sheer amount of research and failing one does in these situations. Things I have looked into at some level as a potential help when trying to understand how to make webgl look alright (haven’t tried all of these, it’s ongoing)…
So there’s a lot and of course these things all potentially interact so it can be very hard to know if one thing is making a significant difference.
And there are plenty of other things I fiddle with I’m sure but I’m just trying to give an honest profile of how much scrambling is often involved in this kind of work - compromises, failures, realizations, re-realizations, crushing realizations.
And second of all a room with a cube in the centre (well, by eye and this is of course making me think about how I’m not easily hable to measure to the centre and perhaps I should figure that out? A little marker?). And a pointlight on one side that casts a shadow into the corner of the space which create a sort of shadowcube based on the way it falls on the corner’s structure. It’s not something I was actually looking for but just came up when I placed the light and moved it around, so I’m happy about that. It felt like a mini-Turrell moment?
This week I’ve managed to actually start a pretty comprehensive list of works and work on some of the simpler ideas around interactivity in the world (diases you stand on to affect the sun). Overall this has made the project seem pretty doable.
Also just aware of a tendency to maybe try to find imperfections and problems to avoid construction. But also aware that if you jump into construction you can find out quite late in the game that it would have been way better to do things another way instead of the shitty way you did them.
Awareness of shittiness
That time when the water was all jagged… there are a few potential before and afters?
If I have the energy I can look into making a reactive skybox that has my beloved pixels. But realistically I dunno because as soon as you have a cloud or something (that shows off the pixels) you’re going to expect the clouds to move if the sun moves and then you screwed. I suppose I could have meshes for clouds, but that’s… well actually the shadows of clouds moving across the terrain would be kind of rad? Uh oh. Well I’ll think about that.
The other thing I did was play around with the spotlight idea, having a dias that turns on a strong spot. Spent quite a while feeling it didn’t work (didn’t seem to cast a shadow of my building) before realizing the shadow was getting washed away by the sun light source. So there’s that aspect of shadows too… a shadow for one light can be cancelled out by another light. Which is kind of interesting really and probably worth demonstrating? The vulnerability/dynamics of shadows?
Spent most of my allotted time today desperately trying to be clever about creating reusable pieces for constructing rooms, even to the level of giving them edgeloops and stuff that was meant to make it easier to align vertices. But noooooo, it was not easy and it did not work. I was quietly confident but there were weird texturing issues, texture fighting, seamy stuff, and so on. So… fail.
- I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to make a nice L-shaped structure, but also: fuck that structure. I was only going to do it for variability of shapes and I think I can do that in different ways…
Anyway, I’m claiming in this moment that I will simply stop trying to be fancy and will instead focus in on just using the building I have.
Which… well it’s progress in terms of the ways in which behind the scenes the room was made in Blender and appears to sustain 0 bias nicely, or how it’s prefabbed with entry and exit triggers tied to the lights, or how I tested probuilderizing it and extruding some of the surfaces successfully.
But it’s also just hilarious that these are pretty much the same two screenshots I posted in late September. So a month of battle with 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, the lighting system in Unity, prefabbing, and more. But… I kind of feel like I have, finally, come out on top?
Okay well I did start the install process as you will see from the commit subsequent to that previous journal entry. And as you might imagine when the rubber meets the road and when the hands get amidst the materials of creation and the shadows mingle… it got complicated almost instantly.
In essence there are a lot of things about the engine itself and how it works that are interesting from one way of looking it (like a maximum number of pixel lights per surface/mesh) but are probably just not that interesting to a person visiting this island.
So what do they want? Well nothing much specifically but mostly to look at things that are… interesting, surprising, beautiful, poignant? And that in combination with my almost educational-orientation yields the game. Do I want to “teach” them that you can only have two pixel lights per mesh? I think probably not right? That doesn’t sound very interesting even if it probably can be in some way…
A quick entry to document some invisible work. I spent some time this morning building a tunnel through the “mountain” in the centre of the island since you can delete individual terrain tiles and therefore make a structure that passes from one side to the other.
