todd

Potential Final Projects

Okay, here are a few ideas I've been thinking about developing. They would all, in one way or another, be considered a computer game at some level, probably 3D, although I hope to us, abuse, subvert and in a few cases revert many conventions that have formed over 30+ years of electronic gaming:

City Without Time
Cities grow and change like some strange macroorganism. Many places and structures last lifetimes, while others vanish before we even know they exist. How many times have you wandered by a building under construction and struggled to remember what house, shop, or park was there before?
The game will take place in a city that constantly shifts through its history…but never all at once. An apartment building may change into an office block and then fade back into primal orange groves, while a bookstore next door may remain static for the time being. The most disturbing times are when sections change to ruin…perhaps reminders of a dark chapter in the city’s past, or a grim foreshadowing of its future. People…perhaps ghosts, maybe just memories, inhabit these places, but also change. You may not even notice that the man who gave you a magazine at the newsstand was different than you saw yesterday, but could have been the same one you say a month ago.
The narrative would revolve around the player character figuring out why the city has come to exist in this manner. Exploring the ever-changing city would be the primary means toward this end. Indeed, the game may be more archaeological, or forensic, following the mystery-novel type of dynamic of piecing together something that has already happened. I guess it could be a like a Film Noir undertaken within a gigantic mesh of overlapped time lapse movies.

Twilight
Set on a tidelocked world, where one side of the planet is always dark, the other always day. The only known cities are at the edges of the planet, where the sun exists in an eternal sunset (or sunrise, depending on your outlook). Exploration would be a key component to how and why the user would interact with this environment. The current plot I have projected onto the world involves its inhabitants’ discovery of the properties of electricity, and how it may be harnessed…

Therion
An idea I've been thinking about for a while...a game using a "show, don't tell" philosophy with regards to menus and dialogue. The protagonist is an alien beast, analogous to a lion or wolf, whose world is invaded by two human, warring factions who proceed to use the planets resources to further the war against each other. The beast's path manages to cross right in the middle of the conflict...With no coherent dialogue, the enviornment should gve the exposition needed for the player to understand what is going on, even if the character they're playing cannot fully comprehend the forces at work. I've also been toying with the idea of transcoding alien senses, like scent, to a visual form that the player could use.

Yuun: The Patchwork Universe
Another "silent", dialogue-less piece I've been thinking about. The “Patchwork Universe” is called such because several worlds are basically within walking distance of each other, entered through a Swiss-cheese network or portals. These range from a freeway-covered, artificially lit world to molten glass bubble islands to floating iceteroids. All of them also seem to be enclosed as well, not a sky among any of them. The general look is kind of meant to be more computer-ry, simplistic, like Rez or Tron.
The plot would involve two warring factions, each strange, silent, semi-machine like races. They fight over a substance that looks like liquid visual noise...a sort of supercommodity that can be worked into any physical object by modulating it or shaving out extraneous color wavelengths. The protagonist needs to work to stop the conflict, as well as find out the nature of this patchwork universe.
While I hope to have this game in 3D, I have authored a small 2D game based on the ideas here.

With these ideas I'm more concerned about different uses not only for existing technology but existing conventions within a media. I'm trying to figure out new ways to engage a user/player, express a certain type of visual aesthetic, as well as communicate a narrative.

It should be noted I have other interests...I've been browsing planetary data collected by NASA (very interested in martian missions right now), VR, especially in relation to virtual enviornments, is of great interest, and I have a few of my own ideas on the subject of location based interaction.