I noticed something interesting this week, I started to explain our project as well as environmental storytelling and Indexical Storytelling in games to our lecturer and he quickly stopped me, instead, he asked if I could show him our project visually.
I was initially confused about why he wanted us to explain the story visually however after thinking about it it made perfect sense. When explaining a project about telling a story through environmental clues to someone, doesn't it make sense to do so visually? It also helps to better understand the project myself.
I feel that the best way to do this would be through a storyboard, basic individual images that tell a story in a non-linear fashion, yes, non-linear.
Environmental storytelling in games is an interesting and rather unique method as the clues that allude to the story are not always received or understood in a linear fashion. For example, in Half-Life 2, a place known as Ravenholm is a town that was overrun with parasitic creatures that turned people into mutated zombie-like creatures. We see in Ravenholm strange metallic pods with open holes which reveal them to be empty, it isn’t until later that we see these creatures climb out of the pods in a different level that we realize the oppressive police-like combine dropped these creatures here to doom the town. Had we seen the creatures leave the pods earlier before coming to Ravenholm we would have immediately known what was going on.
This non-linear and not always cohesive method often leads to leaps of logic or speculation from the player, it is why I feel that a storyboard that can be read in nearly any order would visually describe the experience we are trying to create best.
Some games that employ this type of storytelling are:
However, before I build a storyboard I actually need... a story.
A while ago I wrote the backstory to our project and Sheena talked with me about it until we were both happy with it. What my current task has been, is to build the story our player will actually be apart of, rather than the story they aim to uncover. I felt the best way to describe this is with a diagram I drew.
The parallel lines represent the games events. The lower line is the series of events (Indicated by the markers) that built towards the linear end to the backstory. The top line represents the various clues that the player can discover in the game world and their links to the written backstory. The player can realize and put these clues together randomly, in this way it is much like a puzzle.
So to begin writing the sequence of events and clues to our player's story, I decided to continue on with the idea of creating a vivid and well-defined world. This would help me think about what the player must do within said world.
Since our player is uncovering a story of the past related to an empty and overgrown city, it seemed logical to actually design this city. My challenge here was that the city is technologically more advanced than any in reality and so I had to try to understand what a real city would need while remembering that many of these needs may have become obsolete to an advanced civilization, as well as the city having a different culture to ours.
My finalized concept is shown below. I did not write a legend for the icons in this map mainly because they are to give context to myself and Sheena about the cities general layout. However for the sake of documentation:
Green: This district contains housing units.
Purple: This district contains Military & Law facilities.
Orange: This district contains large scale food production facilities.
Pink: This district contains manufacturing facilities.
Dark Blue & Red: City transport systems.
Diamond: The Atrium Spire (Academy, museum, medical, and science facility).
Yellow: The Nebular Siphon (Power supply, water processing, waste system).
Black: Perimeter Wall (Houses transport systems).
Filler space: Non-District housing, businesses, facilities. (Less restricted, a bit of everything).
