Soul Building

Here are some concepts I made for how the souls could look. After a conversation with Chris I wanted to play with a simpler aesthetic for the souls and keep the more detailed style for the power-ups. That way they will be set apart visually but can still be associated with being a positive pick-up rather than an obstacle.

I find myself being drawn towards the middle one because I could have the little particles be animated but the only thing that would need to change between each level is the colour of the soul; green for the forest level, blue for the ocean level, grey for the gaseous level, yellow for the power level and red for the final level.

Laying Down the Base

Soul Furnace GDD

Target Audience – 10-12 years. This means they will have better hand-eye coordination to handle the difficulty/intensity of the game and will also be mentally mature enough to appreciate the narrative.

Platform – Computer (up, left, right and spacebar keys) but could be adapted to tablet format if the four buttons are on the GUI.

High Concept – Soul Furnace is an arcade-style running game where the player plays an Earth spirit that moves between six lanes in a an infinite tunnel to collect souls and dodge obstacles, ultimately saving the Earth’s soul from corruption.

Summary Overview – The game is arcade in the sense that it is simple in player interaction and linear where the player’s ultimate goal is to reach the final level and defeat it. The player controls Voodude the Earth Spirit (or one of the other unlockable characters) as he harvests the souls from natural resources before humanity can consume them. The player is trying to collect as many as they can, gradually getting closer to the Earth’s core where they can unite the souls and start a new Earth of purity. The player will have to dodge around six-lane tunnels that are abstractions of human resource consumption as souls head towards the centre and obstacles are flying around in various patterns.

Key Features

-          Four simple and responsive controls (move clockwise, anti-clockwise, vertically and jump)

-          Slick animation and aesthetic

-          Intense obstacles sequences and boss battles

-          Unlockable characters

-          Level specific power-ups

Gameplay

-          First Minute: The player sees a menu screen with the option to start a new game or review the scores from past games played. Selecting the “new game” option prompts him to select a character to player. At this point in time only one is available but the silhouettes of other characters and the conditions required to unlock them are visible. After he selects the character known as “Voodude” the screen fades to black and text fades onscreen, reading; “Wake my child. Your time has come to fulfil your purpose. In your home a hungry shadow threatens to consume your very essence. You must save the souls of your flock before they are subject to a fiery fate…” The screen then fades to the first level where the player can see the character they selected running away from a furnace on one of six conveyor belts. Small green souls begin to fall down into the furnace, refuelling it and straw buzz saws and sparks begin to fly up and down the lanes. The player is able to shift between the lanes to collect the souls, simultaneously dodging the obstacles and the chaos of the first level begins…

-          Gameflow: (see diagram)

-          Victory Conditions: The player must collect enough souls so that the fuel bar for that level depletes entirely. This will defeat the level and allow progression to the next stage. There will be several levels which the player has to complete to get to the final stage which defeating completes the game overall. Quality of play is judged by how many retries the player had to make, how quickly each level was completed, and how few souls were lost to the furnace.

-          Aesthetics: The levels will be abstracted versions of human resource consumption set in a spiritual world which the player inhabits.

-          Sound: Each level could have a different soundtrack or each character could bring a soundtrack with them. Boss battles would have their own soundtrack.

-          Controls: Left moves the character to the next lane in a clockwise fashion, Right in an anti-clockwise fashion. Up moves the player to the lane directly across the tunnel to them. Spacebar makes the player jump in the air off the lane they are currently standing on (used as a dodge).

-          Level Design: Each level will have six lanes the player can run on. There will also be some kind of fuel gauge that indicates how much longer the level will take. This refuels slightly for every soul the player misses but otherwise gradually decreases over time. Each level will carry with it a theme for both narrative and gameplay purposes. The obstacles and power-ups will follow this theme. (More on level specifics as they are developed)

-          Bosses: Each level could finish with a boss stage that relates to the theme of the level. The way the player defeats them is by understanding the boss’s attack patterns and dodging appropriately then picking up a power-up that can strike the boss back, reducing its fuel gauge, which is essentially its health. Following the arcade ‘rule of threes’ this will need to be accomplished three times consecutively to defeat the boss entirely. (More on boss specifics as they are developed)

Plot – The player is an Earth Spirit that has been awoken by Mother Earth to harvest the souls of purity from different parts of the world and bring them to the heart of the Earth where they can be united and the world can be reborn. The player starts with their own forest, extracting souls from the plant-life there, then moves on to the oceans in an oil refinery, then a power station, then the skies in a polluting engine. Finally the player flees to the Earth’s core as the world disintegrates around them. Upon succeeding the souls are able to unite in the heart of the Earth and start over once the world has been purged from corruption.

