Complex to simple
THEME: Play and Abstraction
CONTEXT:
This week I was inspired by the early 1980’s video games and the necessary abstraction that was needed in order to represent objects. In his book the video game theory reader Wolf mentions “The games, then, were sold based on their supposed connections to the narrative contexts shown on the games' boxes,” rather than the actual graphical representation. This week I wanted to take a relatively complex scene and produce a more abstract version of it.
METHOD:
Using Houdini I first created the more complex version of a typical outrun or Enduro scene. Once I had this version I could then covert the representation of the objects into simple boxes.
These box versions I could then Import into unity as the base units for the project
Inside unity I setup the scene similar to the way the original game would have been created. A list of road segments was created and based on the camera position in the screen the individual sections of the road where loaded one after another. After the camera moved past the load section the sections where unload
RESPONSE:
The end result was a endless scrolling piece of track that tries to emulate the feeling of the 1980’s Atari games . As closely as possible I tried to emulate how the early games relied on reusing as many elements as possible and how the section where loaded and displayed on the screen
REFLETCTION:
This week there was actually a lot of play that went into the creating of the pieces – the whole process of converting a 3d model into an extremely simplified version was not only fun but really informative as well.
In looking at the history of these early games learning how the track for early racing games was created enlightening and showed how much more clever people used to have to be in terms of reusing elements
References
Wolf, Mark J. P, and Bernard Perron. The Video Game Theory Reader. Taylor And Francis, 2013.
Ataril 2600 Enduro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvli9CXSqP4
Enduro is an Atari 2600 game that was released in 1983. It is am early example of a car racing game
Enduro uses abstract representations of shapes to create a representation of landscape and to convey the feeling of speed
This work shows us how an abstraction through forced limits can inspire creativity as well as to put the emphasis on gameplay rather than the limits of the medium.