Final Game Sketch: Club Baths

Club Baths is a walking simulator set in a gay bathhouse. The title is a reference to one of the four gay bathhouses that were raided by the Toronto Metropolitan Police in 1981. When the game starts, you find out that you’re a researcher who’s doing work in the office and the owner calls you to propose that you take the night off and explore the bathhouse instead. At this point, any choices you make will still result in the owner directing you to where the keys to the door is located and it is up to you whether to take up his offer. There are certain things in the office that you can interact with, such as a Grecian statue, some documents lying on the floor and on the shelves and some books. Once you are ready, you can find the key and open the door to the bathhouse. As you walk through the hallways, you find other statues and things you can interact with scattered throughout the space. Most of the statues are snippets of poetry There isn’t a clear structure or linear narrative and you are free to wander and discover all the pieces of the puzzle on your own. Once you have interacted with most of the things in the space, you will be able to solve the last puzzle, which is big piece of marble that, once you’ve selected all the correct answers, opens up to a waterfall which leads you to a black room, and the music changes once you enter the room.

GDC 2018

This year I was accepted by Different Games to attend Games Developers Conference in San Francisco as one of their ambassadors. Different Games is a collective of alternative and indie game designers, educators and other DIY voices in games that hosts conferences, workshops and other events around the US and Canada. It was an incredible experience to be able to attend such a big industry event as a graduate student and my goals for the week was really just to try to learn and do as much as I could without burning out.

Different Games hosted a mini-conferences for all the ambassadors to introduce themselves and their work/research on the day before GDC opened which served as a great way to begin some conversations that would last the week as we bump into each other at different north east south west halls of the Moscone Center half zombified. I started off GDC by attending most of the level design workshops and the rest of the week was filled with other level design related talks and a few narrative and storytelling talks. I consciously chose to go with more workshops as oppose to social and political talks. Not to diminish the importance of politics and activism in games and games industry (it was a good year for that too #unionization), and of course in my academic work I write extensively about the political dimensions of video games and play as a necessarily counter to capitalism, I just felt like since I have been to many academic conferences in my life and I will be presenting at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference in Regina later in the year, I would do something different. Some highlights include:

Game Story: NPC Dialogue Interaction with Yarn

For my second game sketch assignment I chose to develop Game Story. I looked around typically used game narrative tools such as Twine and Fungus and came across a Twine-like Unity plug-in called Yarn (thanks Robert Yang!).

As mentioned in Robert's blog, it is a plug-in for Unity that helps you write stories and to create NPC dialogue interaction. It works really well as one massive monologue or multiple pieces of dialogue.The plug-in allows you to add as many text files as you need and integrates it all into the game for you. Robert has also created a tool for Yarn users called Yarn Weaver to test and debug their text without having to implement it into Unity right away.

Subversive Play: Gone Home

For my subversive play, I chose to play the game Gone Home by Fullbright Studios. Gone Home is an adventure exploration game where the player comes back to an empty house after backpacking in Europe. Inside the house the player needs to find clues and piece together information as to why her parents and her sister have left. The game is very much driven by its narrative and has basic mechanics of picking up and moving items around in order to unlock the mystery. Finding certain items, usually letters unlocks the story in a linear manner.

I decided to subvert a game that I have already play once before because I believe that it is easier to subvert a game that you already understand. Though I would like to prove myself wrong by trying to play subversively with a game I have never played before too! In the first scene, I started picking random things from around the house and placing it by the entrance lobby. I started going deeper into the house and noticed that there were a big selection of “soft” objects such as tissues and pillows. I immediately gravitated towards such objects and started piling them on the staircase.

Game Sketch Iteration

For the game I am making for my Digital Games class, I am taking references from personal experiences and historical events and using queer theory and performance theory to think through my design challenges.

In 2001, a gang of men with baseball balls and a pool cue killed Aaron Webster in an area of Stanely Park in Vancouver frequented by gay men. Since then, numerous mysterious deaths and missing persons have occurred in Stanely Park. Most recently an international student went missing and was last seen around the Stanley Park's side of the Lion's Gate Bridge. I am not claiming that these are all people who went to Stanley Park for cruising, but I am interested in the park as a site because its beauty and popularity exists in parallel with its seedier underbelly.