Genius Loci:
The spirit of a place
About this project
The theme for this project was 'Genius Loci', which means the spirit of a place. Our team tended to interpret ‘Genius Loci’ quite literally by thinking of actual ghosts and spirits haunting a place. Admittedly, that is in fact what we ended up going with for our game ‘Echoes of Paris’. However, I think the added-on thought experiment of ‘Thomson’s violinist’ created a more unique approach to this “predictable” interpretation of Genius Loci, because it gives the player the dilemma to either help the spirits of the catacombs or let them suffer to save your own skin.
Again, we decided to go with a game story dominant concept. This time with a 3D realistic art style rather than 2D pixel art. Our characters all have a fixed and detailed written background that explains their behaviour in cutscenes and justifies the dialogue options the player is presented with. Since this concept was way too big to fully develop in a short amount of time, I decided to focus on story beats that would act as a vital part in the story structure. In moments of tension certain characters can behave irrational, but by understanding their complex psychology their irrational behaviour felt believable. The character backgrounds are revealed throughout the game instead of at the start of the game. This incentivises the player to keep playing and figure out what makes these characters the way they are. The focalization changes from character to character and it’s completely external.
I felt like this type of game made the most out of the theme ‘Genius Loci’, because through cutscenes and exploration the player would find out more about the history of the Paris catacombs, which then also creates sympathy for the horrors that occur and the spirits that are now roaming the place, making the characters’ lives a living hell. All in all, I learned a lot from these two projects. I think it’s important as narrative designers to find creative ways to integrate gameplay in our narratives and vice versa rather than seeing it as two separate things. I noticed that gameplay and mechanics quickly became an afterthought, but the more I started to think about layering and pacing, the more I started to mix gameplay and narrative together. This new understanding of narrative design has not only made me a better gameplay/level designer but also broadened my artistic eye and improved my environmental story telling when working on art assets, especially for the project that came after this: Very Agent.
With elements such as challenges, cutscenes, quick-time events, exploring etc. I had more careful consideration for frame orchestration. Sticking to a known story structure helped me create good pacing. I didn’t want to bombard the player with crisis after crisis but rather have calm moments of exploration contrasted against more intense scenes and quick-time events. During the exploration moments the player gets dialogue options that teach them something about the characters which will ultimately make the quick-time events more stressful, because they don’t want to lose the characters they’ve grown to love. I’ve also played with the idea of layering these components. In one of the cutscenes I wrote there’s QTE’s that don’t actually affect the outcome of that cutscene, but it makes the scene more intense, because the player gets to experience the same stress that character is in at that moment.