#preplanning

In my original project, I did research into narrative driven games of a similar nature, air pollution, viable domed structures as well as earthquakes. These aspects were significant to my final goal which was to create a short demo. In this revisit I am not going to create a demo, so I want to focus more closely on world building and informing my design with the narrative. For this reason, I want to look more into social and economic injustice in our current climate crisis and how the top 1% can afford to escape disasters, leaving humanity behind. Some pieces of media I can use are the movie Don't Look Up and the Fallout franchise. I also want to tackle intersectionality in systematic issues, i.e. how racism, transphobia, misogyny and ableism all link which each other and poverty to create a complex and covert system that keeps wealth flowing upwards whilst common people that benefit from those systems are none the wiser. I believe this is and idea that I was beginning to discover but I wasn't informed enough to realise at the time.

I will also expand my focus towards the groups of people that reside outside the Domes, exploring the possibility of multiple concurring levels of injustice; at the same time as the people of the Domes are being abandoned by the wealthy ruling class, generations of people have been locked out, left to suffocate. I will explore how they survived outside of the Domes.

The dialogue I wrote is fairly embarrassing. My dialogue for Dean as smug and self-centred came across as childish, as it was clear I did not have a clear enough understanding on how to write complex characters. There is also a clear self-insert character in Priya, which I absolutely intend on reconceptualising. The other NPCs also have amateur dialogue which is uncharacteristic of what should be grown adults. I may explore characters by writing their interactions in script format alongside sketches. This can allow me to form some developed ideas on the characters by fleshing them out in a form that has a much lower level of commitment that an actual game demo. I will be taking inspiration from Disco Elysium on how it beautifully writes sophisticated and simultaneously unlikeable characters.