Places

Midterm "lyric game" project for Game Design I. 

WASD / Arrow Keys for control.

Game of places. Exploration of various environments that exist at varying levels of reality.

Made in Bitsy; all art and music done by me.

Places is a game that involves traversal of various places that exist at varying levels of reality. All of them are connected to my own experiences and thoughts. This can be as direct as in the opening rooms, which are designed as pseudo-facsimiles of my home and immediate neighborhood, or as abstract as the geometric space you traverse through, created from the sensory amalgam of various artistic images and thoughts I’ve experienced.  I wanted to explore ideas of interstitiality and “betweenness,” as I’ve recently been exposed to these ideas in the arts. In the game, there is an emphasis on interacting with the various entities in the game, who have ambiguous, nonsensical, and/or referential dialogue. The second half of the game centers around collecting four “things,” each housed in its own environment thematically unique from the rest. These environments are to some extent connected to ideas I’ve been contending with recently, from my awe at geometric form, to my distress and ambivalence at contemporary mass consumer culture. I am not fully sure of why I chose to make such a game, or why I made the environments or dialogue as they are, but I feel like it is a genuine reflection on myself and my thoughts.

I composed a piece as accompaniment for the game, which extends its ideas into the musical realm. It’s generally ambient, with no clear form and constant subversion of direction, and arranged for a small assortment of warm sounds, from synth pads to harp harmonics. In the latter half, two distinct melodies, that being “Sweden” from Minecraft’s soundtrack (composed by C418), and “Green Greens” from the Kirby series (Composed by Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa). These melodies are deeply meaningful to me, and are intended to parallel the hazy, nostalgic, referential atmosphere of the game.