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"Can she solve a puzzle?" was the question we asked ourselves while looking through photos of me as a child to use as reference for the younger version of the character.


Adobe XD is apparently in maintenance mode so I was looking for an alternative app for wire-framing when I came across a free website called Figma. I'll have to admit now that if I'm honest, I hated it. It was not nearly as intuitive to use (I did, however, skip any tutorials out of impatience) and the end result just seemed janky to me. This could be because it's my first time attempting to wireframe a video game mechanic -- I do quite enjoy designing websites cause they're easier for me to understand as someone who isn't familiar with the coding side of video game development.


The game mechanic I was using to test my ability to create a prototype on Figma was the one with the jewellery box. My idea was that the turn key at the back of the jewellery box could be "turned" to open a secret compartment Joud so kindly added to the model. In that compartment, would be a key that would open some other lock for the next puzzle. We originally hoped we could have some sort of system come up in the players view that allowed you to inspect a 3D object to find the turnkey at the back of it. However, this seemed too complicated to implement and we decided on having 2D widgets showing the front and back view, flickable through arrow icons, since Stanley already knows how to do this in Unreal. Once you press the button to interact with the turnkey, the widget will close and the jewellery box will animate opening back in the 3D scene.



I'm honestly probably not going to be using Figma again (if I can help it) since Stanley and Joud seem to understand what I mean by simple explanations in words and sketches so I'll stick with that method of communicating my ideas for the time being.


Here is the Jewellery box in game:




Recreating Memory Items

My original idea was to just scan the actual papers and cards I had in my memory box and blot out pieces of information like ink splatters. However, this was quite messy and distracting from the original functions of the pieces so as Tadej suggested in a previous tutorial, I tried my hand at recreating them instead. This allowed me more creative freedom and the ability to censor personal information of people whose privacy I would not want to invade as I'm unable to get all their consent.


The first object I attempted to recreate mainly in Photoshop. The AI Generate tool really came in handy for instantly and smoothly removing written text and leaving a blank space for me to replace names and such. In order to recreate the handwriting as closely as possible, I mostly copy and pasted existing letters and rearranged them to spell new names.


I kept a couple of the ink splatters just because they were four-digit numbers which would be irrelevant to puzzles that involve information on this card. For example, I'm thinking 1215 the digits from my birth time could be the code for a safe lock in the game. I'm unsure how to draw players attention to these numbers -- the1102 from my birth date are also intact four-digits -- but I'm thinking the character narration could provide a clue or draw attention to the information to guide them.


"I once asked my mom what time I was born so I could share my birth chart with my astrology obsessed friends. I was a taurus rising for the longest time because I just guessed a time. Apparently entering this world at 12:15pm makes me a cancer rising. I won't forget it now." (True story.)


The "I'm a Girl!" card is gonna be in the Baby box my mother kept of things from when I was born along with a couple pages from the journal it came with. The Baby box is gonna be in the master bedroom part of the first level.



ALso, I've made another font. After using Calligraphr to turn my handwriting into a font to write the Ephemeral journals, I've become familiar with the process and Calligraphr makes it quite easy to do. You simply download their templates -- I use Minimal English and Minimal Numbers to get the basic alphabet and punctuation I need to write short messages. It's not until I've imported the font to Canva several times that I realise I'm missing characters like brackets so I think in future I'll try adding a Minimal Punctuation template for those.


On Monday, I'd forgotten to bring my iPad to the Emerging Media Space in the library (which is our main workspace for this project since it has the PCs with Unreal Engine on it) so I had to physically print the templates and fill them in with the pens. Since those were the only writing tools I had on me to write with, I had one chance to get the letters down if I didn't want to have to reprint it. This meant that the majority of the time customising this font was spent digitally fixing the letters with their in app letter editing system that features minimal brush sizes and a couple brush shapes (round and pixels) with an eraser function. Overall, it was quite difficult to achieve with a computer mouse and probably took longer than necessary.


