hello, friend

If you're reading this then it's likely you're an advisor and/or contributor to this unannounced new Superbrothers project and you were given a login to the website by staff at Superbrothers.

non-disclosure

Chances are you've already signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) but if for some reason you haven't yet then we must ask that you please keep secret all of the information you may encounter here. Pretty much nothing about this project is publicly known, and we'd very much like it to stay that way until we're ready to let people know, which won't be for a good long while. Information leaks can be awkward complications, they can create unwanted expectations and they could have an adverse effect on our plans and we much prefer the relative simplicity of creating in the shadows. You have our thanks for your understanding and discretion.

advisor and/or contributor

If you're an advisor then we are honored and extremely grateful to be chatting with you about our new project. If you're a contributor then we're also excited to be getting into some kind of a creative relationship with you. If you're not sure which category you fall into right now that's ok. At this early stage t might not be clear to either of us how/what/when you may contribute to this effort. Perhaps an opportunity will suggest itself in due time, or perhaps being an advisor is the most appropriate level of involvement. If an opportunity for contribution crops up and when we are able to firm up a batch of assets or 'deliverables' then we will of course arrive at a mutually-agreed upon and appropriate fee or compensation. If you feel as an advisor that your time and attention are worth some compensation or favor then that's perfectly natural too, and we'd be happy to talk.

long term scheme

It might be helpful for us to set up some context schedule-wise. This project will be in a prototype phase through 2013, hopefully moving into more of a production phase through 2014. Videogame creation can be unpredictable, and while we have carved out a rough path towards completion, part of the plan involves staying flexible and acknowledging that the release plan will be a whole lot more clear once we're closer to completion.

When 'version 1' of this project is eventually completed, our hope is that it will be both viable and creatively interesting to follow it up with releases and projects in a similar vein. While it would be foolish to commit to creating more than one project, our aim is to be able to build upon this project in some fashion, and as we move forward we'll be keeping in mind concepts that could be built out into follow-ups, spin-offs, side-stories. The point here is that we're thrilled to be chatting with you and we value and honor your time, perspective and skills... and we will be looking for opportunities to create worthwhile, interesting things with you sometime this year, or maybe next year, or at some point over the next few years.

loose quarterly schedule

We're operating on a loose quarterly schedule in 2013, so if we end up talking about a batch of deliverables, chances are they would be due when the season changes. Right now we're in Q3, ending in late September, so that's roughly when we'd want to get a hold of whatever you're cooking up, and that's also when you'd invoice us. Sooner is often better for us, but not always. There's no heavy pressure these days unless otherwise stated, and sometimes things need to take their time.

think small for now

It's still early days on this project, we're still busily experimenting, so at this point we're only looking for small contributions, and small commitments. To give you an idea of what to expect in terms of fee and workload: we're looking at individual budgets in the 500$ or 750$ range for a batch of deliverables, maybe going up to 1000$ if we end up getting excited about a more medium-sized contribution. Yes, those are small amounts, and we'd like to tailor whatever deliverables to fit. So what do we expect for that amount? Well... let's talk about what we think might be worth creating, then let's talk about your going rate, and then let's describe a batch of deliverables with a fee to fit. We can talk individually about that, and you can let us know what you feels appropriate.

To be honest we are kind of hoping that the relative interesting-ness of advising and contributing to this project (as well as eventual appropriate recognition) might help keep the creative conversation going and keep costs low... but we definitely do want to treat people the way we'd like to be treated, honest compensation for honest work... so let's talk, and keep talking as the project wears on.

big picture

On the money side of things, post Sword & Sworcery we have some money in the bank, but for a studio setting out on a new project it isn't a crazily large amount, and it does have to last. Our intention with this new project is for it to be viable, and our hope is that it will strike a chord and reach a broad audience, but it's entirely possible that it won't measure up to the unexpected success of Sword & Sworcery, and so we have to plan accordingly. We also know that the real challenges and pitfalls with this project lie ahead. At present we're in the honeymoon phase where anything is possible and we'll be in this phase for a while, but then there is the endless hard work of the production phase, which will of course go on too long, and be too expensive. And then there's the all-important awareness-raising phase leading up to and following launch. It's going to be a marathon and we're going to try to budget accordingly.

On the upside, our burn-rate is low. There is one full-time Superbrothers staffer, one regular part-time collaborator on the sound and music side, and our partner and co-creator is self-funding... so even with a long-ish creation process our total cost should be on the low-side. On the downside, it's our view that the videogame landscape is being re-shaped, and parts of the market are all but collapsing. Even if we imagine our project emerging as a brave, high quality, worthy experience it's still fairly unpredictable what that might mean in terms of audience size and viability.

looking for 'good ideas'

Deliverables for this project will come in variety of possible formats including text, images and sound... but all of them can be understood as different kinds of 'good ideas' for this project.

What do we mean by 'good idea'? As legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto once said:

"A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once."

Of course, to be able to know a good idea from a bad idea and to gauge what is or isn't appropriate you'll want to know what's what, you'll need to gather some understanding of the various kinds of problems we're looking to solve with this project, what our creative goals are, what we're hoping to achieve and what our various constraints might be.

Chances are most of this situational awareness will come from in-person conversation, demonstration and maybe from playing a build or looking through related materials. In the interest of pouring a fresh foundation we've prepared a few posts that we think will get you roughly up to speed. The next post is linked below and they're also accessible from the menu at right.

So... to wrap-up, our goals in bringing you on as an advistor/contributor are:

• to have the pleasure of chatting with you, to get your take on things, and spark good ideas
• to maybe generate some tasty deliverables ie: voice recording, concept artwork or visual ideas, scraps of text
• to scout out some opportunities for continued conversation and contribution

Feel free to ask us a question on email or in-person. Also, feel free to point out errors and suggest improvements in these materials... these documents are liquid, they'll change over time, but we'll be using them to initiate new advistor/contributors, and eventually the presentation of our project in these documents may inform our broadcast and communication strategies later on down the line.

We hope this process will be pleasant for all involved, something to look forward to, something interesting to think about. Thanks in advance for your attention, your time, your advice and contributions, your patience and your faith.

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To get things going we'll tear down some expectations and pour a fresh foundation in the next post: 

•  No Sword No Sworcery

You can see other posts in the menu at top right.

notes: no sword no sworcery

'The Greatest Explorer' is an illustration by comics artist and Superbrothers advisor/contributor Dustin Harbin. This artwork provides a clue about the genre and tone of the new Superbrothers project, although it isn't representative of the art style we're busily establishing.

Before we delve too deep into the concepts powering the new Superbrothers project it may be helpful to tear down some expectations and lay a fresh foundation using Sword & Sworcery as a reference point.

Project & Process                                                                                                         

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (2011) is the first videogame from Superbrothers, we were involved as a co-creator alongside Capy, with Jim Guthrie as inspiration and composer. We handled every pixel, every word. Many of the concepts originated with us, many of the songs and sounds are where they are mostly because that's where we put them. That said, as the project wore on it became more and more collaborative. While we set the concept in motion and captained the ship for much of the journey we eventually hit some rough seas and our collaborators helped us through, kept us moving. In the end the project probably felt like an authored expressive work and a handmade patchwork quilt, and while we carried a heavy creative load the experience was bolstered by contributions, feedback and good ideas from all corners.

