Development Journal – Project 3: Underwater Experience

4/13 UPDATE

Team Member: Luize, Nhi, Tiger

Project Theme: Apocalypse

The idea for our project had evolved a lot before we decided to go with the apocalypse theme. When I was brainstroming for the project, since the main focus of it is to present “story-ness,” I came up with a quite cinematic idea based on the escape room theme (can be found at the bottom of this post in italics). To cover it in a few words, I wanted to play with the concept of escape room and design an environment that is inescapable and thus embodies a mind prison. Both Luize and Nhi liked the idea, but we also agreed that the story would be a hard one to tell, because we would need to come up with a very strong background story for the protagonist so the user could relate to it.

Thus, we changed it into a story that is more easily understandable and relatable, but kept the time travel feature and the circular structure of the storyline.

Reality
- The user will first find themselves in an empty room that has nothing but a television (scene 1). Once they interact with the television, they will watch a video clip and then go on an underwater time travelling journey
1st period (1920)
- The user will first go to 1920, where there are a lot marine creatures undersea (scene 2)
- Something leads them to walk towards a sunken ship (scene 3)
- Once they enter, they will find a button (scene 4)
2nd period (2020)
- The button takes them to the present, year 2020. They remain at the same location, but the setting has become the interior of a submarine (scene 5)
- They are led to walk outside of the submarine, where they will find that the sea has been polluted by human waste, and that the nubmer of marine creatures has decreased (scene 6). Surrounded by plastic garbage, they will find another button
3rd period (2120)
- The button takes them to the exact same location a century later, while everything has been much different (scene 7). The scene looks lifeless. All they see are plastic waste and animal skeletons
- Finally they are led to a huge pile of gargabe, underneath which they can find the last button (scene 8)
Back to reality
- The last button takes them back to the real world (scene 9 a.k.a. scene 1)

The original escape room idea

Protagonist (the user) is a prisoner, wakes up from amnesia, finds themselves in a dark small cell, doesn’t know why they’re there (because the user wouldn’t know the background story of the protagonist either, they would need to explore themselves for the story to unfold gradually)
Finds on a desk some of their personal belongings (e.g. a photograph torn in half, a wallet, etc., something that alludes to their identity, will become clearer later)
A giant clock on the wall of the cell shows red digits and counts down from 1 hour (brings anxiety)
Thus starts looking for tools and tries jailbreak
Somehow (needs further discussion on how exactly) finds a secret door behind the bed to a very very long dark corridor and walks into it
While walking, finds the corridor getting brighter and brighter, surroundings changing into a few different scenes over time (e.g. a park scene where they used to date their boyfriend/girlfriend, a classroom scene, a childhood bedroom scene, etc.)
Sees a screen on the wall of corridor every once in a while, thus stops to see what it is, finds that it plays a video clip (where a part of the protagonist’s story is told)
- For the video clips I don’t have anything specific in mind yet, but generally they should be something joyful that contrasts the reality that the protagonist is in
- It could be some image that matches the aforementioned torn-up photos, so that the user realizes that the video is from the protagonist’s memories
- The main idea here is, the farther they walk into the corridor, the more they go back into the protagonist’s memories, so it would be like walking through a time travelling tunnel and going back in time
After walking past a few different scenes (like three or four? Each having a short video clip), the user will have had a basic understanding of the story
The protagonist comes to a final scene that represents their childhood (meaning the time travel is about to end at the very start of their life)
Sees a door at the end of corridor
Opens the door and finds that it leads to the cell at the beginning
Eventually realizes they are actually trapped in their own mind because they are stuck in memories from the past
Two alternative endings:
- Happy ending – suddenly wakes up and realizes it has been a dream, finds that everything (family, boy/girlfriend, friends, pet dog) is still there (main message: cherish what you have right now (?) )
- Bad ending (but more interesting in my opinion) – finds a note on the desk that puts the story together, revealing that the protagonist used to live a good life, but they destroyed it bit by bit. The clock on the wall finally counts down to 0 but, to their surprise, restarts at 1 hour (meaning that this is an infinite loop)

4/14 UPDATE

Link to our paper prototype.

4/17 UPDATE

Nhi and I worked on the first scene together. Inspired by a scene in The Matrix (1999), this white room will serve as the starting point of the experience.

4/21 UPDATE

Considering the switch of platform from Google Cardboard to PC/Mac, we decided to further simplify our project to two scenes, where there would be no more sunken ship or submarine. Instead, the user will first find themselves inside a white room, from which they can go to the underwater scene through watching a video clip of the project overview. I built the room scene (shown below) going for a bright, casual, everyday atmosphere, so that the user would feel familiar upon entering the environment.

4/26 UPDATE

The building of the underwater scene was started by Luize, and I touched it up a little bit after that. We tried to make the environment feel fantastical and wonderland-ish by using the jade-colored water asset and adding a lot of marine creatures.

4/27 UPDATE

Luize edited a video to play on the television in the room scene, which talks briefly about the impact that man-made plastic waste has on the ocean and serves as an introduction to the background and reasoning behind this project.

5.10 UPDATE

I made some more changes to the underwater scene. I added a path for the user to walk along, and laid out more plants and corals.