This image is intended to be an approximation of how an in-game shot will look, were the game made based on the current concept. Though I am not yet decided on a great deal of the actual game mechanics, my hope is that presenting this at the next presentation session will help get my intended direction across to my colleagues, who will hopefully be able to offer opinions on my works and suggestions to help me decide on further developments.
As previously outlined, the game will be from a first-person perspective, with only the arms (and the legs, if looking downward) of the player character being visible. Player character emotions and actions will thus be mostly represented through sound and use of camera movement and effects (bobbing for running, blur effect for tears, etc).
The environment around the player will consist of a series of simplistic buildings and other items (bushes, fences lampposts etc), that are used to represent a stereotypical town. I will include only light texturing, as I find that in a cartoon aesthetic very spare textures (such as only putting a few brinks onto a wall, as I have done in the image), fit in better with the visuals of the world than a fully textured surface. A central aesthetic will be the transition of these elements from their starting bright colour palette (predominantly blue) to a darker one (predominantly red), which triggers in areas that the extremists have entered as they move across the town. Lighting elements will add further to this effect, starting with bright, ‘warm’ shades in areas still using the blue palette, and darker, ‘colder’ shades in areas where the red palette has activated. Both of these effects can be triggered using the trigger volumes used in my first prototype.
The base game play mechanic would be moving through the city environment, searching for a specific objective, while avoiding the Extremist characters, who would give chase if they saw you a trigger a game over upon physical contact. As the robotic characters will have slightly slowed, clunky movements, they will be easier to evade than normal enemies, which I feel is important due to the nature of the game. Were they normal speed, some players may find the game (which contains no way to defend yourself) too hard and thus not play it, while others will be sucked into the challenge and miss the setting and story. Both of these outcomes would prevent appreciation of the game’s inner message, which is the core of the project. By making the game play relatively easy, the player has the opportunity to focus on the observation of the environment and thus the message the project is trying to get across.
The book in the girl’s hand is a possible late-game feature I have been considering. Political extremism largely relies on manipulating people’s opinion by restricting what information they’re allowed access to. Thus, it is commonly believed that a key to overcoming extremism is to provide high-quality and varied education for people. My idea therefore, was that the player would eventually gain access to books, which she can throw at enemies. Being hit by the book would trigger an animation in which the extremist reads the book, and then wails with regret, either disappearing or transforming into a normal person. She could also combat the tank in this way, by throwing the book at one of the hatch openings; a pilot would then open the hatch to see what it was, grab the book, close the hatch and the tank would turn blue and stop moving.
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For when the enemies and the tank were moving around the level, I feel it would be good aesthetically to have a red light following them around, to create the illusion that the colour change is being painted by their movement, rather than separate lights triggered by their presence. I created a second small prototype level to experiment with this, attempting to use Unreal’s attachment feature to attach a light to a moving block.
Though ultimately this failed, the project did show me that animations, if set to repeat, automatically jump the object back to the start of the animation. This could be applied in several situations (for example, an endless line of people or vehicles in the background).
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