For the second project I worked with Yeji and Will. The inspiration for this project was loosely on the book we read, Invisible Cities by Calvino. We decided to create an impression of one of the cities from Calvino’s book, Valdrada. Calvino mentions that “the traveler…sees two cities: one erect above the lake and the other reflected upside down”. He describes it as not comparable, twin cities. We then started brainstorming different scenarios that could give the Valdrada city feeling. We began to exchange various ideas and ended up constructing a city that includes two cities that were affected by a large scale event. The first city is just an ordinary one and the second one is reflected version of the first one. The characters are very happy in the non-reflected version of the city, while characters are very stressed in the reflected one, and their responses show the darker facets of humanity. For the environment we decided to choose Amsterdam as the inspiration.
Each of us voted for different topics at the beginning and after brainstorming together we narrowed to two; Apocalypse and Invisible Cities. Apocalypse – the user would be in an dystopian world where they would be taken to a flashback where they would want to alter the timeline and restore the piece of the universe they interacted with. We wanted to go with the apocalypse theme from the beginning, however after brainstorming further and having class feedback we have decided to go with Invisible Cities theme.
Invisible cities – There are two cities, usual one which we called “initial city” and the reflected version which we called “reflection city”. The user starts in the initial city – pinkish buildings, cheerful atmosphere with people walking around. The user can walk around and explore the place while interacting with characters. When the user walks to the bridge, light appears on top of the bridge to attract his attention. When the user reaches it, they find out they can click on it and after clicking the environment unexpectedly changes. The user finds himself in a reflection city – building positions flipped, very dark sky and people wandering around in despair. As the user approaches individuals he can hear all the negativity which people were ignoring in the initial city.
After having an idea, we sketched paper prototypes:
We decided to divide the workload between us:
We shared some ideas for the story and then Yeji took charge of the story development.
Will worked on building the dialogue system.
Then I started constructing the environment, based on the sketches. We have chosen to use the low-poly style assets. The most difficult and time consuming part was putting buildings together, particularly the “reflection city”, since I had to flip the buildings and decorations so it would look like the reflected version of the initial city. At the beginning I thought of just copying them all together and rotating the x position – 180 degrees and y position – 90 degrees, however, it didn’t work for some buildings, so I had to put everything one by one. Another problem that occurred during working on this project, was to make water look real. Though a lot of challenges occur I really enjoyed working on it.
The only action that the user does is walking around the city and talking with people. We wanted the user to start by just looking around the city and then walking and interacting with characters. The interaction form is a monologue system where NPCs say a few lines to the user, however, the user is not able to respond. The user could just go and interact with the characters. In the initial city the order of the interaction doesn’t matter since monologues are organized by character, however, in the reflection city, the dialogues are organized one by one in a sequential order. Moreover, as the user looks at the specific scene , light turns on and highlights the specific scene to make it easier for the user to understand and follow up on the story.
Although there have been some challenges that have emerged throughout working on the project, I am extremely pleased with the overall work we have done in such a challenging situation. The end product came very close to what we first foresaw for our projects, it feels very natural however, at the same time unusual and surprising especially when the transition to the second scene takes place.