Major Project: Pre Production 3

Historical Research

I have been doing some research into United States history and think I have found a period of time that will prove very interesting for a major project.

Mansions of the Gilded Age

In US history the Gilded Age is a brief era of time between the 1870's to about 1900. In the years following the American Civil War, the Gilded Age saw a rapid economic growth as American wages surpassed those in Europe, prompting an influx of millions of European immigrants. Despite this economic boom, the Gilded Age was a time of abject poverty and inequality. As Steve Frasier states in his book "The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power" (2015), in terms of property, the wealthiest 1% owned 51%, while the bottom 44% claimed just 1.1%. The term "Gilded Age" itself was applied to the era by historians in the 1920's who took it from a Mark Twain novel, "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" (1873) in which Twain satirized the promised Golden Age after the Civil War, portraying an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding of economic expansion.

During this time of rampant inequality, exceedingly wealthy individuals constructed lavish homes across the country. Families such as the Astors, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers used their homes to assert their social dominance, establish a legacy, and generate prestige. But the glory days of the Gilded Age home didn’t last long. By the 1920s, many of the Fifth Avenue mansions of New York City were being torn down. In the 1940s, it was not uncommon to read about Newport mansions being auctioned off.

This period of history evokes so much emotion in me and is emblematic of the constant strife between those with wealth and those with not. I think there is so much potential for interesting storytelling here, that this time period is the perfect historical backdrop to set my environment in. 

The mansion I create will tell the story of the former owner, with each room of the house filling in a new part of the story. One idea I am interested in is as the player progresses to the upper floors of the mansion, rooms will become boarded up and closed off, showing the hard times that gradually befell the former owner.

Lawrance, G. (2011) Pembroke, Glen Cove Long Island. [Online Image] Available at: https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.D3UFppgv6UINkQcfQ4OcDAHaEo%26pid%3D15.1&f=1 [27/02/2018].
 

Sources:

 

CURBED. (2018) Why did Gilded Age mansions lose their luster? [Online] January 2018. Available from: https://www.curbed.com/2017/9/28/16375440/gilded-age-mansion-museum-vanderbilt-newport [Accessed: 27th February 2018]

FRASIER, S. (2015) The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

NICHOLS, C. M. & UNGER, N. C. (2017) A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Major Project: Pre-Production 2

Changing Concept

I have decided to stop working on my recreation of the Brighton Pavilion and go in a new direction for my major project. I am still eager to create a large scale environment, however I would like to add more of my own creative flair to the project. I began to feel that by recreating the Brighton Pavilion I was locking my ideas down to an existing structure and location, which was making it difficult for me to get engaged creatively with the project. In essence I no longer want to merely replicate an existing place but instead create a project that is entirely unique and shows off my creative ability to the fullest. I believe by making this change I will be much more mentally stimulated as I create the environment, removing the limitations I was feeling when creating the Brighton Pavilion.

Abandoned Mansions

As I stated in my previous post, I am really excited by the concept of the game environment telling a story. When deciding what environment I could create that would best encapsulate this idea, my mind was drawn to abandoned structures. Abandoned buildings immediately start generating all sorts of interesting ideas. Why is this building abandoned? What happened to the people who lived there, and what were the events that led up to this? 

I have the idea of creating a large(ish) mansion that a player can then explore and piece together what happened just by studying the environment. I think this idea gives me a lot of room to get creative with environment assets and props.

I want to break down the environment into several distinct areas and would like to create the following as part of my major project:

• A large exterior environment.
• Several small interior environments.
• Unique assets that will populate the level.

The large exterior environment will serve as a "front cover" of sorts for the level. It will be the first thing the player sees away in the distance and entice their curiosity to enter and then explore the mansion. Each room of the mansion will tell a piece of the story. Simple elements like placement of objects and the dilapidation of the building can be used by the player to work out the events that led up to the mansion becoming abandoned.

The Theme

I have started looking at old mansions but the style and location of the building isn't determined yet. I would like to get this locked down soon, as this will inform the basis for the buildings design and story of the environment.

Major Project: Pre-production 1

Research - Telling a story through the exploration of an environment. 

I consider the ability to evoke atmosphere, emotion and story through the simple act of a player exploring a game level, to be the ultimate achievement of any environment artist. Video games are truly unique in that a player has complete freedom to explore a game world at their leisure, discovering secrets the designers have intricately hidden throughout the environment. The way in which these secrets are discovered, can ultimately shape how the story is experienced by the player. You can convey a particular theme and illicit emotion through the way you make the person playing the game explore the environment. It's this aspect of video games that I really want to build on throughout the development of my major project.

The fact that video games are inherently non-linear, presents me as an environment artist, with a lot of opportunities to exploit this interesting facet of the medium. Essentially what I am interested in creating is a large environment filled with visual information that the player can choose to access at any point and in any order. By exploring the environment in this non-linear fashion the player will discover new areas of the level that provide visual clues as to what the story of the game may be. My intention is that the game environment will tell its own story, no text or voice overs to fill in what may have happened. Through this method of play, the person exploring the environment will use what they have discovered and the way in which they came across the information to tell the story.

P.T. (Silent Hills Playable Teaser) 2014

This is a short psychological horror video game developed by Kojima Productions and released in 2014. The game served as a playable teaser for the unfortunately cancelled "Silent Hills" being directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, hence the name "P.T."

The player takes control of an unknown protagonist who awakens in a seemingly haunted suburban home. Throughout the game the player explores a continually looping corridor. Every time the player opens the door at the end of the corridor, they will find themselves back where they started. This is a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier, in that the way the player explores and experiences certain events throughout the game, they can form a narrative without actually being told directly.

The fact that the main character is stuck in a never ending corridor suggests they are experiencing some kind of purgatory and can never leave. As you continue to walk down this repetitive corridor you get a horrible feeling of claustrophobia, and I think this is a fantastic example of how games can be used to convey emotion and story through exploration of environments.

When taken on its own, the level is essentially a simple room to traverse with a single entry point and exit. However it’s how the designers have been able to make such a simple level feel genuinely terrifying through the way in which the player explores the environment, that makes this game so interesting to me.

GameZone (2014) Silent Hills P.T. Complete Walkthrough with Ending [Online Video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6NCC-nnvMU&t=226s [Accessed: 25th February 2018]