Achimostawinan Games ÒBuilding an Indigenous CybernoirÓ (transcript) Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures May 24, 2018 Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/Indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#mcmahon info@abtec.org Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents Achimostawinan Games Megan Byrne Tara Miller Travis Mercredi Colin Lloyd Gabriela Kim Passos Achimostawinan Game Collective Concordia University 24 May 2018 Produced by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) abtec.org/iif. [pause] 0:00:15 Skawennati: Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Skawennati for those of you who don't already know. And I am the co-director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and I am the partnership coordinator of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. And one of the things that IFF does is we host residencies. And so we're very happy to be hosting a residency of Achimostawinan, [laughter] this game making collective and this is part of our Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents series in which we create an opportunity for resident artists or game makers or whoever we're lucky enough to have come and share their time and space and brainspace with us, give the opportunity to them and to Concordia Greater Public to come and meet up and see what they're working on and talk about it. 0:01:13 Skawennati: And so did I miss anything? Co-director Jason Lewis of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and primary director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, some big name. [laughter] Lead investigator, primary investigator! [laughter] Okay and so without further ado I think we have something to show you. All right press play. [pause] [video playback] 0:01:45 S?: I see a lot of things in this city. Crime, waste, greed, even a little corruption. But I don't think I've ever seen anything like what you've found here. This goes way beyond poor town. Beyond the tower villages, hell this goes beyond the Risen Cities. This goes all the way to the top. You think you've got what it takes to take them down? [music] 0:02:29 Skawennati: I guess we'll see. 0:02:33 Maize Longboat: Okay, so my name is Maize Longboat, I am a graduate student here at Concordia doing my MA in Communication Studies and I'm also an RA with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. And so it's with my great pleasure to have hosted or am hosting Achimostawinan Games and kinda witnessing all the really good work they've been doing and also be able to briefly introduce Achimostawinan Games. So they are a majority Indigenous group dedicated to creating video games for Indigenous people by Indigenous people. And so we have part of this collective is Colin Lloyd, Meagan Byrne, Tara Miller, Travis Mercredi, and Gabriela Kim Passos on the screen. 0:03:24 ML: Gabriela? [laughter] Yes she can hear us! And I'd just like to turn it over to them so they can give their own formal introduction and I just want to say thank you. Thank you again for having this talk with us. I will be operating the Powerpoint. 0:03:45 Colin Lloyd: My name is Colin Lloyd, I'm from Ottawa Ontario. I have been in Montreal for five years. The first four were spent studying at McGill University. I studied jazz performance there at McGill and along with being a trombonist I also studied with composers, musicologists, and got a minor in Music Technologies. It was an all-encompassing degree in both jazz studies and music tech in general. That's my background. I'm happy to be the composer for Achimostawinan right now. 0:04:13 Meagan Byrne: Hello. My name is Meagan Byrne I am a Metis game designer from Hamilton, Ontario. I am the co-founder of Achimostawinan Games and mostly for this I am working on the areas of management, game design, writing, lighting design. I think that's all I get this time. 0:04:33 S?: This time around. 0:04:34 MB: Yeah this time around. 0:04:35 Tara Miller: Yeah. Hi guys, I'm Tara Miller, I am a Maliseet artist, and illustrator from Ottawa, Ontario and right now I am studying animation at Sheridan College. I am the co-creator and art director for Achimostawinan games. So right now I'm just basically putting together our Design Bible and creating all the assets for the game. 0:05:00 Travis Mercredi: My name is Travis Mercredi and I am a Metis sound designer from Yellowknife Northwest Territories. I'm in the Computation Arts program going into my fourth and final year here, but I've been working with Jason, Skawennati, and IIF and it's been a great experience. So this is kinda fortuitous that this has come together here. I'll be making sound, implementing it, and then helping in other ways. Depending on you know, sounding board at times. Yeah. 0:05:27 Skawennati: Yeah. [laughter] 0:05:29 Gabriela: I'm Gabriela and I am the programmer. I am from Brazil originally, I have a game development course that is from back home and I'm in Canada right now, since August, doing programming in college. Basically, my expertise is UI, AI and gameplay programming. And I hope I get things working. [laughter] 0:06:16 MB: So mostly what we're gonna talk about at this talk because this is super early stages. So the trailer that you saw was actually a pitch trailer, that Tara and I used the narrative prototype to make that trailer. So we're super early days. So what we were gonna talk to you guys today was about how we as a group were conceptualizing and sort of world building. Like how do we set the bones in place, for what will eventually become a bigger Indigenous detective noir series. 0:06:53 MB: Yeah, so what we have here are just some images that we put together. When Tara and I first started conceptualizing what we initially were using the working title Of Purity and Decay, it was sort of that really simple fun call back to our youth, because we both had grown up on noir film and I was a voracious consumer of detective pulp magazine novels. The ones where it's like in three pages, you'll find out who the real killer is. I love that stuff. It was just fun. So we wanted to do something fun. 0:07:32 TM: Yeah, we took just basically two genres that we really loved and put them together. 0:07:36 MB: Just meshed. Yeah, especially when we came up with the idea for Purity and Decay we were coming back from imagineNATIVE 2016. After showing our piece Seal Skin which by all accounts was a kind of flaming failure, that was very hard to deal with. It was our first time working together on a game. There was a lot of things we didn't know we needed to do. We kept losing a programmer, that was the story of my life. [chuckle] So we were kinda... Like, we need you man. Stop doing this. [chuckle] 0:08:09 MB: So on the way back home we were just kind of like "Let's just do something fun. Let's just... Why do we gotta be serious all the time, what do you wanna do?" And then that was where it came from. And then kinda from there we got the chance to do a femme fatal, is what it was called. It was a game jam out of Dames Making Games in Toronto, which is like a great group that really gives people who are sort of like marginalized a chance to get together and do really cool game things. And so we had 24 hours which is less than what they were supposed to give us, but we were really broke. 