Working Title: Path
Description: My game is a first-person 2D/3D hybrid game. The player is walking along a dark path, lit up by glowing orbs. The game incorporates ideas of the theory of relativity in that the player is able to speed up to speeds near the speed of light, enabling them to travel forward in time (a fast moving object measures time passing more slowly than a stationary object). Therefore, if the player chooses to move quickly, time will pass more quickly for their surroundings than for them. How this manifests in the game is that when the player is moving they will be able to see the evolution of a city in front of them over the span of many years. However, if the player remains moving at a normal pace, they are able to communicate using technology with a different (unseen) player who exists in the city that the player sees in front of them. If the player moves quickly, the NPC will age faster than the player. Therefore, the player has two major choices in the game. One is to travel fast in an attempt to reach the city/witness the visual beauty of its evolution. The second is to travel more slowly and perhaps never get to the city or see what happens to it, but in exchange be able to talk to the NPC from afar and develop a relationship with them.
Art/Research Statement: For this project, I want to continue exploring a theme I began exploring with my Renpy game (although the characters and story will be very different.) Namely, the theme of the player being able to satisfy their curiosity and gain knowledge, but in doing so hurting someone else. In this game, the player is able to see the evolution of the city over time by moving quickly. By moving quickly to a new point in time, they are also able to talk to the NPC player at future time and find out what happens to them. However, by satisfying their curiosity in this way, the player misses out on in-depth conversations with the NPC and doesn’t get to experience a strong relationship with the NPC. What feels like seconds of fast movement to the player could be years for the NPC, so by moving quickly and accelerating the time frame the player is accelerating the NPC’s death. Therefore, the player is forced to decide whether they will satisfy their curiosity about the future or whether they forgo knowledge of the future in exchange for a strong bond with the NPC. Visually, the game will be a minimal 3D space. In the distance, the evolution of the city itself will likely be a 2D animation projected onto a plane. Therefore, visually I will be experimenting with combining 2D and 3D elements.
Mock Screenshot:
3 Game References:
Digital: A Love Story/Analogue: A Hate Story – I really enjoy the way dialogue and tone is conveyed in these games and would like to incorporate a similar tone in my own dialogue.
Transistor – A source of visual inspiration. The game takes place in a really visually nice city.
The Talos Principle: Game in which you play an AI set in a simulated world and you must figure out why a huge apocalypse of humanity happened. Specifically what inspired me in this game were these computer terminals that you come across throughout the worlds you explore. In these computer terminals, you can have conversations with a computer program inside them. In playing the game, I personally really looked forward to accessing these terminals and having these conversations, because the world is otherwise really empty and lonely. I was interested with playing with the ideas of lonely beauty of the world vs. isolated instances of dialogue as a savior from the loneliness of an empty world in my own game.
3-Non Game References:
Her – This film explores the relationship between a man and his operating system in a futuristic world where operating systems have really advanced humanoid AI. It serves as an inspiration point for this project because it explores the idea of a relationship built between a physical character (the player character in my game) and a character with no physical form (the NPC in my game, who exists in the world but is never seen by the player.)
Memento: Movie which explores fragmented storytelling. About a guy who suffers short term memory loss and is trying to find and kill the murderer of his wife. The narrative occurs backwards (scenes which happened most recently occur at the beginning of the movie, and as the plot progresses the scenes we see are further back in time.) This serves as a source of inspiration for fragmented storytelling and playing with time in storytelling.
Paintings by Kandinsky – I really like Kandinsky’s art, and was thinking of making the “city” in my game be kind of inspired by abstract/expressionistic styles (i.e. it would look like a city but it’s movement/animation would be more influenced by abstract motions of color rather than specific city functions).
