Hello World!
The first step towards creating an immersive game
Over the course of a seven week Interactive Media Arts class, our group of four NYU Shanghai students are creating an immersive game experience. This publication will keep track of our progress along the way, focusing on posts about game design and explaining prototypes. So far, this is what we have:
Overview
The gameplay cycle is measured in days, by waking up in the morning and ending when you go to sleep at night. The player acts as a traveling poet / philosopher, living in modern day contiguous-construction urban development project, similar to the 20th century Kowloon Walled City. The seemingly anachronistic protagonist will move throughout the interconnected buildings talking with people. Your goal is exploring just how deep the city stretches, and discovering any secrets hidden within it. So you won’t be writing any actual poetry, but hopefully the gameplay experience will provoke philosophical feelings in the player.
Gameplay
The game will be a first person platformer, where the player moves throughout rooms and hallways populated objects. There will be no violent themes to the game, and no enemies will stand between the player and their goals. Instead, other people who populate the city will engage in discussion with the player, establishing a repertoire as the player returns each day. In our final product, the player’s goal will be to root around their room looking for the room key they lost. Once they get out of the room, they can begin exploring the rest of the city and the mobility challenges that come with it.
Goals
An unquantifiable goal will be to explore new areas of the city as the player solves environmental puzzles. This sort of goal can appear ambiguous or uninteresting to some players, trinkets will be placed in the world for the player to collect and keep as a score.
Long Term
It’s a somewhat ambitious idea, so we will keep our expectations realistic. But here is where the game could go if we had a full production studio…
Each day you wake up as a different person living in the giant contiguous city. You have to figure out why your spirit is inhabiting different bodies, and why you can see the otherworldly trinkets. For the end of this class, we would like to showcase the first day, as outlined in the Gameplay section.
