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Genre: Mystery, Meditative
Style:
Point-n-Click, First Person

The Plot:
You wake up inside a submarine, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and you are only told on a sheet of paper to mark some very specific coordinates on the GPS. After that you should activate the automatic pilot that will take you to an unknown and perhaps dangerous place. The journey will last for about one hour of real time, they said on the paper, and you will be all by yourself inside the D22 submarine. Fortunately, the people responsible for your abduction and imprisonment have left you a variety of books, recordings of various musical compositions, and a game of chess, so that the monotony won’t get the best of you - the mission needs to succeed after all. But who are these people, and why have they chosen you for this task? What is the mission? Perhaps you will be able to find out the answers you seek inside the submarine, or maybe not.

The Idea:
In the Thalassic Pattern I intend to explore the act of waiting in a video-game, which is frequently not present due to its non-fun nature. I intend to put this idea to the test and see if it works, so that in the future more serious video-games can be made with this principle in mind.

Implementing waiting in a game surprisingly requires a lot of things from a game design perspective, and in a lot of ways it goes against traditional game design. When one implements waiting in a game, one is creating a force that exists beyond the player's control: the passage of time. Normally time in video-game is very subjective, only moving forwards after the player has completed a certain objective. On the other hand, when the passage of time is mentioned or affects the virtual world, it only does so in a very superficial level, for example changing the time of day. This is completely ridiculous from a realistic point of view, yet all those who only think about how to make games more lifelike completely ignore this fact, preferring to spend time and energy upgrading only the graphics and the physics. There is much more to credibility than these superficial aspects. Life is full of unchangeable phenomena, the passage of time being one of them.

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Second Update

News

Since the last update, some work has been put in blocking in two areas of the submarine that were previously empty: the machines room and the control room.

Early Preview

Early Preview

Everything still looks a bit rough because I’ve been concentrating more attention in the implementation of the various books that the player will be able to read during the game.

Early Preview

Besides that, I’ve implemented a basic music player, and added some musical compositions by Bach and Beethoven to the in-game library. In the future there will be many more books and musical works from the real world for the player to enjoy.

After playing the game for about half an hour it became apparent to me that the fps style controls where going against the slow and meditative rhythm of the game, creating an internal conflict. For example, reading books in the game became surprisingly unsatisfying due to the action expectancy created in my mind by such controls. This is why I decided to change the way the player interacts with the game. The old, but gold, point-n-click style of interaction seemed the most appropriated choice, but this doesn’t mean that there is going to be puzzles that need to be solved in order to progress, or any other kind of such artificialities in this game - the actions that need to be taken in order to move the game forward are all natural.

That’s all for now.

The Concept of The Thalassic Pattern

The Concept of The Thalassic Pattern

News

In this article I talk about the general idea behind the Thalassic Pattern, and I also mention in what state of development the project is.

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