INTERACTIVE

At the time of writing (August 2011), most the work you'll find here was created while we were at university. I studied at the University of Hertfordshire and my Bachelors degree was in Applied & Media Arts, specialising in hyperfiction/interactive media. After graduating, I went on to do a Masters degree in Digital Practice, again with a specialist focus on hyperfiction (see see a theme here?). And then, after all that, I went and did a PGCE at the Institute of Education in London, which I suppose didn't have an awful lot to do with the rest of our studies up until that point, but I still managed to bring aspects of what we'd learnt before into our work.

VINCENT CHAN: ADVENTURES IN TEACHER TRAINING

During the academic year of September 2005 through to June 2006, I undertook a Secondary PGCE in Art & Design Education at the Institute of Education in London. In addition to having to write a subject assignment/dissertation towards the end of the course, we also had to make a visual component to accompany our written work. My written assignment dealt with ways of teaching and learning about interactive narrative and hyperfiction in schools, linking in with my own art practice and also the schemes of work I taught in schools. One such project involved introducing some of the concepts of hyperfictions (branching narrative structures) to pupils through the use of comic illustrations.

My visual component, which comprises of over one hundred and twenty individual images and was made in just TWO weeks, was based on similar concepts; how branching/interactive narratives differ from traditional 'linear' narratives by offering the reader/player 'decision points' that can change the outcome of events. I wanted this visual component to also be a reflection of my own experiences of the whole PGCE course. The sequences portrayed in the work were all based upon actual events that occurred in some form or another, as were many of the 'characters' you will see throughout the work.

MEGASPACE: THE ULTRA FIGHTER

In many ways, this game is the spiritual successor to one of the first games I ever made using The Shoot 'em up Construction Kit on the Atari ST. Obviously, the "kit" nature of that software package made everything a whole lot easier to put together than compared to this interpretation! With this game, I built upon what I'd learned from making shoot 'em ups using Director, like The Ultimate Rooster. The scoring system requires you to chain together multiple hits in order to keep your "hit" meter charged (Donpachi style!) in order to get the highest score, but the randomised re-spawning enemies makes everything rather frantic!

The game is more a test of reflexes than anything else since it doesn't use any preset enemy attack waves. They literally just drop down the screen spitting bullets as they go, leaving you the task of staying alive as long as possible. If you find yourself getting boxed into the corner of the screen, well... you've just got to deal with it however best you can frankly! It's all quite unforgiving!

I started work on a Flash-based follow-up game back in 2010, which featured an upgradable weapon system and more varied enemies, but production on the game stalled. It might see the light of day on the website in some form or another eventually.

CHRISTMAS 2004 E-CARD

While the cartoon by Raymond Briggs would suggest otherwise, snowmen don't actually have an awful lot to do with Christmas these days. Indeed, what with climate change and all that garbage, it doesn't even snow here in London anymore, or at least not at the right time of year! However I'm sure that's not the case in other parts of the world, so whenever you get the chance and are inclined to do so, feel free to go out and build snowmen to your heart's content. You could even use this helpful little Flash e-card as practice beforehand. It's perfect for preparing yourselves for the excessive nudity that goes hand in hand with such winter activities!

HATHFIELD

This was my final Major Study project that I made for my MA Digital Practices masters degree at the University of Hertfordshire. It was designed to show how aspects of authorial presence can be expressed through use of character and narrative in a digital medium like a videogame. If you haven't already, please take a look at our Major Study Outline Poster comic that we made prior to this project as it explains (in a slightly odd way) some of these ideas in more detail. One way I would describe it would be to say that an artist can express aspects of their own personality and ideas through their work, which could be anything from traditional 2D/3D artwork, stories/the written word (e.g. think of how certain newspaper journalists or columnist come across!), or, as in my case, videogames. Obviously once you start getting into the whole team-based production nature of most contemporary videogames, there is less of a single creative/artistic vision behind the work...

The game features a number of ideas inspired by the sorts of games I was playing at the time. For example, the main character's attacking animation and sluggish combat controls were inspired by the Silent Hill games (as was the character's name!). The animation for the characters was created using rotoscoping techniques. For a large amount of time, this involved me staggering about the university car park while waving my arms about and growling a lot (the growling was more for dramatic effect than forming part of the actual game development process).

While I do refer to this project as a "game", the main focus of the project was more the authorial presence side of things. This was achieved through use of conversation dialogue trees that changed depending on a number of conditions/variables. Even when the "game over" screen appeared, the variables remained, which allowed for interesting dialogue choices appearing upon replaying the game giving the impression that the main character becomes self-aware that he is in some sort of never-ending "Groundhog Day" style existence.

THE ULTIMATE ROOSTER

While the title screen of this game promises "extreme shooting action", whether it actually delivers on that promise is another matter altogether (I'll leave that for you to decide yourselves!). What we have here is actually something closer to what I had initially envisioned my earlier Pussy Dog Shoot 'sound toy' project to have been like, more of an all-out shoot 'em up than a simple pattern generator. The game features an unusual scoring system, inspired by games like Shikigami No Shiro and Psyvariar. You need to move your character close enough the spinning hamster enemies to just touch them with the edge of your sprite, which then fills your "buzz" meter for larger score multipliers when you shoot. If your health is getting low, collect a "Davina McCall" for a boost! Why does "Davina McCall" give you extra health? Because she's lovely, obviously!

THE REAL ADVENTURES OF VINCENT CHAN: HYPERFICTIONS HYPERFIGHTING

I had experimented with animating digitised sprites using Flash early on during my masters degree, but further use and experimentation with Director Lingo allowed me to to combine animation with keyboard users controls into this game. In terms of game design, I chose to keep things simple while still maintaining the traditional gaming focus of skill-based point-scoring action - there's even a Dance Dance Revolution-style announcer sound effect if you manage to get a "100 Hit Combo".

The main sprites (not including the giant kitten!) were created by filming myself on digital video performing the moves and then editing the individual frames in Photoshop. The animation is admittedly quite jerky, which was probably due to the limited number of frames I allowed myself to use for the walking animation cycle, but it seems to suit the 'old skool' Kung Fu Master-style game play. The KFC health pick-up item is a reference to the "Chicken" sound effect that appeared in the Tekken games, although the fact that the greasy/delicious fried chicken is a source of energy in my game could be viewed as being somewhat ironic based upon healthy eating practices in the real world. It is deliciously finger lickin' good, though...

PUSSY DOG SHOOT

Swirling trails of pixel art dogs and cats yelping in pain while being shot by lasers? Sounds like one hell of a party to me! This "sound toy" was one of the early Lingo-scripted Director projects I made on my MA Digital Practices masters degree. The use of pixel art sprites was due in part to time restraints (although I did like how they came out in the end!), but I found they suited the videogame shoot 'em up nature of the work quite well. I chose to have all the piano sound effects be in the same key (it's an arpeggio of C minor!) so that no matter what combination of notes were played at once, they would still sound in some sort of tune.

BOXED OUT BREAKING IN

A lot of the work I produced during my bachelors degree focused on themes of morality, but I took a step back with a lot of my masters degree work to concentrate more on experimental interfaces, the different sorts of interactive possibilities they allowed, and also meta-gaming later on. This "sound toy" project was based on a short interactive sequence that featured in my final bachelors degree project. The animation and sounds are generated by the user moving the (invisible) mouse cursor over a series of moving grids of squares. It's a fairly simple system, but the final onscreen imagery can become quite complex depending on the user's movement... Of course, an alternate view of things is that the sounds just become more annoying (they do), but that's kind of what "sound toys" are supposed to be like!

HAND DRAWN HOUSE

This was one of the earlier Flash projects I worked on during the second year of my Applied & Media Arts Bachelors degree at the University of Hertfordshire. I would say that the visual style falls somewhere between videogames (eagle-eyed adventure gamers should spot the LucasArts reference quite easily!) and a more 'artistic' sketchy aesthetic. The interface was also inspired by classic graphic adventure games, however it is simplified (you can only highlight specific areas) is due to most of the animation being tween-based. It's a pretty complicated system to get moving, hence why I never continued this project any further upon completion.