BABY STEPS debriefing

Done with week two! 

I enjoyed the theme this week, in how it worked mechanically as well as narratively/thematically. It wasn't quite as clear immediately what players would be doing when they hear the word "roots".  After brainstorming a bit, I really liked the idea of "belly button as root", and was excited to pursue that direction. My instinct was to make something physical, I thought of either buying a cheap baby doll and sticking a controller inside of it with the cord coming out of the belly button, and the idea of somehow the vibrations of the controller being the baby's "kicks". 

However, with the start of this semester I'm trying to go outside of my comfort zone. I've made quite a few physical/digital games with weird control mechanisms. I gave a skillshare presentation in my major studio the other day, where I had to explain what my creative practice/niche was to the class. The presentation tried to tackle the many directions of alternative controllers, with a focus on low tech alt ctrl that anyone can feasibly work on without much physical computing experience. After the presentation , my professor said something along the lines of "it's very cool to think about what happens outside the game, but what about the game itself?". I've been working with the thought outlined in Patrick Lemieux and Stephanie Boluk's "Metagaming," with the idea that videogames are platforms for metagames, which we create ourselves. A lot of my prior work has been interrogating the game interaction loop in such a manner as to add new metagames, but not quite working within it to produce my own videogames. So instead for this week, I set off to make something more """traditional"""" in that you just needed a mouse or keyboard, and the physical movement you do while playing wouldnt be too different than that you do in any other videogame.  

Still working with the belly button/umbilical cord idea, I found a model of donkey kong on models-resource in which he had a belly button. (notably, mario does not have a belly button). I'm very inspired by the work of big bag, and their use of "plundercore": the aesthetic of ripped models from other videogames placed in new contexts that radically change the way we look at the models. Related to this aesthetic, I've been thinking about the terms "so bad it's good" and "jank" recently, as they pertain to both films and games. It's very easy given a plundercore aesthetic to make horror games or joke games, but what would it look like to be sincere within this context? I think big bag tackles it very well.  Maybe it's about taking yourself seriously while making? This is why I was wondering what the tone of my game was! Trying not to come off as ironic was a bit of a challenge to me. 

Finally, I was really happy with how the gameplay turned out. I found myself playing around with it more than I usually play my own games. I liked it being intentionally slow but wonder if I communicated its speed well, in the playtest people often were impatiently clicking around. Maybe i need more feedback? Also, it is definitely lacking in structure / a win condition, which i dont think is necessarily bad. I was thinking some routes would be a physics-platformer where you had to get from A to B, or having a timer with the objective for the player to get as many bananas as they could. Admittedly I wanted to publish this for others to play on itch so I spent another hour or two after class to fix some obvious bugs/changes. I also added instruction text within the game itself. 

Looking forward to next week!