Art Games Thesis

What was I trying to accomplish and what did I do to pursue the goals I set for myself?

To unhelpfully summarize, I sat and and tried to hold the lumpy blob concept of a self portrait and the slimy goop that is game design in my brain at the same time and tried to make something with that. I proceeded to get irritated with myself and stare at a wall for forty minutes. Having not really gotten anywhere, I just opened Unity and started blocking out my room with rectangles. Now staring at the digital version of my bedroom wall, I started to think about my life in terms of the bedrooms I’ve inhabited over the course of it and ended up modeling some more of my bedrooms. It was only by the time I had modeled the third bedroom that I started orbiting around the idea of “trying to replicate what it felt like to be inside my head”. I didn’t really want to create a single moment, but more wanted to just illustrate the backdrop of an overwhelm that is persistent throughout my self. 

Instead of then trying to design levels or gameplay, I opened up Spotify. Something to know about me is that I love making playlists – it allows me to capture snippets of oddly interrelated parts of myself. Naturally, I went through the roughly 300 playlists I’ve made over the last eight years and, well, made another playlist. I ended up scavenging about fifty tracks and then decided to break them. I pushed each track through a plugin that’s supposed to chop up drum samples for breakcore, but instead just had it chop up and rearrange entire tracks. I then separated out the tracks I had found into groups and ended up with about ten smaller groupings [playlists…] of music. What was I trying to accomplish? Well, I wanted to edit the music so that I could play the different versions of the tracks that play in my head in the eventual “game”. I honestly did not really really have a precise goal with this, but as I listened to the edits I was able to make, it felt like a fair representation of the backdrop I was trying to illustrate. 

I now had: three bedrooms, fifty tracks, fifty edited tracks, and ten categories. I spent some time thinking about how I could design some spaces to relate to the different categories and came up with an idea for each space. Ultimately, I was only able to make two of the ten spaces, but in an ideal world, each category would have its own designated space.

What is the game?

The game ended up being a poorly designed elevator. It doesn’t really tell you how to get to different floors, allows you to move up and down via magic and maybe physics, has questionable music playing at all hours, and never really deposits you exactly where you need to be. The way you navigate is by walking up to these weird looking spheres and clicking; this turns off the floor and you fall into a space (randomly selected from a list). You are free to explore the space and listen to what is playing. The audio will be: a regular track I’ve associated with that particular space, the chopped up version of that track, or both playing at the same time. There are more of those weird orbs I mentioned placed around and walking into one will turn off the floor again, dropping you into a bedroom. If in the bedroom you don’t click but instead scroll up, you will teleport one level up – if you scroll down you will teleport a level down. Teleporting up ultimately results in you falling though all the spaces you had just been in until you drop back down to the last bedroom with solid ground. Teleporting down might drop you into the void. If you stick around long enough, eventually the floor will just turn off, also dropping you into the void and booting you out of my brain/game.

Takeaways, Postmortems, and Reflections

Making a game from an emotional place was kinda awesome. I’m honestly a little astonished at how cathartic this process was and that playing what I had made ultimately meant anything to me. This is by a significant margin probably the most self indulgent artistic thing I’ve ever done, but I am shocked that I was able to have that happen in the context of making a playable thing.

While I do wish I had more time to make the rest of the rooms/spaces, watching my friends play made me feel like I had replicated enough of the experience of being in my brain for that to be relevant to their understanding of my person. I think I was able to communicate something through this game that I’ve been struggling to communicate with words for a very very long time.

The usability of this project is unfortunately dog shit. The game is virtually unplayable without me present, but I don’t really feel too terrible about that? It was actually additionally cathartic to make a game where the developer ships with the box (on that note, if you the reader ever want to play this, please feel free to email me at austenvdb@gmail.com and we can hop on a Zoom or something as I will not be uploading the executable anywhere because that feels like I’m exposing myself a bit much haha).

I think the practice of making this not only taught me something about myself, but I was also able to create space for myself as an artist who wants to make games. At this point, much of my education in games has been focused on how to make games for the eventual consumer/player, and I have not really been able to practice holding space for myself in my work. While I don’t intend to spend my life making self indulgent art games, I feel like spending time on this side of the spectrum has given me more control over how I can apply myself as an artist which feels incredibly valuable.

It’s a very strange experience seeing a version of your own insanity being experienced by another. Weird shit.