This design was based on a combination of birthday cards: one written by my mother on behalf of the rest of my family when I turned fifteen and the other from my grandmother (Nonna) on my 19th. We thought the inside cover on the right side seemed too blank so I borrowed the graphic from my Nonna's card.



On Wednesday, I made yet another font. As I've been recreating these pieces from my memory box I've decided creating custom fonts to mimic the handwriting is both a fun way to personalise the documents and also achieve greater realism and accuracy to match the realistic aesthetic of the game. Luckily, I came prepared this time and brought along my iPad and Apple pen which significantly sped up the process and made it a lot easier to make adjustments to individual letters as I went.



Since the original note was written on custom stationary of my old friend's family, I recreated it using a card texture in Canva, some corner border design accents, and fake information replacing the address and surname header and footer. It's quite difficult generating a font that mimics someone's writing style. I upgraded my account to a Calligraphr Pro account that costed a one-time payment of $8 for a month to see if the features such as randomisation, ligature, and spacing adjustments could make the font appear more seamless. It also allowed me to create more than one font.



Here's the rest of the objects I've made so far:





****UPDATE*****

Over the weeks this blog has been in my drafts, Stanley has implemented the majority of the game mechanics. This meant that he created a combination lock system for the safe in the master bedroom of the house. As you know, it was one of the first "puzzles" I'd thought of where the answer to the safe code was always meant to be found on the pink 'I'm a Girl !' card in the baby keepsake box. To make it something lesser known like my birth date, it was gonna be my birth time. However, we found inconsistencies across the baby book my mother wrote in and the card.



We decided we would stick with 12:16pm, as written in the book, because it was much easier for me to change the card. I took this opportunity to just recreate the card entirely so it would be cleaner and more aligned with the aesthetic of the other objects.



Here is the safe mechanism:




The Matthew Diaries

I'd found myself stuck on what more I could add to the game since starting these so I employed the help of my cousin, Celeste back home in Hawaii where my original memory box and diaries are. We've been referring to the diaries from when I was around 11-16 as the 'Matthew Diaries' because they were the basis for my song about my childhood/childhood crush, Matthew. Celeste has been very helpful in sending me photos of diary entry pages I've been recreating with my font and canva.



Copying down all the text took several methods. My first instinct was to use iPhone's feature where it detects and highlights text in a photograph and allows you to copy and paste it. There were obviously flaws to this since it wasn't able to detect all my handwriting accurately so I would edit it in a Google doc before pasting it into canva in my font. Eventually, my iPhone was able to detect barely any of the text and even what it did detect was incomprehensible, so much so that I was practically retyping all of it anyway so I abandoned that method.



I then got Stanley to read an entry aloud to me so I could copy it down without having to stop to look back and forth between the photo and my typing. Of course, I couldn't always type at the same speed he could read but it got the job done.


When he left to go back to the EMS to work on Unreal, it dawned on me that there was a simpler method to achieve this. I could just use dictation to type out my words as I read out the entry myself. Too bad I only realised this at the very last entry.


Here is the diary in game:


I've also found more recent diary entries and Celeste sent me some from the other notebooks I wrote in. Every time I moved, I found the diaries again and wrote an update about my life in the blank pages. I think implementing these could be a nice continuation from the younger years as it became an exercise in writing to my future and past self -- very on theme. However, I'm afraid we may have too many things to read in the game so far.



Reflections

In conclusion, no, she cannot solve a puzzle. I think I'd been so determined to make the gameplay of this project more complex as if that would make it more valid in its chosen medium that I've spent the majority of this time stuck on what would make the perfect contents. I've had to surrender to the process and hope that the atmosphere is at least coming across the way it's intended with what we have created so far. What I've ended up doing is sharing personal items from my real memory box back home that I never thought I'd exhibit in this way.


