THE EXCHANGE
CREDITS
Cecil Boey: Lead Game Designer | Environment Designer | Technical Artist
Alex Wang: Gameplay Programmer | Technical Artist | Generalist
YOU PLAY AS YOURSELF
IN YOUR OWN SPACE
IN YOUR OWN TIME
IN YOUR OWN WORLD
By navigating an AI avatar using intuitive hand gestures, you as an NSA engineer attempt to uncover the mysteries of the arrival of an alien spaceship from an unfamiliar time and space. On board, you will witness their sophisticatedly designed interactive cinematics, they present you with something, somehow familiar…
With hand-tracking and passthrough incorporated using Quest 2'S on-device cameras, embrace this mixed-reality event that happens in conjunction with your life.
GAMEPLAY WALKTHROUGH
Do you like movies? Games?
Great! But, they are not REAL!!!
Hold up, we want to change that...
Boring blahblahblah warning: no, please read me
Traditionally, when we are watching a movie, the agency of the audience is, well, audiences.
Audiences are best described as passive riders on a motorcycle who cannot control the bike but can experience the ride itself lead by the rider, in this case, the movie narrative.
Games in another sense are not so different. Although players directly interact with the contents of the experience, we are still very aware of that the experience itself is independent from our reality.
The aim of this project is to create an unprecedented Mixed Reality game experience using a Virtual Reality headset that blurs the distinctions of visual narratives from games and traditional theatrical experiences. We hope to explore and demonstrate the potentials of narratives through destructing the confinement of mediums, and to establish narratives not as an entity of independence, but a part of our existence & reality.
There are several central questions that dictate the core essence of this project:
- How can mixed reality be a feature and create meanings in a narrative game experience?
- How can dynamic perspectives assist in achieving non-static narrative experiences?
- How can procedural animation be incorporated into an experience as a narrative agency?
- The practice of minimalism and modularity would be applied to the design of game format, which consists of cutscenes, narration, tutorial, the actual gameplay and assets design. How will they be integrated in a way that the game, as a single entity, would seamlessly blend-in with reality?
Finally, it is a feature for our project to tell the story visually, and making the visual of the scenery update based on player’s interaction would levitate the project to the next level.
Hence the reason for this project, we have decided to trailblaze the potentials of VR devices, specifically using Oculus Quest 2.
MULTI-FUNCTIONAL INTERACTIONS
the second form of interaction is using arm-based droid devices to perform multiple interactions using hand gestures. this enables our engineers to perform complicated tasks in composite environments while being stationary.
SETTINGS & NARRATIVE
Scientists from the NSA, aka the National Space Administration, are eager to find a new place for human beings to live on or generally want to explore the universe driven by our curious nature. (What we humans do care, but don’t need to explain since it happens in real-time, they are just facts). Technology allows us to advance telecommunication... bypassing the limit of lightspeed so we can find and manipulate the spaceship and AIs.
You, as the player, are one of the lucky few that has pioneered remote connectivity using a VR headset developed under NSA's most classified and protected project. This project persists through a satellite that NSA has sent decades ago to the orbit of Jupiter, while a remotely accessible android is onboard the satellite as well. However, instead of relaying into NSA's deep space satellite, the player receives an anonymous interception from an unknown source.
In the unveiling of this narrative experience, you find yourself onboard a celestial vehicle in the form of a spaceship. This is in fact a medium of communication between a civilization from another time and space called GEMISIC. The civilization is experiencing the end to what we know as, time and space, under the process of entropy (Maximum disorder in thermodynamics, the universe will collapse for cool down); GEMISIC requires the assistance of intelligent civilizations from across times and spaces in attempt to save theirs. Dwelling with the anticipation for destructions, as well as hope, GEMISIC seeks answers and solutions from their perspective in the understanding to the existence of life.
However, interpretation is the barrier to understanding.
In our cases, human species must understand, be cognitively aware, and translate our self-consciousness of existence for the GEMISIC, as in their cognition, human philosophy are energy, which can be used to heal entropy - orders in chaos. The GEMISIC in their attempts, constructed a meta-reality to understand human cognitions to translate their messages to us in forms that we can interpret.
There are two opposing processes that the narrative revolves around:
- ABSTRACTION to OBJECTIVITY as the player progresses to understand intentions from the GEMISIC that they express in forms that we can understand - under our "normality".
- OBJECTIVITY to ABSTRACTION as the GEMISIC reveals their "normality" to us as we now understand and can interpret them.
In macroscope, this narrative experience is not only an interactive journey to help a meta-physical specie, but also a self-discovering opportunity.
A successful game needs to be delivered through interactive mechanics and a memorable storyline. We are experimenting with dynamic and immersive approaches in visual narratives. That is the reason we will deviate away from any conventional hardware-based controllers, and integrate full hand tacking controls for the most intuitive experiences.
We are also implementing dynamic perspectives to take form with the narrative progressions that we will create. Players will be involved in events occurring simultaneously with their reality, as well as engaging in stories in perspectives of everyone or even everything.
The narration also leads to evidence of metaphysics. We all take our existence for granted, but rarely pause and ponder whether we are part of the chain of our own origin or destruction, or that of the civilizations from another universe?