0:08:48 MB: So we couldn't keep going into town. [chuckle] So mostly we were there for a few hours one day and then the rest of the weekend we just worked from home. And then we came up with what you can play online now, which is called Purity and Decay and that's sort of like a really rough look at the world we want to build. 'Cause when we were conceptualizing it, we were like "Well, there's no way we're gonna be able to get mechanics working. Like the kind of mechanics we want working. 'Cause if we do that, that's the only thing we'll get done. And there's no way we were gonna be able to do this whole story because it's huge. So what could we do? 0:09:20 TM: I think at that point it was still a dating sim. 0:09:22 MB: Oh yeah, [laughter] 0:09:23 TM: There was also that evolution. 0:09:25 MB: Yeah, originally this was going to be a dating sim. [laughter] 0:09:28 MB: And then I was like, "It's too hard." [laughter] 0:09:33 S?: I would play that. [laughter] 0:09:37 TM: There's a comedy in like a native Dating SIM? Just, yeah. [laughter] 0:09:42 MB: No but it was like "Dating Sims?" In terms of complexity of mechanics is right up there with brawlers. I was like "I don't like dealing with hip boxes, I don't like to deal with kindness coins. So I don't wanna do that." [laughter] 0:09:57 MB: So then after that we were like "This is really cool." We put it up online and people kinda went a little crazier for it than we thought. We just thought it'd be like, "Oh, whatever, this is cool." People were like "This things amazing." CBC was like "This is so cool, when are you going to finish it?" I was like "Aggggh... " So we'd already grabbed Colin who we had worked on a children's game together for my Capstone project at Sheridan College where I did my degree in game design. So I was like "Hey you're a jazz musician who knows music, would you like to make Jazz music?" 0:10:32 CL: Oh boy, "Would I?" 0:10:33 MB: But for the future. [laughter] 0:10:36 CL: That was the pitch. 0:10:37 MB: That was the pitch and he was like "Where do I sign up?" I was like "Sweet." So it was the three of us kinda started that. And then we ended up getting Travis 'cause I went up to Yellowknife to do a game design workshop for two weeks and then to Fort Smith for another two weeks. And then I was like, "I just thought you were a filmmaker." And you were like, "oh no... " I was like "Hey you wanna make a game?" [chuckle] 0:11:03 TM: Perfect. 0:11:03 MB: And at that point, I was like "No more people, there's too many people." And then we started... I actually started developing the mechanics. And I was like "Okay, nope I need a programmer with us, I'm doing this." I'm not doing this and all the other things I was doing. So we originally had another girl who unfortunately wasn't able to stay. And then I met Gabi at a party, twice. And the second time I was like "Oh yeah, you're a programmer, you've worked on games." [chuckle] I can pay you in cookies. [chuckle] 0:11:32 Gabriela: I'm all for food. 0:11:36 MB: Which really was the right thing to say. So that's how we ended up with our team. So I told you that story, so I can tell you this story. Which was, then what I did is I just created this brain storming document that basically broke down the world into all the components that I had visualized it as. So when we, Tara and I started working on the conceit for the world and the idea of how it would be set up, I definitely wanted to show literal class stratification as an almost parallel to what a sovereign nation would look like, and I was like, "Oh, what's the best way to do that?" And I was like, "Space elevators." I was promised something as a child and I will get it. 0:12:19 MB: So then you have this sort of space elevator with its varying three levels, that literally represent your poor class, your middle class, and your 1%, and that effect that it has on its neighbors, that it also requires because as this sort of stratified thing, it doesn't produce its own, I guess, resources. So it requires, if not the assistance, at least the tolerance of the sovereign nation on the ground. 0:12:56 MB: And also playing along with those noir and the cyberpunk idea of when you come into a world you're like, "Oh I'm in a crap sack world and everything's terrible," and we definitely wanted the player to feel that way coming in, and to get there and be like, "This place isn't so bad." And then to move into this sort of stratified world of capitalism to be like, "No, I like it back out here, even though it's like rainy all the time, and maybe the buildings are a little crumbly." But essentially it's like I wanted this world that looked rough, like kind of those neighborhoods that you walk into and you're like, "I wouldn't be caught dead here." 0:13:32 MB: I think that's partly 'cause I came from Hamilton, where there's a lot of that opinion from the outside, like Hamilton's a scary place. I'm like, "I don't know. When I live in it, I definitely feel like it's a community, it's my family. Like, I don't think it's scary, but I think that's because I live there." So that's something we kind of wanted to play with. So that was, I guess, the history of the world, and then we needed to like... So how will we show that? Did you wanna... 0:14:00 TM: Oh yeah, so for visual design of this, there were basically, because of the way that we divided up this world, three distinct environments that I had to create, and also still keep it within this style we have of noir and cyberpunk. So it really was this kind of problem solving of you have to have these three puzzle pieces, you have to fit them together, and even within all these puzzle pieces between all the genres we have, and lore we have in this world, there is still like all these things that we need to make sure work together aesthetically, and work with the story. 0:14:41 TM: Like for example, you want to have with noir, one of the things I wanted from the beginning, just because it's something I like as an artist, are those big shadows, like the really big, dramatic shadows that just sweep over everything. I'm like, "Okay, I like it, and I'm gonna use it." But then it's also working that in with okay, so how does this work in a game now with those big pieces that you won't see? And how will this look as we move forward? Like if you're on the ground, then it works kind of better, 'cause we have these big buildings to work with, but as we go up and things start to get a little stranger and... 0:15:17 MB: More washed out. 0:15:18 TM: More washed out, exactly. Like how does the aesthetic change, but still works together as a whole? 0:15:28 MB: Yeah, and then one of the other things, like this kind of example here, is when I was conceptualizing, if we had a future that was a sovereign nation on the ground and in charge of its own self, what would it look like? And a lot of what comes to my mind is a lot of return to sort of the one building for the full family. So we have apartment buildings, and for me it made perfect sense that if one family owned an apartment building, that every unit would basically be filled with that family, much in the way you'd have the big houses that every family would be inside that. And this is stuff that no one's gonna see until they start playing with the world or getting into the world, but for me it made sense in terms of well, in that way, if you had an apartment building that was owned by one family, it would definitely feel better than an apartment building that was filled with desperate strangers. 