Family Friend

In the early ideation phase of this project, Vincent Ocasla’s Koyaanisqatsi-inspired piece, “Magnasanti”, weighed heavily on my mind. I was slightly disturbed and a bit overwhelmed at the sheer scale of the city he had built. Oftentimes in the city builder game genre, players are placed in a Godlike position of power where they are slightly removed from the realistically human aspect of cities. In Ocasla’s piece, the residents of his city lived under horrifying conditions and had an overall extremely low quality of life all in order to achieve a different, bigger picture goal. For my game, I decided to create the exact counter or opposite to Ocascla’s work. My aim was to make a “city builder” on as small a scale as possible so that quality of life and human emotion were impossible to neglect. I decided to create my game on a text based game maker, Twine, to give the project an even more intimate and personal feel. Through dialogue and backstory I aim to invite players into the Alder’s world and make them feel the weight and impact of their in-game decisions.