Why Should I Care?

Cpl. Mason G. Kemp
Pvt. Earl C. Chadwick
Pvt. Carl W. Perkins
Pvt. Godon K. Stykes

Who are these names and why should you care about them? These are just a small sampling of the men of Vermont who died in World War One.  My team's game does not intend to hide from the pointlessness of the First World War but do we need to include a litany of the dead as a preface to our game? No we don't, but a list of names isn't necessarily a litany of the dead of a pointless war. It is an accusation, a reminder that you do not know these men, you cannot know these men. It is a condemnation of the human habit of creating the categories of Like and Other.

I do not have the courage or ability to join the military, I don't know if I would even if I did have the courage or physical ability, but the people who make up our military are human being just like you or me. The military often gets demonized for the current war, it becomes a polarizing subject. Either you are For the War! or you don't support the troops, this polarization dehumanizes and segregates the men and women in the military. After all, you aren't part of "the troops", it's those guys over there, away from you. We often forget or avoid thinking about how "the troops" are just people like us, with hopes and dreams and hates and fears.

The Great War, The War to End All Wars, The First World War, The Great Conflagration, The Forgotten War, it started just over one hundred and one years ago on July 28 1914. The American Civil War Ended just over one hundred and fifty years ago. There are still a couple of Great War veterans alive, the war ended within the vaunted now standard human lifespan of a hundred year. And yet, somehow in American schools, The War to End All Wars is a footnote, especially compared to The Civil War which is no longer within the realm of a human lifespan. American schools can't be bothered to explore one of the most fascinating, human, alien, repeatable, regrettable, relate-able  experiences that war can share.

History is the why, the when, the how, but most importantly, history is the who of humanity. And yet, you ask, why should I care? after all, this war killed millions over a hundred years ago, it doesn't matter to me. And you shouldn't, you don't have room in your primate brain to genuinely care about the millions of fathers, sons, daughters and mothers that died or gave their lives for a cause or a reason that you don't know, or even on occasion for no reason at all. We are tribal people, we can conceptualize a few people, up to the low hundreds, but any further than that and we have to start cutting people from our memory banks. Human beings simply don't have the mental storage space to care about the soldiers of The Great War as more than numbers. So how do you honor the millions who died? and they do deserve honor or at the very least, remembrance.  I don't know, but it certainly isn't by ignoring the monuments we erect in our town squares and halls to remind us of the losses.

In Syria today, along the Northern border lies the Kurdish Semi-Autonomous region of Rojava, though it is a state in all but name just as Syria is a State in name only. When the people of Rojava take up arms, do they think about the pointlessness of war? do they worry about their own death? do they want to protect their family, people and country? I don't know and assuming that they can only pick one or even that they have to reason beyond wanting to fight for fighting's sake strikes me as self-absorbed and self-justifying.

So there we are, I don't know why you should care, but I do  know that not caring at the very least about the history of the world is lazy, disgusting and useless. A person is enriched and the world made more beautiful and rewarding when they begin to explore their history, the history of the world.

Week 11 - Why I made a Mech game for three months

Senior Team Week 10 (11/9-11/15)

First off, our game finally has a name! Our Mech game is now called Korku, the Turkish word for fear. I'm not one hundred percent sold on the name but it does sound cool and not everything can be Tommy Falcon Hoverboard Simulator 2015.

A suprise challenge under our belt, we didn't find out until Friday whether or not we'd passed. The presentation suffered from a lack of preparation since we started it on Friday but we had finally hit the nail on the head with regards to content. With most of the work on the presentation occuring between Friday and Monday we hurried forward with game.

The most frustrating part of this week was the number of bugs that sprang into view just as we set about preparing to show off our game. Many of these bugs were low priority issues earlier in the semester that had slid under the radar as the team concentrated on implementing features and practicing presentations. This week we implemented something approaching a test plan which exposed many of these bugs.  For each night spent tracking down and fixing a bug another night was spent speeding through the unexpectedly simple refining of a system or feature. All in all it was a good if stressful week.

