I have started the preliminary development of my final MADT 201 project by considering the concepts I am wishing to explore with this piece and what basic layout/elements I aim to include in this game.
I think first off, I want this to be more of a “walk-through” experience, where the player walks with a first-person perspective through the game with the objective to be an observer of the space rather than an active member of the space. I want to remove the classic means of interaction in video games in which you interact explicitly with other game objects and instead have the player’s considerations of the environment of the game as the main objective.
In this, I hope to have the player reflect more on their own positions in front of the computer; to have a more somatic experience rather than one that immerses them into the fantasy of a video game.
To accomplish this, I am planning on creating a “maze-like” walk through experience that leads into multiple different spaces with potential different end points to encourage players to restart and evaluate the space again. Some of the spaces the player moves through are to have comforting/familiar emotives and others are to have unsettling ones. I hope to have secret rooms accessible by false walls or trap floors.
Another important aspect of this game is going to be the auditory experience in relation to the visuals. There will be multiple different tracks that accompany different spaces; some musical, some noise-based, some harmonious, some dissonant. I plan on working on compositions for these after I design the rooms.
Through all of this, I am hoping to work through my concept of how we have understandings or lack understandings of the technologies that we utilize in our contemporary era. I am interested in reflecting on how as users and developers of programs, we have come to an time where computations have become so convoluted that the humans in front of and behind the machines have little understanding and blind acceptance of the conclusions and outputs they create. I have been largely inspired by the writing of James Bridle in his book “New Dark Age” where he discusses our current age of widely accessible, over-saturated, and unverified information through digital technologies; how the machines we have made to enlighten the world are doing the opposite.
My next objective with this project will be to outline in sketches potential layouts of this game and begin researching and collecting potential game objects that I think will help me begin to understand the actual visual experience of the game.
