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3D Objects References

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Timothy Thomasson edited this page Mar 11, 2018 · 63 revisions

Pippin's 3D Objects References

Keywords

  • scale, legibility, distance, materials,

Words

Videos

Games

  • Davey Wreden. The Beginner's Guide
  • Bennett Foddy. Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy
  • Rockstar. Grand Theft Auto III
  • Oikospiel Book I
  • Firewatch
  • Walden
  • BPOS
  • Second Life
  • Vesper.5
  • Museum of Simulated Technology
  • Pippin Barr. v r 1

Tutorials, documentation

Alexander Kozina's 3D Objects References

Words

This excellent series goes in-depth into how Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty utilizes the physical and mental “maps” of the original Metal Gear Solid to subvert its tropes and characters. While not all of it is specifically devoted to discussing the physicality of the spaces in 2 versus those of 1, the parts that do (such as one part, which discusses how the physical space in which Snake fights Vulcan Raven in 1 is re-used and corrupted for Raiden’s Fight against Fatman in 2) provide strong examples of how familiar video game spaces and objects can be re-contextualized to have vastly different meanings than what was originally intended.

This article, like the entry above, discusses The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask from a wide variety of angles, but features a very meaningful part at the beginning in which the author discusses how the layout and choice of objects in one of the game’s latter areas suggest a deeper, darker meaning that what is visible on the surface. It’s a great illustration of the power of environmental storytelling through 3D objects in what would otherwise seem a fairly benign environment.

Games

The Unfinished Swan begins with the player in a seemingly empty world. Upon tossing paint around, it’s revealed that in fact, the player is inside of an entirely white world, one whose physical presence is brought to life by how much the player “paints” it into existence. As the game progresses, the world gradually becomes more visible without the player’s paint, and the player gains different abilities in place of their ability to paint. But for its first few levels, The Unfinished Swan is a great example of the physicality of a game’s world and the objects within it being (in a way) dictated by the player’s actions, without the objects themselves actually changing.

  • Kojima Productions. P.T.

P.T. (Playable Teaser/Silent Hills) is a horror game that features a single corridor that the player goes through in a seemingly endless loop. At first the effect is not super interesting; at most, it might even be a bit irritating, as the player hopes they could escape the hallway’s confines. But overtime, the more and more the player passes through it, the more they become sensitive to the hallway’s composition – its normal layout becomes so ingrained in their memory, that the moment something changes, it’s both shocking, and commands attention – because in P.T.’s world, where there is an extremely limited economy of space, any object that suddenly appears or disappears must have an important justification for being there.

Videos

Boundary Break is a YouTube series in which classic games are explored beyond the boundaries that their developers intended them to be explored, by taking the each game’s camera into areas that it was not normally intended to go. As a result, the series’ narrator, Shesez, in able to explore all sorts of instances in which creators used the 3D objects in their games in clever ways, in order to get a specific effect out of them that would not be too energy-intensive. In addition to being extremely entertaining and informative, I believe that the effects demonstrated in these videos have incredible potential as concepts that could be further explored/subverted for our 3D objects prototype. If anyone is having difficulties coming up with clever things to do with their 3D objects, check this series out!

(While all the videos in the series are worth watching, I specifically provided links to a video about Low Poly textures in several games, and a video about the first Crash Bandicoot game, as I felt that those videos in particular had a lot of interesting content in them).

Steven's 3D Objects References

Keywords

  • alienation

Ideas

Bertolt Brecht was a 20th century (east) German playwright. His interests lay at the interstices between theater and politics. While most classical theater is tied to ideas of catharsis and relief, Brecht believed that this was politically dangerous and developed methods that would allow a play to engage an audience in a way that led to political awakening and critical thought. You could probably summarize a lot of the ideas here by connecting them to the fourth wall, a 'turn' and a wink to the audience, and so on. But without getting into too much detail, it's the set designs I want to talk about: they're completely unconvincing and often gestural; they represent nothing in particular; and they combine with the harsh lighting of Brecht's (epic) theater to specifically create a sense of UN-realism. The point then is to do the opposite of 'transporting' one into a fantasy world, or allowing the identification of the audience with the protagonist. The goal is to alienate the audience into seeing/realizing something about the world and what conditions it politically.

