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The background design of this room is set in the mid-adulthood, and the main workplace is a narrow office. During work, he received an email with an attached Alzheimer’s examination form. This room is the final stage of the plot and a key room that highlights the theme.
Room Design
The design of this room retains a portion of the original theme, which was based on the “blind theme” (now the game is based on Alzheimer’s disease).
Game Play Design–Sonic Radar System
I have designed this room to be completely dark, and when players scan the room (using a soundwave and echo effect), the items in the room are briefly displayed in wireframe form. Players need to constantly scan the room to figure out their position and the layout of the room.
reference effect-
final effect-
Thanks to Roger for his help in implementing this effect!
I composed the following track to be one of main themes of the game, titled MemoriesLost. It seeks to sensitively portray the sense of memories fading away and how the player’s memories are incomplete due to the condition, Alzheimer’s, that the character suffers from. It represents the later stages of their life, with many memories having faded away and rendering a sad sense of incompleteness as they try to find what they have lost.
The music itself is centred around a melody that will reappear in different forms across the soundtrack in the game, depending on the narrative and the emotions of the room it is in. One of the key things I want the soundtrack to be is cohesive so as to build a strong consistency in the player’s mind and join the rooms altogether in a sonic way.
In response to the story context of the project, I came up with the idea of Alzheimer’s disease and conducted research and studies on it. Using these studies as inspiration, I came up with some ideas for refining the context of the project.
Including:
Thoughts about the shape of the memory pieces and what they would look like when put together
An extension of the game play based on Alzheimer’s
The game narrative context as well as the story line, I have proposed two different contexts and ending narrative designs that I hope to discuss later.
For more details please refer to my brain map file.
We set up our player’s character as a person who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Every memory in each room is his/her former experience. And the game is designed to help him/her recall and retrieve lost memories.
Why do we choose to focus on people with Alzheimer’s disease?
To call attention to Alzheimer’s disease and this group of people, and give them more love and care.
The Economist describes the disease as a ‘global emergency’. The number of people with Alzheimer’s disease is increasing not only in the elderly but also in the young in recent years. And the patients need more care and love because Alzheimer’s disease is one of the known incurable diseases in which people are unable to take care of themselves in later stages, which can be fatal. Moreover, it is a subject of concern, because nursing and other medical expenses are taking heavy cost on the patients’ families and also on the state’s finances. However, taking medicine could delay the development of Alzheimer’s disease if we can find out about it as soon as possible, so this is also one of the reasons that we want to call more attention to this disease and this group of people.
Why do we come up with ideas about memories?
Alzheimer’s disease
To make an appeal for cherishing life and memories
Memories are very precious, and it can be said that everyone has memories. So we use ‘memory’ as the touchpoint of our game to attract more people to play our games. In daily life, some people may rely on looking forward to the future to comfort their current situation of struggle, and some people may regret not treasuring the past. But each experience is precious to us no matter in the past, now or in the future. And we always get the new harvest from our experience. So, we want to make people realise that memories and experiences are precious, and then cherish their current life. Don’t wait until you miss the time and chance to know how to treasure your memories.
“I” seemed to have arrived in a non-Euclidean labyrinth and couldn’t remember why I was there. I switched on the radio in the room and followed the instructions to complete the first room, at which point multiple doors opened and different choices took me back to different stages of my memory, and I needed to explore each room in the labyrinth to retrieve the pieces belonging to each stage of my life and repair my complete memory.
1. Once the player has completed the room assignment, is it possible to add subtitles or narration to connect Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development more closely to the content of the room.
With the workshop, we can achieve some interesting effects with max and apply them to our projections.
1. Overlaying the player’s real-time play footage with a gradually changing puzzle video to give the viewer a differentiated experience from the player.
Implementation solution: capturing real-time game footage via obs.
2.The projection plays our recorded gameplay video and can make certain effects based on the player’s or viewer’s movements and sounds. The content of the projection is like a parallel world to the player’s gameplay world. Such as RGB video effects : https://youtu.be/sO5NaTjBvL8
You play a character in this game who has Alzheimer’s, who wakes up in their own home and don’t recognize where they are and who they are. They are completely lost, and to them, their home has been transformed into a non-euclidean maze that they now have to work to navigate and find their way again by entering each room, and discovering objects in the space that helps recover their memories of their home and their themselves.
In the last stage the player escapes the maze, bringing all the objects into the final room placing in position so they finally recognize where they are and who they are.
As we are cooperating to build the game, so it might be better to set up a standard outline of what content should be included in the room design docs, please makes sure that the content below is included in your room design so it can be re-build quickly and easily.