Characters – The players play as Voodude the Earth Spirit but other forms of Earth spirits are available based on progress made by the player. These will essentially be skins opposed to having separate storylines/abilities. (More on characters as they are developed)

Haven't Forgotten About You

Chris and I were discussing implementing boss battles in Soul Furnace and how they would attack and such. Pretty much what we came up with is it would be a Crash Bandicoot style where the boss has attack patterns that need to be dodged until they expose a weak spot. The player will have to run over a power-up to attack them, reducing their health and moving the difficulty of the attacks up a tier.

Doing the Rounds

And here we have three potential levels for Voodude to get his game on. I'll try and implement them in Stencyl for the demo but they'll be in the pdf as well.

Deforestation

Oil Rig

Power Grid

Boomskis! The Power Grid level is one of my favourites at the moment. I quite like the paths carrying on past the screen's edges which gives far more of a tunnel aesthetic. I don't want to invest too much time into making the other level concepts as my hypothetical team may have better ideas.

Some People Collect Stamps

Voodude collects souls, and looks damn good as he does so. I got the final animations done for him so his character model is ready for presenting on Thursday. I also cranked out some soul icons that would appear as collectables throughout the level. Each one is tailored to the level is appears in;

The tree soul appears in the deforestation level. The oil soul appears in an oil rig level. The electric soul appears in a power grid level. The gaseous soul appears in an engine level. For each of these levels I hope to make a high quality image on photoshop that shows a potential aesthetic. In the completed game each one would have a brief text prologue that explains what is going on and the souls' relevance. They will also have appropriately styled obstacles.
Deforestation:
- stray buzz saws
- broken conveyor belts
- falling trees
Oil Rig:
- oil slicks
- burning oil
Power Grid:
- electrified platforms
- arcing electricity (spirals around to chase the player)
- grid electricity (forces player to move to key platforms)
- sparks
Engine:
- pistons
- steam valves
- overheating
- stray machine parts
- certain platforms being covered up mechanically
I want to make the final level highly narrative focussed. The four levels leading up to it have been about rescuing souls from resources we abuse and take for granted. The final level would be about Voodude fleeing to the heart of the world as the earth around him corrodes and disintegrates. There, he sews the souls into the earth's core and waits for humanity to exhaust itself. A text epilogue will declare that only by living in harmony with our planet can we hope to live at all. This final level would be far more abstract than the others and would have Voodude saving human souls to sew into the earth's heart.
If anyone was to complete the game entirely there would be an option for a hard-mode play-through which will use more difficult combinations of obstacles and longer level time. If players beat that mode it could unlock a secret level: Hell. Voodude would run through hell from hell-hounds and evil spirits, freeing tormented souls as he goes. This is of course a mere passing thought but it could carry a message that our endeavour to rescue ourselves will be difficult but not impossible and we can escape from our past mistakes and the world we've made.

All Work and No GIFs Makes Scott a Dull Boy

Considering the nature of my sprites and how Stencyl processes them I don't know of an efficient way to convert them into .gif format to show animated. Instead you get a bunch of sprite chains (a 'sprite chain' sounds delicious).

I've broken the work I need to do for the pitch on Thursday into a list of tasks that help convey the principle game elements as selling points. I want the character animations to be really tight. Most of them at the moment are at a stage where they are looking really nice with the exception of the teleport sprites which due to their rapid execution means they look a little flickery. So there is a bit of animating still to be done and I can mention in the pitch that improving these animations would be a skill I can provide, possibly as one of my strongest.
Another task is to get the controls down for the demo so they are highly responsive. I want to promote the game with fluid player-to-avatar interaction. The controls are simple enough that perfecting them wouldn't take too long allowing a team to develop the levels with a lot more precision. This idea of simplicity is how I want to market the game. It is easy to understand and simple to play, meaning that the few elements it does have we can focus on pushing to s state of perfection rather than spreading ourselves too thinly over too many mechanics/features yarn yarn yarn. I would much rather have a simple and complete game of decent length than a rushed and overcomplicated and ultimately incomplete game.
I'll also try and create some really nice still images of conceptual levels within the game. These won't be animated but would act as building blocks on which we could build some really nice levels. They would all be completely conceptual, however, allowing for the team to develop/alter them based on ease of narrative and programming. At the moment I'm thinking of a Deforestation level (pretty much the one in the Stencyl demo) where the primary obstacles are breaks in the conveyor belts and stray buzz saws. There could be a Refinery level with oil slicks and burning oil, an Engine level with pistons, grease, flares and overheating panels, a Garbage level with toxic waste and landfill and a Spirit level. The Spirit level would be the final level where Voodude runs all the souls he's collected to the earth's core to keep them safe, running from the corruption or disintegrating world behind him.