I mean I think that’s a major generative tension both in the making and hopefully the viewing for this project. Realism versus Engine. Because it’s very much wrapped up in what Unity essentially projects as the objective (“this is realistic”) versus what is achievable without ridiculous trickery and hyper-specific modelling, lighting, baking, positioning, and more. So I’m happy with continuing along those lines.
It’s useful relative to v r 5 in the sense that I’ve wanted to explore that core idea of temporal sequencing of shadows (suddenly recognizing I need moving lights) anyway. So this gives me a chance to look at it.
I have to say that, having a working thing kind of put together I felt (as I noted in the associated commit) kind of sadly underwhelmed. I think some of that may simply be to do with general work vibes right now - I’m tired. Some of it may also be to do with the sort of ramshackle layout I’ve done of the lights and cubes, so that it doesn’t look very “professional” or whatever, something I can fix. But yeah is any of it ultimately like… well that’s not that great.
I don’t have an answer to this - I guess I have to magically be less tired, and fix the layout. I wonder, too, whether the lack of apreciable texture on the walls (something I’ve been struggling with frankly) is part of the problem. God forbid I have to take a look at that though. Texturing. I shudder. Maybe even just a bit more geometry on the walls? Some indents, some larger sense of concrete place?
Maybe the space simply feels a bit dead, not real. It’s not meant to be all that real, but it’s meant to be somewhere. These are things to think about.
I think that the fact of the Zium, the idea of an audience, the need to do a sort of vertical prototype in essense, is all helpful in addressing some of the questions that are maybe otherwise easy to not deal with during this sort of extended exploratory phase? The So what? becomes more apparent.
Guess what? The Common Front and FAE unions in Québec have been on strike since 21 November which has meant Felix has not had school since then. What day did that land, you ask? Essentially right on my last journal entry and last work day on this project, because it’s been pretty well impossible to get anything done since then. With Felix at home there’s just not quite the same level of quiet that I feel like I need for this work.
In the interim I’ve been playing a lot of The Talos Principle 2 with Rilla and Felix and that has a really powerful sense of place. In a way it’s maybe making me feel worse about v r 5, but in another way it’s probably a useful inspiration while also being a… well I can’t do that so maybe I shouldn’t worry so much about things? Again the point is to see the shadows at all and then to see the engine’s relationship to shadows within that. My existing plan is fine for that.
Also we’re getting to a point where it’s also like… fucking hell let’s just finish it up and move on with our lives, this is not my life’s work. A bit early to have that feeling, but it’s possible this is one of those projects that kind of gets over conceptualized until it feels very dry and inactive. Probably that when I get back into really making it there will be more opportunities for surprise.
Time to reflect kids. Because reflection work makes the dream work. Writing down what has been happening and how I’ve responded to it is a big part of understanding how the design part works. Maybe most of all because you have your overarching perfect design idea (exhibiting shadows in a game engine) but the reality of that is a totally different kettle of fish, and when you actually engage with the materials (the lights, the shadow settings, the textures, the terrain, the architecture, and on and on) you learn things and bump into things and dislike things and worry about things and feel things and all that is what actually forms the meaning of the design, the expression of it rather than the abstraction of it. And all of those things are what the player eventually runs into and thus potentially has similar or related feelings and thoughts about.
I’m designing by reflecting on what there is and what I can do about it. And because it’s taking place through writing (or drawing or whatever other form of explicit response I take on) it’s intentional design, accountable design, design that’s tethered to the beats on technical practice. And those are the things I want out of design - I want to know and notice what I’m doing, see the trail behind me and the weeds ahead.
Most of all because I finally bit the biting thing and started just speed-prototyping all the installations. An embarrassing realization there was that I could prototype them all in the same instance of a room and just enable/disable thing, rather than thinking kind of literally and wanting to make every separate room from the beginning. Giving in to the idea that all the rooms will be the same base structure and so it doesn’t matter. Also giving in to the idea of prototyping the exhibits rather than needing to nail them down one by one. Which is to say, really fucking obvious stuff that should know by now.
BUT I suppose there’s a bit emotional component to being ready to realize something like that? Just how much should I beat myself up about it? How much of that readiness comes from all the previous work and just general mental stuff, and how much of it could have been churned out incredibly early? I honestly don’t know… my tendency not to beat myself up too hard about stuff thinks that it just needed to happen this way, but I could just as easily be wrong.