0:16:25 MB: Another thing was also the use of greenery and plant life, and this idea that you don't control plants, you allow them to propagate, and it's a sort of a give and take environment. And so, we have all this space that we don't use, we have the sides of buildings, we have the tops of buildings, we have window boxes and stuff like that, and I don't see a lot of people ever using it for nature because there's this idea that we still have this very entrenched Western idea that nature must be controlled, rather than nature as either family or an assistant or something that is just part of your life and should be enmeshed with your life. So that was something I wanted to have in this world as well. Of course, Tara gets mad because plant life is hard to do with... 0:17:15 TM: Only in black and white. 0:17:15 MB: Only in black and white. Yeah, and that was the other thing it was like we'd had a very... It wasn't heated, but it was like I really like that black and white look, but for me it was less about it being black and white, and more for it being monochromatic, because to me that was the sort of aesthetic that I think really caught people, is no one's really done a video game that was monochromatic black and white, and that was what they were going for, as opposed to old school games that only have three colors and you had to kind of work with what you had. Do you want to talk about neon? 0:17:52 TM: Oh yeah, one thing from the beginning, I think even from our very first discussion after imagineNATIVE was like, "Oh we have to have neon. You have to have some cool neon things in there." So what we decided, just as an aesthetic decision, I think, was to have these big splashes of neon within this black and white or monochromatic world. And so, I guess right now... We're kind of just used to working with a very limited palate of just mostly teals and pinks and I think a challenge right now is working that into a monochromatic palette and making sure that it still works together visually, and also again the greenery, the plant life, working with the neon. 0:18:39 MB: And then when it came to neon one of the things for me that was really important is you think of these sort of cyberpunk with Tokyo or Shanghai and that's where they're getting all those references, so there's usually lots of like Japanese, Chinese or Korean. And I was like, "Well, to me, it would make more sense that everything would be in language". So one of the things I definitely wanted to show, and I think there was earlier examples, was... It make sense if there's neon then it's not going to be in English. So it's going to be in either Cree or Anishinaabe or what we end up deciding. Probably Cree because that's what I am most comfortable with, and... 0:19:19 TM: Syllabics too I think is the... 0:19:21 MB: Yeah and syllabics looked really beautiful. That was like... And then that in neon, and then just having that everywhere. And then for Indigenous youth who know that language coming in, that's going to be definitely a moment of "Oh, I know what that sentence is", especially coming up with names for things, which is really fun. So, that's like sort of one layer. But then for people who are coming in that have no knowledge, who may not even know that syllabics exist, they're going to still look at it and be like "Oh, that's really cool". And I was like, "That's fine". And for some people that's all they're going to get out of it and that's okay, because this is supposed to be still a bit of a fun romp, try to keep it light. 0:19:58 TM: Yeah, exactly. 0:20:00 MB: Yeah. And then do you want to get into how that sort of crafting your sound? 0:20:05 TM: Yeah, I guess, to animate I guess, the environment... So how the visuals are going to be kind of a point-and-click. I'm thinking of the 80s-90s like Sierra adventure games. So where we're being economical with resources in terms of how many small team, how many things are moving, to make those things... To imply movement and imply that environment or that... The outside of frame experience through sound. And so... And also to like... We were talking about this before but it's where your Blade Runner is sort of film noir-ing, cyberpunk this is kind of cyberpunk-ing film noir. 0:20:43 TM: So sort of having these kind of retro nostalgic mechanical sounds, is part of the sound experience. So things like interface... Think about what interface design sounds like, card flipping, casino chips, mechanisms, so that there's still this kind of like... It isn't this super digital world. I think one thing from... As we've sort of talked about this and getting my... Putting this world in my head. Is this kind of, this idea that the ground has been kind of decolonized by actual, just leaving. 0:21:14 TM: And so now, the ground of this stratified society is that these big urban cities that were once heavily populated with non Indigenous people are now repopulated with an Indigenous side and it's taking its own form. And so we have these sort of Americana elements from 1940s and 50s. In some ways, it's like that stage maybe that sort of in the midst of that early 20th century in the wreckage of certain events like World War Two or something like that. So yeah, my approach to this is going to be to kind of keep it... I think of one scene in Blade Runner where he's zooming in on the picture. There's all these servo sounds. Those kind of things would be sort of more of the content of how I would approach this. And then also a big voice over, film noir, I think that's going to be one of the things is finding the right voice for the lead and having that person really be key to this, it's going to be really built around her character. So that will be one part of what I'll be employed to do, yeah. 0:22:21 MB: How does that work with your composition? 0:22:24 CL: Music... Composing the music is essentially the same thing... The same process such that you're taking the biggest elements of the game, as far as aesthetic. Two to three are sort of the film noir aesthetic and then also the cyberpunk future dystopian elements and so already there are huge identities tagged on to both of those. With film noir, you get, regardless of sort of what one's own consumption of film noir might have been, mine personally was almost nothing. You still kind of have a thing you might think of be it jazz in the 40s, it could be visually linked, it could be like the shadows and the cigarette smoke in a dingy bar with a single pianist. That actually rings somewhat true. 0:23:06 CL: The expectations are already there when you're writing for film noir, you might as well take elements of what people are expecting. And then with the cider-punk dystopian future element that is also really rich already. The electronic components of past works, like Blade Runner is a great example that's a beautiful score, and it's sort of this synthwave thing that people are used to hearing these days. And then anything that you want to use as a sort of futuristic element, usually incorporate some kind of electronic influence, and so you can combine a film noir acoustic, be it jazz for instance, that happens to be my specialty. You take this element and you combine it with the "stereotypical futuristic sounds". I just use electronic music as an example. You merge the two and it's great... 