Cutting Edge: Week Five

The Work This Week

The week saw us finalize production on Goldspike #4 (the montage segment inside a car) and also get closer to finalizing our story.

Story Discussion:

This question of story has admittedly taken longer than we have wanted, as we are trying to balance a framework to give us a starting point for us to create assets to be able to use in the long-term, but also give us space to wrap our goldspikes around once we’ve finished our exploration phase.

Going off of the suggestion last week to use An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as a framework, we debated on how to do this in order to give us as much room as possible to create in the middle of the story.

First, we discussed the setting at which to set the story, and figured that we’d need to set it either in the Civil War Era (where the original story is set) or in a modern setting, because in any other setting we would be making a statement more about the setting than the story and the transitions.

From this, we thought about potential ways to die in VR, as we didn’t want to simulate a VR hanging that the original story simulates. Thinking about types of deaths in the Civil War era, the only kinds of executions were hangings and firing squads. And guns is another issue we want to stay away from, so this made us start thinking about a potential modern setting for the story.

The cornerstone is having a person be about to die and then relive their memories. So, in VR, we thought that having a death scene that encourages sitting would be good for verisimilitude, so we decided to choose death by drowning – simulating a room or car filling up with water as you relive your memories, which feels doable inside the Oculus.

The idea we landed on was to simulate a car accident that ends with the guest swerving into a body of water, and as the water fills up the car, you relive your memories. The part of this idea we like the most is setting the death scene in a submerged car. This also enables us to use both Goldspike #1 and Goldspike #4 into the opening and potential flashbacks that we will create. This idea still might change as we need to speak with our advisors next week to confirm our direction.

Next Week

Next week we will focus more on playtesting the goldspikes we already have, as well as continuing work on Goldspike #5. By halves, we want to have the majority of our scenes planned out, as well as having concept art finished for our entire narrative. Playtesting data will also help us confirm that is working and not working with what we have so far.