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Shrooms: Color & Forms

In Niek Meffert’s concept for Shrooms, giant mushroom people battle giant plant people in their swampy homeland, while grinding the remnants of humanity under their figurative boots. The dev team was Meffert, Lucas Oliveira, Sabrina Christiansen, Kaspar Dahl, Natasha Beck, and myself as Lighting Designer and Technical Artist. You can check out the demo (Mac & Windows) on Itch.io here.

Frequently heard during environmental modeling: “It’s good, Sabby. Get rid of the straight lines.”

The objective was to create a bright, colorful, murky, fungal setting. Fungus suggests bright, “sickly-sweet” tertiary colors, and we wanted an organic, lively scene. However, with too much clashing color the scene would have become busy and unreadable. Just finding your way and knowing what to interact with would have meant a frustrating cognitive load.

For that reason, I worked with the team to enforced certain rules to control user attention. The main character is in complementary colors. The bad guy’s color palette is a high-saturation split complement. NPC characters each have a single, dominant color. Non-interactive parts of the scene favor muted, analogous colors.

Lighting rules were also held to. Unimportant parts of the level fall back into mist and shadow. The character path is comparatively well lit, always suggesting where the player can and can’t go. Interactive parts of the scene (usually just-for-fun destructibles) pop comparatively, while others harmonize.

Forms avoid straight lines, with blobby, asymmetrical and impractical shapes but—importantly—recognizable outlines. Classic Warcraft games, and the art of Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch) were strong references here.

And of course, what’s the point of a game without asshole physics?

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Oh Steam…

Kubrick twist: Searching Steam aliases is notoriously broken! This seems to be a known issue that’s been causing consternation for half a decade. Specifically, aliases with trailing numbers (e.g. spacetoast123) are unfindable with the exact string, and usually with a partial string.

So, while I’ve been able to send a friend request to the Second Prize raffle winner ($25 USD), who has no trailing numbers, nothing I’ve tried has brought up profiles for the First and Third Prize winners ($75 and $25, respectively).

If you entered the raffle, and your Steam alias ends in numbers, please friend me via my public profile page: https://steamcommunity.com/id/rhinocrate/ Over 300 hours of Civilization VI? Yes, it’s a problem. Regardless, you may have already won! I promised not to post handles publicly (and creating a duplicate with the same alias seems quite easy) so winners can’t be directly announced.

Bottom line: If you ever run a stunt like this yourself, even though it might make you look spammy, get an email too.

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Raffle Code

As promised, I’ll be raffling off one $75USD Steam digital gift cards, and two $25 cards shortly. Just to be super transparent, here’s the raffle code.

And no, I’m sure mathematically this wouldn’t hold up in a real lottery–but for a raffle with fewer than 20 valid entrants, I think we can call it good.

function rankRaffleEntrants(){
        var entrants = "Prima Secunda Tertia Quarta Quinta Sexta Septima Octavia Nina Decima"; //Steam handles
        entrants = entrants.split(" ");
        ol = document.getElementById("orderedList");
        //print function
        function addToList(entrant){
          var li = document.createElement('li');
          var nextInList = document.createTextNode(entrant);
          li.appendChild(nextInList);
          ol.appendChild(li);
        }
        while (entrants.length>1){
          var pick = Math.round(Math.random()*(entrants.length-1));
          var entrant = entrants.splice(pick,1);
          addToList(entrant);
        }
        addToList(entrants[0]);
      }
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24 Hours In…

Imagine if you couldn’t even bribe people to play a videogame. Twenty-four hours in, that’s where this cursed project is at.

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Basilicum on Reddit – Raffle Extended!

Within the hour, I’ll be posting a Unity WebGL game to Reddit, in hopes of collecting a statistically meaningful sample of responses to a questionnaire. In addition, through Tuesday, June 8 at 22:00 CET I’m conducting a raffle to encourage participation. This could go wrong in so many ways, and only right in one.

The characters’ anxious hand-wringing is my own.

Edit: The raffle is open! Click here to play the test app.

Performs best in Firefox and Chrome. Feel free to play the game as much as you’d like, but please only submit one survey form.

Terms and Conditions:

Persons over 18 who submit the survey between Friday, June 4 at 22:00 CET and 22:00 CET Tuesday, June 8, and enter a valid Steam profile name will be eligible for a raffle, to be conducted by June 20th, 2021.

