Music Play and Time Response
THEME: Play and Time
CONTEXT:
The context behind the work this week sits around the theme of having multiple time spaces and the way the user can interact with them.
This week’s work was sparked of by a point discussed in Time and Space in Digital Game Storytelling where the point was made that “narrative time in games concerns the relationships between two time schemes: story time and operational time”(Wei ,2010)
I was heavily inspired by the time mechanics in games such as Braid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Exh6uhJno) and Prince of Persia: The sands of Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmAGhiupN3Y) In which the time of player exist in one time and the time of the environment or enemies runs on a different time.
I was also inspired by the way players perception of time is seen as described by Nitsche where he states that “perspective towards time in games tries to describe a player’s comprehension of temporal situations in games” (M.Nitsche 2007). I wanted to play around with how narrative time is used especially in games like Chrono Trigger where the structure of the game plays around with users experience of Time
METHOD:
Early on in the piece I realized that there wasn’t the time to create a work based on how the user interacts with narrative so I switched to trying to have different elements exist in different temporal spaces but all of those spaces having a relationship to one central element.
In Unity I started playing around with music as this was something that had a linear time structure and normally goes from beginning -> Middle -> End and seeing what I could come up with to break this structure.
An Early Attempt at this led to me being able to control the music speed and direction. Once I had a feel of how that simple mechanic worked, I then hooked it up to the movement of a single quad. Once that was worked I started to try an explore more complex movements and animations
RESPONSE:
The end result was a small app that you could play around with and the animation loops would all play in a different according to what the user was doing with the music.
https://youtu.be/lIpB5KAckKE
REFLECTION:
The end result of this doesn’t go as far as I would have liked to go and while I would have loved to explore this in a more dynamic and more game like world I am happy with the way that the interaction between all the elements on the screen plays and the fun that can be had by controlling all these elements.
The end result of this is something that I would like to take further in a future work.
References
M. Nitsche, “Mapping time in video games,” in Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference, pp. 145–151, 2007.
Wei, Huaxin et al. "Time And Space In Digital Game Storytelling". International Journal Of Computer Games Technology, vol 2010, 2010. Hindawi Limited, doi:10.1155/2010/897217.