This week, I wrote the script for what I formerly referred to as A Glitch in Three Acts. The thematic remains the same, but now it is titled Earl Grey Lavender Tea. The experience is about a businessman, Torpedo Black, whose sole objective is to find and buy some Earl Grey Lavender tea so he can finish some tedious paperwork. This goal takes him through the surreal and glitchy streets of Prague, through which the user has to improvise to adapt and resolve some of these absurd happenings.

Beyond that, I created a mood-board and made some quick concept art for one of the mechanics and for one of the locations.

Below, you can see my plan for the last scene. As soon as the user gets back to their apartment, makes some tea and sits down to finish their paperwork, a “self-awareness” exercise is triggered. The user’s animations will be stored and looped, after the user is respawned to another position. This will happen several times, and the user will be able to watch their “past-selves” all across the room in a loop.

Finally, I researched GOAP systems and created a trello board where most of the assets and tasks are outlined. GOAP systems are a form of AI I plan to implement where a planner class is responsible for taking a character’s goals, decided by their states, and choosing which sequence of actions is better to accomplish these goals. Actions have preconditions and effects. This means that characters states and world states serve as preconditions and effects. The goal of an action or a sequence of actions is to change character states and world states.

The goal of the overall story is to experience where the ordinary and the extraordinary meet. Faced with a tedious task like bureaucratic paperwork, Torpedo the businessman needs to navigate a clashing of worlds (Magritte like characters meet Oreilly’s in the warm setting of Prague) which produces glitches only he can fix or side-step.

Going forward I need to do a lot of reflection around affordances and responsible design. I want to avoid making the story too male-centric, and I would like to play with affordances and expectations consciously. Navigation is still something I need to figure out and craft intentionally.