Art Games Thesis

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

I’ve done self portraits in other artistic mediums, but attempting a self portrait in the form of a game is new territory for me. How do you even make a self portrait game, what does a self portrait game even entail? To start, I knew that the scope of a game is much larger than self portraits in other mediums I’ve worked with. I can sketch and paint my entire figure within a couple of hours, but to capture that amount of myself in a game will take much longer. Instead, my approach for this project was to focus on a very particular yet important part of myself rather than me as a whole.

I will refrain from talking too much about the specifics of what my self portrait is about as I am not sure how I feel about sharing that publicly yet. What I will show however, is that it encapsulates a very prevalent feeling that has been ever-present in my life. To put it simply, it is the feeling of simultaneously inhabiting different spaces, identities, and realities. The feeling of being everything and nothing at the same time. I myself am a person with a multitude of intersecting identities being from a Chinese immigrant family who grew up in Canada and now study in the United States. Sometimes it feels like I have each of my limbs in a different world, and I can’t see them all or be in all of them fully all at once. I am forced to make an uninformed choice on which identities are most important to me. The landscape of these worlds are too large for me to get a scope of and see all at once, which makes it impossible for me to make any value judgements with clarity. I simply choose on a whim and often retrace my steps.

What is the game?

First person character controller, 3D stylized graphics.

You find yourself in an empty misty landscape. Around you is nothing, until something appears. A world of small scattered buildings slowly grows until they are full scale. As soon as they appear, they start to shrink and disappear. Another world, then starts appearing before the previous has fully left. This results in an awkward overlapping of dissonant meshes, a collision of realities that feels not quite right. Then suddenly, another world starts to appear. They fluctuate, appearing and disappearing. You walk around, but the worlds follow you, you are always at the center no matter where you go. Sometimes worlds disappear entirely, sometimes they reappear instantly and stay, and sometimes they linger or don’t appear again for quite some time. There is no way to only exist in one world, and there is no way to exist in all of them cleanly.

The technical explanation is that I have multiple hand crafted landscapes parented to the player’s location and moving nodes that determine the size of those landscapes. The closer you are to a landscape’s designated node, the larger that landscape is. The nodes are invisible and also move along preset paths. You can’t tell where the nodes are, you are only able to see how they affect the size of the landscapes. The game is designed in a way where you will always be close enough to multiple nodes for their landscapes to be visible and overlap. The paths of the nodes also intersect on pre-planned timings and locations. You can move around to try and chase a node by looking at the size of its corresponding landscape, but that will lead you on a collision course with another node inevitably throwing the scene into chaos.

Takeaways and Postmortems

The more I engage with the making of art, the more I realize my art is split between art that I make for myself and art that I make for others. Every artwork I make will fall somewhere on the spectrum between those two poles, never really being purely one or the other. However, my art does tend to lean one way or another. This self portrait leans pretty heavily towards art that I am making for myself. I don’t expect others to really understand it, and I don’t particularly care if they do as that was not my intention. The creation of my self portrait had an immense impact on me. I spent a very long time digging through my emotions regarding this part of myself and distilling that into something interactive. The result is a minimalistic design where every piece is carefully chosen with a specific intention in mind. It wasn’t until the project became playable for the first time that it really hit me. There is usually an “AHA!” moment in game development when your game becomes playable for the first time and you finally get to experience it for yourself. That moment is special and almost always exciting, but this time it was something truly special. I don’t think I’ve ever had any project I created hit me as hard as this self portrait. The first time this project started taking shape, I stopped what I was doing and spent an hour just playing it again and again. I felt something special that I’d never felt before in game development, art making, or really anywhere. It felt like after hours of work, I had created a near perfect distillation or mirror of this piece of myself. It felt like I took a shard of my being, something so cosmically ineffable, and cut it off to lay in front of myself. I cried while playing this game for the first time. I rarely cry when playing games or consuming media, I’ve certainly never cried before while interacting with something I’ve made, and I rarely cry in general. However, when faced with this creation for the first time I found myself surprised beyond reason. Making anything, especially art, is difficult. Sometimes we question whether it’s worth it at all, whether the reward of fulfillment is worth the effort, time, and investment. Maybe we should have spent that time pursuing a more financially rewarding career, or maybe gone for a walk instead. I often ask myself these same questions. However, it is these rare moments of brilliance and magic that we chase as artists, and we all know deep down that it is worth the effort. This was one of those moments for me, and I am reminded why I started making art to begin with.

If you wish to play the game, please email me at davidzheng141@gmail.com. This is a very personal game for me, and I would like to speak with and get to know the people who play it.