0:23:53 TM: Jazzwave. [laughter] 0:23:56 CL: Even taking pre-done samples and layering them over top of each other, that's being done today by artists. That is a genre in and of itself, is just literally taking samples of past jazz music and then putting it with an electronic beat, putting it together. It sounds great, so I'm kind of, right now in the process of doing that only from a completely original standpoint. I could talk a bit about the design of the composition, if there's time. 0:24:24 MB: Yeah, but I wanna I talk to... I wanna hear about Gabi, how you came up with mechanics and stuff? 0:24:29 Gabriela: For mechanics, some of the process is always the same. You look for references and you look for games that have done what you're trying to do, before, and what works and what doesn't. Since my focus is very much gameplay and user experience regarding gameplay, you want to make sure that all of those things that were set before by the sound and the visuals and all of that together with how the user... How the player uses these things. They have to feel good for the player, they have to feel authentic when the player goes and does the things that they have to do. One of the... I think, really, I've been watching a lot of crime series and reading mystery novels 'cause all of that helps, in thinking of what will be good, what tools does the player need, or what tools do we want the player to have in order to do what the objective of the game is, basically. 0:25:52 Gabriela: In this case we're doing detective, and many of the things that we want to do... There are things that you see detectives doing in movies, in series... One of the things that we have is the evidence board, which is something that you always see, especially... I think that this is more done especially in movies, I think, when you have the detectives go and they have this white board, or they have the board where they put every single evidence in it. And, how does that integrate, 'cause how do you do that in a way that feels good using a mouse and a keyboard, basically. And, yeah. Many of the gameplay things that we do have to be tested all the time, and I guess we'll be going to that soon. [laughter] 0:27:02 MB: Yes. All right, did you wanna... Do you have music? 0:27:08 CL: I do, yeah I can do that. Just give a taste. 0:27:12 MB: Colin's going to show... You're gonna talk about your process, which I thought was really cool. 0:27:18 CL: Yeah, okay, no problem. So for me, I'm coming from a performance and composition background, so implementing music in a game or any kind of interactive media, it's new for me, so I'm learning as fast as I'm doing it, essentially. I'm always no more than one step ahead of myself as an implementer, as I am as a composer. If I can go back quickly to what I was talking about just with the styles of the music. Composing for jazz, that's what I'm good at, that's what I studied, that's sort of why Megan brought me on, is because in an environment where you could easily sort of fake your way into sounding jazzy, it's easy to completely stumble over yourself, at least I hear that. So I think if I can bring on a more authentic sound, then that's a huge accomplishment for the game, which is an incredibly detail-oriented game. 0:28:09 MB: Also, I hate smooth jazz. And that was all that was available for the free stuff. [laughter] 0:28:13 CL: Yeah, so you might as well hire someone who can make it sound a bit more cool. [laughter] 0:28:18 CL: And the paradox is that in film noir a lot of the soundtracks that people either hear in their head or will find online when they search film noir, it has nothing to do with the era when these movies were being produced, nothing at all. If you go to Spotify, you look in film noir soundtracks, they're all done from the past 15 years. That's not bad, it's just indicative of what people are going to be both expecting and satisfied by. So I don't have to go back to 1940s orchestral arrangements that would've been done for cinema to get what I think would work. I can easily go to the 1980s, like a live recording in a jazz bar. That would work. With the electronic music, that's a bit more open ground. As a non-electronic artist, everything to me is sort of like a whitewash right now, it'd be very hard for me to look at it from a musicologist's point of view. So I can take what I want, so to speak, from any kind of influence, be it electronic, and just mash it into my palette and see what works. 0:29:22 MB: Also, there's always like, "Can you add samba, can you add rap, can you add hip-hop?" [laughter] 0:29:26 CL: Yeah, this is from you. 0:29:28 MB: This is from us. But like, "Here's some music, can you add this?" We're the worst! 0:29:32 CL: Make it work, so to speak. But yeah, those are two of the three main elements of this game aesthetically. The third one's interesting to me, because I always have to be aware of the fact that this is an Indigenous game, or this is in some sense focused to both Indigenous audiences and coming from a very majority Indigenous-focused team. So what do I do in that sense? For me it's cool, because as someone who doesn't come from that background, I'm exploring a new territory. And so a big question I have to ask myself is, how can I sort of pull this off, how do I get the appropriate influences without making a complete caricature? You can easily make something sound, "Oh this is 'Indigenous'", use big quotation marks. I don't even know if that applies to music, but is this over-the-top? Is this subtle? Like, what works and what doesn't? 0:30:26 CL: That's like a process I'm going through right now as a composer. If anything, maybe it's not necessary, what can I do to tribute the background of making of this game, what can I do to make this unique on that front? To have the Cyber Noir, the whole... That's too cyberpunk film Noir and then an Indigenous game. What can I do there? So that's still at the very gestative period. That's a really cool new egg for me to crack open. Nonetheless, I think it'll be a big part of that. 0:30:55 MB: Yeah, which is why it's great to have Travis too on that and yeah that was one of the things, 'cause you asked, "I'm a native, I shouldn't... " and I was like," No, no, no, it's fine," cause you're not, you will not be putting drums in there. [laughter] 0:31:09 MB: Nope. That's not going to be a problem. 'Cause that's a thing... Because that is a thing that you can't... I don't think it's helpful to try and I guess, "keep the purity of a group", because you're always gonna be working with people from all walks of backgrounds, even between the native elements of the group, Travis and I are two different kinds of MŽtis, and... Whatever Tara is. [laughter] 0:31:46 MB: But it's like being MŽtis, being Maliseet, being MŽtis, it's all going to be different. So we're all gonna have our own way of approaching things and stuff like music. So we were also... It was sort of like, let us worry about that. And we will tell you if it's not working. And if it is working, let's make sure we're doing it in the most respectful way possible. So if that means we're bringing on an Indigenous singer or we're gonna bring on another Indigenous musician, just to make sure that everyone's being respectful and that we're not like... Nothing's being grossly appropriated. 