The Design immersive experience unit focuses on designing/creating a narrative driven experience primarily focusing on the story, script and storyboard for an experience of up to five minutes long.
Starting Point
For my initial starting point of creating a narrative driven experience that could be told in a short time frame, I began by concepting ideas through an environemnt. I have personally always found trains and subways to be very interesting and isolated places where sometimes you can feel seperated from the world during your journey or commute so I thought that this would be an interesting starting point for a virtual environement. A train can be used to create a linear experience by progressing up or down a train and finding different areas, objects or characters throughout different carriages and locations.
I began to note down different ideas for a virtual reality experience taking place on a train an i started to develop an idea of almost a supernatural experience on the London Underground (which i of course know very well living in London). I also always love video games which try to marry the story and the mechanics together as one which I then began thinking about the idea of an escape room taking place on the London underground where the player will need to complete different tasks on each train carriage to escape from the experience.
To then add a more supernatural or fun element to this experience i thought it would be interesting if the player started on the train as normal seeing other NPC’s around them but suddenly the lights would cut to black and when they turn back on everyone has dissapeared. The voice announcer of the train could then tell them to complete certain tasks within the train in order to escape which adds a level of mystery and urgency to the situation that the player has been placed in.
This idea could also be developed further to have different environmental changes in each carriage so you could start in a london underground train carriage but the next could be based on an old steam train, modern bullet train and so many more possibilities. The environment outside of the window could also change over time to transfer from an underground subway to an outdoor environment showing different weather and biomes.
Initial Idea feedback
After coming up with these initial ideas i discussed with my tutor how i could develop this concept further. We discussed that the experience idea might be too long for a short VR experience and could be further simplified by having multiple puzzles or tasks on fewer train carriages rather than one task per carriage. He also suggested to keep the train carriages more grounded and only have minor environmently changes rather than having major visual overhauls in each section of the puzzle.
This feedback was extremely useful and I look forward to developing this project further although my initial idea focused primarily on the gameplay, world and mechanics and I still need to further develop a narrative or story that perfectly ties all of these elements together.