Like a Record, Baby

Right round. Round, round. Good music. I got the world to cycle slowly with the conveyor belts to pull inwards as well. The pulsing glow was removed from the centre however, because I didn't want to distract from the saw blades spinning.

The fuel gauge gradually turns red as well. It's current rate of change is 0.025 degrees per iteration which gives for roughly a 1:35s game time for the level if the player gets a perfect run and no souls are lost. I have yet to decide how long each level should be but I'll make it a bit faster for the prototype so the change in the bar's colour is more obvious.

Voodoo Spirits, Sprites and Other Fey

Well here are the fruits of my Saturday. I got the environment to cycle if it was comprised of one frame of animation, however as soon as it had a pulsing glow in the middle the layer wouldn't draw so I have no idea what is going on there...

Anyway I got the base running sprites for Voodude which I will only add to if I have time. Otherwise here he is;

I always hear war drums in my head when I see it.

Motion Sickness

The last week has been full on but I have gotten some stuff to work in both Stencyl and Photoshop. Firstly, my little green block teleports around the environment to the right location but that's only marginally interesting.

More importantly I got some sweet motion skeletons for Voodude running (the more I use that name the more I'm getting attached to it). I just need to flesh them out so they look like him and then things will be looking good on a basic level.

I also realised the to get the background looking good as it rotates I'll have to make it a circular file and rotate EVERYTHING in Stencyl by a certain amount of degrees each turn... We'll see how that goes.

How Not to Have a Date

So here are the storyboards for my Anxiety video. It may be me in these shots but I'll be calling on the wonderful Michael O'Hara to be my unfortunate up-stooder...

Also my setting will be in Michael's flat as there is far more space around their dining table and the room is much nicer. I may have to bring in extra lighting but I'll be able to check that out tomorrow when I do some filming.

Visual Metaphors and Other Suggestive Imagery

I wonder if anyone is picking "lust"... Anyway, I've completed three pages of draft sketches to get my ideas down for "anxiety".

As well as these shots I was thinking of having a hyper slow-mo shot of my character suspended in the air to suggest a sensation of falling. Another would be dark liquid swirling around in a whirlpool of some sort. A short sequence I envisioned was of the character staring off absent-mindedly then quietly cough/clear their throat but an audio overlay of the character screaming could be heard.
If I want to bring in the idea that anxiety can be a snare and keep you trapped in it I could collect footage of ropes and chains and maybe a shot through a keyhole at the character in a chain or alone on the floor, trapped in an empty room.
Going off the idea in the third sheet of the hand opening and closing in jarring, overlaid cuts, the same technique could be shown of the character's face. Their expression could be indifferent but the audience would catch glimpses of a transparent face shaking violently or screaming on top of this footage with muffled audio to follow it.
Now it's just a matter of getting all this down on a storyboard in a way that does it justice.

Bring the Funk!

Okay I just wanted to prove that I beat Hexagon.

And then kicked my record in the ass.

Yeah boy!

Post-Critique Reflection

Today we had our critiques for the games and some pretty cool projects are on their way. As far as my own work goes there were some good suggestions on where I could take it. First of all I had to play the on-line game Hexagon to see how a game that functions similarly to my concept works with a high difficulty. It is a highly addictive game for a number of reasons;

- The music is great for the epileptic-inducing game-play and can be used to get the player's timing (sort of). It also acts as an incentive to play in a continuous stream so you are able to hear more of the music without it being broken up by re-spawning.

- Almost instantaneous re-spawning means that if you make a mistake (which you will over and over and over...) you don't have to wait long until you're back in the psychedelic action.

- It has a clearly established goal and is simple enough that the player learns how to play relatively quickly.
From this I can take that the levels I put into my game could be rapid and short, but slowly increasing in length/difficulty and players can infinitely re-spawn from the start of each level. However, this would contradict a suggestion Kah made that the player could have three lives based off how close they were running to the furnace (front of the screen being 3 lives, just ahead of the fire being 1). Another thing I learned from Hexagon is having the set position on each path would be better than having an area in which the player can strafe. Too many times in Hexagon did I get caught by a glancing wall as I over/undershot a gap.
As far as aesthetics go the HUD of my paper prototype looks too awkward on a rectangle background around a circular focus. Kah suggested I incorporate the elements in a similarly round fashion. On this note the soul counter does not need to exist, it just needs to be clear that rescuing souls makes the fuel gauge degrade faster. It would also be redundant to have them count as some kind of score because there is nothing stopping a player from deliberately delaying their succession of the level to collect more souls, which defeats the character's narrative purpose.
I also made a realisation today when describing my idea to the class. My game pits the player against the environment as the try to save the environment. Ha.

Paper Prototype Printing Progress

Here is a snapshot of what makes up my paper prototype for tomorrow's presentation.

I had a bit of trouble with the printers in the Kelburn library yesterday so I had to run down to Te Aro to get a better quality print-out but things are looking pretty sweet on my desk in front of me right now. Now that everything is cut out I just need to wait for the glue to dry and I'll be pretty close to finishing.
I decided to keep the Voodude as the player avatar as I've grown fond of his design which means I will carry over the slightly abstracted spiritual aspect of the game. This will be apparent in the core of each level. Not all of them will be a furnace as the prototype suggests. I'm thinking that the earlier levels will be softer with more forest imagery (or at least suggestions of it) with only a minor deforestation aspect which will grow stronger as the levels proceed. Eventually the levels will become black and white as the player moves into a spirit realm. The player will be trying to collect the souls from the trees that fall into the furnace so it saps the energy from it, dropping the fuel bar on the right from green to red. Once the bar is fully red the machine burns out and the player proceeds to the next level. Missing souls will maintain the furnace and making it harder on the player who will be dodging obstacles as they run around.

Reset Buttons

Lots of games have them and apparently so does my project.Talking with Richard today completely flipped my project on its head, in the best of ways. Although I was enjoying the fluidity of the traversal mechanics in my original concept, I felt the game was lacking something that was allowing me to get truly motivated about it. We were originally talking about Audiosurf and Bit Trip Runner which led on to where I'm at now;

Pretty much I've changed my game to a reverse auto-runner type game where the player would be running towards the screen the whole time and can swap between six lanes to collect items and dodge hazards. The six lanes would be cycling around like a hexagon and the camera would slowly rotate, speeding up as the player increases their score. The controls would be simple; jump, skip to left-hand lane, skip to right-hand lane, skip to lane directly above you. The player would be running through this infinite tunnel away from various cores, such as a burning furnace, grinding engine or void. They could still play as a tree spirit and extract the souls from wood they pass through to keep the level of abstraction present, but the tiers of the world concept no longer applies. Instead there would be a fuel meter or something that keeps the level's core engine burning so the more items they collect from the lanes the less fuel is able to be replenished and the player would complete a level once the fuel meter reaches zero and the core burns out. For my presentation I am thinking of combining an interactive processing sketch to explain the rotating world and a Stencyl iteration of the treadmill runner style to show the pacing.

These are two examples of how the player could navigate the six lanes. The first strip shows the player (the red dot) moving right to the adjacent lane. This would be accomplished by a simple press of the "right" arrow key, likewise with the "left" arrow key and moving to the left adjacent lane. The second strip portrays the player leaping from their current lane to the lane directly opposite them. This would be performed by pressing the "space bar" key, as the "up" arrow key would be used for an on-lane jump.
Things to keep in mind as far as controls are concerned is the left and right buttons would be oriented relative to the character's starting position which would be the bottom of the screen. This means "left" more accurately moves the player clockwise, "right" anticlockwise.

Do the Locomotion

I felt my blog lacked some picture-based updates so here are some character iterations combined with motion images. Yay!

The different staff designs and feathers and such are easy enough to add in or take out. One thing that would be rather difficult to animate would be these agapanthus leaves hanging off his back that turn into wings as he boosts. They'd look bad-ass though...
Also I've been trying to program a cube to move in Stencyl and so far I've got it to jump, double-jump and not stick to walls but my biggest issue at the moment is  to get the boost to move horizontally.
Until I get a name for this guy he shall be referred to as the Voodude.