0:32:29 CL: Exactly. 0:32:29 MB: Yeah, also just music... 0:32:31 CL: Yeah, and so my job is extensive enough as a composer to begin with without worrying about everything that comes with that. So, I just have two examples here, sort of the type of music that we were using, not to implement in the game per se, but as sort of what I would show them as an example of what I can work on. So this is what would be more ambient for the game. There are hints of jazz, generically, even if you talk about the instruments: A vibraphone, a trumpet, a saxophone. Those are all things that you can associate with jazz and they're second degree of separation, like the film Noir aesthetic. And then just like... [background conversation] 0:33:22 CL: And then anything that's a drone or that is a padded sound that has no definitive beginning and end. You can create a hugely emotional scene, especially if you're an interactive player, just with that. I love that. Having never composed with that in mind before, it's huge. You can... With two noises that don't really have a melody. You can make someone scared, you can make someone intrigued, you can make someone nervous. That I find really cool. And so this is just, yeah something you can pull up as like an ambient track, if you will. 0:34:02 CL: For anyone who might be interested in what it takes to compose for a video game, I can quickly talk about something that I'm just now getting started with, and that's the concept of non-linear composition. So real quick, if I'm composing for a big band, which is something I've done before, I'm thinking of beginning, middle and end, I'm thinking of like, Okay, it's gonna start here, when the conductor puts his head down, it's gonna stop when the band reaches the end of the page. So that's linear, that's start to finish. If anything, you might have looped sections in the middle where soloists will stand up and do their thing and then it goes on. But more or less, the only thing, the only aspects of the composition that are not determined beforehand, are cues that the director may give. 0:34:44 CL: With a game, it's completely different. With a game, you can trigger different parts of the music by walking from one end of the room to the other, by picking up an object, by discovering in this case with the detective game, a clue that you might not have noticed before. So you've got to be thinking about a lot of different tracks playing at once and how they will sound if one's going off, if all of them are going off, if a combination are going off. That's a cool process that I'm getting used to but if I were to, say, start off with a scene that Gabi was talking about, that's an evidence board, I want something that's a bit like, I don't know, evocative is a word I've used before, but that's kind of generic. Something that can just be repeated over and over and its like, I don't know, a chin-scratching kind of vibe. So this is electronic, this is purely electronic, this is one analog synth. You would not know I was a Jazz composer. [laughter] 0:35:34 CL: Which is fine. I still think it's cool. But if I want to do something a bit more a nod to what I do, I can bring in a certain element like that, and then all of a sudden that kind of lends itself more to the cyber Noir aesthetic. It goes on from there. I can make it more sort of ominous with deep bass sounds. This can all be done by game interactions... 0:36:00 MB: Yeah, 'cause we're using FMOD on it which will actually allow Travis and Colin to do this, where you can literally tell it to trigger because you've either walked into a zone or because you've picked up something or maybe because the player's taking too long doing something, and now we want them to feel anxious, so we're gonna up the tempo. So yeah, part of the tools that we're implementing to sort of give this feel, and it was actually really cool that Colin you've almost come to this thing on your own. I know you played with FMOD, but you didn't really get into it and then you're like... Yeah, if I can just do this. And I'm like, "That's literally what FMOD does." 0:36:34 CL: Yeah. [laughter] That's been fun. Unintentionally I kind of reminded myself why it might be a bit more intuitive to me, and that was the little quip I made about the jazz band piece and the director bringing solos. When you're thinking about a piece that can be an in-determinate amount of length, you want something that can be interesting to listen to, but not so repetitive that after few tries it becomes totally mind numbingly boring. So I guess without knowing so, I kinda came from that background. And that lends itself perfectly to this video game. It makes the job easier for someone who might be implementing, and I'm gesturing to Travis because I'm a complete noob right now at implementation. Anything to do with FMOD right now, it's just like [0:37:15] ____. [laughter] 0:37:16 TM: And it's like taking Vangelis out and putting an Oscar Peterson in there in the synth world. 0:37:23 CL: Yeah, and we spoke nothing about diegetic music, music that we claim from the source. If we wanted to do what a few games have done before, and have like say... [laughter] 0:37:34 CL: The jukebox, why not? You can completely make an era more instilled in the game, by playing music of said era. If we're doing cyber noir, that's like the best music out there. So yeah, that's what it's like to compose for this game right now. [laughter] 0:37:55 MB: Yeah. So that's pretty much our process. Obviously super early days. I guess, come see our talk at GDC in five years... [laughter] 0:38:06 MB: It'll be totally different. So do we have enough time for questions? 0:38:13 ML: Yeah, so we got about 15 minutes left. Thank you all for contributing your own individual, I guess, perspective on the process so far, and sharing your expertise. So, yeah, maybe we'll open it up now to the audience, see if there's any questions right off the bat, or... [applause] 0:38:41 MB: Oh, we should have talked more... [laughter] 0:38:44 S?: So how would you describe where you're at right now? Like, you're still conceptualizing and designing? You're starting to implement? 0:38:52 MB: Yeah, it's... Right now what we're doing is a lot of testing, so a lot of, "let's make something really quick and see what sticks." "Let's make something really quick and see what we like. Now is a good time, so one of the things I'm doing is I'm actually building up a sample scene, so I can see how light and post-processing and all that stuff, and I'm actually handing over some of that to Travis so he can play with it. But that's mostly right now for me to be like, "What tools do we need?" 0:39:21 MB: Do we need to make anything ourselves? So in some cases... So for the writing and the dialogue, originally we were planning on going with Ink, which is created by Inkle Studios, which is supposed to be like a text... Like a multiple choice text asset for games that you can use in Unity and I think Unreal. And as we were getting into it and I was talking with Gabi about it, I was like, "This does not serve our purposes", because for them, when they designed it, even though it's used for a lot of text, it's used for a very linear style. Which we could use for ours. But there are things that I'm like... I wanted to be able to do this. And we could make Ink do that, but the amount of work that would have gone into doing that, maybe we should just make our own tool. So Gabi was like, maybe we should make our own tool. So its sort of stuff like that for me. 0:40:16 TM: Also, I think localization. 