Up to this point, my reflections have been on how my team has been doing and how I've felt about that. With the end of the semester and the project approaching quickly, perhaps a look back and a deeper examination of the whys of this project is in order.  When we chose which game to go forward with we knew that none of our game ideas was going to be easy going forward with. I had wanted to go forward with The Finnish game because I dearly wanted to share my love of history and explore a mostly forgotten and unknown section of history. One of the things that the teachers at Champlain look for in our games is innovation and potential uses outside of gaming for fun.

Our vote was deadlocked when it came to which game to go forward with, two votes for the Finnish game and two for Korku, our designer ended up being the deciding vote.  Both of the votes against going forward with Korku came from the Mech enthusiasts in the team.  I had many reasons for voting against Korku. The ones that stand out to me were my worry about the scope of the project and that we would get halfway done with the game and I would hate it because it wasn't a good Mech game. 

A FPS Mech game is nothing new in the game industry, but its also not a genre that is over saturated with games. Each game in the genre is noteworthy and offers something different.  Mechwarrior 4 and it's expansions explored the brutality that comes with all civil wars and the cycle of violence inherent in war. Multiplayer Mech games such as Mechwarrior Online and Hawken don't offer such a in depth look at humanity but they provide a place for people who enjoy the same sort of game to get together and have fun.  Korku is trying to combine the ability to explore complex issues and stories of single player Mech games with the sense of community and ability to hang out with friends of multiplayer games. To top this all off Korku puts a spotlight on one of the lesser known battles of World War One (to Americans) and exposes gamers to something more than the well-tread battles of the Second World War.

*Warning* Major Biases Ahead *Warning*
Somehow despite the common saying about how those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it few people put any real effort into learning even their own history. Everyone knows that the Nazis were horrible and about as close to evil as you can get in a subjective world, but in many ways the First World War falls through the cracks. Especially in America the main concern in high school history books is to let the student know that without America the war would have gone on much longer and that the end of the war set up the Second World War.  Time changes how we view events, even written records change and are revised.  Games are no more permanent than paper but they are interactive and just as practice is more effective than memorization, games can stick in your memory more than other forms of media.
*Warning* End Major Biases * Warning*

Outside of history Korku is a co-op game, focused on cooperation between the two players. The role of the second player is intended to encourage non-gamers to still themselves while hanging out with a gamer friend instead of hanging around being bored or resenting the game for intruding on time together.

Games have the potential to be an important teaching tool, getting students involved in the topics they are studying rather than repeating by rote the datum from their textbooks.  Korku would not be an appropriate game to use to teach anybody younger than high schoolers. A World War One game that completely sanitized the brutality of the war would be doing a major disservice to it's players and students. Korku should be asking the player to explore the idea of good guys and bad guys in war. Was Gavrilo Princep a hero, a fool, a monster or a young man?

Week 10 - Slouching and Suprise

Senior Team Week 10 (11/2-11/8)

At this point in the semester we knew that we were going to need to challenge every week to be able to be guaranteed a place at the senior show. Work continued this week but I don't think that we truly felt the urgency outside of the presentations. Looking back on this week we did not get nearly enough done even though we dealt with many of the things we needed to.

We really tried to take note of the lessons of our previous challenge attempts when we set about creating our presentation for this week. We finished the initial slides by Wednesday and revised them every meeting afterwards. We also set about scheduling Discipline reviews with various teachers for the final two weeks of the project. However we ran into one major snag on this aspect of our week, Michael and I forgot until Wednesday to contact any of the programming teachers while Kody was completely unable to contact any of the art teachers. This very nearly lead to our not having a programming discipline review and did lead to us not having an art discipline review. We expected that we would not be able to challenge because of this and the initial response from the teachers seemed to support this, but when class rolled around we were allowed to challenge the milestone. This week was stressful on the meeting front for me, I felt uncomfortable with my slides, I nearly failed to get my discipline review done and I thought we would be unable to challenge at the next class.

