Research an' Development

MDA analysis

24th SEP MM XX IV

An MDA is used as a framework to analysis how games are played, work, or made.

I used the process of MDA analysis to inspect the minigame, "Quiplash" from the Jack box Series in the following slide.

Gone Home - Analysis

2nd Oct MM XX IV

(Image Acquired from steam)

The game "Gone Home" (2013), is a first person based exploration game, that majorly takes place within a house. Developed and Published by "The Fullbright Company". The game does not feature violence, has little to no puzzles, and is just the player taking in the house. By investigating the mansion full of secrets, from which it involves interacting with the personal possessions and clues to discover the story of the family.

In terms of gameplay, the gameplay is fairly straight forward, and easy to learn and pick up for almost every player. Maybe not for players who want constant stimulation in terms of there not being a dedicated sprint button. Or much goals other than learning what the house has to offer.

World Building

So moving quickly onto world building. The environments and objects you can interact in with in Gone Home, are fairly interesting, and each object builds upon the last. As in we always learn something about the characters or house with each room or object observed at.

There is 4 family members in the house, and a couple recurring characters in each of the people's lives. Katie, the older sister we play as, as we came back from an overseas trip across Europe. Sam, the younger sister, who struggled with her loneliness without her sister being around. And whom is very rebelious against her parents. The Mother, Janice, being a wildlife conservationist. And then finally, the Father, Terry. Who is apparently a failed writer, now writing reviews for electronics.

There is a couple of religious items scattered throughout the house. With bibles scattered across the house, that could be found near the parents room, and in random closest and drawers. Its obvious the family has some significant believe in god.

But with the context clues that we know about Sam, she is a bit rebellious against the parent's beliefs. And also slowly developed feelings for a female friend of hers. Which she knew to hid from her family, and had to make it a secret.

Marraige Troubles

The parents in this household seems to have marriage troubles. And an apparent affair that took place with one of them. Terry, who is a failed writer, and isn't feeling content with his current job as a tech reviewer. Is unhappy, and resorted to drinking away all his problems, and enjoy "lewd" magazines that are hidden away from the family.

I was under the assumption that the father was the one who cheated. But, with more context clues and pieces that I managed to infer from. It was actually the mother, Janice, who was, previously also unhappy before doing the affair, wanted something more. As this aligns with the random promotion she got in her job, with her superior being written as "hunky" in one letter.

inheriting the house

The uncle, Oscar Masan, had a drug abuse problem. It was due to having easy access to a pharamacy, which he owned. And wanted to sell or give it away to slowly start a way of reducing subtance abuse. But as he grew old, and still unmarried, he wrote a will to just give away his large mansion to his nephew, Terry. As he had no children of his own.

Not much is known about the uncle other than he was rich, had a good business going on from what I inferred, but was unable to find someone to marry as he was cooked up all day busy working, or getting "high" off a drug.

Photogrammetry Workshop II

In a small group of three, we took photos of a sword from every possible angle. And then have it compiled in a software that would map out every possible detail and create a small object to be used in any 3d software application.

I like how fun it was to take photos of it, but once we had the actual object, it felt like I could have actually made this faster in Blender, rather than having it painfully be made with Photogrammetry. Especially the cleaning up process of it.

I don't think I would want to continue with making something like this again, but I can see how it would be useful for creating 'realistic' textures to be used as reference or be used as the actual textures.