If the point is to exhibit shadows and I want the audience to think about them and experience them as something worth witnessing, then just telling them “it’s about shadows” is probably only part of the work - people don’t necessarily have the capacity to sit there and look hard at the shadows and think about them. Worse, that’s not my experience of them in making the game - my experience of them is highly dynamic - I move them around, I see them changing and I have feelings about them because of that. Which is to say that I’ve more and more wanted just a bit more visual interest and maybe dynamics throughout.
I implemented the orbiting light, where a point light moves in a circle around the cube (sans vase right now, but it will be vased) and it was just so much more interesting to look at. Unsurprisingly of course, but it made me look at the shadows in a totally different way once they’re changing. You can still see their nature if they’re moving (have to get the speed right) but the movement somehow foregrounds the shadows, I suppose because the shadow moves and the object doesn’t (though I should have a moving object one).
The continuing saga of me making buildings and remaking buildings and fretting about buildings.
This has been an interesting moment - there’s all the excitement of “discovering” the vase and the dynamic movement as a kind of default or much more common factor in the rooms; but to go with that is a sort of destablizing of the meaning of the rooms.
Just taking a moment to reflect on the project as it stands… actually just a grab bag of stuff I maybe should spend more time either thinking about or doing (because I don’t have time right now, gotta run baby!):
Well not that actually but I’ve found myself thinking, perhaps especially because a couple of exhibition opportunities (A MAZE, unidentified online exhibition, Now Play This) are looming, about how you present the documentation - maybe especially when it’s even still in progress. I feel like there’s an opportunity and a danger associated with deploying commits and builds with an eye toward them being seen as a kind process art. Like, there’s extra work involved and it could be a distraction… but should I think about my documentation and process as part of the artwork and not “just” a separate (and valuable) documentation repository? My instinct is always that documenting should be easy and should feel like there’s no audience outside myself but… that might not be true. How performative and usable should my documentation be not just for a committed scholar (hi scholar, I’m sure you totally exist) but for more casually interested folks?
In this project and in so fucking many projects I have this realization way too late that I’m bored because something about the project is boring and I need to fix it. In this case the “undisclosed exhibition online” (which I’m now realizing is totally disclosed in this repo and that’s… well probably it’s fine, I’m not shouting it from the rooftops) really rammed home to me how bored I was by my own exhibits. But the formalist in me kept going “fuck you, it’s a formal exhibition it’s meant to be boring”. I have this endless tension between formal rigour of my idea and the idea of someone actually experiencing it, how much of a “concession” to make. I’m kind of bored of realizing I’m bored. This feels like a major design thinking idea and moment, I should look into it. There’s probably like 10 books about it.
I’m much happy with how individual rooms actually look now, but that too has had major changes. Most notably the idea of an active/dynamic light every time, even if movement isn’t the “idea” - so the basic pointlight drifts a little just to make the room feel like it’s alive. Also I’ve started positioning the lights in front of the plinth so that they (by and large) cast a shadow to the back wall, which has introduced other considerations (how lights should move, how far the plinth should be from the back wall, how the vase should be oriented) which has… broken my prefabs quite a lot - the whole thing is a bit of a mess in some ways at this point. BUT that’s maybe okay because there’s ANOTHER mess anyway which is
For some reason and as some point, the shadows/illumination levels on the building itself (built in Blender) has become utterly fucked! Like big square patchs on the roof as an example (but it’s interior too):
Well then, 9 days later, I’ve replaced everything with the new construction and made every single room I’ve been planning to make?
Which is good timing because Now Play This got in touch yesterday (or the day before?) to say “okay, ready for the build!” and we had to negotiate a (not-too-big) extension. So I’ve got roughly two weeks to pull the whole thing into shape.
Could also contemplate literal paths as a texture on the terrain? Sounds kind of gross and like I might overreach to such an extent I create something ugly. But generally the question: how much guidance do the visitors need? How much do I care? How much can I care? How much can I bend what skills I have to this task?