Connected to Brecht, Oikospiel uses a similar 'alienation' effect on its audience. Its models are janky and ill matched, and often representing of things that seem out of place; its lighting is occasionally too dark and sometimes completely blown out; it is almost never clear what the story is or what you're supposed to do. Yet the result is not something totally aleatoric or without meaning. Instead holds together with a mood of playful criticalness, something that seems appropriate given that it very much thinks about games as constructed objects.

Joshua Murphy's 3D Objects References

Games

Portal garnered a lot of attention for its namesake mechanic, but the portals are only so fun to play with because of the carefully-constructed 3D levels. The portals allow you to reorient the space and redirect momentum so that you may reach places that appear at first glance to be unreachable. The spaces are also used for exposition, and are instrumental in fueling the player's suspicions about the "helpful" voice guiding them through the game.

A spiritual successor to Portal, this mind-bending puzzle game puts the player in levels that do not conform to the natural laws of Euclidian space. Antichamber problematizes the navigation of 3D game worlds that has become second nature to so many gamers and, in so doing, pushes the player to ponder and experiment with the game space rather than just passing through it.

No Man's Sky has received a lot of hate for failing to live up to its massive hype, but it is remarkable for the scale of its procedurally-generated universe. Its development was both a technological achievement and a cautionary tale. After a relatively short while, the species, ships, and planets feel repetitive even though they are all different. The massive variety of worlds and wildlife was little appreciated because that variety had no meaningful impact on gameplay, and often not enough impact on the "feel" of different locations.

There is a pleasure to maintaining forward momentum that is present and encouraged in many games (e.g. racing games, the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise). One of the nuisances of the original TANKS! game is that it is easy to drive into an obstacle and get stuck, then have to back up (and likely back into another obstacle). This makes it difficult to maintain momentum for long enough to feel this pleasure. Removing obstacles from the map makes it easier for the player to avoid getting stuck, but the game still requires a limited space so that one tank cannot just continually run away from the other. Super Stardust HD provides an interesting solution to this problem by situating the game on the surface of a sphere, resulting in a space that is both small and unbounded. The player can forever maintain their forward momentum, but they cannot escape from conflict.

Films

In speech we often talk about time using spatial metaphors, and the passage of time is often represented using space in art (e.g. the sequential panels of comic strips). The tesseract scene in Interstellar is a particularly interesting attempt to represent time through the use of spatial dimensions. Inside a black hole, Cooper temporarily exists outside the regular passage of time. The tesseract is a three-dimensional grid representing all moments of time in his daughter's bedroom over the course of several years. Cooper can see but cannot be seen (since light can enter but cannot escape from a black hole), but he is able to exert a limited influence on the past through the manipulation of gravity.

Words

A seminal article that attempted to bridge the gap between the ludologists and narratologists by proposing that games are "spaces ripe with narrative possibility." Jenkins discusses environmental storytelling in games as part of a tradition of "spatial stories" (e.g. The Odyssey, Lord of the Rings). He notes four ways in which environmental storytelling operates: 1) evoking pre-existing narrative associations, 2) providing a stage upon which narrative events are enacted, 3) embedding narrative information within their mise-en-scene, and 4) providing resources for creating emergent narratives.

A short blog post that looks at a couple of examples of environmental storytelling, focusing particularly on narrative information embedded within mise-en-scene.

Rebecca’s 3D Objects References

Keywords

Space, movement, perception

Videos

  • This GDC talk by Claire Hosking details how an architectural approach to game design can inform how we think about space in 3D. One of my favourite quotes from this was, “by compositing disparate materials with the same tonal goal, you kind of reveal a truth about the universe and it’s latent possibilities” [17:30].

  • Not about games per se, but this video about matte paintings in film did get me thinking about how a similar effect of using 2D images in 3D game spaces can help provide a false sense of 2.5D depth, like in Skyrim as briefly shown here. Jurassic Park for SNES however has my favourite example of this 2.5D effect.

Words

  • This article shares an interesting overview of the history of 3D game development. I personally hadn’t realized that the first 3D game was in fact a tanks based game, which might be interesting to some folks!

