After submitting my proposal, I started to design my final project following my timetable. Right now I'm learning UE5 and writing the narrative for my levels.
As my research question is How to maximize the player's emotional experience through
level design —— With a focus on environment design, so all of the design is based on emotions.
Inspired by the American TV Series 13 Reasons Why Season 1, I started to think about my story. This is a TV series with 13 episodes and the main story is about a high school girl named Hannah Baker who committed suicide, and she recorded 13 tapes before her suicide. In the tapes, she names 13 people she believes were responsible for the suicide, who either failed to help her or harmed her in some way, each episode tells us the story of one person among all 13 people that related to Hannah's death.
While watching that TV series, a lot of emotions have been raised. As a result, I think a story that talks bout the character's own experiences and emotions is more fit with my research question. My initial plan is to design a game where each level shows a story and emotion of the character that the players are playing with, all the emotions are shown by the environment design (spatial, material, and lighting). The narrative could be like this: The players are going through some important events about the character, and those events will cause different emotions. It can be a progressive emotion and also reflect some health conditions of the character (by using the game mechanics to show this). In the end when the character suffers from all events and finally she decided to end her life.
At this stage, I started to learn more about environment design and at the same time thought about how to use creative mechanics to express my ideas better.
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