Design Domain P.2

 

Here you can see the things I did to begin the second part of the design domain project. I drew out some  concepts for models and repeated and optimized the game from the getting into unreal project. I feel I wanted to further visualize the idea of making a virtual environment based around negative space, in order to allow me to better create it. The concept from the previous project will work well as a starting point and I will try to use this moving forward to deepen the concept.

I am continuing to explore the idea that in a world with pure freedom you cannot do anything at all. Restrictions reduce freedom but allow many more things to be achieved. In my game environment, I am trying to balance a similar concept between pure freedom and that of nothing at all. As with all things, reaching the perfect equilibrium almost impossible but I feel that even if I do go slightly over what is regarded as the leverage point, the concept will still be understandable to the viewer.

Modern games are worlds which are filled with as much life as possible to emulate reality. I feel in many ways, my game subverts this idea we have become used to with detail meaning progression. I believe I want to present my concept through a normal style in which a game would be presented in order to make it clear to the viewer and allow them to draw their own conclusions about the similarities between this game and the normal.

I feel that the reason the above video invokes so much interest for me, is in the fact it is in the middle of a regular Japanese anime. If it were simply posed as an art piece, it would not intrigue me as much, however due to it’s twist on our regular expectations, It shocks us more severely. This is what I aim to do through my own output in a similar form.

Here you can see a scan of an old flat which I used to live. I imported this into a basic template first person environment to visually see how it would appear. I liked the detail and confusion it brought to the game. However I also realized that if I were to add it into my negative space environment then I would need to make it less obtrusive.

Here you can see a much further advanced version of my negative space environment. I have changed the shapes so that each one is unique adding to more interest within the world as well as also making interactions with each one more unusual. I also added some shattered properties to some of the objects so that people who further investigate the space beyond the first few moments of realization could find further detail within it. As with the video I showed of the anime earlier. The longer you spend within an existence, the more you crave, therefore I felt it appropriate that some of the freedom be removed with every continuing moment and some of the mystery also disappear. This also makes each moment draw further away from the idea of negative space and further towards a tangible one.

I created this simple animation in order to allow the player to understand which buttons they should use while playing the game. I wanted a conventional controller to be used with the game so that the ideas of regular games are brought into this space instantly adding a small form of tangibility with it.

Without any form of tangibility it may scare viewers away so much they cease to interact with the piece at all. I intend to have this overlay either constantly to one side of the screen shown as a small overlay hud or when there has been no input for several seconds on any of the controls.

Here you can see the shattering model generator where you chose how many times you want to allow an object to be hit before shattering and where you also fracture the meshes in order to allow them to break in a way that appears to be natural to our eyes. You can vary the amount of segments into which the mesh will break which creates more stress on the graphic processing accordingly.

Here you can see the final fully shattering environment of the game with the full controller interactivity. Implemented. I will demo it at the open studios and record the user interaction to some extent with the environment I have created.

Here you can see the final version of the game with slow time and removed gravity on character functionality added.