Feeling Emotional

Our new project looks pretty sweet. The initial ideas I've had about what emotions I may want to convey are fear, freedom, love and anxiety.

For fear I would try and use shadows to my advantage. I would try and make my shots dark where patches of the screen are completely swallowed by blackness. Any person in the shot would be depicted as small compared to their surroundings. I would use focus to make ominous shapes out of otherwise normal things.

Freedom would entail shots that infer pressure or stress building up through movement in the camera and quick cutting. This would have to be paired quite precisely with music that builds up to a climactic level. On this release there would be extreme slow motion shots of people leaping in the air (perhaps off the warf) and lot of shots flooded with light.

Love is difficult. There are so many layers to it that it would be hard to contain them all into one clip and do them all justice. I had images in my mind of a couple with focus primarily on the man with dream-like shots of the woman using rich, soft lighting and shadow. This would be complimented with slow motion shots of the two spraying each other with paint. The metaphor would be enhanced by the brightness of the colours used and the joy on the couple's faces.

I also found some pretty awesome tracks for it;

https://soundcloud.com/telepathicteddybear/this-is-love
https://soundcloud.com/geoffbennett/vacation
https://soundcloud.com/geoffbennett/with-progress

Anxiety is the one I think I will end up going for. I would use a minimalistic soundtrack and abuse extreme close-ups to allow for the growing intensity of the emotion to come through. The minimal music would allow me to enhance sound effects such as the ticking of a clock or heavy breathing. The narrative would be about a man getting stood up at a date. The anxiety comes from him starting to worry that his date isn't going to show and in his boredom he begins to notice things in painfully close detail. Imagery I want to use is the water he drinks could be tainted with dark ink or food colouring (non-mixed for the floating effect) and shots of lonely things such as a solo pawn on a chess board or a wilting flower could be shown. Only at the end of the clip would you see that there is no one on the other side of the table.
Some potential background tunes I've been looking at so far;
https://soundcloud.com/all-voices-aloud/wthout-you
https://soundcloud.com/heard-by-himself-alone/you-and-i

Dem Bones

It's time to flesh out this conceptual skeleton with some narrative context. So the player is a forest spirit. Mankind's disregard for the life of the planet has reduced the world's forests to an absolute minimum, taking your power with it. Before they destroy the planet from overconsumption you must save as many tree spirits as you can. With these spirits you can regrow the forests once mankind is forced to find more sustainable modes of living.
As you die in the game your spirit becomes more and more detached from the material world and moves into a limbo-style version of the world. There, you can see the world's soul slowly corrupting  and falling apart. In this world all would be dark silhouettes against a lighter but ultimately dull background. Each tier above this would be more and more saturated in colour.
As an incentive for the player to move forward there could be a gradually advancing abyss that threatens to suck the player away. As the world falls apart the forest spirit you play as is threatened from being wiped from existence so you need to outrun the nothingness. You're not just collecting tree spirits to save them but they also validate your very existence.
Deep...

Keeping the Flow

After the lecture today I talked over my concepts with my classmates and we tossed around some ideas. A couple I thought were particularly good that Mark suggested were the addition of a ground-based 'slide' move which has the same key as the aerial boost move. This relationship in execution of the two moves would connect their in-game function. Both are used to move quickly as a dodge or to keep speed up but both have a set motion which the player must commit to, meaning the won't be used willy-nilly.
The other idea I liked was a remapping of the controls on the keyboard. Mark suggested I use the space bar as the jumping key and the shift key for the boost/slide as both keys are commonly associated with such manoeuvres. This would mean both he player's left and right hands need to be used to control the character which is a fairly standard and comfortable set-up.
Another idea discussed was that in the third tier of the world the enemies shouldn't just disappear but broken versions of the should be hanging around, either for use by the player or as an obstruction. An example could be a piston-fist (as I so lovingly named those big grinning engines) that has fallen from its roof mount and is forlornly pumping upwards which a player could use to launch themselves into the air.
As far as camera goes I would not want it to move up or down at all, merely across. If there are plenty of pitfalls in the fourth tier it would become frustrating if players were unable to tell whether or not there is a platform below them to fall on because the camera is too high. For this reason the on-screen character would need to be relatively small so that several heights could be reached. Then again, if I wanted the difficulty to increase this idea could be disregarded entirely. I would need to implement a camera that knows when to move based on the player's height in the level.
In terms of animation I need to keep in mind the idea of 'how' the character moves the way they do. There needs to be some kind of game world reason on how they can slide, double-jump and boost they way I intend them to. Looking over my initial concepts, despite the tree man with the leaf-afro being my favourite I feel the black stag skull dude with the voodoo staffs is my best one to work with. His appearance is mysterious enough that players won't question as much how this character moves so athletically and the double-jump and aerial boost could be explained by the staffs on his back. He could even be holding them as he goes. With the addition of some hoodoo magic graphics he could look sweet as he traverses the map.
In fact the more I write about it the more my mind is making itself up.

