Bernband: Born Under Saturn

Around five years ago, I don't remember how,  I stumbled upon a "game" that completely broke all my schemes about what could be experienced playing a video game. That game gave me such amount of inspiration that I decided to study game development with the purpose of further exploring the new horizons  that game showed to me. That game was called Bernband.

Bernband is a non-interactive walking simulator, made by @TomBoogaart about exploring an alien city in a lo-fi presentation. That game was also inspired by another previous game, a little more obscure, called Hernhand. What those two  games did was something I never experienced before. A sense of total immersion and presence in a world that was not the "real" one. It was totally mind blowing!

Since the start of the history of videogames all it seemed to care was to create more and more immersive experiences by pushing forward the technology trying to get visually as close as possible to the "real" world. Lately the line between real and virtual has never been thinner. But, even now that there is such big words with tons of detail and things to do I don't find myself really that much immersed in those virtual worlds as I expected as a kid. 

What Bernband and Hernhand showed me is that graphic fidelity has nothing (or almost nothing) to do with how immersive  and believable the final experience is. You don't see with your eyes but with your brain (to put it simply), that's why there is no need for photorealism in order to achieve the subjective experience of being in a real world. 

After all these years studying game development, taking apart and trying to understand how the game worked, I've been finally able to try to push a little bit forward that idea. I've tried to follow and stick to the original artistic vision of the creator as much as possible. It was a hard thing to do because I only had some small clips of the further development of the game that he unfortunately later abandoned.  

On this version of the game there is an extra layer of interaction that the previous one "lacked". I thought that If you could LIVE in the city and have some sort of routine the immersion of the experience would be even bigger. The game is still in development and it has been harder than I expected but now you have some sort of systems working. The idea is to live in the city and survive like a bounty hunter of Star Wars, Blade Runner or Cowboy Bebop. 

Credits

Original idea: Tom van den Boogaart @TomBoogaart

I hope you enjoy the prototype <3