We decided that would be a good foundation for the game's plot -- that you're going through a virtual world that's a representation of the internal world made tangible only through a memory box full of assorted photographs, letters, trinkets, clippings, notes, cards, etc. and that these items are your guide through the space. If we still decide to have the game open on the train in the Filling in the Spaces cover art, Hayn (how we've referred to her in development)/Rylie (my middle name and the one we've decided to call the actual character in the game) will have the locked memory box with her without a key after packing up to move to a new place. This will introduce the issue that leads you to this world.


As much as I felt it may be overdone, I've realised diary entries are probably the easiest way to tell a narrative based on a characters internal thoughts and feelings. Reading these old entries of mine has been the quickest route to putting myself back in the mindsets I was in during these younger years of my life. My age is also evident in the tone of my writing. I didn't originally intend for my diaries to be such a driving force in shaping the story of our game because it felt like it would be spelling it out too bluntly. However, since we're now at the final weeks before the deadline, they are a godsend. I only wish I had more time to flesh out the details of the world because Stanley and Joud have created an incredible framework with the levels and assets they've built.







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Superliminal, Sketching The World Map, and Project Proposal

A couple weeks ago, I was catching up with my older brother, Milton on a phone call and explained the rough idea for our video game project to him. I told him I was mainly stuck on how to incorporate Peter's suggestion from Week 3 about having "multiple versions of Nyah" (who for the purpose of distinguishing which is which, we have decided to call Hayn). He then suggested the idea that there are multiple 'ghost' versions of me scattered throughout each level but instead of switching perspective in a way that switches character arcs entirely, you only see a scene from the perspective of that version of me.


The examples he gave were: a child version of me jumping on the couch but frozen in mid-air, or a teenage version of me on a phone where her perspective shows anything beyond the screen to be blurry, out of focus, or grey, symbolising how being absorbed in the phone/technology/social media, etc. can disconnect you from what's happening around you.


I added that these could be the main puzzles that allow you to progress e.g. exploration of the house is necessary to find every 'Hayn' and complete the corresponding 'perspective puzzle' related to what that version represents of a certain mindset/worldview/memory. Everything else in the house could provide additional information about the character and setting without being necessary to complete the main story which, my brother remarked, was like Life is Strange. He also showed me a trailer for Superliminal -- a puzzle adventure game that plays on depth and perspective in a surreal sort of dream setting. He suggested I play it for research into how exactly I could approach the puzzles in our game. So I added it to my wishlist and watched my emails like a hawk as I waited for a notification that it might be on sale.


It wasn't, but SEASON: A letter to the future was and I decided to take it as a sign to just buy my top 3 wishlist items anyway. My bank balance is not happy with this decision but I sure am.


Compared to the first two games I played, this game was a lot more inspiring. I especially liked the ending because it gets particularly surreal and abstract as the tone becomes a lot more suspenseful. It really immersed me into the final level and the game's bigger purpose.


In fact, I was so moved by the ending that I cried. The second time I watched it.



And then I played it a third time. To get this recording of pure gameplay for the last two levels.



After playing Superliminal, I felt like I developed the critical thinking skills my little brother said I didn't develop from playing video games growing up, so that made me feel pretty accomplished. It did also feel like I got gaslit into trusting myself and the process but it was a valuable life lesson regardless. It's since served as essential inspiration for the potential framework of Filling in the Space's world and gameplay.



The World Map
World-building and Fictional Cartography as a Narrative Outline

After weeks of inactivity due to severe writer's block, I decided to break up the game by levels corresponding to their environments and the themes associated with each. This, I found much easier than attempting to start with the narrative's characters, conflict, resolution in a conventional storytelling manner. I had also been struggling to consider my own life story -- as the starting point -- in a chronological order since retrospect makes it incredibly difficult to recount memories as they were at the time they were made. Instead of trying to place myself in a mindset I haven't been familiar with for years (e.g. my past selves) and recreating it, I embraced the perspective retrospection has allowed me when reflecting on my past in the present. This kind of contemplation blessed by hindsight is exactly the sort of experience and feeling that made me want to pursue the endeavour in this final project in the first place. Therefore, summarising the overarching themes that tie together the scattered stages of my life and containing them in more metaphorical places across a world map has been brought about much clearer and more fruitful results to my plot planning.