Games

3D Space

  • One of the things that I think is coolest in 3D games is the potential for impossible architecture and movement. Although Manifold Garden is maybe one of the most explicit examples of this, Silent Hill PT is one of my personal favourite examples of games using impossible space for unique effects. The player traverses a looping hallway where minor but increasingly disturbing differences between loops works to create a feeling of dread and uncanny.

  • LSD Dream Emulator in its own strange way kind of does something similar to the nightmare feeling of the PT game. Dream Emulator is a loosely connected fragment of dream ‘nights’ that will vary depending on how the player moves through the space. Bumping into walls of the dream will change the subsequent dream phase depending on the type of object touched.

  • Dishonored 2’s Clockwork Mansion is one example of how 3D space can be shaped by the objects in it. Set in a steampunk clockwork mansion made by an evil genius (have I sold you yet?), this level takes the annoying video game trope of having to re-traverse a space by instead making the “level” (house) have a delightful set of mechanisms and hidden passageways that are fun to explore.

  • In another great example of how Dishonored 2 treats space, The Timepiece level has players jumping between the present and past of a decrepit house to wonderful storytelling and gameplaying effect.

3D Interactions

  • In what really kind of needs to be seen to be fully appreciated, the Museum of Simulation Technology uses 3D objects and perspective as the crux of its gameplay. Moving objects further away from one’s point of view “enlarges” them in the 3D space, which is needed to bridge gaps as part of the game’s puzzle system.

  • The weird and wonderful world of Store Simulators is an example of 3D objects that I find strangely captivating; the care and detail put into making these products “feel” real in a simulation is something that could be turned on its head to comedic and critical effect.

Janos's 3D Objects References

Videos

  • Overwatch: How A Hero is Mei'd By David Gibson GDC 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHevkQIZL2M) This video covers animation mostly (how they used squash and stretch and how the animation is similar to older cartoons) but it does talk about how to make a character relatable and appear to be more real with the use of animation. He also talks about character creation and concepting.

Games

  • Eve Online CCP Games (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DJVkmcOcaE) This video goes over the Character Creation in Eve a game where you spend 100% of your play time in space in a ship. So the Character creation becomes very arbitrary similar to the project Pippin worked on where there were boxes which contained unique objects like sliders and horses that no one can access. The Character Creation in Eve becomes very trivial and non important aside from the initial faction you choose.

Dark Souls Franchise From Software (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzJF_GQQOZQ) Yet another example of seemingly trivial character creation where the appearance of your character is covered up almost immediately, in this game some of the armor even changes your body shape. Again this is similar to previous example I give above.

Tutorials, documentation

Charles's 3D Objects References

Movies

Inception is good for deforming environment. After all, everything is happening into a dream. Often creating the illusion that they called paradox, only visible from a point of view (somehow really similar to the mechanic of the game Monument Valley. Another focus in the movie is the spinning top, telling if you're dreaming or not. This object even has the role of being the last images of the movie and creating a lot of theories on the conclusion of the story.

  • Wes Anderson, any of his movies really

This director is really good to build the scenery in his movies. Every object and details are placed with precision to create the best effect on the screen. Even if it has a lot to do with camera positions and view, Anderson often uses symmetry and centre line to create environments. Just look at this clip to see how everything on screen is calculated. Nothing is there without reason. Every object serve the function, in my opinion, to fill and organized his shots.

Games

One of my favourite series of video games. The story of those games can be abstract to the player who does the game without taking attention to its surroundings. Indeed, Dark Souls games use details in the environment and description of objects to tell narratives. It's the player's job to link all the clues to build the story and the lore of the world. The developers stay quiet about the story of their games, so nothing is really certain. All is theories and speculations. People like me who are interested in those kinds of hidden narratives are often captivated by the theory of other players like VaatiVidya, who analyzed each description and look closely to the scenery to find out some clues about the story.