I had a first wee go at making a “sculpture”, ripped off that bandaid, at least a bit. As is typical with a prototype (I am listening to the Behaviour event at 4th space right now about prototyping) it helped to frame things up. Though I guess a bit contra prototyping best practice I do feel like… it made sense to just make “something” to try to find out what I’m looking or. I made (as per the commit) a kind of upside down multileg table, I positioned it as if dropped from the sky, I added a point light to cast shadows outward. It looked kind of cool. But also it looked like I didn’t know what it was for and I promised to reflect and here I ammmmmm.
And do I feel like it does what I wanted? When I think back to the original sketches and ideas? The weird thing is the absolute earliest expression of the project is a PDF from mid-August, pretty much when I started that is… a pretty good expression of how the game itself turned out. Like the core vision (look at shadows) has been stable, and even the architectural design has been stable, and a lot of the time has been technical fights to bring that vision about (how much time have I spent making the island and fighting in Blender (and elsewhere) to make those rooms a reality?).
Which… again, I’m taken aback by how much the project has been just this. Did I learn nothing?? And if I didn’t, isn’t that weird? Or… what does that mean? It was sufficiently well-defined that it was “just” an implementation challenge? Is that why the journal has been harder to write for this project? Maybe because there were so many conceptual challenges? Whereas the commit history has been really fruitful and where the action is.
BUT, guess what, I still pretty much make these things because I enjoy making them and I enjoy the brain-feel involved in it. The release and the feedback is vastly less important. Don’t ask me whether any of this matters though. Please.
So mostly my brain is doing the classic two-parter of “let’s move on to the next project!” along with “let’s never do anything ever!”
Well because in doing so you have to think very specifically about the materials of game design directly, not just taking them forgranted as the stuff you put together. If you’re designing to make them heard/seen then you need to know much better what they can sound like and look like. And indeed in the v r stuff it’s often about trying to get some handle on all the ways they appear even. (Just paused to make a note on making the game The Library of Bitsy.)
For the player… well I continue to like the idea that the game itself (and this series and many of my things) are a kind of vehicle for research by the player at a more controlled level. You play this game and you are, yourself, investigating the nature of shadows in Unity, encouraged to think about and focus on them. Ha, it used to be about being “in on the joke” for my game and now it’s like “co-investigator” which is… I mean it’s good but it’s also quite depressing.
Should I, at some point, try to make a successful game. Nah.
I worry there’s a chance that there’s just… too much shit??? Like how am I going to make sense of all of this and cram it into a presentation format? I think I should probably “just read” the commits right now and then return to the question of how to manage the presentation structure.
Hoo boy there’s a lot there. It’s much more direct and clear than the journal. Hilariously I think way LESS material here that I would consider using? But I do like the clarity and there are beats in there worth remembering?
Okay well now that we’ve at least read through the basic thing, what would a talk about this project and MDM and design and prototyping and reflective practice and materiality be like?
In Praise of Shadows: Chasing Reflections, Prototypes, and Other Traces of Design
That’s the title. Breaking it down…
I mean, that’s basically a fucking talk. It currently does not sound fun or funny.
What is funny?
What is sexy and mysterious?
What is magical?
How can I control it such that there are examples that are lighter, funnier, heavier, more beautiful, more awkward, more serious, and so on, throughout rather than silo-ed?
Do I want the above to be the literal structure of the talk? Like
Let us continue. Note that you have…
SEVEN working days before flying to SLC. So I’d suggest we need to be building the slide deck of this thing by Wednesday. And by we I’m looking at me.
In characterizing it to Rilla I found myself thinking in terms of slides that would purely present documentation materials. So it would be a collection of
Probably with headings (either visible or in my head), with the idea being that these concrete examples help me to explain the larger concepts.
(These can show up sequentially as I break down what the fuck is up)
(Will this be too text heavy? No, because a journal includes images)
How many words is a running prototype worth? (Lots… right?)
Okay well I guess if I just start building this tomorrow I have a chance of not going mad?
Just did some of a pass of getting the above structure into the keynote and I can see that it can for sure work.
But at the same time I’ve found myself wondering if I can and should run this presentation live by engaging with the project itself…
Like starting with the finish project, talking a bit about how monolithic these things feel, the absence of seams to pull them apart and consider how they were made – and even if you have trained eye and can see some of that, you’ll never really know why, nor will you know the what of all the things left by the wayside…
So few questions can be answered from the finality of things. So much less can be said.