This unannounced new project is the second videogame from Superbrothers, we are involved as a co-creator alongside the until-now unknown Pine-Scented, with Scntc as inspiration and composer. It's likely we'll handle pretty much every pixel, it's probable we'll be involved with every word. Many of the concepts have originated with us, but in this case the root concepts go back years and they have evolved in conversation with Pine-Scented in that time. Scntfc's involvment on this proejct will be roughly analagous to Jim Guthrie's involvement on Sword & Sworcery, in that we'll be making detailed requests and then placing songs and sounds in the project, and then we'll be keeping the conversation going so we can shape the sound component together. Our hope with this project is that with our chosen platforms, our more relaxed schedule and with Scntfc's expertise we'll be able to explore the audio possibility space quite a bit more than was possible on the previous project.  As with Sword & Sworcery, this new project will be both an authored expressive work and a handmade patchwork quilt, and while Superbrothers, Pine-Scented & Scntfc will be carrying the creative load, the finished project will no doubt be bolstered by contributions and good ideas from all corners, because that's just how it oughta be.

Outline: Basics: Input, Rhythm, Duration, Flow, Structure                                                                      

Sword & Sworcery was built for the touch input of iPhone. It had a laid-back rhythm, a kind of hang-out vibe. We didn't require a lot of precision or hand-eye co-ordination on the part of the audience except in a handful of battles sprinkled in here and there. Sword & Sworcery's critical path* linear story-focused experience lasting around three to five hours, and while the audience was given little pockets of space in which to roam, narrative progress was generally pretty narrowly gated**. The flow of the story was broken up into a handful of explicitly-presented 'sessions' and each session had an estimated time for completion, so that the audience would have some expectation about how much time to plan for, however the third session deliberately abandoned the player, and consequently we imagine a fair percentage of players abandoned the quest at this point and never saw the end of the narrative. Once the audience reaches the end of the story, Sword & Sworcery is basically complete, there are few reasons to return to explore the world.

* critical path= series of actions necessary to advance a videogame campaign towards completion

* gating = a gate in this context is a set of conditions a player must meet before advancing

For this unannounced new project we'll be keeping touch input in mind, and we have a scheme that would lead to a release built around a laid-back spectator-and-listener friendly rhythm that we think would be appropriate for iPhone, iPad & other such machines... but this time around our primary design focus is on the videogame controller input with its many buttons and joysticks, and consequently we will are targetting more traditional videogame platforms including computers.

We're imagining a critical path that would require only a moderate familiarity with a videogame controller, and we are thinking this critical path would be only a moderate time investment, say three hours or less, probably broken into roughly hour-length chunks... and at the end of this critical path we would plan to let a percentage of the audience go, hopefully satisfied with their experience, maybe thinking about some narrative payoff and emotional trajectory.

More dedicated audience members would quickly discover that this critical path is only the most visible part of the whole. The critical path could be understood as the pilot episode and everything else could be understood as a season's worth of optional exploration and exercise, although the pilot would contain the bulk of the narrative elements and the season would focus more on systems and free-roaming. The audience would be quietly invited (but not pressured) to continue on beyond the critical path, and the project would be built so that the audience would naturally want to dig deeper, to see what's beyond the horizon, to climb every mountain and explore every cave, to roam, to recognize and better understand the systems that govern the world, the whys and the hows, to find rabbit holes of surprising complexity and depth, to discover unexpected locations, phenomena and creatures, to delve into lore.

Tone: No Winks, No Nods                                                                                                              

The joking self-aware tone of Sword & Sworcery was there from the start. We added the 'w' to the name/logo early on to kind of let people know that yes, we are going to attempt to make a kind of high concept, beautiful, expressive, music-inspired art-heavy videogame... but we'll crack jokes too. The Twitter component was built with iPhone in mind, and late in the creation process, as the text elements proliferated in an effor to paper over the gaps in the experience, we began to shift the bombastic, poetic, self-serious Robert E. Howard style language towards a kind of light-hearted tone and jokes inspired by Twin Peaks, Scott Campbell and 2010/2011 era Twitter. We extended this very specific tone into our trailers, website, and outward-facing PR. We're proud of the script and the very specific tone, we think it was fresh on day 1 and it's appropriate in-game... but after the script was posted piece by piece to Twitter it quickly got over-exposed. As time wore on, as the project stayed visible post-launch, as other releases had to be announced, and the same very-specific tone was employed... well, it started to grate on me, and no doubt on others too. The context-free wilderness of the internet is a hostile place for subtlety and anything resembling irony. Sword & Sworcery's true heart is very sincere, and this sincerity comes through in-game in quiet moments, and particularly at the end... but the understandable perception of the project is that it is detached, too-cool to care. Some critics have observed that some fourth-wall-breaking comments and pop culture references undermine the credibility of the world and its story, and this undermines the overall cohesion and lasting power of the work... and while this isn't necessarily the case, it has the ring of truth about it. Anyways, it is what it is, and we're proud of it all, it was the right tone for the project, genuine in its way, and we think it'll prove to be a worthy time capsule of the year 2011... but it's time to move on, to adapt, to grow.

With this new project we want to make a clean break with Sword & Sworcery's joking self-aware tone. We are going to attempt to make a high concept, beautiful, expressive, music-inspired, art-heavy videogame... and we'll have our heart quietly but steadfastly on our sleeve the whole time. It's likely this project will have a Twitter component but whatever it is, it will be very much backgrounded and designed as a convenience for the audience. We will be taking great pains to avoid relying on text, the goal is to plough our time and energy into the systems and audiovisual presentation. This honest, straightforward, no-nonsense tone is what we're hoping to extend into our trailers, website and outward-facing PR. More signal, less noise. We want to avoid anything that could be seen as posturing, or overly-sophisticated, or intentionally oblique. We want to create a project, an experience, and a universe that stays true to itself, something worth investing time into, with no references, no winks, no nods and definitely no smirks. All that said, there'll probably be plenty of opportunities for light-heartedness, but these might appear in the form of 'player narratives' or 'funny things that happen and are permitted by the systems'. 

Themes: No Sword, No Sworcery

Sword & Sworcery was designed to be 'an archetypical adventure' built upon the most common mythic concepts: a lonely warrior on a quest in an unfamiliar wilderness, exploring a darkened dungeon sword-in-hand, retrieves a sacred relic and is then embroiled in a struggle with shadow spirits and sinister sorcery. The phrase 'sword and sorcery' was coined to describe the kind of lusty, blood and wine and fire and brimstone short stories written by Conan The Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, whose poetic prose was a constant source of inspiration for the proejct. Naturally, our story had a sword, a primary tool used in several battles, some of which ended with a lethal blow. Our story had a lot to do with 'sworcery' and it included a variety of imagined things including miracles, telepathy, telekinesis and cryptozoolgy. The world was presented in the now well-established hard-edged pixel style we have been exploring and refining for ten years, a style that naturally refers to the past, to the videogames of the 90s and 80s, a style that felt perfectly at home on the tiny display of the iPhone. Jim Guthrie's score was an eclectic mix of vaguely chiptune-sounding samples, progrock synths and funky beats, catchy melodies, occasional pockets of guitar and dreamy affected piano drones, a range of styles and moods that included all of the project's influences and tones.

This unnanounced new project is being designed to be 'a science fiction epic' and we're going to try to tackle the broadest, most resonant, most worthwhile themes. This type of story doesn't require a sword, and in fact tools of violence and lethality will be sorted lower than tools of investigation, exploration and survival. This story doesn't require sworcery either, there's no need for miracles or telekinesis, however it is likely that we'll have a few provocative 'what ifs', and some strategic leaps of logic and dream-imaginings will play a role. Beyond these broad thematic differences perhaps the most immediately noticeable shift with this project is that we'll be taking the opportunity to leave behind our distinctive hard-edged pixel style and carve out a new style of representation in 3-D, and on the audio side of things our collaboration with composer and sound designer Scntfc will lead us in an appropriate direction. We'll dig into these presentation aspects in the Sights & Sound post.

