Hellacious: Live Well, or Don't
From UTSC "New Media" 2008-09 Senior Students Wiki
A New Media Senior Project by Adam Sawicki
Contents |
Essay
hel•la•cious | heˈlā Sʜ əs | very great, bad, or overwhelming
-Oxford American Dictionary
Hellacious is a Flash based work that explores storytelling in video games. It is a two-dimensional side scrolling game developed on Adobe’s Flash platform, written in ActionScript 3. Its purpose is to weigh the importance of interaction, immersion, and narrativity against one another. In Hellacious, your character’s progress is measured by the length of its life. The game only lasts as long as your character stays alive, and the narrative unfolds only as long as your character picks the right path. As the user starts the game, an audible narrator will be introduced. It is up to you whether you listen to the narrator, the writing on the wall, or if you forge your own path through the world of Hellacious.
Ludology, the study of games, does not exclusively concern itself with game-play and how it effects its users, but also how important narrative is to a game and/or whether narrative should even be explored in video games. In Hellacious, the narrative and the story are very important to the game. Hellacious is developed in such a manner because I agree with much of the research I conducted before undertaking this project, because of statements such as the one below from a report entitled Death with a Story:
Results showed that game players identified significantly more with characters and felt more present when playing story-based video games compared to nonstory-based video games… [Story] helps involve them in the game play, makes them feel more immersed in the virtual environment, and keeps them aroused (371-372)
Upon finishing Hellacious and testing it among many different players, it became undeniably clear that most players identified with the game’s character in that they very much wanted to not only succeed in progressing their virtual life forward, but they also started to harbor questions regarding the way they should live this virtual life. Should they listen to the omnipresent voice instructing them where to go, or should they deny the voice’s wishes and live their virtual life in a manner that strays from the apparent norm? Because players wanted to discover what else there is in the world of Hellacious and what forces govern it, I whole-heartedly agree with the aforementioned statement that, “[Story] helps involve [players] in the game play, makes them feel more immersed in the virtual environment, and keeps them aroused.” The story in video games is extremely important, especially if one wants to engage, immerse, and motivate a player.
The methodology I undertook in developing Hellacious was comprised of five steps, and they were: 1) research, 2) writing, 3) programming, 4) media production , and 5) testing. All steps proved to be equally important. Without research, Hellacious would not rely as heavily on narrative as it does currently, effectively changing the game entirely. Without setting a significant amount of time aside for pure writing, the narrative would fall flat and players would have little motivation to move through the game. The programming step was by far the most time consuming, taking up four fifths of Hellacious’ development time. Without reserving programming that much time, Hellacious would be bug-ridden. The media production step comprised of writing, recording, and producing all sound effects, all music, and all spoken dialogue. I decided to produce all media after programming because if I were to run short on time, I was prepared to drop this step from my development, move on to the next step, and still be able to produce a final product with my vision still intact. The final step I employed, testing, proved to be immeasurably important. Only after testing Hellacious did I notice the many bugs apparent in the game. Without the employment of the above methodology, Hellacious would not have been finished in time.
Technically speaking, Hellacious takes advantage of many current technologies, and could not have been made possible without the use of software like Adobe’s Flash and Photoshop, Apple’s GarageBand, and Propellerhead’s Reason. The most important program utilized in the development of Hellacious was undeniably Adobe’s Flash. It is where all of the programming for the game was written and compiled. I ran into many challenges while programming Hellacious, spending upwards of a couple dozen hours troubleshooting problems that arose. My intermediate level of Flash programming afforded me a relatively comfortable experience in development, but while building Hellacious, I taught myself to take advantage of many features of Flash I previously was not knowledgeable in. While shuddering at the memory of spending more than six hours fixing one problem, I am thankful for the experience, because without such experiences, I would not have gained the knowledge and experience I am privy to currently.
New media to me is an exciting field that I still see as being in its infancy. I created Hellacious to explore storytelling in video games, because most of the current interactive new media projects, installations, programs, video games, etc. do not seem to rely enough on narrative and immersion, forgoing classic literary musts like character development. Hellacious being a video game, is part of the new media field, and it aspires to help move the genre of video games forward in engaging players through well written and immersive stories. I hope to push artists of new media to create more meaningful story driven experiences.
Hellacious is important to me because it is my entrance into game development and because it is my open statement to game developers everywhere, hopefully inspiring them to create more meaningful and engaging story driven experiences. It is important to you because it implicitly comments on the life you live and because it engages you in a new experience in an ever evolving genre of new media. From here, Hellacious will grow in levels, narrative complexity, and most importantly, in the number of questions it asks you, the player. The story of Hellacious will continue to grow, evolve, progress, and be updated at http://he.llacio.us.
Word Count: 997
Bibliography
- Ang, Chee Siang. "Rules, Gameplay, and Narratives in Video Games." Simulation & Gaming vol.37 no.3 pp.306-325 (Sept. 2006). 27 November 2008. <http://sag.sagepub.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/cgi/reprint/37/3/306>
- Bradley, Samuel D, Annie Lang, Edward F. Schneider, and Mija Shin. "Death with a Story: How Story Impacts Emotional, Motivational, and Physiological Responses to First-Person Shooter Video Games." Human Communication Research vol.30 no.3 pp.361 (2004). 27 November 2008. <http://scholarsportal.info.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals&journal=03603989&issue=v30i0003&article=361_dwas&form=pdf&file=file.pdf>
- Suttner, Nick. "Shadow of the Colossus Postmortem Interview." 1UP.com. (29 Jan. 2009). 2 Feb. 2009 <http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3172528>
- Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. MIT Press, 2004.
- Official Shadow Of The Colossus Site. 2005. Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. <http://www.us.playstation.com/PS2/Games/Shadow_of_the_Colossus/OGS/>
- hellacious v. demo 1.0. 9 Apr. 2009. Adam Sawicki. 20 Apr. 2009. <http://he.llacio.us>
Images
Inside the game: animation and sound
Inside the game: level matrix
The website: the index page at he.llacio.us
Playing the game: after the introduction, level 1
Playing the game: the quietus drop
Playing the game: final level
Playing the game: the end?
Personal Biography
Adam Sawicki was born in Bialystok, Poland on April 3rd, 1986. At the age of seven, he moved to Toronto with his family, and then to Mississauga shortly thereafter. Adam applied for university computer science programs, was accepted, but ultimately decided against such an educational pursuit, as he believed it would not afford him the artistic flexibility he wanted to practice. Adam enrolled in the New Media program at the University of Toronto at Scarborough in 2005, where he is currently finishing his double degree in English and the aforementioned program.
Adam’s goal is to create artistic, interactive, meaningful, and fun story-driven experiences. Throughout his university career, he has been striving to learn everything about narrative and interactivity in both classical and contemporary works. Adam’s eventual aspiration is to converge everything he has learned into exciting story driven experiences that can be experienced online.
When not studying, Adam maintains numerous websites. Some of these include his online portfolio at adamsawicki.com and his personal blog at blog.adamsawicki.com. He is also currently in the progress of launching a web comic with the aid of a couple friends.
In the short term, Adam plans to travel abroad, teach English in South Korea, and to build up his portfolio with personal projects. In the long term, Adam plans to either land a job in website design, start a studio for website design, or to think of a mind blowing idea and share it with everyone online, hopefully making some profit :)
Word Count: 247
