For this new project, I'd like to open up my process a little and share some thoughts on the work as it develops. I often get questions about my art/design process so hopefully, I can speak to those topics and provide some space for discussion.

So, What is Hollow Hills 1999?

First-person with an open-feeling structure, stylish moody visuals, and a rich narrative space. I'm aiming for an experience similar to my other 3D adventure games. My initial idea was one of those children's museums where you can touch all the exhibits, hence the setting of an educational park. 

My inspiration aesthetically and thematically are my explorations of the Mojave and the history of infrastructure and urban encroachment there. There's a deceptive amount of richness to that massive, complex region which is often seen as a wasteland or at best a blank page for the dreams of some business person or conglomerate.  

Along with trying to make a more condensed and polished experience, I'm trying to weld together what I did with  'Moth Wing' (where text is combined with 3D dioramas in a associative sort of way) with the 3D free-exploration bits. Aesthetically I'm drawing on an earlier prototype that had the look of an old block-printed poster. This will likely change as my assets gain some polish and specificity but the general idea of carefully managed detail and 'crushed' limited color palettes are driving my decisions. 

Prototypes and Development So Far

I've been working on Hollow Hills sporadically for a few months now. A lot of that work is in prototypes, making base features and visual development. Lots of those prototypes have to do with ideas around 'poetic structure' for lack of a better term. In filmmaking, one way editing creates meaning is by cutting between images, which implies a relationship between them. Architecture can create meaning in this way too. Virtual spaces have the extra quality of being unmoored to Euclidean space. The attributes of these spaces and methods and the pace of their exploration can be formed by narrative logic or emotion. I'm trying to get at some of these techniques (see '30 Flights of Loving', Paratopic as examples of the kind of structural trick I'm referring to...). I don't know what will actually end up in the finished product, most likely it will be a slight variation on things I've already made.

I've settled on this more familiar world-exploration structure because it allows me to hang these other elements off in a way where I have control over how and when the player encounters things. I've since settled on a basic layout for the park and the narrative is all written. Work is progressing a lot more linearly since I've made the decision to stick to that structure. 

I should have more to share soon, further devlogs will get into more specifics around tools, techniques etc...