This week I realized that Tuesdays were not good work days for me this semester. Throughout the semester I tended to do less work on Tuesdays and would often be rather directionless. I took steps this week to counteract this by seeking out suggestions from other group members on Tuesday so I couldn't just decide things were done for the night and go home. I also made sure that I was eating enough and was full right before I started working so that I wouldn't end up in the distracted hunger state that I sometimes find myself in. We made good progress this week, many of the more persistant issues in the build were fixed and we polished menu and AI a good deal however I don't feel that we moved forward enough programmatically. Art wise, Kody churned out great assets at a rate that continues to astound me, I honestly don't think I know another artist who creates nearly so much quality work. Design work has always been an area that I struggled to keep track of and I think this was one of those weeks where knowing exactly where the designer was at and what the progress was looking like would really have helped. I felt that several of our group meetings this week were weak, we did not accomplish as much as we normally did during our work meetings.

That all said, during this week I felt the least stressed that I have ever felt during what is essentially the run up to finals week. I think that this is partly the environment of the team,  every single one of them is a good friend and a great worker. We all work well together and I enjoy working with them. I really hope that we succeed in passing the remaining stages and continuing on to next semester together. The other part is that I genuinely enjoy this game, more so and more easily than any other group project I've worked on.

Week 9 - Reassesment and Research

Senior Team Week 9 (10/26-11/1)

 We failed our attempt to challenge out of the Deep Dive stage, this was largely because we failed to convey the research we had done and how that had affected our design process. I do wish that Wilhelm had hurried the previous group a bit rather than simply my team off halfway through each slide of our presentation. Once we had taken a step back and looked at our presentation again we decided to make the most of our extended Deep Dive.

We had failed to show our research, this was easily rectified, in went the slides. We found that we hadn't finalized sound design or exactly what technology our weird war one was using and fixing these was much harder. Sound did not in fact get nailed down this week as the team shifted in opinion from meeting to meeting and I didn't keep track well enough or get everyone else to stick with one position. While we felt we had done enough research previously, the team decided that more research wasn't going to hurt the project.

My research this week focused on The Battle of Gallipoli itself and the conditions in the Ottoman Empire that enabled it to win the battle. One particular point that I was eager to determine was the exact reasons behind the battle (though not directly relevant to the game, it was a point of debate between team members which I hoped to win). Overall a decent amount of new information came up including a very interesting and helpful examination of how the terrain of the peninsula affected the battle, which would be useful for both art and level design.

Progress on the build this week consisted mostly of tightening up controls and networking. One point that we were particularly determined to deal with was getting the weapons to fire directly at the mouse which up til now they had steadfastly refused to do. Michael was finally able to get the guns working correctly by the end of the week. During the Deep Dive presentation our build had crashed repeatedly and we were startled by the bug because it had never happened before. Our Producer insisted that we find the bug before we tested the game again but we never found the bug, and the bug never popped up again even when testing on the same two computers.

Week 8 - Deep Dive Prep

Senior Team Week 8 (10/19-10/25)

This last week felt right, the team was focused on both getting our documentation together for challenging the next stage at the start of the next week.  We each had prototype work to do as well, Kody with getting art assets into the game, Michael was busy fixing and refixing the aiming of the guns and Aiden was designing the level.  My responsibilities were to implement the sounds and get the in game menu to work.  I start getting nervous when a week goes by and I don’t feel like work got done on the game which did not happen this week, unlike the last time we were preparing to challenge.  I was able to strike a healthy balance between implementing sounds, creating the Audio Pipeline, adding the in game menu and writing/practicing my slide for the presentation.

The main letdown of the week was that we did not manage to set up a Discipline Review with Professor Eric Sample who teaches Audio Production classes and who we had hoped would help us iron out the our Audio plans.  The only other Discipline Review we had planned to do this week was with Professor Wehmeyer and it went very well, we went in looking to get a better handle on our aesthetic and to see if we could get any help with our research on the Ottoman Empire. Professor Wehmeyer was a great help in these regards and was very interested in where we had taken the game since we had last talked with him.

