hallucinatinggamedesign

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Setting 

The setting i decided would fit the game the most is one like the Valtellina valley in northern Italy. I think this is partly because it’s really beautiful but mostly because it has all the different landscapes i would include in my game, all in one valley. It has a lake, forests, mountains , fields, vineyards and settlements, which would all fit my game pretty well. I could put several vineyards along the way to the major settlement to represent checkpoints in the game.

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Character Development

Although my character isn’t included in my actual final piece, he is still a part of it as he is the one in the setting and the player would play as him if this was to become an actual game. So I decided to give him a little backstory. Jason Shankridge was a more introverted person even from a young age. He tend to keep to himself during school lunch times and didn’t have piles of friends to boast about either. After finishing high school with better than average grades he decided to do what his parents always pushed him towards and he enrolled on a college course that would enable the start of his journey to become a doctor. The course was hard and once again he didn't have a lot of friends and the pressure kept building up. After a year of college he made a couple of close friends and one of them suggested taking psychedelic mushrooms as a way to release all the pressure that has been  constantly building up. While hesitant at first, he gave in to the peer pressure and started taking them. One drug led to another and being unemployed meant Jason made a lot of debts with people you don’t want to have debts with. So much so that as a warning one of these people kidnaps him and drives him out into the countryside and drops him off at the side of the road. He leaves him there leaving him only with “Next time i see you, have the money.”. And that’s where the game begins. At the side of the road after being dumped there, about to take the remainder of the drugs he had.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali’s paintings don't look very psychedelic but they do look very surreal in the sense that nothing looks like it would in real life. Melting clocks, people with drawer bodies and butterfly ships don't occur in real life but the way they are painted by Dali make them actually look like they would fit in a weird way.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Alex Grey

Alex grey is a contemporary visionary artist. His work doesn't have one single theme throughout it, it varies intensely, but the one thing that is consistent in his art is the style. He uses very vibrant colours as well as complex patterns that ends up giving his overall art a very trip, psychedelic art style.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

This is my final piece. The only thing I have changed from its previous form is the planet colour. I just thought this stood out a bit more and that’s what i was aiming for. I want the planet to be the focal point, followed by the water then the lights, and then at the end, the valley. I also made it to have the effect that you're looking through the eyes of someone standing in the setting, and on hallucinogenic drugs. Being on drugs itself isn't fully a disability, but once you get addicted, like the character in my game, you can consider it a disability. The colour of the grass is blue/purple, something you wouldn't see from grass in real life. In terms of the lampposts, yes you could make bendy lampposts with different coloured lights in real life, but it’s just not the norm. Normal lampposts are straight, grey, and have either a yellow, white or orange light, not green, purple or red. In terms of the road, i decided to keep it straight because although the whole thing is meant to represent drug use, i still wanted it to look somewhat organised. If I had more time I would add more details to the actual valley, not just grass. I would add some trees and maybe some different odd looking rocks.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Ketamine

Although many consider ketamine to be a good thing, (which it can be when used in medical conditions) it is also abused as a drug. It induces a ‘trance-like’ state causing pain relief, memory loss and sedates the user. It is not commonly known as a hallucinogen but it definitely has hallucinogenic properties that occur in the trance-like state the user experiences. 

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Lysergic acid diethyl amide (LSD)

LSD is another hallucinogenic drug that alters your perception of reality. LSD can actually cause hallucinations in sensation form or in actual images that seem real when they are not. I don't think my character will be using this particular drugs, but i just found it interesting how LSD and hallucinogenic mushrooms can be two completely different forms of drug, yet have really similar effects on the user’s body and mind.

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An early attempt at making my final piece. At this point i wanted to just have a straight road, but decided it was too boring so I later changed it.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

This is more or less what I think my final piece will look like. I might change the grass, water or planet but only minor changes like the colour or removing the fog to make the overall picture darker. I still really like the way the whole thing looks however, with the big planet in the centre and the road at the bottom.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

I liked the road from my previous attempt of making the setting, therefore I decided to recreate it in the valley version by copy and pasting the lamp posts, and creating another road. I also remade the planet but at first it was darker, smaller and a slightly different colour. I made it by adding a lot of hair to a sphere and adding a light, and making the light only include the hair from the planet. That way the light wouldn’t light up the water underneath the planet. I came up with the idea that the character could also hallucinate a sort of body of water flooding the valley, but putting normal water would be too boring so I used a light with noise to create a fog effect looming over the water. The picture on the bottom should be what the final result will look like.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

The way I made the valley was simple. I made 2 planes, and positioned them both at an angle of around 45 degrees, mirroring each other. Then i made a  larger plane above them that could cover both of the lower planes. I put a cloth tag onto the large plane and cloth collider tags onto the smaller ones. Then i pressed play and the top plane dropped onto the other two, forming into a valley shape. Then i just deleted the smaller planes and kept the big one.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

My Idea

The main idea for my game is that the genre is a mix of horror, mystery and puzzle. The plot is that the main character is a drug addict. After several bad decisions and debts he ends up being dumped at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. And like any great drug addict, instead of sobering up and attempting to find his way home, he eats the remainder of his psychadelic mushrooms, which begins the hallucinations. The story in the game would be his attempt at a journey home, all under the influence of these drugs. The idea is that the person playing the game experiences it through the addicts eyes, and the hallucinations his mind conjures become a reality in game. I won’t be making the game, just the setting of the very beginning of the game, where he gets dropped on the side of the road. the setting is a grass valley which after the consumption of the mushrooms turns into the world infested with his hallucinations.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

I originally looked at an exoplanet known as 51 Eridani b as an inspiration for my planet. Its known more commonly as ‘young jupiter’ because it just looks like jupiter, except it glows red. Then i thought about having a moon but changing the shape and colour or do the same thing with the sun, but in the end i scrapped all of those and just decided to make the planet furry, simply because its unusual and you would never see one like that. The only bits i took from the other planets is the shape and glow that the other planets had. Of course i changed the colour of the glow as well because i want everything to have an unusual colour in my setting.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Rick and Morty Wormhole scene

I don’t watch Rick and Morty so i don know the context of this scene, however i think it worked well because of how good of a job they did at making the scene really trippy. The colours are incredibly vibrant, almost to the point where they are a bit too vibrant, but they're not quite there so they still look good. They also use very detailed patterns at different points and not only do they look cool but they kind of mess with your eyes, which i assume was the point of this scene. There were no drugs in this scene, however if the wormhole in this scene was replaced lithesome sort of drug i don't think this scene would look very different to what it already is.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

I decided to go for a lamp post with a more Victorian look as opposed to making it a modern streetlight simply because i think using a normal streetlight would look more boring, even after the colours and shapes have been changed. A modern streetlight is too simple.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Valley Setting

I’m making the setting of this particular part of the game (opening scene) take place in a valley on the side of the road.  The road dos along the entire valley and is downhill the entire way. The setting would be very simple with just a grass valley, a straight road and some trees, but since the main character of the game has just taken psychedelic mushrooms, the road is altered, the lampposts    appear bent, as well as the trees. The moon now looks like a huge glowing furry ball in the sky and the main character gets an illusion that there is a large body of water beginning to fill the valley. The colour of almost everything is changed to not look like it would in real life.

[hallucinatinggamedesign]

Psychedelic Mushrooms

These mushrooms contain several psychedelic compounds that cause euphoria, alter thinking processes and can cause visions or spiritual experiences therefore is mainly used as a recreational drug. I’m using the effects of this drug as a main influence on how my setting will look. Im trying to make it look like it would through the eyes of someone experiencing the effects.