Week 5: Conceptualization of Narrative and Game World

Our team met to refine our game concept early in the week. We discussed possible character developments, lore, and the design of our game world and the challenges that our player would face throughout it. We concretely decided that we wanted to go with more of a visual experience where the user would be immersed within our environment and the characters within it rather than the gameplay; the gameplay exists solely to enhance the player’s experience and give them a goal to work towards that would unlock the full potential of discovering the narrative and aesthetics of the game world.

Throughout the week, we assigned individual tasks to each of our team members that related to testing our visual conceptions of the world. These tasks included creating revised environment/character art, script embellishment, narrative/lore ideation, testing a simulated game world in VR in Unity, and modelling skeletons of some objects that we will potentially feature. The following is an excerpt from an exercise of world building for our potential game world:

“It is an arid planet, composed of large swaths of dry land broken only by basic, lifeless seas. From the sky, the planet’s surface looks to be a light reddish-beige, pockmarked with craters and blemished with stony plateaus. But ravines open like deep gashes in its dusty skin, leaking the green and glowing blood of bioluminescent flora. Leading between some of these ravines are cave systems, which go deep and are filled with many mysteries ripe for exploration. That is why this planet is popular among the universe’s treasure hunters, scavengers, explorers, and thieves-- who knows what riches lie in the deep dark.

The wind on the surface of the planet is intense, though, and sandstorms frequent; this is why it is perilous to fly near the surface of the planet-- it is easy to get swept up and lost. Carved into the sides of many plateaus are small villages founded by such stranded treasure hunters and explorers; some of these villages date back thousands of years. Across the surface of the planet are scattered trading posts and bandit camps, made up of the less palatable folk who have been stranded here. These folk are not like to settle down, nor give up their lives of interstellar travel. If the wind doesn’t get you, their makeshift weapons might. They are desperate to bring down any ship that ventures close to the surface, so that they may scavenge its parts and build a vessel to leave this dusty planet for good, and wreak their havoc on the rest of the known universe.”