A Necessary Sequel to Avatars

Between Stencyl tutorials I did some more drawing over the weekend. Here we have some more player avatars as well as some enemy concepts. The enemies are exaggerated icons of industry and deforestation that would attack on set motion paths or rhythms. They would appear mostly on the first and second tiers to make traversal not the only obstacle (considering the world would be whole or mostly whole is these worlds and too easy otherwise).

I was considering having some kind of super stomp ability that could remove enemies from the world but I feel making the player defenceless would mean the game's difficulty could be maintained. Also considering the players traversal abilities would be quite effective, dodging enemies would be more efficient than trying to eliminate them (also this would make it comparable to passive protests against deforestation yadayadayada). Speaking of which, the traversal of the platform world could be broken down into five commands;

- Run (arrow key)

- Jump (up or space key)

- Double-Jump (up or space key again)

- Wall Hike (up or space key when next to a wall)

- Aerial Boost (up or space key, whichever isn't jump, while in the air)

The Jump/Double-Jump would function simply enough, Wall Hike would need some kind of switch or state for the game to recognise when a character is against a wall to give them the free jump (which would only be usable once, no Super Meat Boy wall hopping), and the Aerial Boost would be a move the player commits to. Once it is initiated the player would be launched in the direction they're facing at a set speed and distance before they gain control of their character again. I'm tempted to allow the Wall Hike to reset the player's Aerial Boost ability so they can Jump, Aerial Boost, Wall Hike, Aerial Boost, Double-Jump to reach particularly difficult platforms in the lower tiers or to dodge enemies.

Space Smirfs and Other Avatars

Of the three mechanic concepts I discussed in my presentation the one I want to focus on in my prototype is the changing environment. Discussing this with some classmates I came to the decision that the player would have infinite lives but there would be about four tiers of the world that the player could exist on. Dying in one tier would drop the player to the tier below. Borrowing the idea of conservation of resources the player would have some kind of token/limited power that they could sacrifice to move up a tier but are stuck on whatever tier they are on if they run out. Checkpoints could be available that boost characters up for free, depending on how difficult the game should be.
Since the idea of sustainability needs to be prominent in the game the upper tiers would have the world be whole, or close to it, and the lower tiers would be far more corrupt and falling apart. Navigating the terrain in the lower tiers would be more difficult than the upper tiers but the upper ones could hold enemies (creatures that want to harm the environment) that try to kill the player and send them to lower tiers.
The player would be some kind of forest spirit that is trying to get through each platform level to some kind of goal (yet to be decided) so they can save that segment of the planet from the industrial world; sort of nature fighting back. These are the character designs I've come up with so far:

My favourite at the moment is probably the tree because he has an afro of leaves but the stag-skull dude looks pretty cool as well. I was going to crank out some more concepts between Stencyl tutorials as well as some sketches on how the traversal in the game would work. At the moment I'm thinking of a jump, double-jump, horizontal air-boost, wall hike sort of deal.

MDDN 211 "Iterate" - Post-submission Reflection

Well my video compilation is all done and dusted. As far as my original proposal goes I made some changes to my editing techniques. Nothing drastic, but enough that I felt I should mention it here. The first iteration of "Pill Popping" (as I decided to call the compilation) has a "Fun" atmosphere, representing the pills as uppers. The primary editing technique in this clip is adjusting the pace of the footage. I also used pacing to emphasize it is the pills that have the acceleration effect. The second iteration is "Calming", where the primary technique I used was slow fade transitions to white space and cross-dissolves. Whether or not this is just the computer's speakers the heartbeat I put into this clip wasn't audible, despite it being loud in the video file. Headphones seem to pick up on it okay. The final iteration is about "Addiction," where the primary technique was repetition combined with intense pacing.

P.S. In no way do I support drugs :)