Sections starting with a *** concern some more universal aspect of my game. In this entry, it is a brief discussion on the visual style and aesthetic of my setting.
The concept for my game has changed considerably over the past four days. My current problem is that this shift has not been uniform; some aspects remain the same and are now incongruous. For this reason, I will start from my initial plan and then examine how and why it has changed.
I had a difficult time coming up with an idea; there were no real restrictions on what I could do, which left me paralyzed by indecision. I did not decide what I was going to do until the night before I had to tell my professor. The very beginning of my idea came from thinking about what I liked about games, what my personal motivation was. The thing that I eventually fixated on was exploration. Exploration is a common element in games, but I am somewhat peculiar in that I particularly like to go where I am not supposed to. Someone spent months carefully building a little world for me to play in, and inevitably take any chance I get to try and escape it and explore things 'behind the scenes'...
These are some of the places that serve as inspiration for the sort of strange, surreal world I wanted to create.
From World of Warcraft.
I very quickly decided that this was where I wanted to set my game; it was fresh, unique and personal. To start figuring out what sort of game I wanted to make, I examined my own attraction to these places. The majority of my interaction with them is in the form of actually getting to them, through exploring. This is a rather grueling process; there are very few places that even have the potential to be worth trying. An hour's worth of careful progress can be cut short by falling (often to my death) or by an invisible wall. It's not unlike finding a needle in a haystack and then threading it. I think that the largest part of it is the feeling that I've done something that no one else has ever even thought of trying, despite the game designers going out of their way to prevent me from being successful.
*** Even if I manage to attain my goal, most of the scenery is ugly, bland, or both. These places were never meant to be seen, and it shows. However, there are occasional examples of a kind of abrupt, accidental, striking beauty born of extreme contrasts or surreal juxtaposition; a single tree in the middle of a sterile white plain, a dock that extends over the edge of the world into oblivion. These places were what I valued and what I wanted my setting to embody.
All I really got out of this line of thought was greater empathy and understanding of mountain climbers, who just do it "because it's there". Most people would not enjoy a game based around my own relationship with these settings as they exist as part of other games, so they would serve as a backdrop for a more approachable and contemporary adventure/exploration game.
The next thing was to figure out what kind of story I wanted to tell.
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