I've made a (un)remarkable discovery. Namely that we were right all along.
But I guess we had to explore the alternative to be sure.
And now it's much more clear.
We're in the final stage of
a prototyping experiment that has ended in failure. Obviously, when prototyping, one knows that failure is a possible outcome. In this case too, the reason for prototyping first, instead of immediately going into production, was uncertainty and a need to explore our ideas. But it still hurts to realize that one is not able to create one's vision.
What we are drawn to do with Tale of Tales is the creation of
worlds that players can be in. This is what we enjoy in video games, more than anything else. And this is what we want to work with, as artists. I think we have successfully done this (within the limits of our skill, talent and resources) with The Endless Forest, The Graveyard and The Path. But less so with Fatale, Vanitas and now the failed Cncntrc prototype.
Cncntrc is a rather abstract game in which we tried to evoke emotions and sensations
directly. There is no story and there are no characters. But the shapes you encounter are sensual and respond to your touch. You "touch" these shapes by means of other abstract shapes that serve as a sort of avatar/3D cursor (similar to a ship in an arcade shooter game).
We have now realized that this exploration leads us to a dead end.
(And possibly only us, by the way. Other developers may be more successful.)For one because the direct expressing of sensations got us dangerously close to games. It was hard to resist using game logic to guide the experience. And we wanted to resist this because we wanted to stay away from emotions like challenge and victory and we didn't want the game to be difficult or have extrinsic rewards. It was very important for us that the player remained immersed.
The main problem however (and our Great Realization) was that
immersion does not work without a sense of identity. In the world of Cncntrc, you don't know who you are as a player. You are yourself, in a way. But the world you move around in is abstract, not yours. You are body-less. And that's a mistake. A mistake we also made, to some extent, in Fatale, where the fact that you play the ghost of John the Baptist is not expressed very cleared (plus you literally don't have a body because you play a ghost).
Now we know that if we want the player to feel immersed in a virtual world, they have to know who they are in this world. This applies to both first person and third person designs. Without a clear idea of whose shoes (and indeed, whose
body) you are filling, immersion will not be complete. It's not about the player actually thinking that they are in another world. This is impossible. Instead, it's about transporting the player's imagination to another place. To be able to believe in the reality of interacting with a virtual world, the player needs to know who they are in this world, how exactly they are interacting with it. To be able to touch this world, they need to have a body!
So, for us, our old concept of the primacy of putting "a certain character in a certain environment" is confirmed. That's what we want to work with. All we really want a video game to be, is a simulation. And then within that simulation, we can play with ideas and present narrative elements. And for a simulation to work, the player needs to have a place in it, play a role in it.