We were confident that when we challenged we would be able to pass easily. This was because we had been constantly communicating our research to each other and we had spent each meeting for the last 3 weeks exploring our mechanics, world and story trying to figure out the best way to do everything.  However we were unable to get everyone to create their slides before our Friday meeting and so were unable to practice our presentation then, undaunted we planned to finish our slides by Sunday and practice then. Calamity struck when I got news that one my cousins had died and her funeral was on Sunday, Aidan also found himself stranded outside the state when he missed the bus back to Vermont. The Sunday meeting and presentation practice was therefore very understaffed and what practice the group got did not include everyone.

Weeks 6 & 7

Senior Team Weeks 6-7 (10/5-10/18)

At the start of the sixth week, we decided that we would proceed as if we had passed succeeded at our challenge. We looked at where we were with our game and where we needed to be by the 18th so that we could challenge the next stage as soon as we got back from break. After a review of where the code base was and where we were in regards to the design of the game we bustled off to ready the game for testing.

I ended up working primarily on the networking for the game during these two weeks. Getting networking testable took a lot of fiddling and long nights. It turns out that people don't write all that many tutorials for Networking in Unity and that there are just enough differences in networking code between 4.5 and 5.2 that it is an adventure to code. I got networking up and running on Wednesday 10/14, four days after I had wanted to move on to other important issues. However with networking in place several other aspects of the game quickly fell into place, specifically the game loop got it's first draft and AI/player interaction.

We knew that we would have to nail down the backstory for our game quickly because it influenced so many of our other choices. Our first goal was to figure out exactly where and who we were fighting. We knew that we were making a Diesel Punk WW1 mech game but we didn't want to retread the western front. After several proposed locations we settled upon The Battle of Gallipoli in the Ottoman Empire or modern day Turkey. With our location decided we were able to limit our possible participants list down enough to choose whose side the character would be on. The decision was hotly contested and even brought up during QA and class, but eventually we settled upon the Ottoman Empire. In part we settled there because of our artist's love of the possible art styles but we also got feedback during discipline reviews that the Ottomans would make more sense to play as.

During the course of the first week we discovered that we had not actually passed the first stage and that to fully pass the first stage we would need to present three separate and distinct relationships between the pilot and the engineer roles. This focused us on resolving this thorny issue, if either of our roles wasn't as fun as the other our Co-op mech game would fall apart at the seems. The first two relationships were relatively easy to come up with as we had been wrestling with the relationship issue from the start of the project, but the third required a more imaginative approach. What Aiden eventually came up with was quite an interesting and distinct third option and it threw our previous notions of the best relationship out the window. Eventually we came to see that the novelty of third relationship was mostly just novelty but it did teach us some important lessons about player interaction.

Week 5 - Actually Challenging

Senior Team Week 5 (9/28-10/5)

This week was very important because this was the last chance to challenge the first stage before the break. Missing this deadline would have left us with 5 weeks to complete the rest of the game we chose. Knowing this we focused ourselves on hitting every item we had failed to finish for last week, we also improved our prototypes.

The feeling of this week was mostly paperwork and dialogue. I spent some time revising TRAs and other documentation based on feedback from the practice presentation we did in class last week. The main issue was the suggestion that Isometric cameras were easier to do in Unity than I had previously believed. After researching the matter I discovered Unity's built in system for creating a Isometric camera, however my research did not turn up a solution to the issues caused by the Isometric camera.

I also made the GIFs of the Plant game for the presentation, this was an interesting and sometimes frustrating experience.  Learning how to make GIFs and how to use fraps was simple but figuring out the little eccentricities was an annoying task. In the end though I came away with enough good gameplay footage to make two satsifying GIFs.

The decision for which game we would go forward with was the hardest decision we had to make so far. We each made our case for our currently favored game, we were just barely in favor of the Mech game. The next step we took was to formally cast our votes in light of the previous cases we had made. It came down to a 2-2 split between the Mech game and the Finnish game, Aidan was the deciding vote. In the end we went forward with the Mech game.

Also Kody made an amazing piece of concept art for the Mech game.