Taliah Lamonts Year 2 College work: January 2015

Carrie, a 17 year old student, is walking home from school when she stumbles on a rift (a tear of time and space, similar to a black hole), it’s opened up and she falls through. She ends up in an alternate dimension, which we will soon learn to be a form of purgatory (Limbo) in the form of some sort of building/world. She immediately tries to escape after coming into contact with spirits awaiting judgement, and uses every ounce of her intelligence to try escape from this world. She soon realises this isn’t working, nothing behaves like it should, everything changes around her, warps and mutates every time she turns, she can’t think her way out of it. This isn’t helped by the spirits who, as she starts realising that things may not be as they seem, they taunt her and mocks her for these thoughts. They jeer, and start revealing the truth about her plight and the world she now resides in; they tell her she will never escape, she can’t escape, it can’t be done and she’s a fool.

This idea was first conceptualised when I heard the brief, I liked the idea of a literal land that time forgot, and instead of just doing dinosaurs because I feel the dinosaurs are getting a bit over used and it’s good to get out of my usual comfort zone. This lead me to the idea of somewhere like purgatory, or just an empty space because I believe time simply wouldn’t exist there; but as that had plot holes in, it began to make my whole idea fall apart. From here I followed example from game company Valve and when they begin a game they base it off a school of philosophy, quote, or a concept so I followed a similar path and began thinking of what my story would personify. I ended up wanting to go with philosophy that focuses on logic or stagnation which are two concepts I already understand and relate to. During this research I came across a notion created by John McDowell which refuted ‘The Myth of Given’, he basically states that all empirical knowledge is essentially all conceptual as it’s based only off our sense data, and without someone with an entirely different physical perception on the universe, how are we to know what we are perceiving is true? I really want to play with this in the idea as we can relate a similar concept to time as time is a manmade concept we rely on every day and treat as this ever present, ever controlling benchmark throughout our whole life, despite the fact that we created it, so who are we to decide when is late when as creators we could change the rules to fit our needs and still be right. This will apply to my idea because the land the purgatory resides on will be changing all the time depending on the perceivers of that space.

I began by sketching the main character I had in mind to help get to grips with the software as I have to type it out and test it each time, so I made a basic sprite for this purpose. Then, when I had fleshed out the story and had gotten used to the scripting language, I began adding backgrounds to my pieces and another character. After that I coded in an intro, and a soundtrack, as well as refining the sprites to a more finished style with better shading and greater detail. Because of the time consuming nature of this project however, I could only code a simple introductory sequence for this story.

In the end I decided I wouldn’t end up pursuing this idea for my final project, because I do love the idea but I only envisioned it in the visual novel format. This would obviously not fit the brief and I feel the other 2 mediums wouldn’t service this concept properly.

Here is some evidence of the research and work that went into this idea.