0:40:18 MB: Yeah. 0:40:18 TM: To be able to have multiple versions of the text. To be able to play the game in different languages. 0:40:25 MB: Yeah, which Ink does not like. [laughter] 0:40:28 Gabriela: I find that many tools that you find on the asset store for Unity or even for Unreal, especially if they are for actual building of the game, they're really good for shorter games or certain things like materials and things like that. Those are absolutely great, but tools like that they work better for smaller games. If you want something longer, if you want to build a more specific mechanic, they usually end up not quiet getting there, so you... The good thing about having a programmer that does Inkly... [laughter] 0:41:12 Gabriela: Is that, the idea is we either adapt the tool or we make a new tool from scratch, that'll actually fit exactly the team's needs. It takes a little longer in the beginning, because until you get it ready, it takes a while 'cause you need a lot of tests to make a how to for things. But once you get there, it's the best, you can have. 0:41:39 TM: Yeah, also stuff for optimization. So for the testing that I'm doing, I'm basically, putting in all the lighting, all the textures everything, just to see how much is it gonna eat up and where can we start optimizing in terms of, do we really need that 3D model? Can we just do a plane instead? That kind of stuff. And that's usually stuff that people don't think... I find for, 'cause we're all kind of like junior game designers or a game company, I do find a lot of people who are new to game design, they're like "Oh, I just want it to look really cool". So they throw in all this stuff and then they're like, ""Why can't my game load or [laughter] why is the file so incredibly huge, and no one can download it"? And it's usually because you didn't start with optimization in mind and then it's the same thing for localization. 0:42:25 CL: From the beginning we're like, "We want this in multiple languages". A lot of text heavy games don't do that because not just the cost, it's usually when they built the game, they didn't even consider the ability to localize, so they didn't build that into the system. So the idea of trying to go and localize something, meant that they'd have to literally rebuild the game. And at some point, you're just like, "Well, I already have to pay for translators, I'm not paying to remake my game". So from the beginning, we're like, "No, we really want people to be able to access in a lot of different languages". So, what are you doing? 0:43:01 MB: Oh, yeah. In terms of art, I've actually pretty much just started production. It's not as linear as I'm used to, say as like when I'm doing just straight up animation, because I'm working mostly with Meagan and Gabi and their experimentation to just give them assets to use when they're testing out whatever they're testing out. So what I would have been used to doing is, my plan originally was like, "Okay, so I'll start with lay-out and I'll do that". But I've ended up having to... I'm doing a lot of multiple things at once right now where I'm like, "Okay". To figure out the most with Meagan and Gabi in mind, I have three buildings for Meagan to work with in Unity and I have a first design of the conspiracy board for Gabi and I'm also at the same time, designing the props and trying to figure out how to do animation within Unity. So it's kind of production, but all happening at different levels at the same time. 0:43:58 MB: And that's just because in pre-production, you're usually just figuring it out. And also there's a lot of stuff we don't know. I think it's the first time we've had a pretty solid group. We turn to Gabi for a lot of direction on pipeline and sort of how we should be doing things and that kind of stuff. And that's been super helpful and I've been super grateful to have her there as the sage. [laughter] What about music? You're kinda just plugging along. 0:44:30 CL: In terms of development? 0:44:32 MB: Yeah. 0:44:32 CL: Like, where I am? Right now it's... Music is generally something you almost get to it near the end only because you got to make sure it fits with what's already there. So it's nice to be able to use music as a means of inspiring other portions of the game. But at this point, it could be one and the same, like I'll finish a track whether or not it's gonna be used, I don't know. So just right now it's writing, writing, writing. Seeing what works, what doesn't. 0:44:52 MB: Okay. And you're... 0:44:53 TM: Like editorial phase just going through sounds. Like hearing hundreds and hundreds of sounds, picking, seeing what fits and experimenting. But I think one of the things to do is once we get the pieces put together, implement and have all that stuff working together. So, implementing the music in a drop-in music system, implementing some sounds design elements, tying it to the character. And I think that's kind of what we're searching for. Yeah. 0:45:21 MB: What about you Gabi? 0:45:23 Gabriela: Oh, where I am? 0:45:27 MB: Yeah. 0:45:28 Gabriela: Right now, I'm mostly working with the most basic mechanics like making sure that all the mechanics individually work. So I'm working on a separate scene. I'm not working the same scene that Meagan's working. As Meagan builds kind of like the rest of the world. Usually, for testing this sort of in-house tool mechanic thing, you do a lot of individual testing for each little thing. Right now, for the... I'm working on the evidence board, and you have to make sure that every single thing not only looks like it works, but you have to... [laughter] What I do when I'm testing, is basically make sure that... I try to break it, [laughter] 'cause the user will break it. [laughter] If there's a chance that it can break, they will break it. So what I'm working on is individual mechanics and making sure that anything that I can find that breaks is being cleared right now. 0:46:40 MB: Yeah. And then once we've done all of this, the idea is to finish this prototype by the end of November. Then we take December to not talk to each other, 'cause that usually happens at the end of even like a... Just, it's a lot of... So [laughter] we take that break and then we kind of re-group and they we're like, "Okay what did we learn? Let's take what tools are working, what wasn't working, what do we need to redo?" And then we go into production. And so this is sort of like trial run for all of us. Let's make all the mistakes. It's okay if it's messy, but then once we go into production, then the idea is sort of like, "Now we know how these things should work. We shouldn't be playing this much". So this is sort of... Yeah. 0:47:26 Gabriela: We're not at the point yet, where all the teams come together basically, because right now, we're in the part of development that everyone is working on their own thing and eventually it will come to the pipeline is that in the game, there will come a point where we need all the assets and put everything together. For me and Meagan, we're gonna have to put everything together in the scene to make sure that everything... The things that work and look good individually, putting them together works and make that integration seamless, but that's like the last part of the game development. Basically. Yeah. 0:48:10 ML: Before we take another question, would you guys be able to just outline the concept of the prototype, like what the actual... What the player is actually gonna be doing in that prototype? 