6400 Final - Recollection

Recollection from Sheri Larrimer on Vimeo.

We are now at the end of the semester.  My final project, which I have decided to call Recollection, is more or less complete.  A few of the items the player can collect are still placeholders.  I plan on replacing them with the final objects in the week or so after finals, at which point I will make the playable game available online.  Until then, there is the above video which is the deliverable for the class.  

This project began with Neil Gaiman's poem which outlines what to do if one finds oneself in a fairy tale.  I was particularly interested in the end, when the fairy tale is over, and the hero(ine) returns home to find it is now smaller somehow.  I decided to set my game in the backyard of my childhood home.  The story is based off my own memories of walking through a gap in the hedge behind my neighbor's house to get to my friend's backyard.  Along the way, the player find various objects that I remember owning; things that were important to my child-self.  With each object, the player's view changes.  When the player returns home, they will find it seems much smaller.

Other games that have provided inspiration for me include Antichamber, Gone Home, and oddly enough Assassin's Creed.  Antichamber is an excellent example of using a simplified visual style, and creating unreal spaces as a metaphor for life and thought.  Although not yet released, Gone Home is shifting the focus in first person games away from combat and towards exploration.  The story in Gone Home is told entirely through the artifacts left in the virtual space.  The player must sift through those artifacts and piece the story together themselves.  As I worked on Recollection, the game became more and more about my own process of reconstructing memories.  Although it is not all that obvious, Assassin's Creed is, in many ways, about reconstructing memories (in this case, ancestral memories).  I was particularly interested in the memory walls which cut the player off from parts of the game world.  This was one of the influences on how I chose to deal with the edges of the world in Recollection.

I hope that when I finally post the game online some of you will play it.  It is frustrating to be only able to show the documentation.  Videogames cannot be reduced to cinematic shots without a great deal of loss.