Ideation (Part 1)
The concept started from me deciding to create a narrative driven game, but at the time I played Journey on PS4 which transformed how I saw telling the story as a whole and with this particular project, the designs I created during the process took a lot of inspiration from that, where the game made me feel things. The key word being ‘feel’
I wanted to take the concept of feelings into a game, which was a bit ambitious, taking similar approaches to the game Journey with the incorporation of silent narrative, the player should be able to feel the whole experience through environmental story-telling rather than traditional methods of telling you what’s happening. Because Journey also felt like a dream that was the another starting point. So how did I want to develop the game and what ideas could I retain from there:
Dreams
Feeling Emotions
This then took my focus to what I think a dream could consist of which is well…. random to say the least, but how to make it cohesive and collaborate with the idea of feeling emotion.
With collaborating these ideas, the conclusion for the player to really feel these things meant I needed some type of visual representation of a blank slate, but has to be relatable, so somewhat like a human, my final consensus to who the player will be a walking humanoid diamond character. The reason for this is the character in-game would ‘reflect’ the emotions of the what’s currently happening, so at least I had a starting point in creating a dreamscape with a character.
Next was discussing how to convey these emotions, but what emotions do humans even possess?
So I had to do some research, finding Robert Plutchiks theory of eight basic emotions being and putting it basically comes down to Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Trust and Anger. I wanted to show each of these emotions into core concepts and then took that idea of making them into separate worlds for the player to fully understand each emotions.
