Contextual Statement
For my Animation and Moving image project, I am working with Yuyu, William and Michan. Our group decided to make an educational game based on poverty, our main objective is to raise awareness of the struggles a person living in poverty goes through everyday. To allow players to explore a more detailed environment and understand how hard it is to survive in such conditions.
We are making an immersive exploration game about the problems in third world countries. For this semester we mainly focused on refining our skills with unreal engine 4 and to work together to help players understand how hard it is to survive within the harsh conditions of poverty with facts.
The map we are making will be listed with facts that are located at specific areas and events throughout the environment. The layout and design of the map is spaced closed together to make it represent what it looks like in a poor suburban area. We have slum shacks spaced closely together along with a messy industrial area on the side, both of these areas lead to a large market place where people interact making the whole scenery look busy. We have used Unreal Engine 4 to build our game, so that it can run smoothly in terms of performance, gameplay and involvement with the area. With the materials and textures that we have established due to the high graphics of the engine, the player is immersed into our simulation completely to make them feel sympathy and immersed.
The reason of why we have chosen to help raise awareness for countries that are suffering from poverty is because they don’t receive enough recognition. We want to create an experience for players that are eye opening, throughout years people have tried to help raise awareness with charity and by using their voices. We want to help these people with our game to allow players be more knowledgeable about the problems a third world country goes through.
Since survival games are usually noticed as a game to try and stay alive in, we based our game around the idea and feeling of a survival games, such as ark and mine craft. We have taken our time researching about poverty and the causes of it such as religion and government corruption. We also hope to create an experience with an interactive system that resonates with a player on a much deeper level.
What I wish to change in our game would most likely be to evolve it into a survival game, instead of keeping it an educational game. I want to make the player feel more immersive within the environment and to have them relate to what it feels like to live in poverty. It’s important to us that people understand the importance of basics human needs and that there are people that are forced to live without access to these basic needs every day who are living in third world countries.
Our goal in the end is to make people realise the dangerous environments, diseases, struggles and the harsh reality that people who live in poverty have to go through every day.
Andy Leung.