0:48:19 MB: Oh, yeah. 0:48:20 TM: You go for it. 0:48:21 ML: How it's different from your original conception of the trailer video that you showed about Purity and Decay? 0:48:27 MB: Yeah, so Purity and Decay is like... So if your prototypes are like your pre-stuff then Purity and Decay is like your big 40-hour game. This is more like a quick maybe two-hour max, experience. So we conceptualize it as sort of a tutorial level. So the idea is that, let's have a level that has all the basics of everything we want to have in the full game. So movement, talking to people, your inventory, how that's able to interact with the board and other people, the evidence board, how does that work, how does that feel? 0:49:06 Gabriela: The sticky notes. 0:49:07 MB: Yeah. And then we also wanted to implement like a Google kind of search function, so that kind of thing. So let's come up with an idea for a story, that's really short, that would use all those things. And it was like, okay, so you live in this apartment that's owned by your Aunt and her kid who she spoils a lot, their favorite toy, went missing. So she's like, either you find this, or I'm making your cousin move in with you, because you get this whole place to yourself, and that's ridiculous. 0:49:40 MB: So you're like, "All right, I guess I have to do this," 'cause... There's always... You have to make the protagonist in noir do something. They very rarely just want to do this thing 'cause it's usually something unpleasant to them, and I feel like there's probably nothing more unpleasant to an adult who deems himself a detective than to find their cousin's lost pet toy. So that was the idea, and then we also wanted something where the player would have a sort of an easy crime or mystery to solve because they were dealing with children, and we wanted people to get used to the mechanics and to be able to play the mechanics and maybe do a little bit of hand-holding, without making it super obvious, so we didn't wanna jump right into a Sherlock Homes Moriarty thing, we wanted to kinda start with like... If you just looked harder you can find it, that kind of thing. So... 0:50:33 TM: Yeah. 0:50:33 MB: That's the basic idea of the prototype. And then, the idea's, once it's all working, we can kind of give it to a player to play, and we can just pretend it's like a full game and then we're gonna get... I feel like we'd get more honest feedback than if we were like, "We'll just play this mechanic and this mechanic separately and then tell us," 'cause that's what we're doing now. I want to be able to get a feel for like, if somebody who's playing the fuller game, what would their reaction be? And I feel with this kind of prototype that would work. 0:51:04 Gabriela: Yes, it's very different feedback that you get from testing like individually. Also right now we're only testing in-house. It's very different when you don't know what the mechanics should be. For the team, we all know what it should be. But... The idea is to get it to a point where a tutorial and a player doesn't know where anything should be, but they should have all the experience of them, and what are... What's the feedback that from that? 0:51:39 MB: Does that answer your question? 0:51:40 ML: Yeah. 0:51:40 MB: Okay. [chuckle] 0:51:42 ML: Any other questions? 0:51:45 S?: How has the video game composition process affected your process as a jazz composer? What's changed? 0:51:53 CL: It certainly changes when I think of the timeline, literally the duration of what it is that I'm writing. A big part of jazz, as a genre, is improvisations. So, as a composer, you might write a song that looks this big on paper and that's 20 minutes on a record. [chuckle] 0:52:08 CL: It's being more deliberate I guess is the biggest difference. It's like everything that... Everything you hear in the game is something I have to have written and programmed, so it's kinda like making sure that I have everything there ready to go, on page so that when I start writing it or programming it into the machine, whether I use it or not, the whole thing is there, and then it's a strip down process from there. That's the biggest difference. It's like starting big and then bringing it a bit down, as opposed to what I do in a live jazz situation, which is like, "Here's eight bars guys," give it to the whole band and that is literally, that could be an hour long show right there, it's kinda cool. But yeah, that's the biggest difference. 0:52:45 S?: Cool. Thanks. 0:52:46 CL: Not a problem. 0:52:49 S?: Quick question. If you ever get to it, what platform are you guys gonna put it on STEAM, Itch.io, or? 0:52:58 MB: We'll, actually probably go for Itch.io, mostly because STEAM's not very forgiving for new groups and very expensive, but the hope is like, that we could put it on the PlayStation. So that's sort of like, the dream. Yeah. [laughter] 0:53:16 MB: I don't know how it would work on the switch, it'd be like I think... [laughter] 0:53:26 MB: Yeah. 0:53:28 S?: I was wondering how sovereignty plays out in the story? 0:53:35 MB: In the story, I think it's very much, it's sort of... I don't wanna say it's defined by what it's... By what you're shown that it's not. But that is kind of how I've sort of conceptualized it, is because... Because I was kind of expecting the majority of players to be coming from a western perspective, I was like I think in order to show what sovereignty is, I have to show what it's not, by showing this very stratified toxic world that lives right beside it, so that when you come home, it feels like, "Okay this is... Maybe I don't understand why it's like this, but I understand that this just feels better." 