Project Description
The environment of the space is a confined elliptical structured town composed of houses surrounding a central body of water, directly inspired by Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. The environment choice was taken with careful consideration, leading to a long ideation / brainstorming process. The setting of Amsterdam was chosen due to its capability to encompass our, more abstract, theme of reflection while providing more substance that helped us push the story forward.
The confined structure of the town acted as narrative guidance, leading us to question – why the town was confined in the first place? What existed beyond the town? Are the villagers aware of such an outside? – all of which inspired us to create a corrupted town in which the core tension underlying it stems from lack of awareness of the external world.
Process and Implementation
There is a way in for merchants, but no way out for villagers. The exit is only accessible to those in power, to sustain the deception. The reason for such deception is the queen’s greed for power and control. She assigns the villagers to dig for ‘stones’, the top valuable of the town, in exchange for residency in the town. These stones are sold externally for personal gain.
Such corruption, sustained by deception, exists in the town but not overtly visible. The environment in which the user spawns in is constructed to feel like a jolly utopia. This has been done, on surface level, through the use of warm lighting from the sun which brings out the diverse colors of the scene and uplifting background music playing under town ambient sound. The optimistic monologues and body language of the NPCS, accessible when the user moves close and clicks, develops the environment further through the provision of contextual information. When interacting with the NPCs, the user is a character (merchant from external town) with no-impact. Their presence is acknowledged – NPC faces the user when they start to speak – but must simply listens with no option to respond. These monologues primarily serve to develop the characters of the individual NPCs while simultaneously hinting the tension which underlies the town.
The mode in which the user can gain more insight into this tension is through the reflection. The reflection on the water, central to the town, has the unique property of not permitting deception and lies through, allowing only truth through the reflected scene of the town. This idea was inspired by how we perceive colors. A color of an object is the wavelength reflected from it, every other color is absorbed by the object. In the constructed environment, the reflection has a choice in what it reflects and absorbs and it refuses to passively absorb the lies of the real world.
The user can access the reflected scene through a shining orb which becomes accessible, on the dock, after interacting with the King. Once close enough, the user can click the object which teleports them to the reflected scene. The reflected scene portrays a contrasting mood. The light is dimmed to construct a night environment and the music changes to a more haunting one, layered with the sound of night (crickets, water, wind, etc). This visual and auditory contrast is a clear indicator of scene change, which prompts the user to anticipate a contrast of some sort. This motivates the user to move and explore to fill their knowledge on this change.
In contrast to the first scene, the user is given more guidance in approaching the story. In the first scene, the nature of interacting with the NPCs was non-sequential. The individual characters themselves provided structure of the monologues. However, in the reflected scene, the user changes to a ghost with no-impact. The identity shifts from a merchant to a non-physical being that eavesdrops on the dialogues and interactions between the NPCs. In this scene, the story is organized through scenes, the sequence of which is significant. Spot light is used to guide the user towards the active scene of current order (also why the scene takes place at night). The highlighted scene is also the only interact-able one. The scenes are also constructed spatially to reduce unnecessary movement. The circular path of the pedestrian street allows for the implementation of a linear story without it being too noticeable.
The switching of the spotlight denotes the start and end of a scene, similar to how it is used in theatre. While under the spotlight, the NPCs perform their dialogues and actions and the user watches. The nature of the dialogues in this scene is more honest and real. The persona presented by the NPCs in the real scene is brutally contrasted to explicitly communicate the contrast between the façade that people desire to portray vs. their true selves. One’s ability to deceive seems to be a requirement as social beings. The intention behind deception is highly subjective. Some choose to deceive for personal gain (queen), some for self-deception (the happy depressed peasant), some for comfort of others, etc. One’s choice to not reveal their true selves, emotions, state, at certain moments seemed like an interesting phenomenon, reflective of the real world, to explore in a fictional space.
After the user finishes progressing through the dialogues, two NPCs are dead. After the last scene, the orb reappears on the dock which transports the user to scene 3 when clicked. Scene 3, on surface, is almost identical to the first one. A change, which the user can realize if attentive enough, is the disappearance of the two NPCs. Regardless, the town seems unaffected and unchanged, with each NPC carrying on their usual routine of sustaining their jolly façade. The user can choose to roam around scene 3 as long as they want. The option to interact with the NPCs is removed, however. The feeling provoked from roaming in the space would feel different from the first encounter of the space. Now aware of the truth which lies underneath, the user can recognize the deception.
More specific details on the development process / story development / sketches is all in the development journal.
Reflection / Evaluation
As such, the story is constructed around the central aim of bringing light to a phenomenon which occurs in the real world – deception. To communicate such an abstract concept in a tangible form, we had to design a space – composed of characters, speech, animation, environment, sound which all follow a central story. Also, the fictional aspects – the reflection, characters – all played a significant role in constructing a space capable of expressing such concept.
This project taught me a lot on how to develop a theme, through story, in a VR setting. More specifically, it made me recognize the limitless number of approaches the creator can take when attempting to convey a story in VR. Space being the main medium of VR, we had to reconstruct the way in which we told the story. It was not limited to purely text (ex. books), sound (ex. songs, podcasts), visuals (ex. movie), etc. It was an integration of all these components, which made it flexible but also very challenging. As such, I found that we drew a lot of inspiration from many forms of media and combined them. For example, the scenes and spotlight in the reflected scene was inspired from theater. The interaction with NPCS was inspired by the approach taken by many open world games.
The final game, I think, achieved most of the goals intended for this project. The reason for feeling so has to do largely through constantly changing and adapting in the creation process. We made a lot of changes along the way to adapt to the VR interface, but made sure these changes did not take away the core message of the story.