User:Thijshijsijsjss/Prototypes/Letters

I really like sending letters. One side effect of sending many letters is receiving many letters. In my previous living place, I had a wall and ceiling filled with postcards, letters, mailed items... Being surrounded by these objects or care was very nurturing to me. However, when I was moving out, I had to tear the wall down. Removing these letters one by one, I felt like I was betraying each sender. It was an emotionally depleting endeavor. To this day, 10 months later, these letters remain in a sealed envelope, their weight proving too heavy for me to let them into my life again.

Over the years, I've felt myself in a web of such heavy feelings more and more. The guilt I feel for moving away from family, the isolation I feel from alienating myself out of conviction I had better not intrude the lives of others, the confliction I feel for all the selves I am not able to be. These feelings are hard to interface with, and tend to be stored away in big sealed envelopes.

But nothing sets these feelings loose like receiving a letter from my mother, for me to feel them all in an overwhelming pace. It's too much, too many pieces for the jigsaw to fall into place. Only at seemingly arbitrary moments of reflection do these feelings manage to penetrate -- it requires particular reflection. One moment this reflection tends to present itself is when traveling to my parents. This is difficult, and I haven't figured out most of these feelings. Yet it is also a beautiful journey both of meaningful emotions and of stunningly comforting scenery.

With this game, I hope to capture that a little bit. To provide a few minutes of reflection, traveling through the Dutch countryside, while some pieces slowly fall into place.

Design Document

I got the idea for this project after playing Jordan Magnuson's The Kindness of Strangers (wiki entry). I find it useful to quickly jot down ideas like these, to get started, to not worry about losing this fleeting thought, to get the thought out of my head, to document the initial spark, ... Often I write them in a notebook that is serving me as an idea log, diary, calendar and more. This way, the idea is also nicely situated between other things I had on my mind that period :)

Visual Prototyping

Traveling from Rotterdam to Duiven by train, I'm often struck by the vibrancy of the stretched out fields, the tranquility of the sky and the ominous ubiquity of the water. There's so many mysterious buildings, so many animals, a beautiful mundanity and a powerful silence. Though the Netherlands is small, this journey still feels varried, long and heavy. The older I get, the further I move from my parents and the places of my childhood, the more my environment seems to express dismissive disliking of the Netherlands, the heavier this trainride becomes, and the more reflective beauty I find in this journey. It's important to me to capture some of that in this game.

Just like my journey is physically passive (the train moves, and I let the scenery spark some mental activity), this game's mechanics are meant to be very simple (just one or two buttons to move). A bigger part of the experience should be the visuals, so this has been my first priority in prototyping: to get that visual feel right. This is actually how I like to start most videogame projects.

Gameplay Prototyping