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We'll dig into these presentation aspects here:

•  Sights & Sounds

You can see other posts in the menu at top right.

A/V: SIGHTS & SOUNDS

Aesthetics are obviously super important for us, they are our most direct method of communicating the concept, the mechanics, the themes and the narrative... and perhaps most significantly, the vibe.

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The slideshow above will give you a sense of this new project's still-evolving visual style. As well, here is a song created many years ago by Scntfc, it includes a monlogue by Carl Sagan and it creates a beautifully contemplative space. This song, or something like it, will eventually find its way into this project and the vibe that it creates is an inspiration. Here is another recording from Scntfc created for this project, this one captures some of the brightness, awe, scope and wonder that we're after. Please keep those sounds safe, they are 'for internal use only'.

Sights                                                                      

The new look is built on strategically stylized surfacing and materials, naturalistically proportioned but elegantly simplified shapes, with an emphasis on motion, cinematography, lighting, atmospherics and lens effects.

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It'll take a ton of ingeunuity and clever decision-making to be able to flesh out this world, as a tiny team we have no choice but to work smart, as brute force won't get us to where we need to be. Consequently we'll be looking into the creation of various world creation tools to help carve out rivers, shape coastlines, seed forests and shape landscapes and stake out ecosystems. Procedurality on its own won't solve all of our problems, many man-made objects and locations will have to be handcrafted. It's a tall order, and we know it'll take a fair amount of time and experimentation, but in general we feel ok about our chances on this one. We have a history with 3-D and several years of videogame industry experience as an artist and designer using a tool similar to Unity, and our prototyping so far has given us some cause for confidence, so we think our ambitious-yet-cautious approach will see us through. There are some other common timesinks that we hope to sidetep, for example we'll be designing the project with the goal of minimizing or avoiding human character animation and rigging, we'll avoid cutscenes, and we'll move towards a surfacing style that doesn't involve UV unwrapping and custom textures.

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This look will need to be scaleable and clean enough to be appealing and coherent on smaller displays and economical enough to maintain a high frame rate even on older machines, but we'll also need just enough detail density to properly fill out a much larger canvas, be it a television, a computer display, a projector in a theatre, or even stereoscopic virtual reality goggles like Oculus Rift. 

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This project is pretty much all about 3-D space, we're creating it with the affordable all-in-one videogame-making software Unity from Unity Technologies.

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One of the constraints is that the player will be able to look at the world from a range of perspectives and altitudes, going from walking around in caves, corridors and hangars and looking at the world from a human scale, and then the player will hop into their scout ship and careen around at various altitudes with a camera following as if in a helicopter... and it'll even be possible for the player to rocket up into the sky and look down.

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Hopefully our style will be lean, mean and clean... and as distinctive and identifiable as Sword & Sworcery in its own way.

Sounds                                                                                                                              

On the music side of things we're talking with Scntfc about an approach that will match this earnest, wide-eyed, no-nonsense tone. We'll be avoiding catchy melodies, funky beats, badass synths and anything remotely prog rock. Instead we are looking at creating a musical language built out of hushed, thrumming strings as well as harps, bells, an occasional trumpet or horn, with any synth elements employed to create an underlying vibe of awe, wonder, mystery and menace. We have been talking at length about the score to the Tree of Life, The Thin Red Line and a few songs from Prometheus, and we've spoken a fair bit about Metroid Prime and Skyrim. We're fortunate in that we have plenty to refer to in Scntfc's own stellar discography, including two profoundly inspiring compositions that include a monologue by Carl Sagan.

a/v: prototype footage

password: carl sagan

Q1 2013 march

3 minutes, very rough

no music, temp text-to-speech audio, sketching out camera behavior ideas and basic overlays

password = mtsthelens

Q1 2013 january

10 minutes, very rough

ocean, thunder, fog bank, fjord, creature

temp music from Scntfc, The Tree of Life, Prometheus

password=voyager

moon grotto teaser with inexplicable footage

a/v: initial flow

 

 

sketches q4 2012

 

 

 

 

 

MUSIC: LOREJAM PLAYLIST

2.0 THE DISTANT PAST 

AUDIO: 02 01 the distant past  

• 0-1:45 grasslands, sky, nomads and caravans, a multicolored multitude assembling, a steppe coronation (scntfc composition for this project 'the plains')
• 1:45 - 3:49 the fragility and warmth of human voices, ritual and ceremony (god yu tekem laef blong mi, hans zimmer, from the thin red line soundtrack)

2.9 THE PAST

AUDIO 02 09 space race

0 - 1:01 electricity, chemistry, machines, powerlines reaching to the horizon, a civilization industrializes (scntfc composition for this project 'sovietskis')

1:02 - 2:59 a naive old-timey dream of a journey to the stars, a tolstoy/verne/star trek novel about space explorers and colonists that became a popular musical play that became an early silent film, an inspiration to rocket scientists, engineers, exploreres and pilots (star trek symphony, tony bremmer 'is there no truth in beauty')

2:58 - 8:22 meanwhile, in the secret recesses of the governments in the three superpower nations, an existential threat is discovered and top secret plans are put into motion to prepare for the future. in remote uninhabited locations at the ends of rail lines rockets are built and tested. in seemingly disused hangars, strange new aircraft are built and tested under cover of darkness. telescopes are trained on the sky, keeping an eye on the incoming threat, searching for a suitable cradle world. great strides are made. a rocket, then a dog, then a person are sent into space. a 50 year plan of research and construction is set into motion, a plan that will eventually yield a cathedral sized space ship secretly in orbit above the earth, with a destination across the abyss of space. (danny elfman, from the score to the film standard operating procedure)

3.0 PILOT PROJECTS

AUDIO 03 01 pilot project pt1

0 - 3:10 young people in a kind of aviation boy scout / girl guide society are recruited for 'special flights', they board a train and travel to the ends of the earth, they are set up in cabins and barracks at an airfield, they do drills, march, run obstacle courses, fly trainer planes, and the recruits that measure up move on to a new battery of tests... centrifuges, oxygen deprivation, pain, focus, various emergency simulations, more drills, more running, more obstacles courses, more flight tests, they are evaluated by instructors and government dignitaries and a few are chosen to proceed (alexander desplat 'heroic weather conditions of the universe' from wes anderson's 'moonrise kingdom')

3:15 - 7:40  a strange new aircraft is revealed that looks like something out of buck rogers, with a seemingly inexhaustible fuel supply, new recruits hop in and go for joy ride / test flight... montage?! fun times!?! (caribou/daphni 'yes i know')

7:40 - 11:10 more joyrides, races, competitions, fun times around basic flight and ship handling, radiosports (beastie boys 'futterman's rule')

11:10 - 14:20 the new recruits have been moved to the coast for some maritime training, they arrive at the new training location, move in and get familiar with the facilities (alexander desplat 'heroic weather conditions of the universe' from the film moonrise kingdom')

14:20 - 18:53 more funtimes in flight, this time over water, dealing with waves, weather and islands, bit more intensity/more stakes (daphni/caribou 'jiao')

 

• AUDIO 03_02_pilot_projects pt2

• 0-8:55 eerie long distance multi-day / survival mission (solar fields remix of FEZ song 'puzzle')
• 9:00 - 12:30 fun times, competition/race/whatever (beastie boys 'root down')
• 12:30 - 17:30 stakes are higher, government dignitaries taking a closer interest, another series of tests, the selected few will be chosen for the mission... which it turns out is to explore a new world, the heroes are revealed to the public, there are parades in their honor and a grand celebration before they are loaded into a rocket, put to sleep and the mothership sets off (alexander desplat 'heroic conditions of the universe' from 'moonrise kingdom')
• 17:30 - 17:53 eerie dream monster sound (scntfc)

3.9 - 4.0 FROM CRADLE TO FAR SHORE

4_0_0 1000 year dream journey.mp3

"a thousand years passed while you dreamed, and while you dreamed this song played, and played, and played"

You fall asleep, a pilot is put into a capsule, the capsule is loaded onto an aircraft, the aircraft travels to space, docking with a mothership, the capsule is loaded onto the mothership. At length, the mothership leaves the cradle world behind.  The pilot dreams for a 1000 years while fragments of identity, experience, culture, history and heavenly, hazy abstract structures swirl around. 

• (temp) Music: Primarily "Skytown" from Metroid Prime 3 from Nintendo, with a bit of Danny Elfman's Standard Operating Procedure score at the start. 

4. NOW, THE FUTURE

 

4_0_1 planetfall

"deep breath... ok, that's it... here we go

it's ok, that's your heat shield

 it's ok, this is normal, this is expected, this is nominal

and as the clouds grew closer, the pod split, revealing a scout ship

which tumbled down through towering clouds"

• (temp) Music: "Journey To The Line" by Hans Zimmer from The Thin Red Line.

 

4_0_2 brine & explore

"this thick suffocating brine"

"and suddenly you're above the clouds, you can see to the horizon, and it's a beautiful morning"

"home, safety"

• (temp) Music: "Pale Fire 01" by Scntfc & Morgan Kuhli.
• (temp) Music: "Cirlces" by Alexander Desplat from The Tree of Life.
• Music: Bivouac sketch by Scntfc.

 

4_0_3 dream of sagan 

"we look at the sky, at the stars, at the gas giant hanging there, and other moons"

"we hear a famous speech by a famous scientist and leader, who propelled the pilot projects, the initiative that lead to this moment"

• Music: "Saints of Infinity 09" by Scntfc with Carl Sagan.

 

4_0_4 day two

"morning. we're in a tent. we hear the wind outside. we exit the tent, squinting at the light

a sparkling dew covers everything, the air is fresh, smelling of unfamiliar flowers, the rising sunlight is pleasantly warm in the cool"

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"we enter a valley darkened by the edge of a storm

faraway we see something churning

as we approach we see it, a sky whale, grazing a forest, kicking up great steams of debris"

• Music: Dawn/Morning, sketch by Scntfc
• (temp) Music: "A Planet" by Marc Streitenfeld from the score to the film Prometheus.
• (temp) Music: "Clouds" by Alexander Desplat from the score to the film Tree of Life.
• Music: Dusk/evening (flautando) sketch by Scntfc.
• Music: Bivouac sketch (harp duet) by Scntc. 

 

4_0_5 storm day three milestone

"we decide we're going in

the energy of the tornado is the only thing we're aware of

we're being blown, sailing through pockets of turbulence

we need to get across the valley, but to do so we need to get close to the funnel"

• Music: Excerpts from Scntfc's brine.
• (temp) Music: "Going in" by Marc Streitenfeld from the score to the film Prometheus.
• (temp) Music: "Too Close" by Marc Streitenfeld from the score to the film Prometheus.
• Music: Late morning after a storm (landing group midday) sketch by Scntfc. 
• (temp) Music: "Outro" by M83 from the record Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.

________________________________________________________________________________

5. THE FAR FUTURE (secret)

 

5_0_0 the far future

xxx

• (temp) Music: Pilot Priest
• (temp) Music: "Tick of the Clock" by Cliff Martinez from the score for the film Drive.

________________________________________________________________________________

 

3. THE PAST

3.1 Sovietskis. Tolstoy. Industrial Revolution.

3.2 Star Trek Symphony. Jules Verne. Captain Kirk. Voyage to the Moon.

3.3 Standard Operating Procedure. Lovelock. Skunk Works.

3.4 Pilot Mixtape 1.

3.5 Standard Operating Procedure Dogs.

3.6 Pilot Mixtape 2.

3.7 Standard Operating Procedure. Subtle Launch.

THE DISTANT PAST

2.1 God Yu Lakkem. The Thin Red Line.

2.2 The Plains. Scntfc.

2.3 something from conan

 

DEEP TIME 

1.1 Brine. Scntfc.

1.2 Neptune? Not sure. Holst

1.3 Murky waters of the Rhine. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Wagner

1.4 The Four Seasons? Vivaldi

1.5 X? Arvo Part? 

vignettes: the future - planetfall, the past

 

we're looking at one of three train-engine-sized bullet-shaped object attached to a flying-buttress-like pier structure, this pier is extending out below a cathedral-sized space station in low orbit above a planet, slowly spinning in silence, hanging in the blackness of space. white clouds and sparkling blue water, just like our cradle world only the shapes of coastlines aren't familiar

we input something, tap or press a button or whatever

as we look on we notice the bullet has decoupled, tiny jets fire, and the bullet slowly begins to fall away… and we follow it down, down, down…. we watch it rotate to an angle that will help it in its goal to survive the stresses of entering the planet's atmosphere…

we can shift the camera around, zoom in, zoom out

when we input something else there's a jump cut

as we descend we're buffeted, shaken, we see flames lick out from the bullet's heat-shield.

the planet and its atmosphere, previously perceived as a rounded spherical object, now surrounds us

the image starts breaking up, static, noise, inexplicable imagery, flashback, memory

input= jump cut

 

soon we are able to discern details of coastlines, rivers, mountains, forests… we're plummetting and the surface is alarmingly close when three white-and-red striped parachutes whip out of the bullet's transom, and all of a sudden our fall begins to slow… and for a moment it feels as if we're hanging there, and we can look all around and below, at mountains with lumpy clouds, and a fog bank obscuring the coastal waters

input= jump cut 

and then our bullet-shaped pod suddenly snaps apart and is wrenched upwards by its chutes, jettisoning a smaller brillaint aircraft with rockets a-glow

input=jettison

now input controls small aircraft

the scout ship's wings are creating lift but not enough to fly, not quite enough to glide, and so it descens at an elegant angle, tumbling through the coastal fog bank, levelling out at a comfortable altitude low above the darkened, twinkling ocean of this unfamiliar, limitless new world

when we eventually climb out of the coastal fog bank we see a vast planet looming in the sky above, and we see a faint pink-ish aurora borealis above wispy clouds

 

exploring the world we make our way up the lowlands and glimpse an impossible creature

as we proceed we sometimes hit the ground or sustain various impacts, the camera shakes and flickers letting us know how mild or severe these are, and for some hard impacts our view may be distorted, as if our display or camera is malfunctioning under stress. similarly, at high speeds our view narrows, suggesting g-foces.

sometimes when these distortions occur we see ghost images. do they represent the pilot's memory, like micro-second flashbacks? on our first hard impact we saw a face, a woman, a man, an airfield, a building.

there are various entities and phenomena in this world. we sometimes see waterspouts and little twisters, forming and then dissipating. if we approach our view becomes slightly distorted, we get the sense the entity is electric in some way, and if we approach closely enough we'll see more ghost images. a roomful of uniformed people. a chandelier. a cat. a bunk. these little twisters dissipate before we can see any one image clearly, before the images resolve into a story.