I think this project of mine is strongly linked with the subject of this project. Typograzoo is a zoo with letters and typographic elements in a cage instead of animals. It was odd to create the mesh of every letter inside blender before exporting them into Unity, since the engine uses text mostly on canvas only (UI). Each part of the zoo represent a group of letters or symbols. In the consonants zone, letter meshes are merged together to create a beastly shape that could be linked to actual living animal. My main objective was to make my letter shapes look almost alive.

Another game that put a lot of details into its scenery to help the player understanding the story of the game. Little nightmares are happening on a boat and have some really disturbing foes who are going to run and search after you. One scene, I'll call it the Shoes scene, let the player navigate in a sea of shoes. It's a weird moment when you try to find your way in many shoes meshed (that act more like particles), while you're being chased away by "something" under you. Even if you don't see your foe in this scene, that doesn't mean there is no pressure.

A similar scene, in my opinion, is in Amnesia: The dark descent. The part of the water level, when you're beginning to be chased when you walk in it, gives you the same feeling of being chased by the unknown.

Roberto's 3D Objects References

Works

Videos/Words

Games

  • The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Ocarina of time itself uses 3D to tell a story through the representation of Hyrule Castle and Town before and after the 7 year time skip but also from the particular Forest Temple Puzzle presented.

  • The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild The dungeons in breath of the wild are all large 3D puzzles in themselves that must be manipulated to travers. The most complex likely being the DLC dungeon though all of them, even the smaller shrines, make the area large environments.

  • Shadow of the Colossus uses the environment as a major part of the story and sense of immersion. But also as the main arenas for the Colossus battles. Many of which can be considered to be 3D environments in themselves to a degree. Argus is interesting due to how much it must be used to gain access to different areas in the arena and then ultimately gain access to it.

  • Pandora's Tower sets up many traversal areas to reach the main bosses. With Specific themes and large Hero Prop like structures. The towers are also ultimately connected in a Metroidvania style of design in a 3D world.

  • Super Mario Galaxy The implementation of many small planets around which the player may travel remains interesting and a fun use of 3D objects and environments in an abstract form.

  • Gravity Rush/Daze makes use of gravity (as the game would imply) to traverse through many interesting environments and locations in an interesting floating 3D world.

Mélina's 3D Objects References

Words

Keyword: brutalism

I put two sources, however the subject is more of the same subject, which is brutalist architecture. It is (honest) expression of raw materials, and use of space distinguished by the modularity of the form. These buildings offer somehow a cold aesthetic that plays with composition and light, to convey the nature of the materials, that lend themselves well to 3D engine.

Video

Insightful video about low poly aesthetic, with the consideration of the time of production to create good results. Redd insist on the effectiveness of low poly, by reaching the limit of reduction of the geometry, without compromising the model’s silhouette. Plus, Redd offers tricks to obtain better result.

Installation

With his installation, Bellinkx explores the limits of space and the materiality of objects, as (real) plants literally grow through walls. Generally, for any video game or movie, objects that cross walls unintentionally are considered undesirable, or even glitch. This often leads to amusing situations for players and/ or viewers. However, due to the nature of game engines, these are likely to appear. The tangibly of our reality does not allow this kind of situation. That’s why when comparing it with video games, the installation seems to blurry the lines between reality and virtual.

Pandora's 3D Objects References

Coraline is a stop-motion film from 2009, based off of a novel by Neil Gaiman, and also the first of its kind to be filmed in 3D. 3D models/printing were used to create a more traditional/analog look for a something that had a surprising amount of digital contributions. The characters and environments are expressive, and allow the same spaces to alternate between drab and realistic to fantastical and colourful; these spaces also play with the viewer's perception of what something familiar or sinister can be, a central theme in the film.

An episodic adventure game from 2015. The story takes place in a small, coastal town, where you play as a high school student studying photography who eventually discovers that she has the ability to rewind time. The story alternates between small town drama and the surreal, and often uses the same distorted areas and models to create an eerie dissonance between the past, present and future and the nightmarish spaces in between.

An upcoming PC game said to be "Harvest Moon meets Pokémon meets Animal Crossing". While this in and of itself sounds like a lot of fun, I was initially drawn to it because of its aesthetic. It really pulls off low poly in a way that harmonizes its character design, colour scheme and theme really well. The pastels and cute, quirky characters placed in these detailed environments fills my heart with nostalgic whimsy and childhood glee. That's the intent, I'm sure.

