Game idea
- Thread starter InProgress
- Start date
Recommended Videos
That's not depressed, it's more like psychotic. An advice, if I may: You should not feel constrained by realism, and should be free to explore and have fun with the proporions of the human body. I heard a quote once, something in the lines of: "People paint the sky blue, because they're constrained by their own perception. Artist paint the sky whatever colour they want because they know it's blue and don't care about it."sorry user name taken. said:
Anyway, keep it up. *thumb of approval*
A small character sketch for the Tyrant banker.
The tyrant banker, a fiersome buisnessman with a heart of stone when it comes to making descisions regarding the fates of others.
Melanie sees him as representing the root of all that is wrong with the world, greed, gluttony and cold-heartedness towards others.
In reality he is a balding, middle aged man with a large well combed moustache.
In the dream-world, he manifests as a monstrous shark in a suit.
At the end of the game, when Melanie has finaly come face to face with her adversary, The Tyrant Banker gives an epic speech on the pointless nature of her quest, stating that while she may see him as such, he is not evil or acting out of malevolence, and is simply a far more successful person than she.
He knows how to get what he wants and isn't afraid to trample over others in the process, he tells her that were she to defeat him, nothing would change, the world would be rid of one buissnessman, and that is all it would be rid of, the starving would not suddenly have food, the poor become rich, the dying brought back from death's door-step.
No, were she to take him down nothing would actually change at all.
Melanie sees him as representing the root of all that is wrong with the world, greed, gluttony and cold-heartedness towards others.
In reality he is a balding, middle aged man with a large well combed moustache.
In the dream-world, he manifests as a monstrous shark in a suit.
At the end of the game, when Melanie has finaly come face to face with her adversary, The Tyrant Banker gives an epic speech on the pointless nature of her quest, stating that while she may see him as such, he is not evil or acting out of malevolence, and is simply a far more successful person than she.
He knows how to get what he wants and isn't afraid to trample over others in the process, he tells her that were she to defeat him, nothing would change, the world would be rid of one buissnessman, and that is all it would be rid of, the starving would not suddenly have food, the poor become rich, the dying brought back from death's door-step.
No, were she to take him down nothing would actually change at all.
I like that alot. It would be really awesome if you could make that a dialogue, funny and witty, like what would actually be in the game's pre-final cutscene (before the battle would insue).SmilingKitsune said:
That's exactly what I'm doing, I love writting monologues for villains, it's not so much funny as it is menacing though.InProgress said:
Hmm, I don't know, she looks more manic depressive than psychotic to me.InProgress said:
Ok. I'll help you with the beginning... Presumably, you have heard of "water-cooler conversations". That is where people from the Office tend to aggregate around the water-cooler to talk about last night's episode of Lost, or Grey's Anatomy. What needs to happen for your story to work is that your protagonists need to be artfully introduced in their environment and for the audience to empathize with them. You should not start with the girl as that is hackneyed...InProgress said:
Instead, start with the Office, the noise of phones, faxes, hammering of keyboards. The occasional person standing up from their desk to hand a document across the adjoining wall into the next cubicle, with only the back of their head and shoulders showing. Faces are blurred, anonymous. As the camera moves from the maze of cubicles to the side-aisle you mainly see legs and feet, people's personalities and relative importance expressed through the smart work shoes they wear. Again, no faces as these are not the characters we are interested in. We are attempting to represent the Office as a character itself, an organism which is host to other symbiotic entities. A collaboration.
Look at the films 'Office Space', the beginning of 'The Matrix' and the Dilbert cartoon for more information on 'cubical life'.
A general hubbub of voices gives way to multiple, overlapping conversations as the 'microphone' moves along with the camera through the environment, eventually becoming more focused - i.e. you would record two tracks of ambient audio and another via a directional mic with the sound engineer mixing between the sources during postproduction, all incidental dialogue would be scripted and you would have an overhead 'master' camera taking footage to help you map the positions of all the speakers to where your CG reconstructions would be; as you would only have to animate those people who weren't hidden behind cubicle walls because they were seated this wouldn't be a lot of work to ensure an effective opening.
Obviously, the half-conversations you get to voyeuristically eavesdrop on range from the 'clandestine affair' to the mundane. Nothing is dwelled on for more than a few seconds, the camera seems restless, distracted, in order to ensure that the audience doesn't start to get involved in any of these 'alternate stories'. The keywords here are detachment and generality.
Before the end of the first minute the camera 'happens upon' a group of people spontaneously coming together at the water-cooler, talking, leaving, those that remain being joined by others, as the chat turns to work-related stuff and back again to the inconsequential business of 'the topic of the day', some anticipated sporting event, or last night's TV.
