Topia Game Segment

Topia 

Working within Topia was a very interesting and eye-opening experience for everyone in the Team Snazzy. Twine was the simplest expression of our story, Road to Vladiriysk, but Topia visually brought that world to life with an easily understood learning curve. Because of this, we were able to closely monitor the aesthetic direction our experience was taking. This is why the visual quality of the Topia varied greatly from the Twine, we were able to shift our focus to what the engine was built to do; and coincidentally, our team was well versed in creating stunning visual experiences. We wanted to focus on creating an environment that provoked the similar emotions in a psychological horror film, as well as solidifying the creepiness and downright unknown terror this town is. With these core concepts in mind, we went ahead and divided the experience of the cave from Vladiriysk itself. This was a crucial first step in realizing what we wanted this semester-long project to be: a disjointed and harrowing experience for Dimitri, and by extension: you - the audience. 

Road to Vladiriysk

Here I decided to create a means of allowing some form of narrative cohesion between the Twine and the Topia by creating a thin strip of canvas in Topia to work with. This was done to give a claustrophobic feeling to the players - to coax them to explore lengthwise in order to give the story a sense of urgency. Here I really wish that Topia actually allowed a designer to tweak in detail more things that have to do with the user, things like movement speed or character design would have been massive. I wanted to decrease the player’s movement speed for a section of the map up until they had interacted with the absinthe bottle, where they would be taken to the ”Howling Lake” this would then allow them to interact with the road into the city’s wall. However, since these intricate actions have yet to be implemented into the platform, we had decided to just create a long strip with a lone absinthe bottle to prompt some kind of interactivity into a special area. 

Vladiriysk 

We had planned out the layout of the plan beforehand, but things changed as we interacted more and more with the platform. I noticed that you could create perspective and implied boundaries (instead of hard ones like canvas limits) which - in my opinion - made the entire topia a lot better compared to the simple 2D plane that we had initially brainstormed with. I tried to imply a sense of depth and height with the given materials that they had in the default set of objects within topia - but with the help, support, and effort of everyone we managed to get in some of our own designs which greatly helped the overall. However, this especially helped with making the town feel a lot more believable for being a mining town. Additionally, the atmosphere overall was amazing - I think everyone’s contributions to the town’s development truly hammered in how hair-chillingly terrifying Vladiriysk became. We were able to achieve what we had initially set out to do: an eerie Russian town harboring a dark secret. I think the sound design by Evan really hammered in the experience we wanted to pursue for this town, gluing the various aspects of design, assets, and story together and helping each aspect maintain their intended effect. 

Further Improvements

While overall, Vladiriysk was an awesome Topia page. There are a lot of things that we could do to further improve and make the experience better. For one, we could further improve on the sound design by adding more tracks, custom assets, and more interactable events. In order to submit we focused on the main experiences we thought were necessary for the Topia, but now looking back - it’s kind of hard to justify that decision. Maybe for a game this would have sufficed, but what our group planned to do was to create a totally occult and bizarre world within Vladiriysk. 

You can’t have a world with just two or three interactable events. By increasing how many musical tracks we have we can adjust the atmosphere for the various areas within Vladiriysk, this can draw users towards certain important areas of exploration. I was thinking of not only adding more intractability with some of the houses, and also to the church and the hostel. Hopefully, these important areas will be further worked on with the addition of loose notes and drawings done by a past explorer who had gone missing in the area. In order to tackle this goal, I hope the team and I can design roughly 3-4 more custom assets.

The Road to Vladiriysk could also have used further improvements to its design and the way it pushed its’ users towards certain interactable objects.

Links:

https://topia.io/spawn-outside-vladiriysk-free-91m938v0k

Notes:

This is a project created by a small team for ATELIER III in OCADU 

Quoted Project Brief:

This fall in Atelier III we will explore spatial story telling approaches across a range of media technologies.

Working in self-selected teams of 3-4 you will create a short story that you will develop and flesh out via a range of conceptual and computational approaches. From branched narrative, social shared story worlds, 3D virtual world and exhibition presented on a publicly accessible website each group will develop their core story across the semester using these spatial approaches.

Team is made up of: 

Alfonso B, Evan S, Iris A, Sana Y