And then I break out of it and into all the contingencies and strangenesses of the process… somehow, somehow staying on track enough to show things in a sequence that is moderately helpful?
Like I have my “classic” document-with-links instead of a beautiful pre-made presentation?
It would be truer to the spirit… but also more susceptible to career-ending fuckups… which… well that would be a bummer if, for instance, the internet didn’t work that day and I’m just mega-fucked?
But I still want to contemplate it because I think it would make not just for a more dynamic presentation, but a more honest one… enough control to steer the ship, but enugh behind the curtains to show… well, what’s there, and the FACT of being able to get there… the REALNESS of it…
So, requires thought and maybe a small consultation with Rilla.
Meanwhile, in Pippin’s brain, yeah, we’re thinking about doing this in a more ramshackle, direct way. And the most direct way of all would be to write the talk in a markdown document, which I am trying out… now.
13:56 @ Noble
Well I’ve made a decent start on this now, but I’m being a little slowed by a couple of things
So I think overall this is working pretty well. The key things I want to make sure they SEE are:
Note that this is all structured right now with a mind to explaining MDM and not so much explaining v r 5 – how much do I care about that? Can they be blended, or does one need to have supremacy for it to work?
How confident am I talking about what the fuck v r 5 meant anyway?
Would it be funny to run the talk from the markdown preview inside VS Code? Getting too fucking ridiculous? Or I could at least show that I could do that.
But yes back to that question a bout v r 5… maybe it should be more that I convey the general idea of the project, and then I more generally point out just how much you and I can learn about that process by the documentation… so not about necessarily conveying the actual “this is what it is” but rather the “this is how it was”…
On Ponte (from Discord):
Update on this: downloaded and built @Enric Granzotto Llagostera’s Ponte because I want to include it in the talk and – excuse my language but – FUCK ME it is an amazing experience to view the v r 5 repo through Ponte’s latest iteration.
As in, I was scrolling horizontally through v r 5’s history at 50% zoom and it just spoke to me so much about my life over the last months, made things visible that I haven’t thought about, and frankly would have brought tears to my eyes if I weren’t in a café right now.
Truly it’s an incredible resource even without all the QDA exporting magic. I already knew it was great in principle, but it has been very special to encounter it in this very particular use case of needing what it does, wanting to talk about it, and finding just how much it delivers.
Bravo, Enric.
(One funny thing: I sure don’t work on the weekend. So visible in the timeline.)
Today didn’t work out too well in terms of being able to look at the talk, but I’ve spent at least 15-20 minutes just now going over it.
Overall I think it’s pretty clear that the core story is of MDM, with v r 5 being more in support, and I think that’s fine - MDM is the more important story to tell to the world really? And v r 5 is a nice background/backing to that because it’s well documented and looks kind of intelligible to a broad audience.
The big tasks ahead seem to be:
I think with a good mindset I could get a lot done in an hour or two? Just got to find the hour or two.
I like the idea that there are multiple versions of the talk that can be given from this material - the 30 minute one, the 60 minute one, etc.
So tasks:
Making pretty decent headway into this. I’m all the way “through” the prototypes in terms of the webgl builds. I’ve painstakingly (it wasn’t that hard) duplicated the webgl folder for a series of builds so I can just magically click-to-show them as no big deal.
Major tasks remaining (quite a fucking few):
I’m going to do a “run through” on the talk now and I’ll take notes here as needed as I notice things. I’ll have a timer going but I’m not imagining this will work as a timed version. But that said I’ll be shooting for 45 minutes or so because that’ll meet both sessions (Utah is 1h30 so I can be more relaxed and go over, Texas in 1h straight up and I want to leave time for conversation).
Notes:
Alright well after talking it through with Rilla, it pretty obvious that my heart-brain or brain-heart or breart or heain or… you know, that part of the anatomy, want and needs me to refactor this talk so that it has more of a narrative structuring of how MDM works. Illustrating things through the Art of Storytelling instead of the formalisms or technique.
