Now That’s Just Bizarre: The Making of “Dominique Pamplemousse"

•

0 likes•799 views

Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!” is a point-and-click adventure game about gender and the economy that features hand-made stop motion puppets constantly bursting into song. Conventional game industry wisdom would have you believe that a game like this shouldn’t exist, but it does, thanks to a nail-biting Indiegogo campaign and a hell of a lot of passion and dedication. In this presentation, you will get a rare inside look into how this weird little game was made, from technical considerations to story inspirations to self-promotional… perspirations? Something like that, anyway. Oh, and there may also be a song and dance number involved. You have been warned.

Technology Entertainment & Humor

Now That's Just Bizarre!
The making of Dominique Pamplemousse in
"It's All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!"

Deirdra Kiai
AKA "Squinky"
deirdrakiai.com
@deirdrakiai

Viewers also liked

Interactive Fiction (IF) has a somewhat deserved reputation for being hard to get into if you’re not already familiar with the medium’s conventions. Facing just a blinking cursor with no or few initial instructions, together with often unhelpful error messages, requires more than the usual amount of effort from the player to climb the initial steep slope of the learning curve. Developers of modern AAA titles like Call of Duty on the other hand can’t afford to exclude any players from buying the game so they have spent considerable effort to make the treshold to enter as low as possible. Could their techniques be adapted to text-based games, making them easier to learn and play for a wider audience? In this presentation we’ll take a look at some of the methods IF has historically used to educate players and the methods AAA first person shooters employ, and discuss what IF and other indie games could learn from them. We’ll also see demonstrations of some of the latest advancements in user interface technology that make these techniques possible.

The Call of Duty Approach to Interactive Fiction Tutorials

No Show Conference

L'istituto della Notifica tra presente e futuro

infonotifica

Taking ARGs Back from Marketing and Museums

No Show Conference

Paint is limited by physics of light and mass, and buildings are limited by the physics of materials and load… similarly games are limited by “digital physics”, the computational power of today’s computers and a developer’s ability to feasibly express ideas in a digital mode. I argue that effective games criticism must take technical constraints into consideration, and those same constraints influence the social norms, values, and diversity of developer communities. I also want to model a type of inquiry for other developers to consider — this idea of “reflective practice”, to critically deconstruct why we craft games the way we do, and the assumptions embedded within our craft… basically, I’m just going to play some first person levels, and talk about how these levels work / how they are constructed / the technical considerations that went into designing them.

Level Criticism

No Show Conference

Whenever there is a talk about narrative design, it tends to end up being a laundry list of examples of how the environment can be used to communicate the backstory of the game world without cutscenes. This talk is different: rather than just focusing on the backstory, we are going to explore how environmental design creates opportunities for gameplay. The focus will be on leaving traces and indications in the space, both by the designers and the players. This is called “indexical storytelling,” because interpreting and engaging with these traces is the core of narrative gameplay. These traces are systematically classified depending on their type: they can turn the player into a detective, help create an identity, teach the player what to do (or not) and how, give a sense of progress or mess up with other players. Although there will be a couple of requisite mentions of Portal and Bioshock, some of the core examples come from games as diverse as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Myst, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, Demon’s Souls and Colossal Cave Adventure.

No Show 2012 - Clara Fernández-Vara - Environmental Storytelling

No Show Conference

OpenSaaS event: SaaS as a Growth Accelerator

Nebucom

Games are tools to connect you with the people you love (or those you want to get to know). But how can we effectively design games for the purpose of bringing people together? This talk presents a design philosophy for “Heads Up” gameplay — gameplay that brings your attention to your environment and the people around you rather than your screen. A “Heads Up” game embodies these values: Eye Contact: Players engage in face-to-face interactions with each other Conversation: Players actively converse with each other using a relatable vocabulary that’s easily understood by spectators Physical Contact: The game encourages playful physical contact between players Context: The game makes use of the physical environment it’s being played in Flexibility: The game adapts itself to different environments and skill sets Personality: Players can express their personalities through their chosen style of play These qualities, when working effectively together, create a memorable shared experience for those involved. To demonstrate how to practically apply the “Heads Up” design philosophy, this talk presents a series of prototypes and finished games that explore this space. Each game will be related back to the “Heads Up” design values as a measure of its success. At the end of the talk, attendees will understand both the value of “Heads Up” design as well as the practical ways to incorporate these values into their own designs.

