The game is built around the idea of a revisit. The game is 3D and the interaction with the game is about navigating around the space, grasping the story being conveyed. Seeing the flaws through someone else’s perspective is the main theme. This is not a proud revisit but rather a mocking and sarcastic one. This theme aims at judging the flaws in a nondirect, nonvocal way. The judged object in the game is the humanity itself. The game is about a robot’s visit to a once populated island with the objective of rescuing different animals. This event is what makes the game a visit because it is the repetition of another historical event: Noah’s Ark. Through walking around, we observe the leftovers of an abandoned land; trying to understand the reasons behind this migration. The aim in the game is to collect all the animals, through such a collection the story continues and we get a hint about why the habitants left. These hints are not clearly revealed, the player should observe the surroundings well to understand them.
The conveyed theme is not a cheerful one so the light of the game is dark. The game space is a desert so there is a sandstorm which makes the navigation more challenging. Desert is a good choice to convey the idea of loneliness. It strengthens the idea of abandonment. To create a space that conveys the message of being abandoned, we added many empty buildings to the island. This clearly shows once there were people living in this space. There are many buildings around which most of them have interior design and the robot can enter them. The space where the people live tell a lot about their way of living, the gadgets they used, the way the society functioned. Overall, the details of these designs tell a lot about the people who left. For example, there is a room with many technological devices such as televisions and laptops; and there is a horse to be collected right next to them. This clearly conveys the message that we are like racehorses competing with one another, constantly working on our laptops. Another example is the chicken to be collected next to a person who just committed a suicide. This is criticizing the people who take the simple way. The animals and the specific design that surrounds the animals advances the story while making statements about humanity one after another. We hoped that through creating these spaces, the player would be prompted to think about this representation of humanity and reflect on certain trends that are relevant right now, such as immersion in technology and consumerism, the use of guns, and addiction. Thus, the player is given a platform to reflect on flaws of humanity. Thus, to convey the negativity of these trends, we made the game as realistic as possible. To make the game realistic, the laws of physics apply to everything but our robot is like a superhuman that can jump from really high buildings. The system does not let the robot to leave the island unless all the animals are collected. The excuse to such a limit of the space is the water surrounding the island. Because of the water, it logically makes sense that the robot cannot get outside of the designed space. We picked the robot as the protagonist to convey a futuristic feel to the game and we wanted to convey the message that space was being experienced by an outsider. The shininess of the robot contrast to the dusty surroundings emphasized the fact that the robot did not belong there.
The final version of the game was great at conveying the message. The size of the space was satisfactory in a way that it was not too big so the story was not being interrupted by failing to find the animals, nor it was too small so the game would end instantly. The light of the game dark was enough that it established the feeling of abandonment along with the desert. The feedback we received was positive. The player talked about the quality of the graphics and the variety of space. One downside was that the rendered version of the game was laggy because of the high graphics.
The game space was successful in conveying the certain critiques it was trying voice out of humanity. In the end, the robot completed the Noah’s Ark (with much few animals but the message was clear). There was another hidden message in using a robot to complete this mission. “Perhaps the robots are the heirs of humans”.
Link to the game
Dogukan Avci and Simran Parwani