0. The Train


Inspiration:

- filling in the spaces cover art by Crystal Legaspino

- A Taste of the Past

- Life is Strange

- Metropolitan Line/Northwick Park station southbound platform





1. The House

The first level is based within a childhood home designed after a few of the houses Nyah’s own family lived in as she grew up. While the surrounding area of the level features parts of her hometown, specifically her elementary school playground, the beginning stages of gameplay will take place inside the house. Players will have to interact with the house’s interior similarly to a child playing “pretend” games in order to complete puzzles and navigate the space. It would encourage them to exercise their imagination as they uncover memorabilia of the protagonist’s childhood memories and familial relationships.



Inspirations:

- Superliminal

- What Remains of Edith Finch

- Alice in Wonderland

- Community S3 E14 Pillows and Blankets

- Memories of playing pretend as a child

- House on Carnoustie Crescent

- House on Serano Crescent

- Kaylee's Childhood Home in Nevada






Assets:

- Pillow/blanket fort

- Sliding door closet

- Cardboard boxes

- Wooden chest

- Couch car



2. The City

The second level expands beyond home life and into the protagonist’s external world. It will be structured similarly to a maze or labyrinth representing the effort to navigate peer relationships against individual identity. Gameplay will be about escaping the maze of side streets, buildings, unfamiliar people and the industrial while having to regulate the subsequent anxiety and mental instability affecting players ability to complete tasks and navigate the space.




Inspirations:

- Superliminal Labyrinth

- Pokemon X and Y Lumio City

- The Last of Us

- Maze Runner

- Canary Wharf

- Toronto/Richmond Hill

- Vancouver

- Honolulu

- London/Hampstead




Assets:

- Grocery Store

- Backstreets/Alleyways

- Corner Shops

- Maggie's Corner


3. The Dream

The third level represents the internal world of the protagonist. The environment will be dream-like, surreal, and dynamic. This portion will be heavily reliant on syncing music and sound to the gameplay as its more expressive and interpretive than the other two more tangible levels.




Inspirations:

- Superliminal Whitespace/Retrospect

- Real dreams I or someone I know has dreamt

- "I dreamt the world ended in a flood and I climbed the jungle gym"

- "In a world of construction paper I know I can't stay"



4. The Dimension



Inspirations:

- Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirror Rooms

- Marina Abramovic Portal & Transitory Objects for Human and Non-Human Use

- Inside Out core memories

- The Illusionary World from Clannad

- Domain Expansion from Jujutsu Kaisen

- The Pocket Dimension from Miraculous Ladybug

- Ephemeral Memory Garden




Joud's 3D Models

Since the game's design is based on places I've lived personally, I work most closely with Joud by creating concept art for her to make 3D models from that will later be put into Unreal Engine by Stanley. So far, she has made a good start on the first levels' house, train, and the main avatar modelled after me. To provide direction for her to follow even when I'm not able to work with her in real time, I've sketched out floor plans, created collages in Photoshop, and sent reference photos she can use as guidance, for example, when she's been away on trips for professional ski training. Joud has been very good at quickly understanding my vision based on the various methods I've used for communicating them visually.



When she has struggled with understanding my less detailed sketches, we've hopped on an online Google meeting so I could walk her through it.



It has been a very strange experience watching Joud create a Meta Human modelling after me. However, the process of identifying the finest details to make miniscule adjustments of my facial features is not so foreign to me as I used to sketch many self-portraits. I've found that this process reminds me a lot of that and has made it easier for me to guide Joud on how to recreate my likeness. Though we did take to naming the Meta me, Hayn, for ease of reference and differentiating between my virtual and corporeal self (and because it was just too uncanny to keep calling her by my own name. The majority of avatar templates weren't very similar to mine and I asked for help explaining things about asian faces that I wasn't sure how to put into words. She remarked that asian facial structure kind of resembles a cat's so a few cats were also included in the reference photos.