No Show 2012 - Bryant Drew Jones - Designing For Togetherness

No Show Conference

Scaling a Business with SaaS

Nebucom

Viewers also liked (8)

The Call of Duty Approach to Interactive Fiction Tutorials

L'istituto della Notifica tra presente e futuro

Taking ARGs Back from Marketing and Museums

Level Criticism

No Show 2012 - Clara Fernández-Vara - Environmental Storytelling

OpenSaaS event: SaaS as a Growth Accelerator

No Show 2012 - Bryant Drew Jones - Designing For Togetherness

Scaling a Business with SaaS

More from No Show Conference

In this presentation we will examine one of gaming’s most culturally contentious and well-known genres: fighting games. Specifically, this is a historical tour through the genre’s humble beginnings, with games like Karateka and Kung-Fu, right up to the current explosion of online-capable, arcade-perfect 2D and 3D battlers. Our goal is to weave together the development of fighting game mechanics — what are the stylistic and gameplay choices that make a fighting game and how have they developed? — with the concurrent development of their boisterous and exciting but often highly problematic player culture. Using emblematic examples from fighting game’s history — some well-known, some not — we will look at the history of the genre holistically, exploring technological, cultural, and design elements that have brought both the games and the players to their current state. One of the core concepts we will explore is the idea of fighting games as a meritocracy: that as long as a player is skilled, they can succeed and will be welcomed. This theme runs rampant in both the design of the games themselves, and in the community. Players demand that characters must, in theory, be ‘balanced’ so that skill is the determinant of victory… yet ‘broken’ characters, which are inevitable, can attain a certain cult status. Meanwhile the community expends serious effort mining and observing game data to create things like ‘tier lists’ and ‘frame data’ — efforts towards achieving that perfect ideal of balance. This creates a tension between a culture that demands perfect balance and games that can never entirely offer it. Overall, this presentation will combine an understanding of the evolving mechanics of fighting games with the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of their player culture to demonstrate how, in gaming, these two factors often converge and influence each other.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fighting Games (But Were Afraid to...

No Show Conference

Twine has recently exploded as a tool for DIY game creation, but it has a long, tangled development history. This talk takes an honest look at this history from the point of view of its original creator, providing both an inside look at everything from early attempts that didn’t quite hit the mark to ongoing work on a browser-based rewrite. This talk will also cover the joys and frustrations of leading a small open source project. In particular, it will discuss the decisions that led to Twine development bogging down and what factors led to the success it has found.

Twine: Confessions of a Deadbeat Project Leader

No Show Conference

How poor is too poor for video games? Gone are the days where a quarter got you the same play as everyone else. Millions of dollars of capital are being sunk into games for phones and tablet devices costing $600 or more, and each generation of console games are costing more and more at launch than inflation can account for. Today's market prompts many questions. Are gamers being expected to earn more than in the past? How can we ensure our development process is profitable without gearing our design the highest earners? Does our current base of developers represent those we are selling our products to effectively? This talk will cover the history of the economic class of your "average" gamer, a comparison of the markets being targeted by the current sections of the industry and the strategies being used, and some analysis of the challenges economic class plays in maintaining an creative development culture. Not all doom and gloom, this talk will also highlight positive strides in the industry in recent years, proven strategies and case studies, (yes, yet another talk with a Kickstarter section!) and as many discussions of people getting it right as discussions of the problems our industry faces.

No Show 2012 - Mitchell Smallman - At Least Your Parents HAVE a Basement

No Show Conference

Creating the number of levels that players are coming to expect from casual games can be a daunting task for small teams – especially when you factor in replayability and difficulty progression. In this session, Luke Dicken and Heather Decker-Davis detail the process of developing “Easy Money?”, a casual game that relies on procedural level generation. The goal of the session is to showcase some techniques that have been learnt across the whole development process. Not only will the mechanics of Artificial Intelligence system driving the generation of fun and engaging levels be explored, but also how using this approach impacted both the design decisions of the project, as well as the artistic direction. The experiences related in the session should enable teams to apply similar methodologies in their own projects and have greater success wrangling this increasingly necessary topic, which can otherwise be fraught with peril. In this session, attendees can expect to learn about the ways that implementing procedural content generation can affect your overall workflow, your approaches to early implementation and prototyping and importantly the manner in which you iterate your designs. Although all of this will be presented in the context of the development of “Easy Money?”, the lessons imparted are intended to be generally applicable.

