Making Games in Video Class: Hongik University, Advisor: Oliver Griem, 2015
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In 2015 at Hongik University, I took class that focusing in making videos, but after I heard the brief and expectations I felt I could do better than just making videos, I aimed to use videos to make interactive games.
In the first project, I asked my two friends from dormitory to chase each other. I recorded many different scenes, at the beginning I was trying to plan the order and potential different flows in chasing story, but It wasn't easy. We didn't have enough time, dormitory corridors were in use all the time, so while we recording people were appearing in the back ground. So because of these reasons we recorded late night time, as much footage as we can, didn't care the story flow much. Another challange was my friends acting, I didn't give them clear directions about what to do or how to behave front of camera, also related to this situation some scenes were longer than it should be but later all these problems solve in the production phase.
For the first project I used vidzor platform they were explaining their platform like this "A full-service platform to create and distribute interactive videos that engage and convert target audiences across all online channels." but I guess they didn't realize to use their own platform for making games. It was html5 based platform, we were able to add links/buttons to bring next scenes/videos, so with this approach I made my interactive chasing actual video game :) and it had 3 different endings.
Unfortunately vidzor platform closed but they already kept my video for showcases purposes I guess, even I got mail from CEO but for some unknown reasons I didn't replied, here is the screenshot, anyway I'm thankful to them they kept my video for really long time :)
In the second project, I wanted to make game like Guitar Hero :) while playing notes, we could see some videos behind, so still somehow I was aiming to prioritize the videos.
For this project after long search I ended up with Construct game engine, which was web based and user interface was friendly for non coders. After long trial error and research, I realized it wasn't easy to make rhythm game, because I had to know some music knowledge too and even had to do some mathematics for programming.
I learned some limited knowledge from reddit stackoverflow etc. and tried to make it again, in this actualization progress, I replan the idea and turn it to "Dance dance revolution" style game, because it was much more easier compared to Guitar Hero mechanics, in detail it was just 4 different direction and flat 2 dimensional representation without depth like in Guitar Hero.
I prepared basic mechanics but my coding knowledge wasn't enough, I asked for help to my CS major friends, nearly begged them, got promises but never heard later. Before 2 days from deadline, I decided to code all by myself manually without any algorithm or short cuts. In this time I just focused to make 1 music video, to make moves/directions for the music, I probably listened and watched the music video more than 300 times to match dancing direction moves in the game.
After finalizing first video, I added second video but this time I wrote algorithm with some randomized timed directions, which was worked better than I expected, video content was also mix of videos so it somehow worked okay and players can't even realize directions coming random.
Final remarks :) At the end, I was really proud of my projects, because only expected outcome from that class was videos, but I achieved more than creating videos, I also integrated interactive elements to videos and created web based games where we could play in any device that can open websites. I'm thankful to have chance to take that class and professor also didn't stop me or strictly directed me, so I could achieve what I dreamed.
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