we encounter other obstacles in our way, even aggressive entities that would damage the scout ship. if we were skilled and knowledgeable about how to operate our scout ship, and if had a better understanding of our goals and motivations, we might better understand these obstacles and avoid them. if this is our first time then it's possible, likely even, that we would have several opportunities to learn about impacts, dangerous phenomena, shields, damage... and it's quite possible we would learn about what happens when our ship crashes, and our pilot ejects, his or her chute popping open as he or she blacks out and our view goes dark...

we awake, we're near a crash site, our chute is all around us... but this isn't the same place, this isn't the same time... we're on a blindingly white salt flat under a bright blue sky, on our cradle world. we can see the smoking remains of our craft a few hundred yards away, and we can hear far-off sirens. we look around, trying to place the source of the sirens, and we see three dark spots, one of them an ambulance, driving in our direction... the words '1000 years ago' appear

jump cut

medical exam

jump cut

walking into a large building, a hundred young uniformed people stand facing away from you, looking to the front of the room, where someone is speaking, addressing the audience, who we gather are pilots-in-training, and today is a big decision day, there are three large doors at the front of the room, one on either side of the speaker, one directly behind her, and we are told the central door is for new recruits, basic training at the salt flats, the door on the right leads to a train which leads to a facility on the coast where various maritime and heavy weather exercises and courses take place, the door on the left leads to a forested mountain and alpine region where survival and high altitude exercises and courses take place. the speaker continues to speak, the uniformed pilots continue to stand, but we make our way to the doorway of our choice, walk down a corridor adorned with relevant imagery of the kinds of places and activities we might expect, and as we approach the end of the corridor

jump cut

a beautiful day, our sweeps down from on high and we see a dot leaving a trail, carving its way across a landscape... our view starts to approach and follow this craft, and it dawns on us that we can press an input and take control. we'll be presented with various exercises, we'll learn how to operate our scout craft and the various equipment it comes with, we'll learn how to manage its cargo, how to deal with heavy weather, to manage our fuel consumption and our energy absorption, we'll learn to gather, to transport cargo, to land and to take off... while in-between and during each exercise we'll get glimpses into this world that is familiar but interestingly different, and we'll get clues about what it's all about, and we'll notice whenever we're in a menu that we can press R to fast forward to the future, to that planetfall scenario, we can try again whenever we like, whenever we're ready... and if we do launch another planetfall mission, or pick up where we left off, we know we can flashback to this flight school to become more skilled, more knowledgeable, more self sufficient

this is going to be a videogame where you mostly zoom around low over ground and water in a little science fiction scout ship, having a fun time, going slow and enjoying the natural world as it goes by, listening to the wind and the birds and the sound of creeks accompanied by an unseen orchestra of hushed thrumming strings, and then you put your foot on the gas and hear the rockets fire and now you're going fast and skidding around corners and taking risks, taking jumps and landing them with skill and flair. as you get into the flow and get familiar with the controls you'll discover you can 'film' your adventures as if you're directing an IMAX film

think of the best bits of driving a car, with a lot of the off-road thrill of snowboarding/skiing, plus occasionally some of the thrill of flying a hang glider, riding a rocket or flying around in a jet. 

there's a world to explore, river valleys to whizz up and down, surf-battered coastlines and beaches to follow, large mountainsides to traverse. you feel the dirt kicking up behind you, you see a satisfying plume rise out of water. each corner of this world has its own charms, there are swamps, lakes, meadows, forests, grasslands, desolate moraines, glaciers and snow… and in a matter of minutes you can skate on down from a windswept ice field following a growing river to the sea, our inexplicably quiet careening startles birds in the morning light

the sun rises on dew-soaked grasses, the morning fog lifts, it's a glorious morning although there are dark clouds on the horizon suggesting heavy weather, perhaps a storm this afternoon. we take a moment to plan out our tasks for the day, where we'd like to go, what we might be able to gather or harvest, and we think about how much we can realistically get done before the storm rolls in towards dusk, because when the sun is gone our scout ships solar won't be able to supply us with the energy we're presently enjoying the heck out of

on our way up an unfamiliar coast we sight a contrail, evidence of another scout ship in the vicinity. the trail uggests the ship has followed a creek. should we investigate? we haven't been up there. would be interesting to know who it is and what they're doing, and maybe there are some materials worth gathering, or some food or fuel we could harvest.

as we're driving slow, looking towards land, enjoying the mood, we glimpse something else that catches our eye further down the coast… an impossibly large shape, floating in the air, attached at one end to a hillside.. we move to investigate this titanic creature, slowing down as we get near so as not to alarm it… you've heard of these creatures, that they are plagued by parasites made of a material that would be precious to your fellow pilgrims, perhaps… if you're careful enough… maybe you can approach and use a kind of tether harpoon on one of these parasites, remove it from the floating creature's side like a horn from a lion's paw… but of course, the floating creature might see us as a threat, and we might have to deal with that… but that parasite would definitely come in handy…. let's watch the creature for a bit, he appears to be feeding, and birds are circling his maw… maybe we can learn something that'll make our task easier

later on we a returning down the coastline we had been exploring as dark clouds move in, when we hear radio static, and a garbled voice. the voice comes in more clearly when we look at an island on the horizon, where we can identify a faint glowing dot that seems to blink in time with the voice. we could continue on up the valley to where our fellow pilgrims have settled, or we can head out over the increasing choppy water to investigate the source of this transmission. over open water we can really gun it, and it's fun to skid and watch the plume of spray jet skywards

at length we reach the island, a sandy rocky place, and sure enough we see a strangely-shaped structure close to the highest point. there's a sandy spot nearby that would make a good landing spot, so we gun it, skid, and then put our scout ship into a semi-automatic landing manoeuvre, the landing gear unfolds in a flash - four robot dog legs - and we're safe on the ground. we unbuckle, tur a latch, and now we're beneath the scout ship, our flight suit and helmet still on, standing on the sandy ground on our own two feet. the sky is darkening, the trip back to the mainland will be slow-going with less solar energy

but it's time to take a look at this structure, whatever it is. we slowly walk forward in our bulky flight suit, clambering up the rocky slope, we can hear our breathing apparatus. the strange structure has an entrance, we fire up our headlamp and step inside…

it's past dark, our trip up the valley was a slow one, our batteries mostly depleted, a trip made slower still by swarms of flying creatures that we took pains to avoid alarming. at length we see a comforting sight, the cheery campfires of the settlement, where twenty or thirty pilgrims are sleeping, cooking, eating, talking, drinking and laughing around campfires and in tents beneath a broad overhang. we put our ship into a skid and land, a pilgrim comes out to meet us, remarking on the materials and food we've been able to gather and how they'll be put to use to build new equipment or structures or for research purposes on this unfamiliar world or to better feed the pilgrims, and then we're invited to relax by a fire and listen to a story or a song before going to bed, exhausted after a busy day. 

should we tell that one pilgrim about the transmission, and the strange structure we found, and what we found inside? will the other pilgrims think we're losing it? there isn't supposed to be anyone out there.

we're dreaming. we are remembering our three years in flight school, preparing for this adventure. it's a blur. we remember the temple where the hundred or so young pilots would gather to for public addresses, where the young pilots would be sorted by year, by which assignments they would take, some taking the train to the rugged coast for ocean rescue training, others heading to the glaciers and lakes of the mountains, the rest staying here in the valley to learn about equipment and about the mission

we didn't know who among us would be chosen, or if anyone would be chosen. the odds were steeply stacked against our selection. only a dozen pilots would be chosen, and nobody knew when. more than once crews had been assembled and then, following endless delays and myriad setbacks, disbanded. after all, the titanic colony mothership had been in construction for almost a hundred years, the job of building it had started and re-started more than a handful of times as old designs were proven unfeasible or rendered obsolete. the feeling amongst our class was that now was the time, that the colony mothership presently in orbit was ready for the thousand year trip across the abyssal expanse of deep space, but hadn't flight classes' in previous years thought exactly the same?

there were advantages to the delays, it could be said. in the intervening time newer, more powerful telescopes told us more and more about our destination, a world we came to learn was in the 'goldilocks' zone of its star system, and impossibly according to many of our thinkers, it was home to oceans of water, with a cloud cover just like our precious, doomed cradle world and even forests, or something like them. with each new discovery, interpreted from spectrograms and decades-old reflected light, the design of the colony mothership and its various components and cargo was adapted and its appropriateness improved

perhaps the biggest improvement was the major advancements in propulsion in the last few decades, fuel yield, energy harvest and energy storage orders of magnitude better than what came before. what once took gallons of liquid fuel now required only microns. the original colony mothership was a mass of vulnerable fuel containers, the latest design could be contained within a hard-shield. for us recon pilots these advancements have re-shaped our scout crafts, we can go further and faster than what many thinkers would have thought possible in years past

ok so that touches on some of the main things we're looking to accomplish

concept: timespaces

Our story is primarily about a group of pilots exploring an unfamiliar world. The primary appeal of the project is how it plays, how it moves, how enjoyable it is to explore and navigate the world skillfully, to soak in the vibe. Consequently, the audience needn't be concerned with minutae about precisely what's going on. The world simply exists, our pilots and their aircraft exist, and hopefully it's all coherent and implicitly interesting, creating an easily understood context to adeequately explain the main action and to sustain the audience's interest and imagination.

After a little while, as the audience spends time exploring the project, they're bound to get curious and starting asking 'why X, why Y'...

"Why are we exploring this planet? What are we hoping to achieve? Who are these pilots anyways? Where do they come from? How come my aircraft doesn't seem to obey realisitc physical laws? When these pilots sleep at night, what do they dream about? When these pilots are chatting around a campfire, what stories do they tell? How does it feel for them to be on this adventure? Is it scary? What kind of person embarks on an adventure like this? What do they eat? What are the living conditions like on this planet? What languages do they speak? etc"

As creators, we might as well think all of this through from the audience's perspective, dream up interesting and thematically congruent answers to these questions, and then look for elegant ways to weave these ideas into the world to support the core experience and vibe we're after. This 'lore' will help shape the audiovisual style, the design of costumes, vehicles and objects, the reasons for certain situations and locations, help carve out the characters and possible stories. As the player explores further and further into their project we would be wise to keep their curiosity and imagination alight with interesting, surprising or even epiphanic glimpses into what's going on.

To dig into this lore we'll need to expand the scope and look at what happened before the 'now' where our story begins. We need to ask who are our pilots, what is their culture, and why. We also need to look at what might happen after - if this was a TV show, we would need to ask what the season finale might look like, and what the series finale might be (note: this process isn't as straightforward as dreaming up a story, because we need to keep in mind that the audience will be given freedom to roam, to make their own decisions, and while we can look at a broad progression of events, we will have a tougher time attempting to tell a specific story).

Some relevant reference points: Terence Malick's film Tree of Life is about growing up in small town Texas, but this story includes the origin of the universe and life on Earth, shown in a stunning sequence about half way through the film. The TV show LOST is about a group of people exploring and surviving on an island after a plane crash, but the scope of the show expands considerably as the histories of the characters are presented in flashbacks. 2001: A Space Odyssey is primarily about two astronauts on a mission of discovery frustrated by a malfunctioning computer, but the film includes an extended vignette touching on the evolution of intelligent life. 

So this focus on lore will help us carve out the experience we're after, but it's also worth mentioning that this broad scope is a key aspect of a science fiction epic. By crafting a narrative that spans hundreds, thousands or millions of years we're putting the audience in a contemplative state of mind, snapping them out of the usual lifetime-dependent time scale and forcing them to consider processes that occur on much grander timescales. This contemplative frame of mind is an integral aspect of the vibe and meaning we're interested in constructing. For more time talk there's an in-progress reading called 'Time For A Science Fiction Epic'.

It's worth mentioning that time is interconnected with space, and we'll be aiming to do similarly horizon-breaking things with distances.

With all of this in mind we have dreamed up five distinct eras with related locations, we're going to call them 'timespaces' until a better word comes along.

The main time/space divide in our project involves a thousand-year journey through space from a cradle world to an unfamiliar new world. What happens before the journey on the cradle word is The Past, what happens after on the unfamiliar planet is The Future. Let's address these two core timespaces first.

 

The Past & The Future

These two timespaces are accessible from the start. The Past is primarily focused on flight school on the cradle world, The Future is a about exploring and surviving on an unfamiliar planet.

These two timespaces will be very much 'in-play' in that the vast majority of the audience's time will be spent exploring what they have to offer, flipping back and forth. These two timespaces may function narratively a bit like the 'now' of the island vs the various flashbacks in LOST. For our project, the 'now/island' bit begins as our pilots make planetfall and start to explore an unfamiliar world in The Future. At pretty much anytime, our audience can choose to skip backwards a thousand years and access a vignette with the slightly younger pilots back on the cradle world attending flight school, learning the ropes.

The events in The Past have already happened, so those stories and situations can be a bit more specific, more contained, more like a series of vignettes the player can access in almost any order. By contrast, the events in The Future are happening in the moment and play is therefore open-ended, so if the audience wants to see what happens next they'll have to survive to see another day.

A new player hopping into The Future may become overwhelmed or lost, and when this happens we can bring this player back to The Past for a more guided experience where techniques are learned, the mission goals are made more clear, the audience's abilities and knowledge improve and their narrative interest deepens, so that the audienece feels emboldened to return to The Future and progress into that vast undiscovered country.

While the controls and mechanics in The Past and The Future will be more or less identical they will feel like two interestingly distinct videogames. The Past will probably feel a bit like Pilotwings or even Motorstorm. The audience will be able to quickly queue up an event, launch into it, and in three, five or ten minutes the event will be done and the audience will have a score or a standing and feel a sense of accomplishment. Drop in, drop out, instant action. Events would be designed to indirectly teach a particular technique, to flex a particular muscle, or to focus on a particular style of play. While participating in these events, the audiene would have the opportunity to take a look and optionally explore various locations on the cradle world, and in the process they would get a sense for the culture, why this 'pilot program' exists, who these pilots are, why the colony mothership has been built. As well as deepening the audience's investment in the world and sharpening their abilities, time spent in The Past would uncover opportunties for cosmetic customization and other minor bonuses and extras. For example, as a reward for completing a particuarly intense rescue mission, the audience might be given the option to change some aspect of the coat of arms that appears on aircrafts and flags, or to suggest a different paint color for the aircraft. Or perhaps the audience is rewarded with a mixtape, or some ornament for thier cockpit. When the audience skips ahead to The Future they'll see these minor alterations reflected there.

So The Past is a more guided, more contained timespace designed for three, five or ten minutes of action. By contrast, The Future will offer the audience quite a bit more freedom, and more time would be required to make progress, starting at fifteen minutes at minimum and going up to thirty or forty five minutes. We would use the day/night cycle of this new planet to time-box the audience's session, so from the first light of dawn to the last light of dusk might take 45 real-world minutes. The audience could continue to play in darkness, but our systems and tasks would all be designed to reel the audience back in towards dusk so they are incentivized to return to a bivouac or base camp.