-One first-place winner will receive a $75 USD digital gift card, sent through Steam.
-Two runners up will receive $25 USD digital gift cards, also sent through Steam.

The winners will receive a friend request from my Steam account, “rhinocrate” and receive their digital gift cards as a friend-to-friend gift.

I wish it weren’t necessary to say, but I must reserve the right to disqualify participants based on evidence of ballot-stuffing or other forms of inauthentic or abusive behavior. There is a limit of one entry per person. Steam accounts must have at least one purchased game to be eligible for the raffle. If fewer than 20 valid responses are received, the raffle will be cancelled. No data collected will be used by me or anyone else for any purpose beyond tabulating results and completing the one-time raffle, nor will personally-identifying information (including IP addresses and Steam account handles) be distributed.

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Hacking Twine: The Multiplane Effect

For Chronovoros, I created a Twine hack using custom macros inserted via Chapel’s Custom Macro Framework. These interact with the game’s custom CSS styling by adding foreground and background image elements. The image files,  indexed-color PNGs with a 1-bit alpha channel, are crushed down to surprisingly small file sizes for their resolution. (GIF would be just as useable, with interesting implications for animation.)

A layout for the different planes of one “scene” in the game, color-coded

Each set of images has its own macro, which when called passes a list of the desired image filenames and styling to a function which displays them. The images are scaled to fit the width of the window, and positioned to align either their top edge to the top of the viewport (the entire scrollable content of the page) or their bottom edge to the bottom of the window. An additional function is called every time the window paints (started by a call to its own macro on the first page of the game) which adjusts the vertical positions of the planes based on user scrolling; the vertical positions are calculated so that whatever the height of each individual image, scrolling completely from the top to the bottom of the window displays the entire image.

In practice, the multiplane hack breaks when the window is too tall. An aspect ratio should really be enforced with some kind of letterboxing scheme in the CSS. Having to write and call an entirely new macro for each set of image planes, while not complicated, is a little inelegant for a production-ready tool. Additionally, HTML5 special effects like contrast, color adjustment and blurring are implemented, but didn’t end up used on Chronovoros. Knocking the multiplane hack into something easier to use would be a good weekend project, for a later date.

Click here to download demo files and code for the Twine Multiplane Hack.

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Chronovoros: A Multiplane Graphic Novel

The Nordic Game Jam 2021 is over and–as far as I know–everyone survived. My team set out to make a “cinematic text adventure” you can play in your browser. Which wasn’t totally a thing, so we had to invent some stuff.

The theme, announced at 6:30PM Friday, was “Pending.” (Yes, you can imagine the initial confusion!) We had the story, setting and characters in rough form by mid-morning Saturday. All five characters were designed, the outline was running in Twine, my basic multiplane hack was running, and I had some of the layouts sketched out by the end of that day. (Around 1AM, for all of us.) Sunday was a sprint to get the temporary artwork replaced, layers assembled and compressed, story finished, and the bugs squashed. We got it submitted at 4:50PM Sunday–10 minutes to spare!

The story and interactive logic were written by Sejr Thompson. The character design and other hand-illustrated art were by Alexander Pechlivanidis. My own role was twofold: Designing the layouts–in an animation sense–of the independently scrolling background and foreground art layers, and hacking the Twine text engine to display them.

It’s a jam game, so there are a few rough edges, but not half as many as you’d expect. Reviews so far have been very good. Check it out:

Play Chronovoros on Itch.io

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The High Arctic: A Story World Pitch

View as PDF

A story world pitch deck for Alex McDowell’s “Planet JUNK” collaboration. 500 years after the collapse of our civilization, an admixed tribe live an Inuit lifestyle in northern Greenland.

Destroying the world in 30 years is depressing, but this isn’t my first time down this philosophical road. God kings and abject despotism have held civilizations together for thousands of years–many times longer than democracy. Tribal-scale survival for hundreds of thousands of years.

The horror writer must look where they don’t want to. I feel that we understand, on some level, how fragile our current civilization is. With rare exceptions, we dress up collapse stories to make them more palatable–as Romero zombies, as alien invasions, as fantasy-science-gone-amok.

As dark as it was at times, I wanted to look at a downscaling of human life, and find some beauty and hope in our own survival.