So I need to pick, let’s say… 3-5 moments that are illustrative of “something” and then
So we go:
So what are the beats?
So that would be
That’s five and I think they’re a good five. I guess I need to “make it so” now?
Runthrough notes.
This is just to say, I checked the ice-box, and the fucking plums were gone? Seriously???
I went for a long walk. 12,000 steps today in total.
I thought about the talk, having given it a read on the plane to SLC. I felt worried by it then, in part because I was just feeling tired and overwhelmed by travel, chair responsibilities, leaving family in Montreal, and so on.
But it’s true that I think it can still be improved. And one of my notes to myself, a refrain, was about Geraint’s point about how funny formalism is, how funny formalists are.
And I like that puncturing (of myself) that exists in the documentation (compare to Judd). There’s this desire to be professional and to make something very perfect and austere and conceptual, but then the really is all about mowing grass inside buildings and being unable to figure out why the shadows cast the wrong way, and so on. And it turns out that the installations themselves are kind of trivial and that what mattered or what was so hard was the place.
And it’s funny that was hard, but it’s also a really true note about how a project like this works. What you think or thought was the most important thing isn’t really… so there’s a sense in which I was overcaptured by beauty and perfection, but also that those things were deemed necessary in my heart for things to work.
Can we imagine the island with seamy buildings on a monotextured terrain? We cannot. Or we can, but we could not be taken seriously.
And so there’s something really funny about this decent through layers of godliness, architecture, all the way down to being a humble lighting technician, … so that we can look at shadows on a wall (paging Dr. Plato etc.)
And that’s kind of the story that the island and the buildings can tell… the huge distance from professional perfection that exists most of the time, the comedy of that, but also the necessity of it, … and then in the end the comedy of that kind of enterprise anyway.
But also the value of learning (texturing the island), …
The talk cannot, in the end, lay down the law about some specific thing about design - it’s meant to be about how MDM lets you into the inside, and that from that you can extract stories and knowledge and evidence about real, messy, reflective design practice. And the luxury and necessity of doing that.
Who am I trying to convince here? Who are they? Do they want to analyse games and game design? Do they have their own digital creative practice?
A through-line is really… I thought the game was going to be all about taxonomizing shadows; but in the end that was the easiest thing. The hard part was pouring the concrete, landscaping the island, mowing the grass, the service roles.
The Why?s as a north star for this, to keep you going.
The architecture story is more difficult because it feels deflating? Like I kept having all these big plans and efficiency dreams… but in the end I made exactly the thing I planned to make very early on… and I don’t know how much I truly learned doing it?
Is it a story of the landscape again, but gone wrong?
There were some beats that really made me believe… should I be looking at those?
Am I better off telling an abbreviated “horror stories” about shadow acne and seams and so on? And then also the You Gotta Believe moments?
It’s the final run-through (to the tune of Final Countdown by Europe)
As I gave that ending, I’m going to drop the “here are the themes” thing. It feels too much like belabouring the point.
Well, when I gave the actual talk it ran pretty much exactly as practice - I’d say it hit around 58 minutes? So it would still be good to think of a way to pull it back. I didn’t rush anything last time, and went on at least one tangent, so I suppose it continues to be the case that I need to just “say less everywhere”… which is… tough to imagine doing, but not impossible. If I can have even 10 minutes at the end it would be helpful and more usable as a talk? There does appear to be empty time after the talk at least for me, so there’s that little lining.
I don’t think there’s anything in the talk that could or should be outright cut.
Should I add local builds throughout in case the internet is wonky? Or “just” incorporate it into my existing hugo structure and build locally? That might be overkill, but those are the kinds of smart things that smart people sometimes do?
Anyway, the main thing is probably just: go a bit faster, Pippin. Say a bit less. Maybe especially up top. Yeah really everything before In the Beginning could perhaps just skip along faster without too too much ad libbing? Because it’s also true there’s a million things at the back end to fill time if I had any anxiety about finishing too soon.
The cute thing with the keynote was nice and it does make a specific point, but maybe it’s a bit too much? Or maybe not, maybe this crowd would - if anything - appreciate it? I like the idea that it gestures out at how much this applies to all creative process.
Points of emphasis that I guess can land harder: