University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

No Ground: a nostalgic play on childhood

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No Ground: a nostalgic play on childhood

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Content No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood By Christina Orcutt Master of Fine Arts Interactive Media & Games Division School of Cinematic Arts University of Southern California May 12, 2017 No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 2 of 27 Table of Contents Introduction......................................................................................................................................3 Goals................................................................................................................................................5 Ongoing Process..............................................................................................................................7 Lessons Learned and Take Aways.................................................................................................12 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................18 Works Cited...................................................................................................................................20 Figures............................................................................................................................................21 No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 3 of 27 Introduction Throughout my life, I have always been attracted to games. Games are activities in which participants take part for enjoyment, learning or competition. Games often have goals, structure and rules to declare the results and/or winners. Many games, such as sports, rely on physical prowess, whereas others feature mental and psychological stimulation. Games have been part of every culture since ancient times. They help facilitate learning and boost the development of children. As an educational tool, games teach children how to master certain skills, overcome obstacles and reach goals. Adults also benefit when they play games, as doing so relieves them from work and obligations. Games also help maintain social connections with other people (“What are Games”). To me, the greatest part of gaming, is the emotional experience it creates for the player, whether good or bad. Players will often look back on these emotional experiences for a lesson learned or simply a nostalgic reminiscence and want to share that experience. As humans, we often want to share our experiences and recreate the ones we enjoy by doing things to remind us of a particular feeling. This is what inspired me to revolve my thesis around childhood play, the nostalgia and silliness of being a child. Childhood is often one of the greatest times of our lives. It is a time of learning, a time of memorable experiences, and a time of freedom from the burdens of the world. It is usually a separated and safe place a lot of us fondly remember and would love to escape back to, even if only for a brief moment of time. As children, we believe we are without limits and our imaginations run wild, bringing about that novel childhood magic of silliness and ridiculousness that often confuses observers other than those privy to the fantasy world that was created. As a child, I always loved playing games with my friends, especially competitive games, whether they were physical, board, card, or video games. The social aspect of playing with friends and competing against/or with friends has always enticed me. Being social is how people make friends and acquaintances, but playing games forms unique bonds that can result in lasting No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 4 of 27 friendships. One of the main reasons so many companies will have team bonding days is because, by doing some activity with another person, it relaxes people to allow them to form that special bond. This can make the work environment a more team-oriented and enjoyable place resulting in those inside jokes and moments that people fondly remember. During childhood, I often played a game called, ‘The Floor is Lava.’ The game as I knew it, revolved around having to constantly jump from one piece of furniture to the next without touching the floor. My friends and I would try to see how long we could last before everyone had “fallen in.” There may be variations on how people played the game; but the common thread was that the players could not touch the floor. This game provided the inspiration for my thesis. One, it was a game I remember playing all the way up until 7 th grade with friends and classmates. Two, I always enjoyed the imagination and thrill brought about. And three, so many people I have met similarly have fond memories of playing the game during their childhoods. But I was not just going to make a video game version of the game. I wanted to incorporate one thing children do most; they argue and fight over things constantly, usually trying to turn things into their favor. Whether playing kickball on the playground without a ref and trying to decide if a person is safe or out, fighting constantly over toys while playing with a sibling. Children inherently are fussing over something trying to get their way. Think of a child in a grocery store and you are in line to check out and a child sees and wants a candy bar. More often than not, the child will start to make a scene when its something they want until they learn otherwise that isn’t how they get things. Taking into consideration the ‘The Floor is Lava’ and children arguing usually to try to get their way, I wanted to make a game that let players constantly change the rules to try to outsmart the other players. The overall premise of the game, which I titled, No Ground is: No No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 5 of 27 Ground is a fast-paced, last man standing game where players will be able to change the rules of the game on whim while navigating a treacherous environment. Players need to use the environment and rule changes to their advantage while playing both offensively and defensively. It is every player for themselves, as each player fights to gain rule changes and cause other players to fall over the edge into the “lava” while trying to survive. Goals After coming up with a concept and basis for how the game would work, there were certain goals I set for myself. The main goal being, No Ground is intended for a group of friends looking to be competitive, yet silly at the same time. To be able to revisit that childhood experience of playing the lava game and enable the player to feel nostalgic and be a kid again. Secondary goals included, having a compelling rule changing mechanic that invites players to interact and change the environment; design a visually pleasing interactive environment, design an environment that reminds players of childhood and things children love; make it difficult for there to be lurkers/campers(players that try to avoid interacting and only interact from a distance); have it so players will always want/need to be moving in the environment; have the environment remind players of childhood; the more players play, the more players learn and develop strategies to kill each other off; and lastly a sense of difficulty and competitiveness. In terms of art goals, I wanted to go for a more realistic style in terms of the environment but let the characters be a bit more whimsical. By going for a more realistic art style, I believe it would help invoke those feelings of nostalgia. Visual cues are always great for memorization and recalling something. Dr. Haig Kouyoumdjian does a great summarization as to why visual cues are so important in terms of memorization. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 6 of 27 Visual cues help us to better retrieve and remember information. The research outcomes on visual learning make complete sense when you consider that our brain is mainly an image processor (much of our sensory cortex is devoted to vision), not a word processor. Words are abstract and rather difficult for the brain to retain, whereas visual are concrete and, as such, more easily remembered. To illustrate, think about your past school days of having to learn a set of new vocabulary words each week. Now, think back to the first kiss you had or your high school prom date. Most probably, you had to put forth great effort to remember the vocabulary words. In contrast, when you were actually having your first kiss or your prom date, I bet you weren’t trying to commit them to memory. Yet, you can quickly and effortlessly visualize there experiences (now, even years later). Your brain memorized these events for you automatically and without you even realizing what it was doing. (Kouyoumdjian) Taking into consideration visual cues being so important to memory, I decided to base the majority of the environment around furniture you would find in 1990s homes because that is when I grew up and a majority of the furniture was passed down or parents had for awhile. I also decided to include some modern furniture to address current children growing up. This way the nostalgia could be felt across different generations. In addition to the art style and environment, I decided to make the furniture players are traversing across to be larger than normal. As children we imagine things to be way bigger than they actually are. In talking with other people who have moved while growing up like myself, when you visit your old house, it always seems way smaller than you remember. I was surprised I was not the only one who felt this, but it made sense in terms as a child you are relatively small. For example, as a child you are trying to get into the cookie jar without mom or dad knowing, it was a much bigger obstacle to overcome than it is as an adult because we do not necessarily have to use chairs or step stools to access the out of reach cabinet where they are hidden. By using a combination of scale and 1990s furniture, I hope it would help invoke the sense of nostalgia from a player’s childhood. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 7 of 27 Ongoing Process Because No Ground includes changing the rules constantly, first, my team and I had to come up with a variety of rules for players to be able to change. I wanted to have enough rules for players to pick and choose between as well as make it feel like they had a good variety of rules to choose from. Our goal was to come up with about 20 rules for players to be changing. We only ended up coming up with 17. We got stumped as to what other rules we could come up with, but 17 was still a great amount for what we were trying to accomplish. The rules we decided upon were: 1. Shrink: move slower, get smaller, makes it harder to jump. 2. Speed: move super fast, harder to control where the character is going. 3. Reverse Controls: forward is now backwards, left is now right and vise versa. 4. Lava Safe: it is now safe to move on the lava; lava will not be able to kill players for a short period of time. 5. Slow Motion: everything moves extra slow. 6. Freeze: freeze all other players except the player who activated the rule. 7. Cancel: cancels all rules in play. 8. Invisible: player becomes invisible to everyone else for a short period of time. 9. Blackout: everything goes pitch black for everyone except the player who activated the rule. Players who cannot see, can only see the UI (user interface). 10. Double Jump: players are now able to jump extra high. 11. Grow: all players increase in size by three times. 12. Flip: the entire world flips upside down. Gravity does not change, just makes it more difficult to control a character as players are looking at it from upside down. 13. Time Shift: go back in time by three seconds. Everyone goes back by three seconds, but if any rules were activated in those three seconds, players do not get that rule back. 14. Force Pull: pull the nearest player towards you and stun them for a short period of time. 15. Shock: shock the nearest player to you and stun them for three seconds. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 8 of 27 16. Doppelganger: your character splits into three characters, one is your character and two are identical fakes. It will place your character in one of the random three. All will go into idle mode unless you move your character. 17. Swap Places: swap places with the nearest person to you. After we decided upon all the rules we were having, the next step was to test them out in addition to coming up with recognizable icons for players to associate each rule with. As iconology goes hand in hand with UI, we had to come up with the overall look of the UI at the same time. The first pass on the iconology and UI ended up not being that great. It was okay and no one was in love with it, plus it did not quite seem to fit with childhood. However, it was a great jumping off point in figuring out the outlines for the icons and layout. From there I explored common items found in childhood. Some of the items I explored were stickers, candies, watercolors, crayons, sweets, and paints. In the end, I used stickers as a base. One they looked the best and were the most cohesive, and two, as a child, stickers were often collected or given as a reward for doing something good; thus a way to trigger nostalgia in people. Third, stickers can be/represent anything. (See Fig. 1.1 and 1.2) Going away from the UI, we were trying to figure out a good control movement; jumping, running, etc. The running, moving left to right, back and forth felt decent, but the jump not so much; as well as the lunge could be better. To be honest, I believed we took a bit too long trying to find something that felt great, when in reality I still feel the jump needs work and the lunge seems to have funny results when we push it to the extreme but still not quite there. But when you only have a limited time to work on something, you cannot afford to get caught up on things that can be polished down the road. The game play to me is more important than is the jump perfect, or the lunge push the player far enough with enough force. I forget who it was, but some game designer took years working on just the player controller movement, which I No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 9 of 27 unfortunately, did not have the luxury of. Because we took longer than anticipated, it took some time working out the game play. Game play included the rules and how they worked in the game. The game play was dependent on the rules working. If we did not have any rules working, then the game is just a simple jumping game, trying to avoid falling in. Thus priority of getting the rules programmed came first. But not all was halted while waiting for the rules to be made. In addition to the rules working, we needed to figure out the size of our playing field. We wanted to make sure players were not too far, where they never interacted with one another but not too close, where they were always in each other’s faces. This took a bit of testing. We tested this mainly by playing in 4- player mode to start. My hypothesis was if the four-player space felt good, then it could work for two and three players. This method proved to be most successful. Once we got each of the individual rules programmed and working, it was onto balancing those rules out into a semi-fair state. Another thing we had to account for in terms of game play was color blindness. I grew up around people who had many different forms of colorblindness and did their best to never let it stop them from having fun. Keeping those people in mind, I wanted to try to account for at least those who were colorblind. I hoped if someone who had one of these ailments would not feel like they were at a disadvantage. Historically, if you look at how other games account for colorblindness, it is usually done through a whole-screen filter. However, this never seems to fully work. Quite a few colorblind people still have issues. Hence, the things they have noticed best over their years of interacting with different kinds of design and UI are visual effects/cues, textures and outlines. Taking those things into account, I did not want to use the typical whole- No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 10 of 27 screen filter that may or may not work. I felt a combination of obvious effects and use of texture in certain areas of design would be best. First, I made sure to make unique individual rule icons to represent each of the individual rules so if they could not make the color, they would still be able to tell what they had in their inventory based on image. (See Fig. 2) Second, I wanted to make sure there were individual sound effects going off when a specific rule is activated. This way, players could associate sound with certain images as well as if they did not have a specific rule in their inventory they would be able to think, ‘oh that sound does this.’ Also going off visual cues, there are different effects activated when a rule goes off. This also helps everyone in general for additional feedback when a rule is activated. For example, when the player activated the rule Lava Safe, a unique sound plays and the ground turns into carpet meaning it is safe to walk on. For the rule Freeze, an ice block spawns around the player and a different unique sound plays upon activation. If an obvious rule changing effect does not occur like the rule Blackout, where the screen goes black for every player except the player who activated the rule, then those rules have specific things happen visually on screen. Upon having the rules created, balancing was/is a major debate. Between all of the rules, there are some blatantly over powered rules and some that are not as strong. The major dilemma with the rules is how often should players be able to access the rules. Part of me is completely fine if some players feel unfair in certain situations, because often as children we believed mainly things were unfair to us and could not always come to terms with why it felt unfair. But on the other side, if players think a game is too unfair, they are not likely to play it again. They may try go back again and see if they can create a different situation, but more often than not, if something feels unfair in game play, players give up. Looking at these two different points of No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 11 of 27 interest, we had to figure out a way to accommodate both without making the players think the situation was too unfair. The solution we came up with was giving the players the options to pick a rule, other than the super over powered rules, to have in their inventory at the start of the game. This way it made players think about which rule they felt they might be able to use most effectively during game play. Thus, if a player thought when a certain rule was activated felt unfair, they would look back at the beginning selection process and think ‘which rule could I have chosen instead to help counteract this?’ Balancing of these rules is constantly being tested and changed. The programmers made a Rule Spawn manager. This easily lets us adjust the percentage of each individual rule spawning in a game. Thus, during a playtest, we can easily go into the editor if we notice a particular rule is being used too much and making the other players feel like they can do nothing because this rule is being used too much. On the flip side, if a rule is not appearing enough we can easily go in and change the percentage to make that rule spawn more. With how much time is left before the end of the school year, it may be difficult to find that perfect sweet spot of balancing because there are so many different possible scenarios without major testing. If you look at major AAA games, there are constant patches being put out to fix bugs in addition to better balancing of the game. Therefore, to find the perfect balancing point for all the rules to interact with each other, I would need a good half-year of constant changing of percentage values and constant playtesting; to truly find the perfect balance. Despite only having a limited amount of time to test and limited resources, we will continue creating the best balancing we can with time we have left before graduation. As I plan to continue onward with this project after graduation, I know I will eventually find the balance I am looking for. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 12 of 27 I did not take into account how many different variables we had to find the best balance of the rules in the time it would take at the start. But this whole process has been a learning process on, one, creating of the game, and two, how to better scope how long certain elements of game play could possibly take considering all the variable amounts of play going into the game. Lessons Learned And Take Aways I started this project out of a love for my childhood and a sense that I will always be a child at heart no matter how old I got. I will always be the person who goes to the animated films and never gets tired of playing children’s games. This being who I was, knew I wanted to bring about this feeling of nostalgia while playing a very iconic game from many people’s childhoods but with a twist. But this was not as easy as I anticipated it might be. There were various bumps in the road with unforeseen circumstances that pushed certain elements of the project back. It also caused me to scope down and figure out back up plans in case certain things went awry. At the start, a bunch of people in my class gave me a stink about creating my thesis using the Unreal Game Engine because I was not a programmer. I only had minimal programming knowledge, and they felt I was better off in Unity because I knew some C#, the programming language Unity uses. They also felt you should only choose a thesis you could do completely by yourself if you could not find people to help. I did not let that stop me, especially considering my own philosophy when it came to projects I am passionate about; I feel just because you do not know every skill to do something, does not mean you should give up and look for something else. Those who are truly passionate will find a way no matter the obstacles to complete what you want to do. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 13 of 27 I had three main reasons for using Unreal over Unity. One, Unreal was used at the game company I worked for and it is the main game engine used at other big studios if they were not using a custom built engine. Thus, this would make me more prepared for future job hunting and I would be showing constant improvement and better understanding of the engine at my job. Two, I wanted to be constantly learning and familiarizing myself with a new software. I have noticed in past projects, if I am not learning something new or doing something to polish and improve a skill, I get bored easily. I did not want this to be the case with my thesis project. It was a yearlong project. I wanted to constantly be motivated to learn something. I already knew Unity quite well except for the hard-core programming. But hard-core programming is something I do not like doing and would like to avoid as much as possible if I could afford it. With Unreal, I basically knew how to import objects and textures at the start and place them in a scene. Third, Unreal makes art look far better than Unity. I wanted to learn the entire art pipeline and the blueprint editor. I also wanted to delve into the particle systems in Unreal. Getting close to end of the project, I have learned a good majority of the art pipeline integration into Unreal. I learned a good part of the blueprint editor for materials and how to make things glow, transparency, using masking, making instances, creating parameters for easy changes, and a few other things all pertaining to materials. I also learned about Transparency and performance issues with overlapping transparency planes. Unreal offers a tool for identifying rendering issues: (Lit Icon > Optimization > Shader Complexity). It turns everything to have certain colors: Green meaning good; Red meaning should fix: and White being bad. Since Transparency planes are rendering two sides of the object it means double the performance and with overlapping transparencies it only gets worse. You want to avoid any white if possible as you will start to get discrepancies and artifacting occurring, especially when you bake No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 14 of 27 lighting. Thus if your scene ends up having a bunch, you have to go into the individual models and either delete the unused polygon space or redo the model where you model the plane to wrap around the texture. The second option is usually the best way to go about creating transparency planes. Outside of the Blueprint Editor, I have also learned a bit about Unreal’s particle system. GPU particles cost less in terms of performance where as particles using premade models cost significantly more. But with model particles, there is a lot more in terms of control on what you want to do with the particle system. However, it is quite easy to get lost in the particle system because there are so many fun and interesting things you can do with particles. I did get a little sidetracked with the particles and started experimenting with things I did not necessarily need which made less time for other things. I was pleased to learn I could easily transport a Maya Scene into Unreal. This meant I could create my layout and lights all in Maya and then export it to Unreal. Lighting systems are different in every program. Being able to create my lights in Maya saved me a bunch of time in terms of efficiency and getting things done. Even though I like learning new ways to do things, lights are not my favorite things to relearn even though they are highly needed. Thus, throughout working on my project, I was putting off doing the lights in the scenes. At work one day, one of my leads was showing me how you could import and export lights to and from Maya or to and from Unreal. I was extremely happy to learn this as it meant I could make the lights a lot faster. Lastly in the Unreal Editor, I learned how its Canvas system for UI works. I was able to incorporate setting up menu scenes and making sure the assets were imported with proper UI settings. Because UI needs to be crisp and have more mips, the import settings for these texture files are different from your basic texture imports for materials. Upon first importing and setting No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 15 of 27 up the UI structure, I was a bit confused at first as to why my UI seemed somewhat hazy and blurry. After a bit of digging and asking around, I was able to figure out how to properly import and implement UI. Throughout this whole process, I have learned a lot about the Unreal Engine, but I am far from having mastered it. Nevertheless, I am happy with how much progress I have made and am excited to continue learning more about the engine at my job after graduation. Besides learning about the Unreal Engine, I gained experience with project management. You always need to have a back up plan for when things go wrong, or people who agree to work on your project decide to bail. Team management is an interesting skill and a very exhausting one if you are doing more than just the management and producing. Unfortunately I was not able to find a Producer for my project, thus having to do all the producing myself, which ended up pushing back certain design and art tasks I had set for myself. This caused me to cut certain parts of the project. Initially I had planned to have different themed environments all representing childhood, but because I did not quite understand how much time producing took out of my schedule at the start, certain elements of the game became simpler and less intensive. Going forward, if I am trying to get an idea made, I will make sure I am either just the producer (without any other roles), or I will find a producer who understands the goals and what needs to be done for the project. In addition to managing the people on my team, certain elements I thought I could figure out quickly proved to take longer than initially anticipated; one of those things being the sticker UI. UI is one of the key elements of game play. If players cannot understand the UI, they are going to be very confused as to how to play your game no matter the format. “Interface design is often one of the most challenging aspects of game development. There is a lot of information to No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 16 of 27 convey to the player and little screen space with which to do it. (Russell) “A game hurts itself by providing too little information or too much, requiring too many inputs, confusing the player with unhelpful prompts or making it hard for a new player to interact. Poor UI design can even break your game completely.” (Quintans) Realizing UI is a key element to successful game play, I was not worried by the UI pushing back certain elements because of how essential it is to the game and conveying to the players, this is how ‘x’ works. Even though my first pass at the UI wasn’t the greatest in terms of style and look, it could still be used until it was replaced with the finalized work. To me, and I believe most game designers out there, the look and game play are the two most important parts. You could have an amazing gameplay, but if the look just does not match and feels like it was thrown in there, you may have the coined term, ‘programmer’s art’ attached to it and people making fun of it only saying it is good, but not great. And on the reverse side, you could have amazing artwork throughout the game world, but if the game play is just eh and feels like its been tacked on, you will only have people buy/play your game because they love the artwork. You want the two to go hand in hand to make the game come full circle, having players love it from any angle. Two questions I’ve been constantly asking myself through this whole process are: 1. Does the look fit with the game play I am trying to accomplish and reach those goals of reminding players of nostalgia? 2. Is the game play enjoyable and remind you, as a player, elements from your childhood? These two questions are what have been helping to tie both the art and game play together. I was fortunate enough to get two amazingly talented programmers to help me tackle these questions. We have been going back and forth on does this mechanic work properly, is it getting the feel we want it to, does this art style fit with the feeling we are No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 17 of 27 trying to get across? Because we are constantly brainstorming the different problems together, the entire progress throughout the project has become easier and more enjoyable. In the past, I have been on teams who just want to stick to their specialty rather than try to help someone else solve a problem. In other cases, because my background is initially in art, my points/thoughts were not considered or acknowledged when it comes to other disciplines. I think this is about the third time, I have truly felt everyone listens to everyone’s input and takes it into consideration. No one shoots anyone down and if someone does not know, instantly offers to explain or help them understand. In being able to create my own team, I was able to create this work environment. I wanted anyone on the team to feel welcomed at any point to help, to give critique or to question why something was being done. I also felt it necessary, both the programmers and artists and designers work together hand in hand. One to teach each other and to better understand what the other one does; two, to make it so everyone could give input and feel it was taken into consideration; and three, to get different perspectives together to be able to tackle issues and solve them better; especially considering my target audience. With my game targeting childhood, you need to get multiple people’s perspectives of their own childhood to be able to properly target that happy feeling of nostalgia in everyone. However, I do not see my game necessarily resonating with those who suffered an abusive childhood. In fact, those with not so happy childhoods, may see the changing of rules to be unfair, akin to something ‘bad’ happened to them and them not considering it to be fair in it only happened to them or them thinking why them. Though if you really try to get down into all the fine details, I bet someone could probably come up with some grotesque way as to why and how this reminded them of their awful childhood. But my main target audience is those with fond memories of their childhood, those who now laugh at the ridiculous situations we as No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 18 of 27 children fought about or tried to have someone else, usually a sibling take the fall. Also on a side note, I think the main reason we all enjoy the project so much, is because it brings back those happy and silly moments from childhood we all love sharing with other people. Conclusion Despite this project coming to an end, it is not truly the end for the project. There is so much more I want to continue expanding on, especially getting in those other art elements which were scoped out. There were also additional rules we started thinking of halfway through the year, which we could not add in because one, we did not have the time and two, other more important elements of the game play needed to be addressed first before adding in addition rules. Working in a game pipeline, things are constantly changing and new and better ideas are constantly coming to fruit. But when you have limited time, there is only so much content you can create depending on your team size and capabilities. Hence my reasoning, this project is not truly done, but I believe it achieves the main goal of revisiting the childhood experience of playing the lava game and enabling the player to feel a sense of nostalgia through childlike play. Throughout this project I have learned of many different people’s experiences of the Lava Game as a child and sibling rivalry, which has never truly vanished. The process of interacting with others to test out elements in the game play has opened my eyes on how people relive their past memories, which was usually done by someone writing something down or through verbal communication or a video recording if you were lucky enough. Putting this experience into a gameplay form, brings people together to play and experience this sense of childhood together and remind each other of fond memories of their childhood. I still feel there are parts to improve upon within the game play, which I plan to continue to improve upon to make an ultimate experience of nostalgia and childhood play. But after a school year of working No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 19 of 27 on this project, it has met many of the goals I had hoped to accomplish and inspired new ones to go after. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 20 of 27 Works Cited Kouyoumdjian, Haig, Ph.D. "Learning Through Visuals." Psychology Today. N.p., 20 July 2012. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/get-psyched/201207/learning-through-visuals>. Quintans, Desi. “Game UI By Example: A Crash Course in the Good and the Bad.” Game Development Envato Tuts. Envato Pty Ltd., 22 Jan. 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. <https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/game-ui-by-example-a-crash-course-in- the-good-and-the-bad--gamedev-3943> Russell, Dave. “Video Game User Interface Design: Diegesis Theory.” Dev.Mag. Word Press, 06 Feb. 2011. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. <http://devmag.org.za/2011/02/02/video-game-user- interface-design-diegesis-theory/> “What are Games?” Reference. IAC Publishing, LLC, n.d. Web. 27 Feb. 2017. <https://www.reference.com/hobbies-games/games-5c78b353301607e4#>. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 21 of 27 Figures Fig. 1.1 First pass at User Interface. Fig. 1.2 Final pass at User Interface. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 22 of 27 Fig. 2.1 Unique Rule Icon Shapes for Color Blind Fig. 2.2. Final Rule Icon to fit with the overall User Interface and look. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 23 of 27 Fig. 3.1 Base Character Textures before going through Color Blind Test Fig. 3.2 Character Textures going through Red-Weak/Protanomaly Color Blindness Filter. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 24 of 27 Fig. 3.3 Character Textures going through Green-Weak/Deauteranomaly Color Blindness Filter. Fig. 3.4 Character Textures going through Blue-Weak/Tritanomaly Color Blindness Filter. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 25 of 27 Fig. 3.5 Character Textures going through Red-Blind/Protanopia Color Blindness Filter. Fig. 3.6 Character Textures going through Green-Blind/Beuteranopia Color Blindness Filter. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 26 of 27 Fig. 3.7 Character Textures going through Blue-Blind/Tritanopia Color Blindness Filter. Fig. 3.8 Character Textures going through Monocromacy/Achromatopsia Color Blindness Filter. No Ground, A Nostalgic Play On Childhood Page 27 of 27 Fig. 3.9 Character Textures going through Blue Cone Monochromacy Color Blindness Filter. Fig. 3.10 All types of Color Blindness next to each other showcasing the side by side differences.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Orcutt, Christina (author)

Core Title No Ground: a nostalgic play on childhood

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Publication Date 04/28/2017

Defense Date 04/06/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Childhood,competitive,Fighting,Floor is Lava,game,game design,multiplayer,No Ground,nostalgia,OAI-PMH Harvest,process,rule,rule changing,rules

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Wixon, Dennis (committee chair), Moser, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email christina.r.orcutt@gmail.com,corcutt@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-366351

Unique identifier UC11258097

Identifier etd-OrcuttChri-5290.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-366351 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-OrcuttChri-5290.pdf

Dmrecord 366351

Document Type Thesis

Rights Orcutt, Christina

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA