Here is a piece evaluating my work on the Urban Legend character designs in the previous post.
For this story world piece, we were tasked with making a narrative element for a game based on Urban Legends. Our group could not agree on a single Urban Legend so we decided to incorporate them all in The Facility.
The Facility would be a game where the player, taking the role of an intern, would have to keep these creatures and objects contained and prevent them from escaping.
For my piece I wanted to work on character design, specifically the creatures being contained as that would provide me with the scope to do some interesting designs, owed to the fact that there are thousands of urban legends to derive content from.
I drew concept art for each creature ranging from The Jersey Devil to a humanoid frog professional wrestler. On the whole, I was quite pleased with how the sketches turned out. I kept the drawings rough, as if they had been drawn by hand.
After finishing the concept art, I had the idea of writing descriptions of the creatures from the perspective of the Intern’s Supervisor. In game these documents would be given before they (the player) encounter the creatures and they would function as a hint system where the player could figure out how to treat each creature appropriately by reading the notes.
The tone and style of these notes was in part inspired by the lecture given on framing. It gave me the idea to try and subvert the player’s expectations by having The Facility treat the creatures in as mundane a way as possible. I wanted to frame the experience as a comedic one and to achieve my goals I also took some inspiration form Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil and tried to emulate his sardonic view on bureaucracy and capitalism through the notes, such as the employee being charged for any drinks they have with the Gentleman Vampire character or leaving the player to imagine what grim things could be meant by The Facility Agents “re-educating” crowds that saw the Frog Man in Tijuana.
I chose to focus on this brief because I thought, of all the narrative pieces I attempted, that this piece in particular was quite unique as I was able to exercise my ability to create decent pre-visualisation sketches alongside my writing.
I believe that the concepts that I incorporated into this brief were quite effective, the openness of the Urban Legend tag gave a lot of room to manoeuvre when deciding how to tackle the narrative elements. This allowed me to try and add the comedic elements relatively easily.
In the future I would like to expand on this idea as I believe that the comedy genre is underutilised in games. Most games that attempt to be “comedic” end up falling flat, sometimes offensively so in the case of Duke Nukem Forever (3D Realms, 2011) and there appear to be no games that try and emulate the British comedic stylings present in programmes such as Black Books (Channel 4, 2000) and Red Dwarf (BBC2, 1988). I am quite fond of that branch of comedy and would love to adapt it properly into a game and this brief suited it particularly well.
I would also develop more creatures and anomalies and play with the different ways that The Facility could contain these phenomena. Such as a haunted house or room being lifted in its entirety and placed in the facility.
Completing this task gave me a greater appreciation of the gestalt nature of games and how narrative design functions as a part of that (Dena, 2017), and, even within narrative design itself, there are multiple ways to apply creative techniques to create narrative elements. It is not as simple as just writing a story.
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