Project Description
The Fall Of Octavia is a piece of interactive storytelling designed for the Google Cardboard. The project is based on the city of Octavia as described in the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. The piece takes this depiction further and imagines the complete destruction of the city, providing the user with the task to move through the city and escape with their daughter before it collapses. The city is depicted as being constructed of wooden houses similar to medieval-style homes. It is described in the book as a “spider-web city,” with many floating islands connected by bridges and ropes. As a consequence of the city’s flimsy architecture, the precarious situation is viewed as a part of life in the city, as something that the inhabitants must face everyday. How does this constant threat of collapse and destruction impact the culture of the city? In what ways would its inhabitants react if the city were to collapse? How might these reactions to death differ from the reactions of inhabitants in other cities? The project depicts the gradual destruction of the city, the reactions of its inhabitants and brings the user into this dynamic environment.
Process/Implementation
We all agreed that we would either do our final project with either the theme of apocalypse or a city from Invisible Cities. Eventually we decided on depicting Octavia and imagining the city as an explorable virtual reality experience. We found the premise interesting because of the architecture of the city as well as the dangers that this architecture would pose to the preservation of the city. We were also inspired by a few depictions of the city that we found online:
At first our idea was putting a fantasy spin on the destruction of the city. The idea that it was a “spider-web city” by actually introducing a malevolent spider that attempts to destroy the city. In this case Octavia would have been constructed by a spider and built upon by human settlers who were unaware of the spider’s existence or believe it to have disappeared. Because we believed that there were many interesting things we could play around with in the destruction of the city’s islands we found this destruction of the city to be at odds with defeating the spider character. Furthermore, we were unconvinced that this would be a compelling experience because of the restrictions of the Cardboard and the difficulty in creating an engaging way to kill or repel the spider with just the one button.
After some more brainstorming and also experiences with the Google Cardboard, we decided that it might be a better idea to focus on the environment rather than a story that might require a more complex interaction system. Two questions came to mind when we decided this: why should we care about exploring the city? How should the user navigate the city with the Google Cardboard? To address this we decided to make the city as one strip of planks with houses on the sides of the path. This was done to immerse the user in the scene, making it apparent that the city is hanging in the sky between two mountains. It was also done to encourage the user to travel along that path exclusively, motivating them to get from point A to point B naturally. Because we wanted the user to also pay attention to the surroundings and the city’s inhabitants we decided to make the motivation for the user finding their daughter through the collapsing city. We realize that this motivation may be a bit superficial, but because of the difficulties with the Cardboard and our desire to make the user focus on the inhabitants, we decided that this would be a good option, even though finding the daughter is an easy task. The user can decide whether or not they choose to save their daughter, with the decision having no impact on the ending of the story. The user is also given no time restrictions. These decisions were made to encourage the user to fully observe the environment while “encouraging” them to seek out their daughter for the sake of the story introduced during the introduction sequence.
For our interactions we decided to just have one interaction which was clicking on the ground around you to move the camera in that direction. The other interaction was going close to the daughter which would enable her to follow you for the rest of the scene. This was done to allow the user to pause while walking to look around and observe the city. It also becomes obvious that one of the inhabitants is the daughter because she starts waving at the user when they come close.
My task was designing the city and creating animations for the city’s gradual destruction. Applying what I discussed before I created a strip of land that the user could walk on through the city and placed medieval houses on the sides of the path. I found a great script that broke apart gameobjects into smaller pieces through this YouTube tutorial which I found made the user’s situation in the city more dangerous. With this script I made some objects fall onto the strip and become destroyed at certain points in time while others are cued by the user’s movement into a certain position in the scene. I also added flames and smoke inside several houses and scripted objects and houses to fall from the city’s other islands into the abyss. I also added some post processing effects to the screen to make the appearance of the scene more aesthetically appealing. Fog was also added below the city to create the illusion of a deep abyss and to avoid creating additional terrain/gameobjects that might be heavy on rendering power (the scene was heavy enough as it was!).
I also worked on adding ambisonic sounds to the scene as well as the final destruction sequence that occurs at the end. Ambisonic sounds were added to the fires, to the daughter, to an inhabitant crying and to an inhabitant screaming. This was done in order to increase immersion as well as guide the user to investigate where these cries might be coming from and to pay attention to the reactions and expressions of the inhabitants. The final destruction sequence was triggered as the user stands on the mountain slope and loud rumbling noises can be heard as the city falls into the abyss.
Reflection
Overall, I was satisfied with the project and my contribution to it. With this project I really felt like I understood how scripting worked compared to other projects, especially communication between different scripts. I did grow frustrated with how difficult it was to create a complete environment that was beautiful and responsive to the user’s actions and movement throughout the scene. Even though I felt like I did a solid job, I felt like a few of the animations looked a bit out of place with the environment. I think that the ideation part of this was where our group struggled the most as we put a lot of thought into how this whole experience would be designed for the Cardboard while also creating an engaging and immersive scene. Our biggest question was: what would we do with the one button? Our answer to that was to allow for the user to move around the scene with little limitations by reserving the button for movement up and down the city and over the bridge. I am not completely sure about whether it was the best decision, but we had a difficult time figuring out what kind of compelling actions could be taken with the click of the button, especially in the context of feeling powerless in the face of imminent death.