The most obvious ultimate goal for the castaways on LOST is to be rescued, and their secondary goal is to figure out what's going on with the island. For our explorers in The Future the ultimate goal is the establishment of a colony, and most of the drama and struggle in The Future will predictably be about overcoming various obstacles in order to accomplish this task. The secondary goal for our explorers, as with LOST, is to figure out what's going on with the planet.

With regards to the ultimate goal in The Future, there are a variety of obstacles. When our story begins, the motership in orbit above the planet has deployed a scout ship to get familiar with the planet's surfae. The initial touch-down location for this scout ship isn't appropriate for a colony for one reason or another, perhaps the ecosystems aren't favorable or there are unforeseen dangers presented by the elements or by the various lifeforms, and it's up to the audience to guide the scout ship and eventually various other explorers through a series of challenges, gathering food and materials, escaping danger, investigating various phenomena and eventually carving out a location for the colony.

Once a location is chosen, a series of events are set in motion where the mothership, still in orbit, deploys various payloads which, after re-rentry, become buildings, one of which is home to some number (thousands?) of sleeping colonists who awake from their sleep. Perhaps there are still dangers to contend with before the colony can be said to be stable and safe, and perhaps our now veteran surviving pilot plays a role.

Once stability has been reached the way is cleared for the colony to take root, for the colonists to start to reproduce and adapt to their new world. Perhaps at this moment our pilot chooses to 'go to sleep' in case he or she is needed in the years to come, and perhaps on this note our story ends.

Quietly, a suggestion of the existence of The Far Future may be introduced somewhere in the project at this point, with no details. Or perhaps nothing is said. With the first Star Wars film, the story ends on a note of triumph, the Death Star destroyed and the heroes honored in a throne room, and there is no indication that the story will continue on... this might be the wisest strategy.

Of course, there's also an opportunity for a head-spinning LOST style reveal of The Far Future... but there are downsides to doing this. Leaving the story on a cliffhanger would make The Future less of a standalone short story, which might lessen its initial appeal, and it might come off as tacky if it all seemed like a set-up for a sequel or a follow-up. For a free TV show, cliffhangers are ok. For a videogame, where a sequel would cost the audience money, it could come across as cheap, and it might rub people the wrong way. We think it's always better to under-promise and over-deliver rather than setting up needless expectations. With that in mind, it would be preferable if the announcement and reveal of The Far Future occurred months after the release of The Future, when The Far Future is ready to launch. Still, it's worth looking ahead and considering what The Far Future might be so we know how it would fit in with everything else, just as everyone wished the writers of LOST had a satisftying answer for why the castaways were on the island. 

The Far Future

Hidden and probably witheld from the initial release. The Far Future would be made possible by successfully establishing a stable colony in The Future.

A dedicated audience member might learn what they need to know from The Past in order to overcome the challenges in The Future and establish a colony, once this colony is stable the story would end. The existence of The Far Future might be suggested. It's likely that The Far Future would not ship with the initial release, instead it may appear months or even a year later. The Far Future might have a very different tone, style and structure from The Future and The Past. 

So what does The Far Future look like? Who knows! One key idea is that the location chosen by the audience for the establishment of the colony is up to them, within certain parameters. Towards the end of The Future the audience can settle at a river mounth, in the hills, beside a lake, along the coast, on an island. We as creators would imagine a few different possible energy and food sources, a few different building materials, and try to accommodate a handful of location types. So when our pilot awakes, perhaps summoned by the colonists due to some existential threat, the audience sees how the colony has thrived, or not, in the intervening thousand years. 

Another key concept is that The Far Future would have a heavy focus on playing with friends and strangers online. The audience would be able to visit other settlements, which are in fact colonies established by others.

Some of the luckier more stable settlements would have hung on to and maintained the technology their forefathers brought with them from the dimly remembered cradle world. Some settlements may still be able to manufacture modern technology. Other settlements may have deteriorated. In a reasonably stable colony, the pilot's aircraft and equipment, might be protected in a guarded tomb in the colony's central building, kept safe from the elements, perhaps maintained by a monastic order that has somehow retained the knowledge and expertise required to maintain the aircraft. In a less stable colony, the aircraft may be a little worse for wear.

There's a lot of potential with this timespace, but until the rest of the project exists it's tricky commiting to much of anything, and that's okay. In any case, for now The Far Future is a timespace where a whole variety of interesting concepts can secretly be filed away, separately from the initial release.

 

Deep Time & The Distant Past

Hidden, glimpses discoverable in The Future in dreams and campfire stories, various clues in the statues, buildings and culture of the cradle world seen in The Past.

Our explorers and their colony is an offshoot of a civilization and a culture that has existed for thousands of years on the cradle world. What kind of people are they? What do they believe? Why do they believe that? What was their schooling like? How does it make sense for them to develop this pilot program and launch the mothership? 

To understand these things we'll need to look at the world of The Past and the thinkers, scientists and leaders who have shaped that culture, whose books, buildings, statues and beliefs are scattered everywhere.

Digging even deeper, underneath a modern technological society there is the pre-modern society, and the processes that lead to the transition from one to the other, and behind that there are texts, some of which are at the center of religions, where many laws and philosophies originate. These elements are rooted in The Distant Past, a murky time when mythology gave way to civilization.

Before The Distant Past, before civilization, a whole lot of time flowed, this is Deep Time.

concept: chronology & characters

tone poem represting the primordial earth, genesis of life

sounds like... start of wagner's ring cycle 'murky waters of the rhine', then some kinda thus spake zarathustra and outer space choir, some kinda gustav holst planets style music

twin cosmic serpents representing DNA skimming, swimming, slithering across ocean waters and forest floors, transforming and metamorphosing and reproducting, representing genes moving forward through time through individuals and species

reference points: flOw, flOwer, REZ area 5 

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could be bronze age, could be iron age, analogous to 1000 AD

sounds like conan the barbarian score by basil poledouris

vignettes that tell the story of a ghenghis khan like character, only less of a conquerer and more of a philospher leader who began as an outcast and became a great leader on the steppes unifying the four corners of the world and dissemenating technologies and beliefs

steppes outcast, young

decides to tackle a sea of troubles to create a life of stability, in the process rises to become a great leader

 great leader of the steppes, later in life

a comet hits the moon, creating distress and confusion, various religious leaders offer explanations, the great leader invites a theological debate, the resolution of which leads to the birth of scientific thinking

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think of a modern, technological society sort of analogous to an alternate universe 20th century soviet union

now think of chuck yeager and the right stuff and all that

now maybe add a dash of that new star trek film? a lightness and a shininess, some lens flares

the great teacher

a few hundred years before the technological society there is a culture undergoing an industrial revolution and there is this figure, who memorably re-interpreted the story of the ghenghis character, who helped further a scientific perspective in culture, who helped synthesize and popularize a new understanding of evolution. during his lifetime, astronomers looked to the moon and were able to notice its deteriorating orbit and predict a cataclysmic event that might destroy life on the cradle world. this figure taught about the need to push beyond the limits of the cradle world, to look to the stars and find another planet. he wrote a story about the centuries-long construction of a cathedral sized mothership. this science fiction story motivated the culture

born into the aristocracy, conscripted into the army, disgusted by what he saw, became a well-read author seen as a threat by the establishement. as an older man became a philospher and advocate of non-violence. founded schools accepting boys and girls, rich and poor, teaching philosphy

his voice recordings of his books and essays were some of the first radio broadcasts in this world, and these broadcasts are considered essential, formative for this culture, and he is remembered as a great teacher

later in life he lived on a well-appointed train, travelling to the four corners of the world

his portrait and statues are in various places, his voice recordings can be found and were included in the planetary exploration mission, his train car is a little museum and can be explored

inspired by tolstoy, the tolstoy film 'the last station', plus tolstoy's book about non-violence and christianity 'the kingdom of heaven is within you'

plus a bit of jules verne and a bit of charles darwin

rocket engineer, space mother

a promsing student in one of the great teachers' schools, motivated by science and exploration, trained as a pilot and engineer, first woman in space, went on to contribute to rocket science, became adminsitrator and advocate for space program, planned the construction of the cathedral-sized motership(s) and oversaw most of its creation, founder of the pilot program

her portraits and statues are in various places, many of her philosophies inform the design of the motership and the policies of the explorers, could be her voice as the voice of the ship if that ends up being a thing

modelled after anoushka ansari, wealthy persian born, trained as electric engineer, became a business leader, motivated by science and space, was a space tourist 

 administrator

might be useful to have someone like this around, maybe he is running the pilot program

modelled after jude law's infinitely patient character in anna karenina

these are achievements from valve's team fortess 2. imagine these kinda icons for the events in The Past

