untitled garden/park experience

notes, gamelog-100524

an unrealistic garden/park simulator for a hopefully unlikely future - that is what this is going to be. i might leave the name as is, i think it fits, i.e., what if a situtation arose where we found ourselves unable to recall gardens/parks as people (circa now) do. 

context ->

on gardens
i love a garden/park. all my friends love a garden/park. i would be hard pressed to find anyone who hates a garden/park. this is a garden/park. we become our best selves in a garden/park. okay i know that bad things can happen in a garden/park, but let’s play into the solarpunk cottage-core escapism a la sean-penn-into-the-wild outdoor living thing, okay?

think happiness, think good vibes~~~, think green.

and then don’t. because the last time you saw grass was the grass in the instagarm 90s ps1 video game aesthetic post. this is a garden/park.

i really want to play into the dissociation of reality and the virtual worlds we create for ourselves, as a form of escapism from the real.

on sims
stardew valley, right. i love stardew, i’ve got about 300h of playtime on my steam, i’ve achieved perfection (that means im pretty fucking great at farming) -> stardew is inspired by harvest moon, and in both you farm and create connections with your fellow village folk, friendships, sometimes even marriages (yes, there is divorces in stardew as well). I do all of this (sans marrying) in Animal Crossing too. I love a good comfy sim, you know, the ones where you just kinda do without a care in the world, there’s not much to lose afterall.

i love these games so much that  can play them for hours on end. days even. You don’t get 100h within two months of downloading the game without losing some sleep, you know.

sims are cool, sims are fun, i am more than i am in physicality in a sim. Game Reviewers and other Smart Commentary Folk will tell you all of this in a much better way, but bottom line is that chances are you’re having a lot of fun in a sim because it’s something you yearn to do in reality, but circumstances stop you.

on apocalyptic futures
yeah, so, world ends, all goes kaboom, we live in either
(a) fallout style shelters or
(b) in bunkers or
(c) space, like on mars or something
(d) in vats, with our brains connected to serverAs simulating some sort of virtual lived reality.

what then of the human passtime of laying out in the sun in a garden/park? Where else can we see lush trees, have picnics, and just kinda be?

why, in the simulated garden experience of course. it’s a garden, like the one in your digital dreams, you’re gonna love every second of it.

what is the thing then ->

a garden/park experience of a lifetime that is not now.
like an experience, you know? you wake up, in a garden/park and you take it all in, its nothing like you’ve ever seen (the best i can make it within unreal). feel it with your senses, become one with nature.

ideas ->extras
pictures+notes

worldMap

the world of the game is inpired by an idea i came up with during a unit assignment where you had to design a game and a custom controller to naviagte said game.

now, the thing with custom controllers is that what it ultimately ends up bein a reinvention of the keyboard+mouse system of control if it in any way requires the use of hands. It’s not as if feet aren’t ever brought about in the conversation of custom controllers either, but all most of us can think of is DDR. 

my team and i decided to to leverage the physical activity involved in DDR and create a “walking sim” - the whole idea being that you walk around this space, with the player having to exert more pressure on the foot pad to scale up inclines and so forth.

initial idea

variations on the game world

originally planned as a landlocked space of green in this vast expance that the player could only look but not walk into, the worldmap had undergone a multitude of variations, at one point even becoming this space confined within really tall while walls that physically prevent the player to leave this utopian park. but upon recieving feedback that the walls made the game seem to claustrophobic and boring, i instead decided to make it an open world.

it has evolved from a singular island to a much larger expanse that can be traversed while the game recalls the importance of this space.

gameplay quite simple really, you just walk, like you would in a park. and all the thoughts come rushing back to you. as you stroll, text fills the to half of the screen, reminding you of memories you’ve once lived through in this space, and why you keep on coming back to it.

i want to urge the player to think back to why certain places remain in their heads long after everything that is associated with it has left.