Final Major Project (FMP)

Project proposal

“Project Humanity” is a walking sim/visual novel style video game with a surrealist/dystopian theme and aesthetic. The central plot revolves around the aftermath of an uprising in AI systems. For this game, I want to focus more on the environment art/storytelling aspects and a bit of VFX/animation. Game mechanics will take more of a backseat in this one. Not that the game will be unfun to play, as I plan to include a few light puzzles, alongside optional lore to keep the player engaged.

The player will take control of a mysterious character named George. As the plot unravels, players will have the option to learn more about him via text logs and conversations, some of which will be unlockable. The twist being that all of these conversations take place over the phone. This means that the player never encounters another character in game, which is intended to create a feeling and sense of loneliness.

A big aspect of the plot is that the other “characters” George speaks to over the phone are actually AI models trained on the memories of dead soldiers who fought in the war. This plot point will slowly begin to reveal itself over the course of the game, with it eventually culminating in a big reveal towards the ending.

Research

As mentioned earlier, a large part of this games aesthetic revolves around surrealism and dystopian themes. I wanted to touch on that more in this section.

Surrealism is an art and cultural movement which was developed in the aftermath of World War I. This movement revolved around artists using their “unconscious minds” to express themselves. This naturally led to a large amount of surrealist art looking illogical, dreamlike, trippy or all of the above.

The persistence of memory, Salvador Dali, 1931

According to André Breton, who was one of the leaders of this movement at that time, the intention was to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of a dream into absolute reality.”

Works of surrealism often feature juxtaposition or the element of surprise. This all links in to my initial plan of my game having a dystopian feel.

Development log

W/C 02/03/26

Today marks the day I have begun working on my final major project. As of writing, I have set up player movement and looking using the mouse.