This goes on for a while and pretty soon everyone has walked off. Except, for the first time the camera isn't following any of them.
Voices (it has all been unidentified voices so far), can be heard off-camera, both left then right stereo positions until they go out of earshot, then back to the hubbub of the office. The camera moves extremely slowly in towards the water-cooler, an all but static image of a stationary, inanimate object, all on its own.
The next time someone comes past they take a cup of water from it, crush it, drop it into the trash can (integrated into the pedestal on which it stands) and continue walking left, offscreen, without speaking.
A little time elapses and then the pretty shoes of a young woman walk past from left to right, hesitating just after passing the cooler. The cooler releases a couple of trapped bubbles of air within its tank (presumably from the guy who last used it), which make a gulping sound. However, the young woman walks briskly on, the water-cooler now seemingly ignored and forlorn.
Now, with the pseudo-character of the water-cooler foreshadowed I think that one way to proceed would be via a split-screen device with the cooler on the right and your heroine on the left, seated at her workstation, with parallel activities happening simultaneously to both; so she drops a crunched-up memo in her trash can at the same time the water-cooler is next seen to be used by someone and its paper cup is disposed of. Every symbolic parallel that you can think of is applied to both parties, in order for you to note the similarity and empathize with the predicament of 'an important part of the Office that everyone takes for granted, doesn't ask how it is, just takes from and ignores'.
Perhaps, a more stylish, alternative way to accomplish this double-empathy which does not involve 'dubious use of split-screen' (as it is rather too associated with the TV show '24'), would be to move the camera in on the water-cooler as before, stop, fade-up the sound of brisk noisy typing and then cut (for the first time in what has been a long continuous tracking-shot) to the darkened image of the white water-cooler in the reflection of a glossy computer monitor (say, one of those new iMacs with the irritating, reflective, screens). This image takes up the whole picture, with green letterforms on a black background (note: if it were white windows you wouldn't see the reflection). The software being run is either some Call Centre's data-entry screen (to which the heroine is having to speak to aggressive, dissatisfied insurance claimants (that's fairly soul-destroying), or some cryptic UNIX command-line (the network geek, no one wants to speak to, but everyone wants to crawl underneath their desks when they want to get their new machine linked to the company's intranet), or some kind of old programming language like COBOL or LISP (with the horrendous EMACs editor). The point is, she is hard-working and productive, yet seemingly unacknowledged. People take from her: they take her time (delegating work that they were asked to do to a fellow peer, making her into a de facto subordinate, they take her credit (they will carry work she has just finished and pass it off to the boss as their own) and they will take her sandwiches (eating one in front of her as they ask her to do another favor for them as they know she is too cowed to stand-up for herself and complain).
After a while the camera slowly pulls away from the computer monitor at an angle that reflects the face of the user as well as the cooler in the deep background. This is the first face we have seen and it has a studied and tired expression, overwritten by green letterforms which give its pallid complexion an ill colour.
Over the next few minutes the camera stays in her cubicle, moving around to cover the action as it unfolds, but always keeping the reflection of action in and around the cooler in her monitor in shot which happens to be situated directly behind her (note: the back of her cubicle opens onto the side-aisle). So we see work being handed down to her over the partition from the adjoining cubicle that isn't in her job description to actually do, people interrupting her work and generally disturbing her concentration by talking about inanities at the water-cooler right behind her, making you wonder why she had been given such a poorly located desk.
The sound fades out as time speeds up - with the aid of time-lapse photography. This helps compress the rest of her day, the fact that she ploughs on with her (and others) work through her lunchtime, whilst everyone else seems to step out of the Office. Eventually, the sun goes down, the fluorescent strip-lighting comes on and everyone goes home in dribs and drabs until only she is working late. The donkey.
The time-lapse stops and the camera follows her as she gets up and looks out of the window beyond the maze of cubicles to the dark sky.
She sighs and her shoulders fall with fatigue. She turns and walks the short distance to the cooler. This is the first time she has taken a drink from it all day.
Having had no one to really "talk" to all day, only mutely accept their work-assignments, she says:
"So, have you had a good day?"
The cooler gulps one bubble of air.
"Hah, what's that 'one gulp for no and two gulps for yes'?"
The cooler gulps two bubbles of air...
You, sir, have just won a whole batch of internet cookies for your suggestions. There's a lot of things which we could take from there, if not the entire thing. I'll try to find some time to work on it, but I have the whole next week packed to finish a nentry for a competition.Uncompetative said: