Essential Experience

For my games essential experience I want to explore the emotions of nostalgia

What experience do I want the player to have?

- I want players to feel connected with the emotion of nostalgia, this doesn't necessarily have to be nostalgia of the players own memories, and I'd like to experiment with a second hand or induced nostalgia. I did some research and found several articles on the sensation of nostalgia for something you've never experienced, specifically for a location you've never been to. This sensation is interesting to english speakers because it doesn't really have a word to describe it; in german, however, the emotion is sometimes called fernweh which literally translates to far-sickness.

What is essential to that experience?

An idealised yet untrue symbolic past

How can my game capture that essence?

By experimenting with:

- A character experiencing nostalgic emotions, that can be empathised with or projected onto by the player

- Repeated experiences or locations throughout the game that attempt to trigger a nostalgic response. This would involve experimenting with what memories can trigger this response and how much time needs to have elapsed before a memory can pass into this nostalgic state, and whether this is possible within the span of a single game.

An Artistic Expression

Art based on poetry

| And Nothing More - An interpretation of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe |

For this project we were presented with a series of poems and tasked to create an artistic expression stemming from one of these pieces, the only rule; no language.

An initial idea of mine was to interpret a poems structure via another medium, presenting a thought provoking challenge.

I read through the poems and was struck by Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas) and The Raven (Edgar Allen Poe). Both of these poems having rigid structure with repetitive segments. Eventually I chose The Raven and decided to represent the repetition of the rhyming couplets within the stanzas and also the recurrent line "and nothing more" via a cyclically repeating animation, and what better material to focus this animation on than the titular raven.

Additionally, in recreating the original form with copies of the raven attempts to visualise the line "Only this and nothing more"

Created with Blender and Adobe After Effects

Rendered with Eevee

| 360 of the scene showing it from other angles |