#22: A Question of ‘When’
“The Aristotelian tradition held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies of different weights did in fact fall at different speeds.”
I have much to share, but for the last few months, my mind really has been elsewhere, pondering the big questions of life. I will get into the project, but first, a little foreword.
Personal reflections - Time
It’s been almost two months since my last blog, which was about taking a hiatus from being online, to devote mental room to processing the unexpected loss of my older brother. The cliches are many, and my originality runs dry at the prospect of describing the intersection of our lives. Yes, the memory still feels like a bad dream. Yes, it’s incomprehensible. Yes, the knowledge that it won’t be long until I’ll be older than him keeps rising, unbidden, to my mind.
I feel that the journey of life is much like a Buster Keaton film, laying out the train track in front of you without a moment to spare, everything is always happening at a moment in time where, on reflection, things could not have been any other way. As the journey continues, patterns emerge, your tracks cross over mine, then diverge, then away again.
With his passing, the criss-crossing of the roads that my brother and I laid out before us as we went will now only overlap when I double back, return to them on my own, either seeking them out or stumbling upon them absent-mindedly.
With his passing, the roads that my brother and I travelled will now only overlap when I return to them alone, every instance a private memorial.
With his passing, our roads, once shared, have become my roads to maintain, for both of us.
With his passing, I will tend the garden of his memory.
Project update
There is so much for me to share that I’ve almost started forgetting parts of it. My project, if you have never heard of it, is I Am This Castle, a game whose purpose is transform the way you understand the experiences of transgender people, by transforming my own life story into a surreal mixture of fairytale, fable, and adventure.
Not sure why you’d want to play a game about trans people? Try having a read about that over here.
I feel like on the project, it’s been big personal wins in the last few months:
I have submitted my Arts ACT grant funding application. I should know whether I was successful or not in late October.
I have submitted my Creative Australia grant funding application. I should know whether I was successful or not in late November.
Personal update - Programming study
This is a long update because I have been busily turning the handle on the last semester of my advanced diploma of programming for the last few months. I was in a group project that made a virtual reality game in 5 weeks about shooting drones, which you can download and play here if you have a headset (warning - there’s no explanation of the controls because time and reasons. You’ll work it out!).
For the last semester of the program, we as students have had to undertake a number of activities:
Solo task: Pitch one videogame feature for inclusion in a larger game of many features.
My feature pitch was for a branching choice system. What I mean by that is essentially an RPG dialogue system (the base of my idea), but generalised, and with broader applications for anything to do with a player making choices.
My pitch was essentially for a beefed-up or alternate version of my existing dialogue system, which if you are an Unreal Engine user you can check out at the bottom of this page over here. It even has a tutorial!
I got excellent feedback on my pitch, which always feels good, but more than that, I enjoy these types of tasks, and enjoy presenting ideas I care about.
Group task: Pitch a videogame
These pitches were amalgamations of student feature pitches which the Academy of Interactive Entertainment lecturers believed synergised well. The task was for students to workshop the basic idea given by the lecturers into something unique and interesting and, ultimately, buildable by teams of students.
There was no requirement to workshop the game that used your feature pitch, and also, not all feature pitches were used. My feature pitch wasn’t used - more on that below.
I got very good feedback on this pitch as well, which is always inspiring, and is a silver lining when the game I pitched wasn’t selected; that’s show-business, baby.
Solo task: Decide a videogame team to join.
3 of the 5 game pitches were selected to be turned into projects that teams of students would spend the remainder of the year building.
… but they were all of them deceived, because there was a secret (read: not at all secret, regularly communicated about) 4th project!
The 4th project available to all students was a game project collaboration between the AIE and the Australian Federal Police. This is the team I put my hand up for, and was assigned to.
AFP game / simulation project (UNCLASSIFIED)
The brief for our team is, essentially, to create a prototype tool for individuals, partners or groups within the AFP to test and discuss decision-making in different scenarios.
Think choose your own adventure, but your adventure is being an AFP officer on one of: a) your ordinary day; b) your bad day; c) your worst day imaginable.
If you think that sounds like a program where a branching decision making dialogue system is right at home, you’re spot on!
We knocked together a rough idea of what we would propose to the AFP based on their brief, and made a little demonstration using both my dialogue system and some outstanding art assets that the artists on my team Evan Antonio and Adithya Sharma put together at light speed.
In short, the feedback from both our lecturers and the AFP was that we knocked it out of the park!
We spent a subsequent week developing our pre-production documentation and project plan, and then dived into production.
After 4 weeks of building our prototype, we have just compiled our ‘alpha build’, the first of four major iterations on the game / simulation, I don’t have permission to share this with you right now, but I do have permission to share development videos that I’ve been recording as I go, and I’m going to start dropping these for the next two weeks, at a rate of one per day on my LinkedIn.
The first of the videos I’ve recorded is right here, shown below. This is (out of context obviously) the micro demo that my team and I shared with the AFP as a part of our pitch to them, where we synthesised their brief into our own idea of what the experience might be like at a conceptual level.
My love to you all.