Patrick's 3D Objects References

Keywords

  • cutscene, environment

Words

Why Games Have Loading Screens

This text goes on to speak about why games have loading screens, and why they are necessary. Talking about how certain games, that are very graphic heavy, or include a lot of assets such as 3D models, sounds, lights etc. require for there to be a longer loading time in order to have the game properly load in as the developers intended it to be.

Videos

The Art of Video Game Loading Screens

Interesting video that gives a little backstory about video game loading screens, in why we use them, and how companies can disguise them now with more seamless gameplay. Lets hear it for video games

Pokemon Gameplay

In Pokemon red, or nearly every pokemon game for that matter, the game is never fully showing you everything that is going on. The player has to jump through cutscenes/loading screens/ black screens, in order to be in the next place environment. Examples of in Pokemon are when the player goes from inside a house, to outside of a house, and vise versa. The player is met with a black screen to which it then loads in the new environment.

Metal Gear Solid

Same as in pokemon, Metal Gear Solid never entirely shows you everything that is going on in the game. It only shows what is important in that specific instance of the game. An example from Metal Gear Solid is when Snake is infiltrating the base. Only the front part of the base is being shown, until he crawls through a vent, to which the game does a cutscene and loads up a new section of inside the base.

Games

  • Pokemon
  • Metal Gear
  • Skyrim
  • Resident Evil

Sam's references

Words

Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies According to this article, literary works tend to follow the natural laws of the world in which they exist. This article argues that an imaginary video game world, such as the one developed in Everquest, tells a lot about the actual world in which the game was created and the cultural beliefs of people who made it. It tries to imitate the configuration of cities, for instance, but eliminate some part of its natural design.What the game exhibit and what it ignores appears characteristic of its context of production.

Art

Sol LeWitt: Incomplete open cube Sol LeWitt created many iterations of an open cube in a very formal way and displayed them next to each other in one room. From some perspectives, the cubes appear as a chaotic composition but from other points of view, the pattern becomes clear and elegant again. This piece relates to the notion of perception and how the mind can figure out a hidden logic behind the sculpture.

Joseph Kosuth: One and three chairs This piece by Joseph Kosuth talks about the notion of representation. Exhibiting a real chair, a picture of this same chair and a definition of the word chair next to each other, it explores the relation between language and referent and questions the equivalence between them. Kosuth mixes the concept with the application of the concept, taking a step away from a purely conceptual work.

Art Assignment: Copying Starting with the case of Sherrie Levine photographs series, After Walker Evans, showing exact reproduction of Walker Evans photographs, this video elaborates on the notion of copy in art. Ranging from artists such as Manet and Picasso, referring to other paintings in their own work, to Pop Art, borrowing imagery from advertising, this episode of the Art Assignment talks about the concepts of authenticity and reproduction in art.

Game ?

Cory Arcangel: Super Mario Clouds In this piece, Cory Arcangel removed all the representative elements from Super Mario Brothers, except for its now iconic background. It appears as a process towards abstraction. In the manner of the suprematism movement, Cory Arcangel eliminates all the elements of the game until he reaches what could be considered as its original canvas, the light blue sky and slow-moving clouds, questioning the moment at which it is no longer a video game.

Simon-Albert's 3D Objects References

Games

  • Superhot Monochrome environments were always very interesting to me, and I think the team behind the shooter Superhot nailed it well. Composition and scale become very interesting, and use two other colors (black and red) to direct the player's eyes.
  • Braid Jonathan Blow used a very simple trick to display scrolling dialog. Instead of asking the player to press a key to skip to the next blurb of text, the text is physically embodied in books distributed over the screen and the player has to walk through them to display the text.

Movies

  • Enter the Void Gaspar Noé used a lot of camera travelling techniques in this film, which on one hand feel very disorienting, but on the other show that there is either a timelapse, or a parallel story happening.
  • Spring, summer, fall, winter -- and spring Always interesting to see the same environment in different contexts. In this movie, the same house is shown across all four seasons, with each of them associated to a different beat in the story.