0:54:21 MB: So for me, it was a lot of like, "I see a place where people care about each other so that you have social programs, so nobody... Everyone's needs are met." So for my utopia of a sovereign Indigenous future, it's the sort of utopia where everyone's needs are met, even if people like, "Aunties are gonna bug you." [laughter] 0:54:44 MB: Your friends are gonna take the piss out of you. People aren't gonna be happy all the time, but people are gonna be taken care of. And for me that was the big thing. Sovereignty to me means that people are taken care of and that we take care of each other, and that you don't have those... I guess those things that really cause that deep pain, because people are invested in not just your physical health, but your mental health and your general well-being. And then for me that was, again, I was thinking like, "That is the opposite of what we're in now," so that's how I view this, what did I call it? The capitalism silo... [laughter] 0:55:26 MB: That lives next to the sovereign nation that's planted on top of a part of it. And that so when you're going through this thing, you're seeing how you have a society that does not care, that will discard people at the slightest proclamation that they're not useful anymore. And then you come home and you're like, "Yeah. We take care of our elderly and our sick. We make sure that if you don't have a home, you got some place to stay, you got food." For me, that's always been the big thing, to be able to control that and not have to put a price on everyone's head. To me that's always been what sovereignty means to me. Do you have... I think you have thoughts on that. 0:56:12 TM: Yeah, I think, considering the world exists that we are looking at even though the images are the 1970s New York and the 1940s Los Angeles Brutalist architecture. That's the part of what the visual side of it, but I think within it, is the characters are existing within a world that people's relationships have an Indigenous side to them. So even though they're re-populating this empty city, the fact that she lives with her aunt who owns the building. That is, starting off this hard-boiled character has these familial relations and that's where she has to respond to, and that everyone is existing in a way where there it's not, this capitalist ideal of the 20th century, it's got that look and stuff, but within it, people are interacting as though it was a small community. I felt like that in Winnipeg, actually. It was like someone took my hometown and blew it up. [laughter] 0:57:11 TM: Just made it like times by a thousand, but it had... So these different ways that when Indigenous people take over an urban space, how does it change what their relationships are? And how are they reusing these buildings that they now have the power to occupy and control in a different way? So we have talked about things like the building itself isn't like the landlord and everyone's separate. It is its own little town. 0:57:37 MB: Yeah, definitely the idea of... Even just from Fort Smith this idea that you kinda live and work in your neighborhood, because why do you need to go halfway across town? Most people you'd have family businesses. That to me makes way more sense and feels way more like a sovereign future than someone's expected to go off to the mill every day or you live in the mill. That's how it felt like it used to be. You lived next to where you worked. If that was a farm or if... And then if you were hunting, you'd go out but you always came back and that was a once in a while trip. 0:58:20 MB: That wasn't... Not like we have now, where it's this drone mentality of you gotta go out every day and then you come back, and most of the time people are traveling vast distances. I travel almost two hours every day just to get to my job. And you think about the toll that takes on you emotionally. So to me, in a society that values health, especially mental and physical, that you wouldn't put that on people, that you wouldn't say, "Oh you gotta travel two hours every day just to make money." 0:58:52 TM: This is this weird story. When I was at imagineNATIVE and we're having a smoke outside Tiff Light Box, and this guy comes up in suit, expensive watch and he's like, "You guys Natives?" Like, "Yeah," and then he just starts hanging out with us. [laughter] 0:59:05 TM: And it was just like, I wasn't sure what this guy's deal is. [laughter] 0:59:09 TM: And he was elusive about who he was, right? So I'm like, "So what do you do?" He's like, "Well I'm into security, data security and all this stuff," and he's like... So I think he was doing research. I think he was... 0:59:20 MB: Oh geez. 0:59:20 TM: imagineNATIVE, do some research. And some of the questions he asked us. Well one of the ones was like, he's like, "This community right here." Some specific one. He's like, "I'll pay every person, hypothetically, every person $1 million dollars just to leave, 'cause we have a project that's worth, where that's totally a worthwhile expense. We'll actually spend more money going through negotiations in the long-term process. Why would they live in this town that has nothing and not just take the money and move to the city?" And it's just like, "Holy shit." I had to explain a whole ideology, and that it's like, "Well that money can come and go, but that land that they have, that's the thing". That money doesn't even come into consideration in a sense, it's something that's more important, intrinsic. And I think in that sense, it sort of relates to this a little bit, is that... 1:00:13 S?: I hope he was providing the smokes. 1:00:16 TM: Yeah. [laughter] So we had our director for our organization there, who's a total curmudgeon and I was like okay, this is oil and water, let's leaves these guys to have a total battle. That was an interesting time, but it relates to that thing, like how a space can be transformed by having a different perspective on it. And we talk about this up North trying to get more community interaction and what does the community center look like? It's like, "well what does it feel like?" 1:00:47 TM: Sometimes it's like what are we supposed to do inside of it, not like how does this sort of brick and mortar like... Oh, well it should be this big. Have these big spaces in it, it's like, "Well how are we gonna interact, that feeling is the thing that what we want to bring and I think, integrate that at least those ideas, those wants are future projections, for those kinds of spaces. I think that sometimes that's not... That is in a way, I guess, bringing that into a science, sci-fi future vision, that now we're not just taking something contemporary, and just planting it. A very western social way and planting it in the future. Hopefully, re-indigenizing in these subtle ways of interactions and different use of space. 1:01:31 MB: Well, with a game, you can't just tell people. You have to let them explore and you have to let them come to conclusions on their own. So it's one of those things where it does have to be a feeling that maybe some people aren't even gonna understand why they feel so much more comfortable here than they do in the risen city, they're just gonna feel more comfortable and maybe... That's why I love fans, 'cause then they think about things real hard and they do videos on "well it's obviously because you were there and then they were like... People weren't even talking to you, and then you came back, and your Auntie's like, "Oh you look shitty, here is some hot tea." So it's like that people clearly care about each other kind of thing. 1:02:13 TM: Yeah, 'cause it seems like alienation is a part of that cyber punk future. And in some sense this is kind of counter to that alienation. It's kind of like well actually no, these people are in these spaces, but it's more of a more community perspective on it. [laughter] 1:02:35 ML: All right. [overlapping conversation] 1:02:35 ML: I just want to say thank you, letÕs give them another hand. [applause] [pau Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents: Achimostawinan Games Page 23 of 23