No Show 2012 - Heather Decker-Davis and Luke Dicken - Procedural Processes

No Show Conference

In this satire-drenched and badly-photoshopped image-filled presentation, participants will be invited to imagine an alternate universe where women are people and men are… well, men. The videogame industry, as such, is heavily female-dominated, with “boy games” being a niche, low-budget genre mainly enjoyed by middle-aged househusbands. Most representations of men in mainstream, triple-A “female power fantasy” games are as little more than sex objects, and all of them promote a very narrow ideal of what a man’s body ought to look like. Men who play multiplayer games are continuously subjected to flirtatious comments, unsolicited game-related favours from other players, and demands for pictures of themselves. While a number of male gamers arguably find this sexualisation “empowering” (because we all know that men enjoy being attractive, and women enjoy looking at attractive men!) others, unfortunately, find it exploitative and degrading, reinforcing the stereotype of gaming being a female-only hobby. Furthermore, very few men themselves feel inclined to enter the game industry, both due to this perception of a “girls’ club” and to the discouragement given to boys from an early age in pursuing math and engineering as careers. Men tend to feel unwelcome in the presence of Playgirl pinup posters on cubicle walls, corporate meetings at Chippendales and similarly objectifying establishments, and the proliferation of “booth dudes” at game conventions. It’s easy to say that women are pigs and/or socially awkward nerds who don’t know any better, but, as many of us are happy to point out, “we’re not all like that!” Clearly, we can do better. Fortunately, there are many inroads being made today in making men feel more welcome in our industry, from Men in Games social gatherings (to which women are also invited, of course!) to MENtorship programmes in college/university engineering programmes to companies such as Him Interactive and Binary Brothers creating games “by real men, for real men”. These initiatives do have their detractors in the “but women are objectified in games too!” sense (because, you know, they’re always so strong and muscular and powerful and all) as well as the “why does everything have to be about GENDER, anyway; why can’t we all just make GAMES?” sense. However, unless and until some kind of worldwide social upheaval takes place, well, we’re just going to have to take what we can get, right?

No Show 2012 - Deirdra Kiai - Men In Games

No Show Conference

Six flavor of quarks, six colors of M&Ms, and six varieties of game design documents: coincidence? Almost certainly. But can you really take that chance? Whether you’re trying to record design decisions, refine project scope, or get investors on board, a good game design document can be critical factor in success. Get vital tips on choosing the right format and crafting the perfect document to lead to a more perfect game design. We’ll discuss document structure, defining goals, best tools for the job, place in a game’s lifecycle, pitfalls to avoid, and examples of both good and bad design documents. Whether you’re a fledgling developer or long established and looking to improve your process, you’ll walk away with a clearer understanding of how to make the best design documents possible. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll learn to love great documentation as much as I do.

No Show 2012 - Tim Crosby - Can You Write That Down

No Show Conference

More from No Show Conference (6)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Fighting Games (But Were Afraid to...

Twine: Confessions of a Deadbeat Project Leader

No Show 2012 - Mitchell Smallman - At Least Your Parents HAVE a Basement

No Show 2012 - Heather Decker-Davis and Luke Dicken - Procedural Processes

No Show 2012 - Deirdra Kiai - Men In Games

No Show 2012 - Tim Crosby - Can You Write That Down

Recently uploaded

Six Myths about Ontologies: The Basics of Formal Ontology

johnbeverley2021

The value of a flexible API Management solution for Open Banking Steve Melan, Manager for IT Innovation and Architecture - State's and Saving's Bank of Luxembourg Apidays New York 2024: The API Economy in the AI Era (April 30 & May 1, 2024) ------ Check out our conferences at https://www.apidays.global/ Do you want to sponsor or talk at one of our conferences? https://apidays.typeform.com/to/ILJeAaV8 Learn more on APIscene, the global media made by the community for the community: https://www.apiscene.io Explore the API ecosystem with the API Landscape: https://apilandscape.apiscene.io/

Apidays New York 2024 - The value of a flexible API Management solution for O...

