DESN385

Project 2

The computer screen is an illusion– it is essentially a grid of flat pixels. To convert these pixels into a narrative world that suspends disbelief that can immerse the user/player within a situated experience requires strategic designing. This project will explore gaming perspectives and examine the design problems surrounding the constructing seamlessly interconnected levels. Additionally, we will be analyzing how characters are integrated, not only with the worlds they inhabit – but the perspective employed by game designers. This project will examine how to build such systems while striving towards a more general goal of creating virtual worlds that support internal game systems, while also relating to the player’s second order of cognition: the real-world.

20% of your total grade:

1. Choose an environmental system from an existing video game. Write about this environment in your blog, describing how it reveals itself to the user, changes through different levels, and how characters and objects behave and are controlled in this space.
2-4-08

2. Create a character and environment in Unity that is influenced by your research, with the following rules:
1. You may only borrow the perspective structure from the inspirational game – not the game content.
2. You also must significantly alter your version, so that it departs from your inspiration (game-play, level design, user-interaction (UI) and/or conceptual framework).

Hand-in all work: publish your interactive animation to the web; document your research to your blog; turn in a PDF of your writing, and all files used for the project (Unity, Photoshop, and any other media files used) on a CD or DVD by the due date. Nest a Unity game web file in your blog.

10% Blog Hand-In:
Each part of this project must be uploaded to your blog using clear and concise entry headings… Your blog will serve more than just an organization and presentation tool for your project – use it to fully describe your research and production processes for all phases of your project. Think of your blog as a ‘hand-in’ basket: If it isn’t on your blog, it won’t be graded.

Objective: The goal of this brief is to push the boundaries of immersion wtihin a gaming experience – detail of graphics is only a small (yet overly focused) element of how immersion can be achieved. Graphics, audio, dialogue, story line, and game play work in tandem to create a state of player-game symbiosis that can be thought of as cybernetic ludology. Evaluations are based on the timely completion of labs and reading assignments, and creativity and mastery of the project. Project due Wednesday, 30-4-08.

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