CPS - Week 4 - Discussions of place

Context:

Games which inspire my sense of place:

No Man’s Sky

• Colour palette
• Guiding vision of 70’s sci-fi book cover

Overwatch

• Location styles
• Culturally embedded
• Mechanical vs tactical vs realistic

Subnautica

• Light, audio, palette, form all help to indicate increasing levels of drama & danger
• Player skills & abilities limit exploration
• Resources in various locations maintain relevance of previous areas, with majority of resources common to multiple biomes.

Kenshi

• Little initial world-building. No grand backstory.
• Story of game world can be seen physically in the game world.
• Plot is sparse, no ‘main narrative’

Method:

I want to create a space in Unity wherein the environment projects the story upon the agents and objects within it.
To do this, I imagine a central “mood control” which would then adjust lighting, camera angles, relative proportions, behaviours or other factors over which it had control in the scene.

I want to use basic objects which don’t convey a story on their own, Unity 3D primitives are good for this; cube, sphere, capsule, plane. I can use some scripts I have from a previous project to spawn objects with some degree of randomness and agents with a few simple behaviours. This idea crosses over with my work in IOL and gives me a chance to consider weather I might use what I create for CPS in my project for IOL.

Response:

This week I put together my initial object and agent spawners and constructed my prototype UI. The UI elements don’t do anything yet but it’s useful to have them there to hook up to whatever I end up doing with them. The agents and objects spawn a little too dark but I can change that later. Otherwise they are working well. I also added an overcast skybox just to play with the ‘ominous’ feeling of the scene