This room relates to the early adulthood stage of people. The keywords of this stage are love, isolation and relationship. Based on these words, this room attempts to display the emotion and atmosphere of loneliness and longing for love. I want to use lighting to create a contrast atmosphere. The overall tone of this space is warm, but the house in the center of the space uses cool colors to create a lonely atmosphere. The trees outside the house are designed to show the vitality and warmth brought by establishing close relationships. The house presents three different scenes as the players explore, which show the loneliness and psychological contradictions of people at this stage.
Map
Basic Models
Rendering examples (without textures)
Key item-Finger ring
Visual References
Gameplay
The whole environment is divided into six different parts by lakes and river. There are five portals for each area. The players need to explore each area and walk through the portal to enter the next area. They will enter the house and collect the finger ring. The portal to the next room will then open.
These notes are based on the group meeting on 03/06
How are we presenting our game?
We are playing with the idea that there are multiple people on a journey of discovering their lost memories at the same time.
Our game can become a kind of art installation, where the waiting room, and the room that people are playing can become part of the game experience to make it more immersive for the players.
We would like to have people experience the game in two different ways, where one group of people are participating in the experience as the player in the game, and another group of people are participating as a spectator.
We have also decided to have 4 people playing the game at the same time, in their own space in a cubical or some other such thing but the key is the players are in their own enclosed space.
How are we making this immersive?
We would like to include a projection of visuals in the room, along with sounds that can correspond with them on a speaker. Some ambient music would also be a great addition to have.
We can either project the the gameplay from one person into the room where other people can watch as spectators, or it can be a warped version of the game to project a different perspective of the game for a bit of a interesting twist.
The goal is to help the physical setting of the game become part of the play experience to make it more immersive. So, there can be one speaker and a projection with visuals that can match the color aesthetics of each room the player enters in, with the sounds and music in the background that’s heard in the room that matches the gameplay of the player.
In the enclosed space the players are in, we can also put LED lights in each space that would light up with same colors seen in the room that player enters in the game. We can also include some floor cams that would do the same thing.
Some things to consider…
How can we make sure the audio matches the projection?
How can we make the experience more convincing for the players but also the spectators?
Should we have people watch the gameplay play while in the waiting room, or should we just have a projection showing some game controls and hints? Or will there be some abstract visuals with fun textures and colors with some sound and music that could build anticipation as well as interest?
How are the spectators viewing the game? Are they peering over the players shoulders or are they walking around the room and experiencing the game as a kind of art installation with warped images of the game or just fun seeing visuals and textures?
What do we need to make this all happen?
We need to take the time to find the best room to do this in. The Atrium is the best contender at the moment, where it has the most space that we could easily manipulate for our needs.
We thought about Room 101, but to make the game more immersive it would be a bit tricker to try and figure out how to use the room to our advantage.
So far we need: One speaker, a projector, 4 really good laptops, and 4 really good headphones.
Due to the model collision problem after the room model provided by the original team members was imported into UE, the player could not enter the room. After the team meeting, I further refined the original concept of the room, recreating the model of the room to represent the life stages of adolescence.
Firstly, the room adopts a wave-effect back room style to reflect the instability and insecurity of this period. In my opinion, adolescence is a crossroads in life, with multiple choices and a sense of confusion. Now let’s talk about the game design of the room. When the player enters the room, it is pitch black and they need to use the sound exploration function to search for three hidden items in the room. These three items correspond to three different life paths: sports, art, and science. Once the player selects any of them, they can unlock the corresponding memory photos. This also indicates that although there is instability at this stage, there are still multiple possibilities to explore. After unlocking, the entire room will become bright, which also represents that once you find your direction in life at this stage, you will be wholeheartedly devoted to it.
For gameplay design purposes, I added models to the other rooms to make them more relevant to the game.
Adolescence Room Iteration
3.20 Update – Import into UE 5 and conceptualise and implement the
Gameplay
//Mind map TBC
Schematic diagram of the scene
Room Concept
This room is a Late Childhood stage, which means goodbye to childhood, so the first thing I associate with is school/classroom/classroom. But the room also contains deeper memories of grief, as the player explores the items in the room, linking seemingly unrelated items into a complete story through the questions on the board, in order to get to the hidden pieces of memory in the room.
Gameplay. The chalkboard will act as the main interactive object in the room, giving the player different tasks by switching between different texts. The player will need to explore/search the room for what they think is the correct answer and place it on the podium, if the answer is correct it will unlock the memory associated with the item and finally by stringing all the memories together the player will be able to find the final memory fragment.
