Every story happens in a place. And time has come to build and iterate on the scene that the drama of Those left behind will play out.
During Week 2 I have participated in a lecture concerning the game spaces and how to believably design them. Pity, that my world does not have any levels per se, but I will use the first part, the tree diagram and the biome disection to jump start my design of the game world.
The working title for the world is Otherworld – it is a name that should reflect the possibility of the world. I want it to embody a future, possible path that our civilisation can follow, if we are not careful.
Our world can go in a wrong direction – not that there is an inherit good one. For me, that bad direction was somewhat portrayed by the semi-recent movie “Don’t look up”. The ever-growing disconnection between the people who have money and means and those who do not, between those in power and those stripped from it, between super-rich and regular folks is a well prepared soil for discord and resentment to grow. The Otherworld is a desperate world, that the survivors must make sense of, tame it again and try to live till tomorrow.
So… how do I go about making the Otherworld feel as much abandoned and final as possible?
I have started by defining the emotions I need in the world. To tell a story of diffucult choices, compromises and thrilling struggle for survival I need to make the player experience the world devoid of hope and progress. It is what was left behind by those capable of leaving. The rich has taken to stars. With the help of hired scurity forces and taking those who were deemed “useful” and “desired”, they managed to lift themselves, safely to the orbit, where they prepare for sending colonisation ships to other galaxies. We are left behind, unwanted, unsuitable, undiesired in a world without a future.
That idea made me think further of the spaces that the world itself needs -> desolate spaces, portraying the leftover civilisation, damaged cities and abandoned lives and the “safe spaces”, space ports that can lift those worthy of saving up to the orbital stations. I figured that the distinction, the divide that the rich of this world had made needed to be reinforced with a proper security force. The space ports should be small, guarded and difficult to penetrate. They will have some temporary housing for the travellers but will mostly be focused around a landing pad – where the rockets would land and take off to the orbit.
But the game itself will not happen in one of those places, not in a functioning one anyway. The game must happen in a place that was built as a shelter from harsh, thrown out of whack enviroment and one that sustains a fragile island of care and safety in a hopless place.
People do not live in cities anymore. Most of them died beacuse of harsh weather coditions and changing enviroment. Most of the places on Earth are inhabitable due to lack of water or food. Cities are mainly a source of intresting and promising trash. Leftover mechanisms, resources, cans of food that hasn’t gone bad yet, it is all there, waiting for the scavengers to take it and use it.
The wilderness is the real danger. Desolate enviroment started to deteriorate long time ago, but now has reacged new heights of deadly. Poisoned wildlife and toxic wastes are one of many obstacles on your joruney thrugh the landscape of the Otherworld. When corporations and bilionaires started taking to the skies, they did not care what sort of remnants they leave on Earth. Discarded industrial complexes, neighberhoods, refinaries – its all still there, half-destroyed, in the process of being reclaimed by the desolation.
Below I have compiled a list of “vibe inspirations” – movies, books and games that create this sort of enviroment that I want to evoke in Those left behind. I will be going back to those inspirations further down the design journey.
- Elysium: the barren and abandoned by the richest landscape of desolate and destroyed Earth
- Metro: atmosphere of dread and fragility of the society that is being sustained in the depths of russian metro system
- Fallout: deserted and destroyed land of lost civilisational progress
- Blade Runner 2048: deserted lands of trash and abandoned factories
- Wall-E: landscape of neverending wastes and trash heaps
- MadMax: dry, horrible enviroment which makes all people contend for most basic resources
- Nausicaa. The Valley of Wind: postapocaliptic enviroment, wrecked and changed by the effects of human exploitation
This is just the begining of crafting the Otherworld.