Second Idea - The Borrowers

My Second main Idea came to me when watching Ant-man in the Cinema, for those who don't know he is a character who can shrink himself down to around an ants size. Being so small opens up a lot of possibilities as in to what you can do, where you can go, and the amazing and different points of view you could experience. I wondered at the time why this interesting aspect hadn't been used in games more, theres plenty of examples of it in books, film and on the t.v. screen. I can only recall playing 3 games that used being miniature as a main feature, Toy Story and Micro-Machines on the playstation 1 the other being Buck Bumble on the Nintendo 64. Must have been some of the first games I ever played and I remember thoroughly enjoying them all. 

  

So why are no more games based around being miniature being made? With Todays graphics it would be Amazing, using macro photos to produce high quality textures, being able to view the world differently. I almost expected there to be an Ant-man game after the films release. However I believe even now to get the the mechanic of turning small to big, big to small would still be nigh on impossible to create and make function well within the environment. Fortunately I don't want to make an Ant-man game I want to make a Borrowers game, or at least design some environment samples for one. I Imagine the game not based on the books but within the same world, and the game play being like that of an open world adventure where you can start different quests at anytime and your success depends on how much you have levelled up by. Similar to that of the Witcher games were there is a storyline, but also multiple side quests one can partake in, in order to adventure more, have fun and level up. A lot of the missions would involve exploring new environments in order to find and 'Borrow' specific items, which you can then keep, sell or use to build other things. It would be a very explorative and collecting game.

So far thats the basis of my Idea (for Idea 2), A borrower for hire but has his or her own mission too on top of staying alive in such a big world.

Miniature Street Artist SlinKachu

Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu

'Undoubtedly philosophers are in the right when they tell us nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. It might have pleased fortune to let the Lilliputians find some nation where the people were as diminutive with respect to them as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious race of mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant part of the world, where of yet we have no discovery.' Lemuel Gulliver, Gulliver's Travels.

Slinkachu's photographs capture the evanescent existence of the diminutive in the great and troubling city and have all the power of Guillevers Travels to impose upon us a realisation of the asinine pride we take in the mere fact of comparison. Or rather: the asinine pride that derives from our environment and ourselves being to scale with each other. The built environment is an outgrowth of social form and thus an endlessly repeated sample of the same old tune: human domination and submission, leading to individual alienation. 

In Levi-Strauss's formulation, 'the intrinsic value of a small-scale model is that it compensates for the renunciation of sensible dimensions by the acquisition of the intelligible dimensions.' In other words: we cannot know what it feels like to be a tiny manikin - a Borrower, Stuart Little, a Gulliver - adrift in the Brobdingnagian city, but we understand their predicament intuitively, because it mirrors our own responses to both a built environment - and a concomitant social form - that impose upon the individual impotence at every turn. 

(Above are parts of the foreword that I found interesting and extracted, by Will Self)

Slinkachu's Website: http://www.andipa.com/artist/slinkachu

What to do for my Final Year Project?

First Thoughts: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! There’s so much choice!

The Edge Chronicles

Before breaking up for summer I discussed with my Tutor Nigel perhaps doing some environmental/ level design based of one of my favourite childhood book series, The Edge Chronicles by Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell. The Edge Chronicle books are some amazing books! That really captured my imagination when I was little and it still does today.

The stories of The Edge Chronicles take place in the fictional world of The Edge, a vast cliff with no apparent bottom. The majority of books are grouped into trilogies, with each trilogy focusing on one character. The series covers a 600 year period, divided into three "Ages of flight". The power of flight is a major theme of the books, with each age defined by the current technology used for air travel. The series is notable for its detailed flora and fauna, along with the maps of various locations in the edge. (From Wikipedia)

Upon the Edge there are several specific environment types that I imagine would be fun to make concept art for and to create within a game engine. The books are illustrated so there’s quite a bit of reference, however if I were to pursue this I would definitely change and experiment with the style. The fact that there are illustrations and it’s already a world imagined up by somebody else would give me more time to concentrate on the aesthetics of what I create, however I feel perhaps my peers may be unimpressed and feel I couldn't create my own world from imagination. Of course I could I have 101 bouncing around my brain most of the time, I would like to discuss the benefits and negatives of using The Edge Chronicle World or creating my own some more with my tutor when I get back.

 
Environments

The world itself is a cliff, half of which is Forest, The Deep Woods and the Twilight Woods so there would be a lot of fauna design involved. Capturing the mood of each of these environments excites me, The Deep Woods is a Perilous forest full all manner of beast (even some of the trees have teeth), your supposedly safe if you stay on the path. The Twilight woods cause anyone who's in them to long to lose their mind, there’s no way to tell the passage of time, most who enter don't leave, but it’s also the only place to collect the most valuable substance on the edge Santphrax aka Solid Lighting.

Then there is The Mire, a desert of some kind of goo very hard to cross, this separates the Woods from Undertown where most of the human/ humanoid inhabitants of The Edge reside, it’s a large shanty like town, with the odd old traditional house or tavern here and there, but it is constantly in the shadow of the floating City of Sanctaphrax which is built upon a large floating rock that is anchored to the ground by a colossal Chain (a cool concept to draw). On the City are more extravagant buildings most of which are for academics who all study different types of weather.

Past Old Town is the end of the edge where The Stone Gardens are situated, these are stones that grow out of the ground and expand in size and grow in buoyancy until they fly off. These same stones are the ones used in Skyships to keep them afloat as well as the one Sanctaphrax is built upon.

Okay so lots of cool unique and individual environments for me to potentially play with, with bucket loads of story to give them depth.