Ozymandias Remediated

Game Design Document: Ozymandias

         Creating something new is one of the great abilities of mankind. Stories of creation are some of the oldest known to man, as they can even be traced back to the Old Testament. These stories of creation have long captured our imagination, and authors have realized this for generations. From Pygmalion, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to Shelly’s Frankenstein, people have always been enthralled by the idea of something new being made, and the consequences of such creation. However, with creation comes the consequential and often disappointing understanding that nothing built by man can last forever. The great human desire to create magnificent things, coupled with the knowledge that those inspiring creations will ultimately crumble caught the attention of our group. Thus, we turned to the poem Ozymandias by Percy Shelly. This poem highlights the finite window of human creation and importance, and our group knew that it was the piece we wanted to recreate.

         The goal of our project was to remediate the poem into a first-person controlled video game environment. The first question we had to ask ourselves was what we wanted our project to encompass. We decided that we wanted to create a desert landscape with the ruins of Ozymandias laying strewn across the overworld. The other aspect that we decided on very quickly was that the centerpiece of our game was going to be a puzzle. Just as poems need to be taken apart and solved in a sense, so does a puzzle. Only when all of the pieces are seen together as a whole does one fully understand the purpose of either the poem or the puzzle.

Once these preliminary decisions were made, the tasks had to be split up between group members. Luckily for our group, we had a variety of skill sets. This allowed us to divvy up the tasks to those who would do them best and most efficiently. Creating and coding the game, writing the game design document, and making the trailer/review video became our main tasks. So we started working, and here is what became of it.

Choosing what we would create

When starting to create the game itself we needed to decide as a group what we wanted the end project to look like. The basic idea was to create a desert landscape with ruins of a great statue and other structures strewn across the visual plain. This sort of grand setting filled with the remains of an older world was the type of aesthetic our group was looking for. Once this was decided we realized that there were two different scenes we needed to create: the desert landscape and the puzzle itself.

The desert was easy to decide on because it is laid out plainly in the poem, “the lone and level sands stretch far away.” Having exact imagery to base our project off of made things a bit easier in terms of decision making. This wording allowed for us to decide on a simple flat landscape for our project. The textures would be made to look like sand so as to imitate our desired desert landscape. In the far background the sand appears to slope upwards to give the feeling of being in a real desert, with the end of your field of view blending into the sky to create a realistic feeling horizon. This expansive and empty feeling is taken from the line “boundless and bare” as it should feel like there may be no end to the desolate land around them. You are alone in this destroyed and empty land which should help elicit a similar feeling to the one you gain from reading the original piece.

After deciding on our setting, the first object was chosen. “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desert” is the first mention of physical structures in the poem. As it is the first thing the traveller talks about in the poem, we knew that the scale of these legs needed to be very large compared to everything else in our scene so that they stood out immediately to the player when they entered the game. In the poem itself Ozymandias says he is “King of Kings”. This is quite a bold statement, and signifies that the setting that we were going to create needed to be grand and on a very large scale. For this reason, our group decided to use a model of the statue of King Ramses II to depict what a statue of Ozymandias might have looked like for real. King Ramses II, along with many past leaders of great empires, loved grandiose creations, especially those created for him and in his image. 

Along with these “trunks” of King Ramses, we felt that the player would gain more from seeing what happened to the top half of the destroyed statue so that the true scale and size of the sculpture could be seen and experienced by the player of the game. In order for the size and scale to really make an impact on the player, other pieces were needed in the landscape of a size more similar to that of the player. For these objects our group chose what looked like the remains found in an archaeological site of an old egyptian/mediterranean civilization. The ruins strewn across the landscape near the statue highlights the eventual collapse of previous grandeur. In the poem, the pedestal of the statue reads, “…Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” However, now, “Nothing beside remains.” The player can see that everything here was once grand and beautiful, and yet sadly nothing beside remains are left.