apidays

Tracing the root cause of a performance issue requires a lot of patience, experience, and focus. It’s so hard that we sometimes attempt to guess by trying out tentative fixes, but that usually results in frustration, messy code, and a considerable waste of time and money. This talk explains how to correctly zoom in on a performance bottleneck using three levels of profiling: distributed tracing, metrics, and method profiling. After we learn to read the JVM profiler output as a flame graph, we explore a series of bottlenecks typical for backend systems, like connection/thread pool starvation, invisible aspects, blocking code, hot CPU methods, lock contention, and Virtual Thread pinning, and we learn to trace them even if they occur in library code you are not familiar with. Attend this talk and prepare for the performance issues that will eventually hit any successful system. About authorWith two decades of experience, Victor is a Java Champion working as a trainer for top companies in Europe. Five thousands developers in 120 companies attended his workshops, so he gets to debate every week the challenges that various projects struggle with. In return, Victor summarizes key points from these workshops in conference talks and online meetups for the European Software Crafters, the world’s largest developer community around architecture, refactoring, and testing. Discover how Victor can help you on victorrentea.ro : company training catalog, consultancy and YouTube playlists.

Finding Java's Hidden Performance Traps @ DevoxxUK 2024

Victor Rentea

Vector Search -An Introduction in Oracle Database 23ai.pptx

Remote DBA Services

presentation ICT roal in 21st century education

jfdjdjcjdnsjd

ICT role in 21st century education and its challenges

rafiqahmad00786416

Elevate Developer Efficiency & build GenAI Application with Amazon Q

Bhuvaneswari Subramani

Artificial Intelligence Chap.5 : Uncertainty

Khushali Kathiriya

Repurposing LNG terminals for Hydrogen Ammonia: Feasibility and Cost Saving

Edi Saputra

Following the popularity of “Cloud Revolution: Exploring the New Wave of Serverless Spatial Data,” we’re thrilled to announce this much-anticipated encore webinar. In this sequel, we’ll dive deeper into the Cloud-Native realm by uncovering practical applications and FME support for these new formats, including COGs, COPC, FlatGeoBuf, GeoParquet, STAC, and ZARR. Building on the foundation laid by industry leaders Michelle Roby of Radiant Earth and Chris Holmes of Planet in the first webinar, this second part offers an in-depth look at the real-world application and behind-the-scenes dynamics of these cutting-edge formats. We will spotlight specific use-cases and workflows, showcasing their efficiency and relevance in practical scenarios. Discover the vast possibilities each format holds, highlighted through detailed discussions and demonstrations. Our expert speakers will dissect the key aspects and provide critical takeaways for effective use, ensuring attendees leave with a thorough understanding of how to apply these formats in their own projects. Elevate your understanding of how FME supports these cutting-edge technologies, enhancing your ability to manage, share, and analyze spatial data. Whether you’re building on knowledge from our initial session or are new to the serverless spatial data landscape, this webinar is your gateway to mastering cloud-native formats in your workflows.

Cloud Frontiers: A Deep Dive into Serverless Spatial Data and FME

Safe Software

How to Troubleshoot Apps for the Modern Connected Worker

ThousandEyes

Dubai, often portrayed as a shimmering oasis in the desert, faces its own set of challenges, including the occasional threat of flooding. Despite its reputation for opulence and modernity, the emirate is not immune to the forces of nature. In recent years, Dubai has experienced sporadic but significant floods, testing the resilience of its infrastructure and communities. Among the critical lifelines in this bustling metropolis is the Dubai International Airport, a bustling hub that connects the city to the world. This article explores the intersection of Dubai flood events and the resilience demonstrated by the Dubai International Airport in the face of such challenges.

Navigating the Deluge_ Dubai Floods and the Resilience of Dubai International...

Orbitshub

Following the popularity of "Cloud Revolution: Exploring the New Wave of Serverless Spatial Data," we're thrilled to announce this much-anticipated encore webinar. In this sequel, we'll dive deeper into the Cloud-Native realm by uncovering practical applications and FME support for these new formats, including COGs, COPC, FlatGeoBuf, GeoParquet, STAC, and ZARR. Building on the foundation laid by industry leaders Michelle Roby of Radiant Earth and Chris Holmes of Planet in the first webinar, this second part offers an in-depth look at the real-world application and behind-the-scenes dynamics of these cutting-edge formats. We will spotlight specific use-cases and workflows, showcasing their efficiency and relevance in practical scenarios. Discover the vast possibilities each format holds, highlighted through detailed discussions and demonstrations. Our expert speakers will dissect the key aspects and provide critical takeaways for effective use, ensuring attendees leave with a thorough understanding of how to apply these formats in their own projects. Elevate your understanding of how FME supports these cutting-edge technologies, enhancing your ability to manage, share, and analyze spatial data. Whether you're building on knowledge from our initial session or are new to the serverless spatial data landscape, this webinar is your gateway to mastering cloud-native formats in your workflows.

