Postmortem: The Feast of Fools

Throughout production on the Feast of Fools, I teamed up with Raymond Liao, a fellow IMGD MFA and one of the most talented and brilliant individuals I have ever had the honor of working with. Raymond and I came together as a team because of our shared interest in complicated, artistic, and serious games. We made our game the Feast of Fools in the hopes that it would be seen as a reflection of that shared interest.

The Feast of Fools is a virtual reality experience for the Oculus Rift CV 1. In the VR experience, the player plays as Jay Aster, the sole heir of the Hayden Aster estate that is wrapped up within their family company and must decide, with four eccentric board members of the company, what to do with the estate through a grueling voting-based, decision-making process in the middle of a surrealistic nightmare. Throughout the game we accentuated the theme of moral ambiguity and focused on an exploration into the process of decision-making. Aesthetically, we focused on making the game darkly theatrical and dramatic in order to get a feel for the outlandish, surrealist characters we wanted to portray.

Throughout this postmortem I will discuss how Raymond and I came together to make the version of Feast of Fools that exists today. First, I will detail the process of making this experience and then move into analyzing our process by looking at both the accomplishments we made and the obstacles we faced throughout the Fall 2017 Semester. Lastly, I will discuss how the experience of this course has changed my creative process and how I hope to utilize the ideas I learned in this course for my future work.

We began building our experience by holding several brainstorming sessions where we wrote on a whiteboard all of the different topics we were interested in. The main three topics we discussed were surrealism, truth/lies, and inability. These words stuck with us throughout the semester as kernels of our ideas and eventually, we built the entire game around the ideas we thought of on day one. After we solidified that we wanted to make a game about tough choices, moral ambiguity, and consequences, we began getting to work. I wrote several VR scripts the focused on these topics and we read through them together, picking apart the good and the bad parts of each one. Eventually, Raymond picked the script for Feast of Fools.

With that, we launched into production. We first made sure to communicate with each other what skills that we wanted to learn and what skills we already had. Raymond wanted to hone his animation and art skills as well as create work in VR, I wanted to learn how to use graphical elements like shaders and sprites as a way to make my environments feel more polished and I also wanted to learn more about computer programming. Taking this into consideration we divided up the tasks equally. We worked together in making core mechanics that were heavily embedded in the narrative and making the experience, while game-like, feel natural and seamless.

After we finished developing the core game, we began playtesting. During our first few playtesting sessions we found that a majority of our players were confused by the rules of the game and were unsure how to work the mechanics. We were then able to add what I think became one of the most successful parts of our game, the tutorial section. To make the game more understandable, we added extra voice lines and animations that visually showed the user how to use the mechanics without breaking immersion. We added a time sequence that waits for the viewer to complete the mechanic once before moving on so that we can move at the players pace, rather than our own. Since our game is incredibly narrative heavy, this turned out to be the appropriate course of action. It allowed users to take things slow before throwing themselves into the game. We mirrored this approach to the tutorial in the round progression as well. We broke down the progression and made it simple and clean so that viewers can focus more on what the characters were individually proposing.

The tutorial and round progression heavily impacted the success of our game. In this next section, I will detail the other things that contributed to this success both in regards to our game design as well as our team work dynamic. The five things the most positively influenced the success of our game were our unified aesthetic goals, our unified thematic goals, our equal contributions, our mutual care for each others mental and physical well beings, and our modular game design.

• A unified aesthetic goal

As I stated above, Raymond and I made special care to make sure that both of our aesthetic styles (which are very distinct from from each other) were represented in our work. As such, we made special care to each put in time doing concept art, creating 3D models, and making our own textures and materials. Ultimately, the piece came off with a stylized, comic-book like aesthetic that I usually hold in my own work combined with a polished, delicate, and pristine style that is present in all of Raymond's work. Because of the combination of our styles, our piece felt complex and, with a strong established aesthetic, we were able to turn our focus to the game play and the narratives.

• A unified thematic goal

During our initial brainstorming sessions, we made it a priority to hear out both of our ideas and thus based our brainstorming process on finding bridges and relationships between the ideas we each individually pitched. While in the previous sections I said we had three main topics we chose to make a game from, the reality was that we started with hundreds of ideas and words that we were interested in. By building bridges and looping some ideas into groups with others, we were able to find three themes that were present in all of our ideas and this unified thematic goal that was born from equal contribution was a strong part of our game.

• Equal contributions

It wasn’t just in themes and aesthetics design where we equally contributed, we also equally shared the workload. We assigned tasks for each other on Asana, we set deadlines and goals for each other through our production meetings, and would communicate constantly on Slack especially near a deadline so that we were always on the same page. These practices helped us to always be aware of the developments in our projects so that we both knew where we can help. With that understanding in mind, we would always make sure to put in equal time and effort, for example, when Raymond was solving a serious technical issue, I made sure to pick up extra art work so that we would still retain a balanced workflow.

• Mutual care for each others mental and physical well-beings

Raymond and I are always and have always been friends first. While we both know that this project is important, if we had to choose between having the world’s best game or having our happiness and health intact, we would always choose the latter. Throughout the project, there was multiple times were Raymond would stop everything and ask me if I was happy and he would say “if you aren’t happy, you don’t have to worry, we’ll just turn in what we have and you can focus on your happiness”. This sort of care and consideration was inspiring and actually pushed me to work harder, since I didn’t want to let him down. We lifted each other up, reassuring each other every step along the way that we were in control of this game, and we would not let it take control of our happiness.

• We made our experience modular

From the start, we wanted to make a modular experience. We had heard tales from the 3rd years about the horrors of over-scoping in this class and new that we had to make a game that would have a strong core that could be added to should we find that we had time at the end of the semester. This worked out very well for us. Because of the fact that our game was modular, we were able to put a great deal of time and effort into the mechanics and the narrative, which, as I said earlier, became the strongest points of our game.

While there were a plethora of great things about our project, there were also tons of things we found we could work on in our future projects. Our time management, our choice of communicative words, our review of the script, our organization, and our limited bonding time were perhaps factors that may have negatively contributed to our project.

• Time Management

Due to the length of the course, there was always another deadline to work towards in the months we had to develop. It began to become a routine that we would finish one deadline only to have one week to implement all of our feedback and build upon it before the next. Because of this, it was immensely challenging to create a routine throughout production and, as a result, we found ourselves crunching every week. In the future I hope to perfect this by spending more time to create a good routine for my team to follow.

• Careful Communicative Wording

Throughout the project, I found that different words meant different things to the two of us. There were times when we would both agree on something only to find that we both understandably had different things in mind. In the future, I hope to remedy this by making sure that we are on the same page every step along the way by defining our crucial words when we use them.

• Script review

Since I wrote the script, I felt it was clear and self explanatory and I did not realize that there were parts of my script that were unclear to the outside perspective. This was entirely a shortcoming on my part and I hope in the future I can fix this by walking through the script step-by-step with my partner.

• Organization

Throughout the course I found that Raymond and I had different ways of organizing things. I prefered to organize in my personal calendar and often would set deadlines for myself there and Raymond would organize in Asana as well as several other tools. We fixed this throughout our project by showing each other how to become comfortable with the others organization platform of choice.

• Limited bonding time

Another negative contributor was perhaps our limited bonding time. Because both of us have several other responsibilities, we often found that we had limited time to get to just hang out and be friends with each other. In the future, I think it will be helpful to create a mandatory day in our schedule where we simply bond.

The project has impacted my creative process by teaching me to make every project modular. I learned to have one core great interaction/idea at the start and build off of that throughout the development process. While I am happy with the result of my team’s hard work throughout the semester, the most valuable part of this experience has been working with Raymond and learning from him. He is incredibly talented and I learned from him how to communicate, how to support your team mate, and also many technical skills. For my thesis, I hope I can learn from him and treat my teams in the future with the same respect and care he treated me with.

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