WEEK 1: research, mechanics discussion, concept development, story brainstorming

First, we needed sources of inspiration: we looked at games like The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide, Horse Master, Thirty Flights of Loving, etc. all games that specialize in narrative and sometimes employ text in 3D space. We especially examined Twine games closely, looking at the various mechanics they used with hyperlinks such as: progressing through passages, flavortext, and switching descriptions. We also looked at VR examples that use text to see what best practices people have figured out so far.

Thus we settled on these mechanics to play around with for now: 1) each "passage" is an environment/room, 2) hyperlinks can be "clicked on" with time of gaze, 3) hyperlinks can change the physical "description" of the environment a.k.a. the actual object, 4) hyperlinks can advance passages, branching or not, and 5) there will be text sprawled on the 3D landscape corresponding what the text is describing.

We started working on a story; the premise was the player is a space renegade on a mission to find the source of a strange, unidentified magnetic pulse on the distant planet of Marzuki. The idea was that an AI would interact with the player solely through text, navigating her through the plane. Based on this, we developed several concepts that visually conveyed our mechanics: