The Garden of Forking Paths
Date: Spring 2022
Project Duration: 2 weeks
Teammates: Personal Project
My Role: Game Designer & Developer
-A VR garden where spring and winter coexist.
Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths"
I get inspiration from the Argentina writer Jorge Luis Borges' book: The Garden of Forking Paths. In this book, he imagined the labyrinth of time "where all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings which sometimes converge" ( 22). The concepts is known nowadays as the "Parallel Universe"
Inspiration: The Concept of Forking Paths
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Keywords: Distorted Time, labyrinth
Moodboard
Ideation
Scene1: Players enter "The Persistence of Memory", where there are huge clocks floating in the air. After finding the teleportation sites, players are able to go to the second scene.
Scene2: Players enter “Garden of the forked paths”
Two scenes with identical object settings but with different atmospheres/moods.
Scene Design: The Parallel Universe
Design Objective
1. Fragmented Narrative
nspired by the award-winning immersive experience Homestay, which utilizes objects and scenes for storytelling, I would like to explore the potential of fragmented narrative connected by objects. This requires me to prepare different interactions for different objects, as well as think about how to present the story by connecting the dots. For now, I am thinking about fully utilizing my pets as the medium for user navigation, as well as telling my childhood memories. The good thing about that is this fits into Janet Murray has mentioned in her article: “Not a Film and Not an Empathy Machine”, that designers should “leave out anything that can be heard or seen that is not diegetically part of the virtual space that is the actual focus of your design”.
2. Consistent Aesthetics
I realize the consistent aesthetics really change the user experience a lot, and I would like to try my best to use existing assets to create an aesthetically pleasing scene. The good examples I can think of include Proteus, the award-winning indie game that caught my eyes the first time I saw that.
This makes me want to put more effort into the scene design. In terms of the technological details, I would like to experiments on post-processing, dynamic light baking, etc.
Proteus
Project Development
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Scene1: The Persistence of Memory
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Scene2: The Garden of Forking Paths