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pilot/explorer team of 7

commanding officer, top pilot

maybe co-runs the pilot program, more for the advanced set

engineer, pilot, mechanic

maybe second in command

  

pilot, one of 7?

could be 7 pilots sent on the mission, chosen from a pool of 30 or so

each pilot would ahve same stats, wouldn't speak much, but would have some kind of background?

pool of 30:

at least an equal gender mix, maybe more women than men, colonists gotta reproduce after all

range of races, representing the four corners of this world

range of backgrounds. some are second-born from high status families. some were conscripted into government service and showed an aptitude. some are volunteers

the training begins in early teens. the pilot program starts at 17. the pilots chosen for the mission are in their early 20s

hard to say how these characters will really come across! there are many constraints and priorities

doesn't hurt to flesh out ideas though

concept: spectator, participant & pilot

This project will support three distinct audience activity types across two distinct types of input.

On systems equipped with a controller, all activity types will be available including spectator, participant and pilot.

On systems with a touch input style, only spectator and participant will be available.

These three activity types can be understood roughly as automatic, semi-automatic and manual - they describe varying degrees of engagement required by the audience and varying degrees of autonomy on the part of the system.

On one side of the spectrum in spectator mode, the videogame plays by itself. Events unfold, it looks great, it sounds great, and whoever is playing (probably one of the project creators) is putting on a good, interesting show. Think of the 'attract mode' concept, now think of a 'let's play' video series on youtube... now imagine the audience can choose a camera angle, skip ahead, skip backwards, and maybe turn on/off layers of audio. A spectator will be lead down the garden path, but it'll be a lovely garden path, beautiful and interesting a/v unfurling all on its own.

Moving a step away from system autonomy towards player engagement we have participant mode, a sort of semi-automatic spectator mode where the audience is involved as much as he or she might like. The audience is tasked with optionally making various decisions about where to go, what to do. Go north and look for materials for X, or go south and explore along the coast? Intercede in an argument between two crew members or stay quiet? In spectator mode we might not have even noticed these as decision points, in participant mode we see the decision and we can choose to affect the flow of events. A participant is more or less lead down a garden path, but if they see a fork they can choose to explore, and they can stop to smell the roses, as it were.

Moving a big step away from system autonomy towards player engagement we have pilot mode, which absolutely requires a controller with its precise joysticks and many buttons. The audience is making the same decisions as in participant mode, but they're also in control of their aircraft at every moment as they move from location A to location B. In pilot mode the audience can roam, staying on the garden path, choose whichever fork, and once they're feeling familiar and brave, they can set a course for the horizon.

As a point of reference, Sword & Sworcery would exist in a space in-between participant and pilot modes. Would-be pilots who enjoy the moment-to-moment of direct control and decision making were perhaps a little unsatisfied, while would-be-partiicipants, who would like to follow a story and interject here and there, were perhaps given a bit too much freedom to get lost and lose momentum.

notes: approach to narrative

In Sword & Sworcery our approach to narrative was fairly specific, focused on the path of particular protagonist, The Scythian, whose identity and motivation was hinted at but kept at a distance. While this wasn't part of the initial concept, the audience's enjoyment was often interrupted by hopefully-intuitive but often oblique progress-stopping puzzles. 

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Our intention with narrative this time around is to keep it broad, our focus will be on a group of characters, pilots and pilgrims exploring an unfamiliar world, and while the non-player characters may have specific roles and backgrounds, the player character will be mostly blank. Our goal is to create an interesting, dense world rich in expressive systems and give the audience enough room to shape their experience. While some gatingwill no doubt occur, we'll aim to keep the playspaces wide open. We intend to focus on enjoyable, repeatable activities that will require and reward precision, skill, focus, practice and thoughtful decision-making. There'll be no shortage of puzzling elements to ponder while going about these activities - there'll be mysteries to investigate, hints and clues to uncover... however these puzzling elements will not be placed as obstacles in the audience's path, they'll be woven into the world sparking a player's curiosity and creating intrinsic incentives to look around, discoverable by anyone who has the time and interest.

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On the topic of narrative, we recently had the privilege of creating an illustration for the cover of Austin Grossman's book YOU: A Novel. Austin is a veteran videogame designer and now a published author who got his start at a now legendary videogame company in the early 90s. His credits include well-regarded classics like System Shock, Deus Ex and the more recent and well-received Dishonored. It turns out Austin is a fan of Sword & Sworcery, and his twin brother Lev Grossman, an author and book critic, put it on Time Magazine's 'Top 10 Videogames of 2011' list. It's a bit of a long-shot, but we're hoping to loop Austin in to this project at some point as an advisor and maybe even contributor. YOU is a great book btw, recommended.

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In any case, Austin Grossman's thoughts on how writing and narrative fit into videogames are well worth considering, as they align with our perspective. These are from "Opinion: Videogames Taught Me To Write" an essay by Austin Grossman published at Polygon, we'd recommend reading the whole thing. link

You learn to be inventive. After all, players are using everything on the screen to form an idea of what they're doing and why. You learn to sneak story in at the margins. Leave it lying in dusty corners and layered into other parts of the world, embedded into combat mechanics and level geometry and audio cues, or leave half-cues for players to fill in. 

In a video game, words are often the worst way to convey anything. Why say "take the third door on the left" when you can illuminate the correct door, or make the controller shake when you walk near it? Reading is cumbersome, it's abstract and it's slow, and in a medium that uses light, sound and even touch, you have to be conscious of what jobs language does well, and what it doesn't, and video games expose those strengths and weaknesses really well.

You can coax or seduce them along a narrative path, you can create all the affordances and connect all the dots, but ultimately what they're thinking is not up to you.

They come to a piece of art with their own investments, intentions, prejudices and plans. Their story might be wanting to collect every missing coin in the kingdom, or smash everything breakable, or just reach the highest vertical elevation in the game's universe. It may well be something cooler than anything you'll ever come up with. You don't know, but you make a world in which story can appear and take effect, and hope for the best.

From "In Dishonored, Sometimes The Story Is What You Don't See" a post on Kotaku about Austin Grossman's role as a writer on Dishonored, worth reading. link

The beautiful thing about games and novels and films is that you don't tell a story one way. You have a huge tool kit for telling stories. Montage is a tool. Flashback is a tool. First-person is a tool. Third-person is a tool. Environmental storytelling is a tool.

Finally, here's a spot-on tweet from videogame director Hidetaka Miyazaki, known for Dark Souls.

The greatest tool for narrative is the world you create for it to exist in.