##Words

  • An Architectural Approach to Level Design Architecture is a very misunderstood discipline by level designers, and this book by Chris Totten aims to close the gap between the two. Game designers certainly don't need to become architects in order to craft believable spaces, but a few architecture notions are essential to get better at it.

Edwin Lucu's 3D Objects References

Games

Garry's Mod is a physics sandbox. There aren't any predefined aims or goals. We give you the tools and leave you to play. You spawn objects and weld them together to create your own contraptions - whether that's a car, a rocket, a catapult or something that doesn't have a name yet - that's up to you. You can do it offline, or join the thousands of players who play online each day." This is what you find in its steam store page description. I really like the idea of playing around with different 3d objects in a sandbox space, I would like to incorporate such an aspect into my game.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin "was intended to have a darker atmosphere and more serious tone in contrast to the previous installments in the series, and features a new storyline independent of the previous games. Set amidst a post-apocalyptic world, the story focuses on the Rubinelle 12th Battalion, one of the surviving remnants of the military of the country of Rubinelle, which had been locked in a century-long war with its rival, Lazuria, prior to a devastating global meteor shower." I really enjoy the Advance Wars series, I find the gameplay great and the stories enjoyable. What I particularly like about the game's gameplay is the capturing of bases and spawning more troops, new tanks, airplanes etc. I would to incorporate some of these core gameplay mechanics into my game, not necessarily just like the game but perhaps something derived from it.

Videos

  • Matt Wester Pick up and Move Objects | Unity 2017 Tutorial This tutorial reveals how to pick up and move objects just like the title suggests, the scripts in place and its effects are similar to that of pick up an object in Garry's Mod, I believe this will aid me in my endeavors in creating my next prototype.

Vito's 3D Objects References

Words

This article touches on the importance of planning, style, lighting and optimization of level design in games.

Videos / Games

This video explains the philosophy of the Nintendo with super Mario and how they constantly introduce new game mechanics and how the level design compensates to learning and interacting with.the new gaming methods.

This video also goes through the Super Mario philosophies Nintendo has put into place and how they affect the world in the latest Super Mario game.

Kyle’s 3D Objects References

Words

An article on Gamasutra exploring level design. The fourth page examines object placement in particular.

Videos / Games

A look at the Blue Sphere minigame mode in Sonic Mania, where the camera uses parallax (or is it rotozoom?) to give objects in the scene a sense of depth in a 2D world.

Laura’s 3D Objects References

Keywords

Space, colour, therapy

Words

Tutorials

Games

  • Tilt Brush - Google The shooting will be transformed into colourful projectile paths of shooting stars.

  • Even the Stars - Pol Clarissou An esoteric exploration game lacking any real goals other than to live, die and try to enjoy it. Also interested in the feeling and overall aesthetic of the game.

  • Space Colors - Team Chaos LCC In this game the player shoots out colourful trails to light up the playing field and cause explosions/trigger animations.

Movies

  • Wall-E - Andrew Stanton For the overall feeling and aesthetic of the game I'd like to reference this scene from Wall-E.

  • Star Wars - J.J. Abrams This movie illustrates colourful shooting trails from a first person perspective in outer space.

Audio

Anthony's 3D Objects References

Keywords

  • perspective, interaction, objective, alter

Words

A great article that dives more in depth about game modding. Often, games become more popular due to some game mods. This article also lists specific games that game mods had high impact on and why. Often game mods not only change the visual aspects, but the objective as well. Game mods almost becomes this way for players to reimage the game the way they want.

A article that gives a broader overview of game modding. Covering the beginnings and how far its grown. It also gives great examples of games that grew even more in popularity due to its modding. Some games in which it created an entire new mission or objective.

A great website that gives you a workflow on how to approach 3D game assets and how to get them prepared. It covers things such as UV mapping, scene placement, texturing, conceptualizing.

Videos

Sort of like were doing with TANKS, this person has modded a game made previously, the person explains the things he has changed. Gives nice examples of what can be changed in Unity.

A GTA V mod, although these are popular, this person shows a mod that resembles super mario world. I find this interesting because its like an open world for mario, allowing him to choose from mario like vehicles and to simply explore.