We also scanned some of my objects from Week 2-3's workshops in which we had 30mins to create something that encapsulated our initial project ideas. This was to encourage us to get up and make things in preparation for the practical research we would do as the driving force behind the creative process of the module. Since I live on campus, I had a lot of my personal belongings easily accesible from my room such as my guitar, my polarid camera and digital camera, baby photos in frames, my journal, my sketchbook, my songbook my Aunt gifted me, and the stuffed animals I've had since I was young. Joud discovered an app called Kiri that allows you to make 3D scans from your phone which we were eager to try out on these items (and me).



This is definitely a method I'd like to try incorporating into my game so that we could have scans of some of my actual childhood belongings in the game. Not only would it save time making and finding 3D assets, but it would be really interesting to see the real memories overlap with the fabricated memories, like the house interior modelled only after my own jumbled memory of the layouts of several houses I grew up in. Julie mentioned that the difference in textures might also add to the idea that this world is an amalgamation of the real and imagined and in taht case, become an art style in and of itself.

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Yayoi Kusama, Marina Abramovic, and Infinite Dimensions


Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms was an exhibition I didn't think I'd get a chance to see since tickets had been sold out for the past two years since I'd moved here for university. So when I got an email from Tate that the final round of tickets had gone on sale, I simply checked availability on a whim.


Kusama's work was one which heavily inspired my older brother and 2018 CMP graduate, Milton's own Final Major Project, Inertia. My first memories of the Westminster Harrow campus had been from when helping him build that installation, and later, at his graduate exhibition in Marylebone campus' Ambika P3. At the time, I had no intentions of following his footsteps and pursuing a degree in Contempoary Media, so it's interesting to see how it's come full circle.


The first part of IMR was different from the infinity mirror rooms as I'd known of them, and had more of an impact on me than I'd have anticipated. Yayoi Kusama's Chandelier of Grief (2016) features a chandelier that is "fixed to a rotating mechanism and, combined with its flickering, pulsating lights and the mirrored walls, is intended to create a destabilising yet mesmerising effect."



The experience felt like a direct confrontation with myself. Victoria and I remarked that the visual effect of our infinite reflections surrounding us from different directions felt uncanny. To me, it was a great representation of the concept I'd had on my mind as of late: a space in which one could oversee every version of themselves from their pasts and possbilities. This idea was one that I wanted to incorporporate into our game as part of the overall message.

As for the second room, it was a lot closer to what I expected. However, the pictures I'd seen posted of it were so affected by the infinity effect the space always seemed so much bigger and so I was surprised to find it wasn't. Nevertheless, it was beautiful and the most similar to my vision for the game's potential symbolic dimension space.

Tadej had mentioned to me that what was most effective in tying together our previous year's video game project, Ephemeral, was the final level's "memory garden" --- space where the theme of memory (and connection through sharing of memories) was most evident, and the atmosphere generated by the glittering spheres of voice memo recounts of different participants' memories with the game's emotional instrumental theme (composed by my own younger brother) really came together to convey that nostalgia and sense of community.


Fortunately, I'd already intended to create something similar as is clearly the overarching theme across my work. Many of my songs I visualise as soundtracks to movie montage type reflecting on a series of memories that lead to that point in my life and this project is just an expansion of that.


I don't remember if my vision came first or the phone call from Liam --- either way, my close relationship with my brothers has become increasingly relevant to my work and this project's no different.


After dropping out and moving back home to reevaluate what he wanted to do, Liam called me one day in the middle of some epiphany. Long story short, he recounted his life and shared the things he'd never told me before, as well as how much working on Ephemeral meant to him as a project that felt like the unspoken understanding we had with each other despite never being the kind of siblings that spoke with a particular sentimentality. He ended the call by telling me that sometimes, he wondered if he would've been happier had he stayed in Hawaii after graduating high school, instead of moving to London for his first year of uni. The conclusion he came to, however, is that he doesn't regret his choice. He was able to be there with me and for me when I needed him and if there's a parallel universe where he was happier having stayed home by himself, he would still rather have me in it.


