Story/Blog/220210

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<h1>lucrest, a player home based on my home </h1>
february 10, 2022<br>
#game-design #setting #lucrest<br>
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<h2>quick overview of blessfrey's game world </h2><br>
Blessfrey takes place between two worlds: the southern American town of Lucrest and the underground world of Blessfrey. This week, I'll explain the concept behind Lucrest, then on the 24th CST, I'll tackle Blessfrey. <br>
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<h2>the only game set in the modern-day deep south </h2><br>
Most of the worlds I make in creative writing are on the fantastical side, but Lucrest is quite mundane in comparison. It's more or less representative of a typical town, complete with a shopping center, school, church, a neighborhood, and some natural beauty. It's perfect for filling with my real experiences growing up with other people, places, and things. Looking around at other games, though, it seems like a little portal into suburban Deep South life could be somewhat novel. <br>
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Japanese media presents endless amounts of interesting tidbits of Japanese culture, and this window into another culture is part of what draws me in. English games feel the same way. I understand so many English cultural references because I was exposed to them through RuneScape growing up. I wonder if American-set games alienate but intrigue other people in a similar way? American culture has dominated all media channels for ages, so maybe everyone's sick of us by now, but the vast amount of broadcasts show L.A. or NYC culture anyway. American-set games are similarly narrow in how much of our country they display. I'm not even sure there's much to learn about us from games in general, since I've played countless US-based shooters that massively de-emphasize setting, characters, and mundane situations. Some are so generalized you can't even tell what city they are modeled after. This could just be my experience, though. I've played games with richly detailed settings, too, like Bloodlines's L.A, Mafia II's 1950s urban east coast, and all the Night in the Woods's and Life is Strange's out there. None of these are set in my region, though, and America is so patchwork that I've picked up on tiny cultural differences in each of these titles. <br>
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There's an urban vs rural divide, but there's also a regional divide. Game writers favor other regions heavily then collapse the entire South to Louisiana and Florida, which are both geographically southern but culturally divergent with stronger historic ties to France and Spain respectively than the English derivative Deep South. Wikipedia agrees. In their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_set_in_the_United_States_by_state">list of games by state</a>, California, Alaska, the West, and the D.C. metropolitan area dominate American representation. It's not like the Deep South is the most romanticized setting, but, excluding Miami, I'm only seeing an Assassin Creed game, a Hitman game, Left 4 Dead, a Call of Juarez game, and The Walking Dead series. Most of those are too historical or post-apocalyptic to really count, either. Alabama is the least favored by writers all states: only one <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability">notable</a> game, a random sports game from 1995, while Mississippi only has three. <br>
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(Honestly, seeing the stats surprises me. I always thought the patrician world where the Age of Chivalry took its last bow was just as plausible a setting for a bunch of knight errants doing quests as tired ole' medieval Europe. The Antebellum South has swords and farmers and pirates and tradesmen and everything RuneScape has, so why not? And with all the DOS-era games based on books, nobody tackled Gone with the Wind? And is there not more than one Civil War game out there when there are how many tens of random war games released every year?) <br>
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<h3>what's there to do in lucrest? </h3>
Functionally, it will have story events and side quests, but it will mainly serve as the hub for recovering and gearing up between dungeon crawls. I think of it as Torchlight a lot. (At least, the hub from the first game.) As for the smaller details that will be nested into the environment and character interactions, it may end up realizing some of my old game designs. <br>
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This isn't my first iteration of game world that's more of a personal diary for things I encountered growing up. I spend a lot of my middle school years filling out a GDD for a game named after the fictional neighborhood it was set in. The protagonist was Walker, a girl who she ripped out all the pages of her diary in a moment of grief and set them to the wind. All you did was walk around, watch events, collect diary pages, and do some basic puzzle-solving. There's an entire subdivision to explore, each neighborhood with its own flair and obstacles. As you collect diary pages, you unlock a clearer image of who Walker is and why she was sad. At the time, I was inspired by Tale-of-Tales, especially The Path and The Graveyard, but similar genres have since emerged like walking simulators and whatever those Slenderman collect-all-the-pieces-of-paper games were. The only remnant I have left of the game is an old <a href="https://sixthview.tumblr.com/">tumblr blog</a>. If only Unity went free earlier; I would totally be sharing an broken demo instead of a moodboard with a broken theme. <br>
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<center><img src="/static/img/ent/sixth_view.png" alt="(image: a screenshot of my old game project moodboard. There's flowers, home gardens, fortune-tellers, cute girls, fairy rings, polaroid cameras, and meandering prose about Walker's encounters in her neighborhood. Overall, the writing was meant to evoke Kafka or Sisyphus, like how she watches a boy recreate a Michelangelo masterwork in sidewalk chalk, only for the first drop of rain to fall on it as he finishes the last stroke. Deep stuff.)" width="500" height="551.19"></center> <br>
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Sixth View's gameplay is really basic, the narrative is really linear, and a lot of it is middle school cringe, but there's a tiny glimpse of Lucrest in there. Like Sixth View neighbors, Blessfrey townspeople are going to be drawing with sidewalk chalk, having yard sales, playing Concentration 64 and Big Booty, painting clear nail polish over chiggers, avoiding water serpents in the brook, doing Bible drills, folding fortune-tellers, having class in portable classrooms, playing I Spy or license plate games, finding golden orb weavers in their gardens, my mom scaring me with stories about Wampus Cat, wondering why pairs of shoes end up hung over telephone lines and trees, wearing clover crowns, making sock monkeys, blowing dandelion puffs, VBS, finding arrowheads in the river, playing four square, cutting through cotton fields, and all the stuff I think of when I think of my childhood. <br>
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The GDD it probably won't be like is the RuneScape clone set in the Antebellum South (because you know like all 90s kids, I had at least 3 RuneScape clone GDDs saved in WordPad). I wish I had a scrap of any of those GDDs because they're probably funnier to pick apart than Sixth View. <br>
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Last updated January 16, 2022
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