This was a big week for honing the direction of my project going into the last few weeks of production.

It started with a meeting with my advisor, Gabriel Ibias, who suggested the neat idea of framing the game as a sort of virtual museum exhibition depicting my post-apocalyptic world as a scene from the distant past. Identifying this framework opened the way for brainstorming fresh ideas for artifacts, text descriptions, and gameplay.

Also on my production calendar for this week was establishing the game’s sound system, so I took some time to whip one up!

The Virtual Museum Premise

The idea of a museum with a first-person tour of a distant past reminds me a lot of The Talos Principle series—particularly the newly-released second game.

This premise answers the need for an underlying narrative tying the game together; the very existence of a first-person camera suggests the existence of a someone/something being controlled by the player in a specific time and place. Who is this being? What are they doing here? Why do they care? Focusing the narrative more on a specific person or people in 22nd century New York could provide an alternative narrative framework, but would require development of complex characters (for which I simply don’t have enough time).

In addition to providing a simple explanation for the game’s existence, this background logic would require minimal additional explanation or storytelling. For example, the premise of a virtual revisitation could be explained at the very start of the gameplay through an introductory screen (e.g. one that says “Loading simulation…”, or “Welcome to Reclaimed Memory, and prepare for a virtual adventure into a long-forgotten past”).

I think this allusive approach (vs. a more “on the nose” explanation of the player being a museum visitor long in the future/far away and learning about 22nd century human history) could have multiple benefits:

• avoiding corny exposition (e.g. “Welcome to a virtual experience at the Intergalactic Federation’s Museum of Civilizations”)
• avoiding adding complexity and underlying logic that begs additional questions and that the audience could quickly find holes in. For example:
  • “Okay, what exactly is the Intergalactic Federation?”
  • “Are these beings humans or some other species?”
  • “Where and when is this happening such that 22nd century human history is so distant yet near enough for historians to have studied/visited earth and reconstructed its narrative without having to make everything up?”

In other words, I want the player to have an incomplete picture, but I don’t want to focus their attention on the incompleteness of this picture. Instead, I want them to focus on the story being told about 22nd century human history.

Ideas for Gameplay

My mind immediately flooded (no pun intended, really!) with ideas for artifact descriptions that could imply some level of limited knowledge about the time in history being retold (just like our limited knowledge of ancient civilizations or prehistoric life).

For example…

• an airboat = “a shallow water vessel powered by hydrocarbons”
• a solar powered fan = “an air circulator powered by stellar radiation”

I also thought of ideas for explaining the identity of the place and its people in a way that similarly implies and understandable level of uncertainty (as if we were to describe prehistoric settlements)

• Manhattan, New York = “The central island of a massive metropolis”
• The war of the early 2100s = “a warring period in which technological development stagnated and populations collapsed”
• “Large Roadways connected the city with other settlements near and far, suggesting the existence of some overarching state or civilization  (i.e. the U.S., North America, etc.)

And finally, I thought of turning the final view of the NYC metro cityscape into a binocular view with expandable blurbs describing places and facts as the player looks around. This would provide a great opportunity to tell a greater picture about what happened to the civilization (and where in the civilization the player has just spent the last several minutes exploring).

the Binocular View

After some trial and error and much troubleshooting, I was able to define the necessary classes and logic for having the player switch to a binocular view of the city and expand descriptions of the environment by hovering around it.

Essentially, the player will press “B” (or another key—this is easily reprogrammed) to switch to a camera with a much narrower field of view. Doing so also switches the post-processing effects to include increased chromatic abberation and depth of field (making it clear that the player is looking through a separate zoom lens).

Here’s a comparison of the binocular and regular cameras:

Zoomed-in view of the city depicting the field of view, chromatic aberration, and depth of field of the binocular view.

Regular view of the city showing the differences in field of view and post-processing effects apparent in binocular mode.

I also added interaction logic such that the player can look around the scene (using a central cursor to aim) and pull up text descriptions providing exposition about the visible feature being hovered. This required the creation of a few extra classes, similar to the “Artifact” class, that would detect the player’s gaze and serve up text descriptions to be displayed on screen.

Here’s an example of the player’s view passing over Manhattan:

Binocular view while the player is currently not looking at a feature of interest.

A text description pulled up when the player’s central field of view (represented by a small cursor) hovers over Manhattan.

The “Interaction System – Trace Area – Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial” series on YouTube by NiceShadow was an invaluable resource for coding this logic quickly. Here’s the first video in that series:

refined artifact “collection” mechanic

I realized that visitors at a museum exhibit aren’t restricted to traversing the content in one, orderly go—they are free to wander as curiosity arises or revisit displays to gain clarity.

In terms of the gameplay, I felt that this would be better captured by having the player “inspect” artifacts instead of “collecting” them. This basically means that:

• artifacts don’t disappear after they’re viewed up-close (so the player could come back to the apartment and alleyway and re-inspect artifacts after learning what they learn on the rooftop).
• artifacts can be viewed in any order (so, theoretically, the player could skip over all of the artifacts in their first walkthrough and then view them after the big reveal at the rooftop.

My original intent was to force the player consume the narrative in a specific manner, but I think the beauty of giving them freedom and echoing the experience of visiting an actual museum is worth the variability!

As an example of a full-fledged artifact coming together (with a textured 3D model and a text description), here’s the airboat implemented as an artifact!

View as the player approaches the airboat, with the left mouse prompt visible.

Inspection view of the airboat as a proper artifact instance (using the “Artifact” blueprint that I had previously depicted using black cubes)

The Sound system

I was able to create a sound system with footstep and ambient sounds using bites from sound sources on YouTube. The workflow involved:

• Downloading audio from YouTube videos as .wav files (abiding by the creators’ relevant copyrights and noting sources for attribution)
• Trimming and altering the audio in Adobe Audition to get usable sound bites
• Importing these sound bites into Unreal, where they get fed into “Metasound” objects that play sounds either at random (from a set) or on loop
• Defining attenuation and occlusion behavior (so that sounds fade over distances or behind walls)

The 4 footstep types and corresponding sources are as follows:

• Flooded Marsh

• Concrete stairs

• Wooden floors

• Overgrown rooftop

Looking ahead

With all the foundations of the gameplay in place (the sound system, artifact collection, and binocular view), I will focus mainly on artifact modeling for the next few weeks. This will involve 3D modeling in both Unreal Engine and Blender, writing text descriptions, and defining blurbs for the player to read while they’re in binocular mode.