That's why his domain expansion dream with Ephemeral's finale playing provided a perfect visual representation of The Dimension of Filling in the Spaces.


The idea is visually similar to the infinity mirror rooms, the Unlimited Void, Pocket Dimensions, and Inside Out's core memories/long term memory.



We also visited the Royal Academy of Art for the Marina Abromovic exhibition. While I was previously familiar with her physically intense performative pieces, such as Rhythm 0 (1974), Victoria and I resonated more with her more spiritual, nature-based works of later years. Her use of natural stones and materials to connect with the source of all things was a concept which resonated with us.


We liked her Portal piece, in particular. Victoria told me about how it reminded her of something an art therapy teacher said to her. "When a person goes into a space, they take on a new body within that space. So it's essentially the two bodies, the space, and the person interacting. It's like their separate bodies collide in space." We thought that idea --- of stepping into a new body, taking on a persona appropriate for the situation, space, and dynamic of the interaction between others within the space --- was similar to stepping through a portal. This concept felt like one I could use to apply to the idea of entering new "versions" of myself --- as the protagonist of the game and the different perspectives the player can experience.




Summary of Relevant Exhibition References:

Yayoi Kusama - Visual Artist

Kusama's immersive and otherworldly installations, like "Infinity Mirrored Rooms," serve as a reference for creating surreal environments that mirror the protagonist's internal struggles and fragmented memories and multiple realities.


Marina Abramović - Performance Artist

Abramović's work, such as ‘Portal,’ ‘Dozing Consciousness’ reflecting on the different states of being she reached from pushing her body to its limits through her physically intense performance pieces influence the narrative's depth in portraying the protagonist's emotional journey and self-discovery.



SUPER META ACID TRIP FUNHOUSE

When I was severely ill earlier in the semester, I spent a whole day sleeping and had the trippiest fever dreams. There was one which I described as being like a "super meta acid trip funhouse." You know how in a funhouse, things you step on move or you look into mirrors that distort your image? It was like that except, as you went through it, reality itself would change around you. The fabric of the universe and everything that's true would change every second and you wouldn’t be able to grasp it was changing long enough to get yourself out of the loop. Somehow the moral of my urban legend fable-like dreams is always along the same lines because the only way out of this one was thinking of someone you truly loved, some might call a soulmate, and keep a hold on the thought of them as they could be the only constant in every version of reality and the universe.


Also, I made this phone case to commemorate it.


This concept of being able to jump into multiple universes' versions of yourself reminds me of Everything Everywhere All At Once (which is one of my favourite films).



I particularly like this clip of Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wange verse jumping through every universe all at once. The amount of detail in every second long clip is so visually effective and impressive.


Practical Experiments



I experimented with my own starlight projector and a small mirror I had in my room to see if I could capture any similar effect with just what I already had. Naturally, it was quite difficult due to the significantly smaller scale. The lack of blank ceiling or wall space in my room also made it hard to make the space look as vast or infinite as I'd have liked as the ceiling light fixtures would show. The white frame around the mirror also made it impossible to make any reflection look seamless.



I've also been painting and drawing pictures of sunsets. I find that I always gravitate towards imagery of spaces in the clouds with a moon and other celestial symbols e.g. the design of this website, the design of my professional website, my first album cover art, etc.


The saturation and different combinations of pastel coloured sunsets back in Hawaii were a sight that always brought me peace, especially during quarantine. The way the crescent moon would often be visible during the day in the clear sky felt surreal and the stars I'd get to see so clearly from my own driveway always helped me put things into perspective. Some of my best memories so far have been while watching the sunset over the ocean or the mountains with friends. So when I'd paint to destress, those were the images I'd automatically find comfort in visualising. That's also why the background of the filling in the spaces album cover is set to golden hour.




[Instagram Highlight Covers]




[Photo vs. Drawing]


[Paintings]




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