Games

  • LittleBigPlanet.

I feel this game is a good example of what 3D assets and change from the players perspective. A simple game that resembles a modern mario look uses detailed assets that add to the players experience. From the characters to the actual objects, often your character is found in a world that is out of proportion. Certain levels also include completely intractable objects that may of may not have purpose.

Fadel's 3D Objects References

VideoGame/ Video

This level in the game Donkey Kong Tropical freeze is truly a visual treat as well as a mechanically simple and smart level. the Idea is to bounce on these Jello-like platforms to progress forward. Their bounce physics add a feeling of freedom & fun that the player doesn't expect in the game, and really makes the level feel different then the rest.

There is something inherently interesting about a maze, The mystery, the aesthetic, the discovery and constantly wondering what will be behind each turn/corner. in the Legend Of Zelda BOTW, mazes are rare to come by, but when you find one, it becomes a puzzle because of how grand they are and how small you feel, trying to figure out the correct path, and using creative ways to get through is more fun than the reward at the end

Timothy Thomasson's 3D Objects References

Videos

Chinese artist who creates very realistic 3D scenes and landscapes. A lot of the models for instance seem like base meshes that can be found online for free yet they are used in interesting ways. (Also see http://jonrafman.com/)

The "blackest building in the world" in South Korea (similar to Nam Jun Paik covering Chicago's Cloud Gate in Ventablack) Interesting to think about how the game engine can immediately render a pure ‘black’ (or other colour) object. Could be used for making strange objects that stand out apart from the world -- or whose silhouette can only be seen. Also makes me think of different shades that can be put on objects -- keeping the mesh the same but changing their display -- wire frame, pixelation, etc.

Games

Interesting to me because all of the animations are done on objects whose form was made by players. Makes me think of ways of generative designs for objects and their animations -- maybe something cool with randomizing meshes and animations for weird glitchy effects.

Very cool style of combining 3D and 2D visuals. I Especially like the part of the video where they toggle the '2D' button (in the Unity editor)...

Vincent’s 3D Objects References

Keywords

Prop, Blend-In, Size, Scale

Words 

Wright explains the very basics and fundamentals of stealth games and gameplay. From protagonists, movement and into environmental aspect of stealth games. He explains how developers needs to be conscient of the player behaviour and need to find himself a place to hide/blend in. He shows how important what the player sees has a direct impact on his decisions and thus his gameplay experience.

  • Hide and seek: The theory of mind of visual concealment and search by Giles M. Anderson,Tom Foulsham, Eleni Nasiopoulos, Craig S. Chapman & Alan Kingstone https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-014-0675-6 A very complete theoretical book about behaviours in the classical Hide and Seek game depending on the environment aspect/ location. The authors go deep into explain behaviours directly linked from feedback to the location of where the game is taking place. Very interesting to see explication of extremely similar patterns from completely different individuals.

Film

  • Toy Story (1995) Disney Pixar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXvR6yxUVSw Toy Story is a very interesting animation film because they created a micro world (Toy world) in contrast with the human world. In this particular scene, we can see the toy soldiers trying to sneak in the Human world. This is a nice example of scale differences in a stealth context.

Games

  • Deus Ex Human Revolution (2011) Eidos Montreal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xorZiitfedc This is a classic stealth shooter game, the levels are made in a manner to incite players to sneak up on enemies.

  • Gary’s Mod: Prop Hunt https://youtu.be/42qY6Z9Yxkw?t=36s Prop hunt is a variant of Hide and Seek, where half the players tries to hide from the other half by transforming themselves as environmental props. This game will create some micro gameplay amongst the two teams, to taunt each other like shown in the video.

  • Call of Duty World War II: Prop Hunt game mode (2017) SledgeHammer Games https://youtu.be/OAzVGQ2TUwQ?t=41s This is a extremely similar concept to Garry mod's prop hunt, almost identical. The props are in game props and it is played in known maps from the players. To know the maps is a very important aspect of this gameplay, because as a player you can tell if something is out of place.

Course Outline | Course Schedule | People | Experimental Game Design | Lights, Camera | Sound | 3D Objects | Final Project | Technical Resources

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