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Message: 4449

Author: Alexandra

Date: 13/09/2004

Subject: Re: Classical/Synthetic/Glitch...&...Bottom-up/Top-Down/Reuse

 

It's interesting that you should distinguish three styles. When we
discussed this in March 2001 [Messages 2138-2141], it was
"synthetic" or "natural" (i.e. "classical"), and that's how I've
tended to think of MM/JSW rooms ever since.

You could group glitch and synthetic together but to me the visual
impact of both is different. Glitch /is/ synthetic but it has a bitty
and chaotic style that purely synthetic rooms don't have in my eyes.
Of course, it's all interpretation (which is what makes it
interesting to me).

I would describe We Pretty as mainly "abstract" (what you call
"synthetic"), as most of the rooms there are very surreal, although some are quite classical (e.g. "EM ERG ENCY SB A C K Y A R D" -
which has a strong beach atmosphere - and "IRON B RIDGE WITH THE
CURVED TOP").

That's true. I haven't actually looked at WP for a long time but GL
would have been a much better example for my interpretation of
classical/glitch. I just realised I don't even have WP on my computer
at present :O.

I'm not sure why you would classify We Pretty as "glitch", although
"A S P H A L T ST O R M " springs to mind here - a seemingly random yet ingeniously designed scattering of wall-blocks:

.....................|..........
.|...|.......|................|.
.......|.|.|....................
|..............|................
..|.|...........................
|..........|......|.|.....|.....
............................|...
.|..................|...........
......|..|...|...........|......
..|............|.....|..........
...............................|
..|............|.......|........
...|...|...|....|...............
.|...............|........|.....
.................|..............
|.||.|...|...|.|...||.........|.

I remember that one :)

I tend to associate your games (and some of mine, such as Strangel)
with a certain amount of glitch because setting up complex quirky
features tends to require putting odd, 'corrupted'-looking series of
blocks in certain areas of the room, while other parts of the room
might be classical - which does create a very surreal atmosphere ;)

But "glitch" to me would imply starting with something random and
massaging it into some sort of order, whereas all the rooms I've
written so far, I've started either from blank or from an existing
JSW room.

That (and the other example of random sprite data) would be glitch in
it's purest and most experimental form, I guess. To me if it /looks/
random and computery then it's glitch, regardless of how it was
formed. For example glitch music is rarely made with random
processes, it just mimics the oblique angularity of the computer
world. That said, techniques such as loading data files as sound
samples are not uncommon (which is analogous to what you're
describing with loading data as sprites).

Richard Hallas's "Worse Things Happen In Space", from _JSW in
Space_, is a prime example of the glitch style, being based on Room
63 from the original JSW. The block graphics are certainly very glitchy :) Following on from that, I can identify three ways to design a MM/JSW room:

1. BOTTOM-UP
Start with a blank room, and slowly build it up from technical
building-blocks (for me, this means always thinking "what quirky
feature can I incorporate here?"). I design the majority of my rooms bottom-up, which tends to result in economy of space, with each and
every character-square having a purpose.

2. TOP-DOWN
Start with an overall picture of the room in your head, draw it in
MM/JSW blocks, then add technical features to make a good, playable
room. This tends to result in sparser, more iconic rooms (contrast
Stuart Hill's Monstrum! with his earlier game Utility Cubicles).

Sometimes I do start with an overall mental picture, but since my
brain is optimised for bottom-up processing, the room usually ends
up looking considerably different to how I vaguely imagined it,
unless I explicitly take the approach of drawing a picture first.

3. REUSE
Start with an existing room, and modify it into a reinterpretation
of that room. More than half the rooms in Party Willy were designed
in this way.

These and the 'styles' way of looking at the design process are
interesting to me because you can use them for a long, long time
without ever being aware of them. I think I tend to be somewhere
inbetween top-down and bottom-up with some of my designs, though I
often vouch for one or the other. Reuse is something I haven't tried
much of, but it's certainly fun. I would also describe many of the
rooms in Party Willy as glitchy, because of the insane arrangements
which focus on functionality and playability over visual pattern.
Mulholland drive springs to mind here.

 

 

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