Hitboxes hit cinemas

[Shanon Loughton-2]

I was watchin this show on SBS late fri or sat todo with indie cartoon
shorts. Anyone know the title? Anywayz it had some australian shorts
but some intriguing others.
One that struck me was Skhizein, a french 3D animated Sundance Film
festival short (http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/skhizein)
which is briefly described on the site:

"After being struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to
living precisely 91 centimeters from himself."

And it reminded me of the movies made of Counter Strike Source when it
came out, and how the the hitboxes of the characters were shown well
and truly outside the actual player model in some hacking vids
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRpYaQA8cU).  Apart from the awesome
portrayal of mental disorders such as (probably) schizophrenia,
Skhizein is real-world problem of your own 'hitbox' being displaced
from your 0,0,0 origin and how that affects your everyday world.  I
loved it! It got even funnier when it evolved and he didnt just have a
horizontal adjustment to make.

Anyhoo, im curious how this could be explored more in an actual game
design as perhaps a critical feature, or central theme, any ideas?

ToWeR

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[lyrad]

Heya Shanon,

Admittedly I didn't watch the video, but I saw the pic and referenced off what you said.
Here's a couple of ideas I thought of anyway.

One of which is possibly a spirit being that is somehow attached to but not bound by

a body. Say for some narrative reason (a demon signs a contract with a teenager,
a ghost wants to find a killer and abruptly disturbs a geek, an evil warlord tried to
revive his dead cat and made a mistake, or my great great grandfather possessed 
me to teach me kung fu), two beings are stuck together. 

The spirit may be able to walk through walls and stuff, and have access to hidden

knowledge, but can't venture too far off else he loses connection with the body.

And the body is needed to talk to normal people, use items and basically interact with things.

You can see how this can turn into a comedy very easily in the way the two
miscommunicate with each other, have differences in opinion or the access of a ghost's
perspective's changes the way conversation normally flows, or he could look like he's

talking to himself.


Or in a battle game with many abilities,  you could have a special ability that could call the

soul of a person out of his body and either eat it up, voodoo it, or command it to your will.
Actually that just sounds like standard necromancy.. But for some reason I thought of another

abstract image of commanding an army of zombies to do the thriller.

Another easy to thing to do is say in a list of bad guys or villians, one of the cool villians could

be a shadow/puppet master, who fights you with a seemingly unkillable body. 
But the real bad guy is actually the shadow that controls people, and in order to win the battle, the player has

to realise that you have to shoot the shadow and not the person.

Other things that use duplicate action are robotic control. The story could be about

man-robot synchronisation technologies and through registered motions combatants

can move giant mechs around. Like if I take one step, the distance is covered 10 times

by the mech. Likewise if I punch and kick the mech does that too, that's pretty

standard japanese stuff. You could be -inside- the robot like some power ranger thing,

or you could be controlling it from outside.

Maybe you could have a long chain of illusion clones, all doing the same thing but one slightly

slower than the other. Street Fighter has done this to make use of ultimate moves, but perhaps

this can be tied into a context? You could have an ability to splice time into separate dimensions, and

the depiction of displaced people is a way to represent the different times to interact with.
If you affect one, you affect all the rest in the future and it might be nice to see an immediate

reaction in time.

Of course, as you said, insight to psychology is a good representation as well. Maybe you have

the ability to see the truth behind people's words. Whenever you activate it, you get a spliced

image of the person saying what he or she really thinks. Some form of gadgetry would make

it more realistic. Or maybe you can see ghosts, and people come to you to stop all those

voices in their head. The only thing is, you see four heads.

Just some ideas,
think I spent too long on one mail.

Daryl





-----Original Message-----
From: Shanon Loughton <autobot@...>
To: pigmi@...
Sent: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 12:22 am
Subject: [PIGMI] Hitboxes hit cinemas

I was watchin this show on SBS late fri or sat todo with indie cartoon
shorts. Anyone know the title? Anywayz it had some australian shorts
but some intriguing others.
One that struck me was Skhizein, a french 3D animated Sundance Film
festival short (http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/skhizein)
which is briefly described on the site:

"After being struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to
living precisely 91 centimeters from himself."

And it reminded me of the movies made of Counter Strike Source when it
came out, and how the the hitboxes of the characters were shown well
and truly outside the actual player model in some hacking vids
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRpYaQA8cU).  Apart from the awesome
portrayal of mental disorders such as (probably) schizophrenia,
Skhizein is real-world problem of your own 'hitbox' being displaced
from your 0,0,0 origin and how that affects your everyday world.  I
loved it! It got even funnier when it evolved and he didnt just have a
horizontal adjustment to make.

Anyhoo, im curious how this could be explored more in an actual game
design as perhaps a critical feature, or central theme, any ideas?

