Project Name: Dawn
Project Type: Game
Target Date: Spring 2015
Story
I could talk for some time about my love/hate relationship with video games. At some point I’ll post about my issues with first-person shooters and hack-n-slash games. Dragons and magic can be fun, but well-constructed reality is what I like the most. I love open format games where you can be anyone, go wherever you want to go, and do whatever you want to do. There are some serious technical and storytelling challenges to that kind of game, but whenever someone has pulled it off, it has shattered our expectations about what we should be allowed to do in a game.
Dawn is meant to be a new way of doing this, with a new way of interacting with the world. It is set in the Fertile Crescent roughly 11,000 years ago. There are no martial arts or fancy weapons and there aren’t that many people either. You can kill everyone in your part of the world, or no one at all, and both of those extremes have an impact on the people that you may come to care about.
If you have to have something to compare it to, consider an intersection of Skyrim and The Sims. The controls and user-interface are meant to be intuitive and visceral, your world and the way in which you interact with others intimate and unique. The world in which you live is itself alive and independent, not just a behavioral loop. Life happens around you, the world changes, flourishes or dies, with or without you.
This game excites me. I play it in my mind before I go to bed.
Description
I want to write a formal game document answering all of the questions about programming, art, story, etc. This will be tedious, frustrating, and highly detail-oriented. It will also be fun to problem-solve at this level of specificity, crafting every aspect of the game to be straight-forward to program, simple to use, and emotionally engaging.
I’m currently using the Taylor Design Template and using a few other completed samples as references. I have 5300 words written, several sketches, and additional related material plugged into another document.