Injured child concept. The teddy bear in her arm in this scene is the teddy that is dropped on the ground. My thought was as the soldier carried the girl past it, they or another soldier would pick the teddy up and hand it back to her.
My main reason for using such a young character was to capture the idea of innocence and naivety. With an adult character, the audience may have not have necessarily had sympathy for their plight, as it was the citizens who supported the extremists’ rise to power in the first place. A child of that age, however, would be oblivious to such concepts, and would have had no say in who was in power, thus an audience would immediately sympathise with her. This will help drive home the message of the piece.
* * *
While discussing the project with a colleague, Andrew, I find myself reconsidering the player perspective of the piece, having the child the player character as opposed to the soldier. Having the child as the focus would not only be more interesting, but allow the project greater scope for emotions in the design, as the child, not understanding everything that is happening, will likely ‘imagine’ much more of the environment than an adult, who would see the world for what it is. So for example, a tank rumbling by to an adult would be just a tank, but a child might see it as a large fanged mouth, thrashing like a monster. Changing to the child also allows the reinforcement of the sympathy for her (by viewing all of the events from her perspective), and the friendly image of the soldiers, whom she would initially only hear and think evil, until encountering them at the end and realising are not so, especially when one cradles her and carries her outside; seeing this from the child’s perspective, I feel, will be an interesting sequence, and one I haven’t seen in many (if any) games in the past.
The change of character, of course, necessitated a redesign of the level, with the player starting in a ruined basement, and discovering the items originally dotted around the street as they make their way through the room (with the exception of the teddy, which the player will see being dropped in a cut scene, but wont be given back till the end).
Concept for new main hub area; the ruined building that the girl has run into. It is strewn with rubble and wreckage, a particularly large pile forcing the player to navigate around the circumference of the room in order to reach the door.
The triggered events would be from her perspective, and will provide some interesting points of view for the audience; in the speech clip, for example, the viewpoint will begin with the girl unable to see anything with the adults crowded around here, then she will be picked up by someone and moved to where she will be able to see. The fact the girl is injured will also allow me to return to the mirror’s edge-esque camera considerations I was looking at with the original Raijin concept (see first post); a limp can be created by having the camera jerk in one direction and then lazily move back up as she walked, and tears can be simulated using whimpers and light blurring effects on the screen.
Unlike the previous idea, here the soldiers interact with the child from the outset; it is their yelling and the rumble of vehicles that wakes her up, and inspires the player to move (whether to investigate the noises or to run from them). She may see only vague silhouettes or parts of them for the first half of the game, to help the player feel the tension the girl would feel, thinking they are looking to kill or hurt her. One of them eventually hears or sees her and starts calling out, and the tone and words of his voice begins to reveal their true nature, inspiring the player to crawl through a gap in the rubble, where she finally meets the soldiers face-to-face, who then carry her to a truck, which drives away down a street, ending the game with a gentle fade out.
The designs of the soldiers themselves I will look to next week. I am looking to maintain a multi-cultural atmosphere to this project, so I will likely design the soldiers to appear to herald from a variety of races, to prevent any particular culture being portrayed as the good guys. The extremists too will lack any particular cultural focus, merely be a amalgamation of stereotypes studied in research into such groups.
No comments:
Post a Comment