ToWeR

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For additional commands, e-mail: pigmi-help@...

[lyrad]

Ooh, I thought of some more.

You could have a split screen, where two versions of the same people react to different worlds.
Like maybe a mirror of sorts. The commands and controls are same, except they move
in opposite directions. So they jump, walk and interact simultaneously but the environments
they are in call for divided attention. It could be tied in with a briliant story I reckon.

Or you could have people coming out of the monitor/screen, and have a front-screen representation
as well as an on-screen representation.

Actually you don't really need it to be people, it could be browsers, alphabets, anything can
pop out of the screen to attack you if necessary.

But this mechanic kinda defeats the purpose of the representation you were looking I fear.

Nevermind, I shall not spam anymore.

Cheers,
D


-----Original Message-----
From: lyrad@...
To: pigmi@...
Sent: Thu, Oct 29, 2009 7:55 pm
Subject: Re: [PIGMI] Hitboxes hit cinemas

Heya Shanon,

Admittedly I didn't watch the video, but I saw the pic and referenced off what you said.
Here's a couple of ideas I thought of anyway.

One of which is possibly a spirit being that is somehow attached to but not bound by

a body. Say for some narrative reason (a demon signs a contract with a teenager,
a ghost wants to find a killer and abruptly disturbs a geek, an evil warlord tried to
revive his dead cat and made a mistake, or my great great grandfather possessed 
me to teach me kung fu), two beings are stuck together. 

The spirit may be able to walk through walls and stuff, and have access to hidden

knowledge, but can't venture too far off else he loses connection with the body.

And the body is needed to talk to normal people, use items and basically interact with things.

You can see how this can turn into a comedy very easily in the way the two
miscommunicate with each other, have differences in opinion or the access of a ghost's
perspective's changes the way conversation normally flows, or he could look like he's

talking to himself.


Or in a battle game with many abilities,  you could have a special ability that could call the

soul of a person out of his body and either eat it up, voodoo it, or command it to your will.
Actually that just sounds like standard necromancy.. But for some reason I thought of another

abstract image of commanding an army of zombies to do the thriller.

Another easy to thing to do is say in a list of bad guys or villians, one of the cool villians could

be a shadow/puppet master, who fights you with a seemingly unkillable body. 
But the real bad guy is actually the shadow that controls people, and in order to win the battle, the player has

to realise that you have to shoot the shadow and not the person.

Other things that use duplicate action are robotic control. The story could be about

man-robot synchronisation technologies and through registered motions combatants

can move giant mechs around. Like if I take one step, the distance is covered 10 times

by the mech. Likewise if I punch and kick the mech does that too, that's pretty

standard japanese stuff. You could be -inside- the robot like some power ranger thing,

or you could be controlling it from outside.

Maybe you could have a long chain of illusion clones, all doing the same thing but one slightly

slower than the other. Street Fighter has done this to make use of ultimate moves, but perhaps

this can be tied into a context? You could have an ability to splice time into separate dimensions, and

the depiction of displaced people is a way to represent the different times to interact with.
If you affect one, you affect all the rest in the future and it might be nice to see an immediate

reaction in time.

Of course, as you said, insight to psychology is a good representation as well. Maybe you have

the ability to see the truth behind people's words. Whenever you activate it, you get a spliced

image of the person saying what he or she really thinks. Some form of gadgetry would make

it more realistic. Or maybe you can see ghosts, and people come to you to stop all those

voices in their head. The only thing is, you see four heads.

Just some ideas,
think I spent too long on one mail.

Daryl





-----Original Message-----
From: Shanon Loughton <autobot@...>
To: pigmi@...
Sent: Tue, Oct 27, 2009 12:22 am
Subject: [PIGMI] Hitboxes hit cinemas

I was watchin this show on SBS late fri or sat todo with indie cartoon
shorts. Anyone know the title? Anywayz it had some australian shorts
but some intriguing others.
One that struck me was Skhizein, a french 3D animated Sundance Film
festival short (http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/skhizein)
which is briefly described on the site:

"After being struck by a 150-ton meteorite, Henry has to adapt to
living precisely 91 centimeters from himself."

And it reminded me of the movies made of Counter Strike Source when it
came out, and how the the hitboxes of the characters were shown well
and truly outside the actual player model in some hacking vids
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdRpYaQA8cU).  Apart from the awesome
portrayal of mental disorders such as (probably) schizophrenia,
Skhizein is real-world problem of your own 'hitbox' being displaced
from your 0,0,0 origin and how that affects your everyday world.  I
loved it! It got even funnier when it evolved and he didnt just have a
horizontal adjustment to make.

Anyhoo, im curious how this could be explored more in an actual game
design as perhaps a critical feature, or central theme, any ideas?

ToWeR

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