Cloud Frontiers: A Deep Dive into Serverless Spatial Data and FME

Safe Software

Effective data discovery is crucial for maintaining compliance and mitigating risks in today's rapidly evolving privacy landscape. However, traditional manual approaches often struggle to keep pace with the growing volume and complexity of data. Join us for an insightful webinar where industry leaders from TrustArc and Privya will share their expertise on leveraging AI-powered solutions to revolutionize data discovery. You'll learn how to: - Effortlessly maintain a comprehensive, up-to-date data inventory - Harness code scanning insights to gain complete visibility into data flows leveraging the advantages of code scanning over DB scanning - Simplify compliance by leveraging Privya's integration with TrustArc - Implement proven strategies to mitigate third-party risks Our panel of experts will discuss real-world case studies and share practical strategies for overcoming common data discovery challenges. They'll also explore the latest trends and innovations in AI-driven data management, and how these technologies can help organizations stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing privacy landscape.

TrustArc Webinar - Unlock the Power of AI-Driven Data Discovery

TrustArc

[BuildWithAI] Introduction to Gemini.pdf

Sandro Moreira

MINDCTI Revenue Release Quarter One 2024

MIND CTI

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is the most popular style of large language model application to emerge from 2023. The most basic style of RAG works by vectorizing your data and injecting it into a vector database like Milvus for retrieval to augment the text output generated by an LLM. This is just the beginning. One of the ways that we can extend RAG, and extend AI, is through multilingual use cases. Typical RAG is done in English using embedding models that are trained in English. In this talk, we’ll explore how RAG could work in languages other than English. We’ll explore French, Chinese, and Polish.

Introduction to Multilingual Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

Zilliz

CNIC Information System with Pakdata Cf In Pakistan

danishmna97

Dubai, known for its towering skyscrapers, luxurious lifestyle, and relentless pursuit of innovation, often finds itself in the global spotlight. However, amidst the glitz and glamour, the emirate faces its own set of challenges, including the occasional threat of flooding. In recent years, Dubai has experienced sporadic but significant floods, disrupting normalcy and posing unique challenges to its infrastructure. Among the critical nodes in this bustling metropolis is the Dubai International Airport, a vital hub connecting the world. This article delves into the intersection of Dubai flood events and the resilience demonstrated by the Dubai International Airport in the face of such challenges.

Rising Above_ Dubai Floods and the Fortitude of Dubai International Airport.pdf

Orbitshub

Corporate and higher education. Two industries that, in the past, have had a clear divide with very little crossover. The difference in goals, learning styles and objectives paved the way for differing learning technologies platforms to evolve. Now, those stark lines are blurring as both sides are discovering they have content that’s relevant to the other. Join Tammy Rutherford as she walks through the pros and cons of corporate and higher ed collaborating. And the challenges of these different technology platforms working together for a brighter future.

Corporate and higher education May webinar.pptx

Rustici Software

Recently uploaded (20)

Six Myths about Ontologies: The Basics of Formal Ontology

Apidays New York 2024 - The value of a flexible API Management solution for O...

Finding Java's Hidden Performance Traps @ DevoxxUK 2024

Vector Search -An Introduction in Oracle Database 23ai.pptx

presentation ICT roal in 21st century education

ICT role in 21st century education and its challenges

Elevate Developer Efficiency & build GenAI Application with Amazon Q

Artificial Intelligence Chap.5 : Uncertainty

Repurposing LNG terminals for Hydrogen Ammonia: Feasibility and Cost Saving

Cloud Frontiers: A Deep Dive into Serverless Spatial Data and FME

How to Troubleshoot Apps for the Modern Connected Worker

Navigating the Deluge_ Dubai Floods and the Resilience of Dubai International...

Cloud Frontiers: A Deep Dive into Serverless Spatial Data and FME

TrustArc Webinar - Unlock the Power of AI-Driven Data Discovery

[BuildWithAI] Introduction to Gemini.pdf

MINDCTI Revenue Release Quarter One 2024

Introduction to Multilingual Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

CNIC Information System with Pakdata Cf In Pakistan

Rising Above_ Dubai Floods and the Fortitude of Dubai International Airport.pdf

Corporate and higher education May webinar.pptx