Development Process

Design Process: For attempting to increase enactive realism, I decided this game has to be in a 3D space. After figuring out the game's theming, I set out to do field research and took photos of real world objects that were going to be replicated. From the average MTA Subway I photographed things like benches, trash cans, walls, pillars, and even the subway interior.  These were then all modeled in Blender with the intention of resembling the originals as much as possible, but not to perfection.

Successes: Players who were either from New York City or just remember their experiences riding the subway while listening to music had admitted that they felt like they were actually in the game's environment. Something that was added in last minute, but made all the difference, was the announcer's voice pulled from the subway. "This is a Manhattan-bound 5 train. The next stop is...", this simple sentenced pulled people back in time, and sold the enactive realism. 

The game's interface design, while not fully fleshed out, got far enough to resemble the interface of a music playing app. I did a lot of close studying of the interfaces of Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal to make the final decisions of how the game's should look. The most frequent icons, fonts, and layouts were chosen from each of the three and then created.

Setbacks: Making music is difficult. It's incredibly difficult for me, and making a game whose main purpose is listening to music was incredibly ambitious. I spent a large portion of the development time just trying to make music that was at least bearable to listen to. I had a plan to make a total of 10 songs, but then that ended up becoming only 4.

In addition to songs, the interface design was originally on the left side. After further research and considerations I made the very confident decision to move the interface to the right side of the screen. This was to line up with the buttons on a gamepad, and were also laid in the same spatial configuration on the screen.

Lastly, the game's intentional design left me with little choice but to scrap keyboard support. The way humans use a keyboard to play video games is an incredibly weak catalyst of enactive realism, and so I lost a bit of time fixing the interface as well as trying to make the keyboard support back up my research.

What I learned: If we're including what my research taught me, I learned the origins of realism in fine art, the types of realism in video games, the relation between enactive realism and player enjoyment, interface design and natural mapping, the stove metaphor, and why certain technologies are better at certain types of realism in media. 

As for the knowledge I picked up while making the game, I got a little better at 3D modeling (which isn't my forte), improved at using Ableton Live for sound/music making, and really reflected on my perception of what video games are (and what they can be).

Future Plans: This project doesn't have to be bigger than it already is; what's important is the implementation of the research. But, I would expand this a ton. The scene needs more life to it, like people and pigeons, and it's a little too clean to be NYC. This is a matter of getting better at rigging models, and that's something I've been meaning to do in general.