The second part of our game was the puzzle aspect. This was created originally in a separate unity scene that we would incorporate into the larger desert scene later. This puzzle is a six piece 3D puzzle that when put together depicts an old illustration of what life may have looked like back in the time of the great King Ozymandias. This part of our game is in first person also, and was initially coded with a Virtual Reality control scheme so it should feel even more like a hands on exercise in a lost and forgotten world. Once the puzzle is successfully completed, a pyramid rises out of the ground as a “reward” for the player and acts as a testament to the rise and fall of different empires and civilizations, and a dramatic reading of the poem begins. As we learn from our past, we should be so lucky as to create more grand structures and creations for mankind to marvel at. It is a (hopefully) never ending cycle of creation followed by destruction. The knowledge that nothing will ever last forever should never impede our ability to create beauty. Ozymandias and our game stand as reminders to the importance of having history to look back on in the first place.

Creating the individual Objects and Puzzle

The first things that needed to be created were the puzzle pieces and sand terrain. To create these objects we needed to start with basic cube shapes. These cubes heights were decreased and textures were imported in order to give them their appearance. In this case we imported sand textures from an asset pack for Egyptian style topography. In order to make a large desert landscape, copying the same object over and over and repeatedly adding it next to each other was necessitated. The difficult part of this process was determining the correct height for each of the objects relative to one another in the game. Not only did the objects need to physically make sense next to each other, the textures needed to be applied to each of these objects in order for them to look appropriate and uniform in reference to one another.

The next set of objects that needed to be created and configured were the pyramid and sand dunes. The pyramid was a little bit more simple to create as the model is entirely made out of cubes. This set of cubes was turned into a prefab which is a function of unity that allows you to create and store properties on a multi-part object with all of its components, property values, and so on. The sand dunes were more difficult to construct because they had to be rounded into trapezoidal-esque shapes in order to resemble their real life counterparts. The modification of the initial cube shapes into these more rounded ones was done in blender by modifying the vertices on the object. Once it was put into the desired trapezoid shape,the appropriate textures were applied to the pyramid and sand dunes in a similar manner to how we did it with the puzzle pieces and original sand terrain.

The next task that needed to be accomplished was scripting the gameplay. This meant that every scene that we were going to make had to flow into one another seamlessly. The script that needed to be written was such that when the puzzle was completed the pyramid would emerge from the ground and the reading of the ozymandias poem would play out of the game’s audio. A puzzle panel script was developed that ensured if the pieces were placed in the correct position on the panel, the pyramid would appear. It is important to note that the script was added to the pyramid and not the puzzle because the pyramid is the object that was being affected by the completion of the puzzle. This script included trigger events that would cause certain actions to unfold on screen. In this case, the pyramid was raised out of the ground a certain magnitude in the y direction as soon as the puzzle was completed.

There is also a first person controller on the game which allows for the gameplay to feel like you are walking through the game yourself. The first person aspect allowed for a more immersive experience when exploring the ruins and desert landscape. In the puzzle portion of the game a VR system was incorporated to allow users to have a “tangible” experience with the canvas user-interface (the puzzle). Several scripts were made to allow the player to face the canvas from where the VR camera was positioned and move the camera accordingly based on the position of their gaze.

The one real issue our group ran into was the fact that we had two separate games created that had to be integrated into each other. In the end we could not get the puzzle to work in the larger first person controlled environment so we had to keep them as separate programs.

What we took away from the project

The best thing our group did was split up the workload. We realized quickly that the skills of our group members varied, and thus making each of us do equal amounts of the same work did not make sense. Naturally, we decided that giving each person individual tasks would make the process of making our game, and subsequent parts of the project, much smoother. There were three main tasks our group had to complete: the coding and creation of the game, the trailer/review video, and the creation of this game design document. Once we had this organized, the creation of the game became much easier. With two of our group members working on the hands-on coding and object creation, the rest of us were able to give outside ideas and suggestions on what we wanted in the gameplay. Also of note is that our video creation was more difficult than expected as our group did not have access to the iMovie video editing software. This, then, resulted in a manual creation of composite shots, transitions, and title cards, which is much more intensive and difficult than using the premade iMovie templates.

Throughout the semester, we have played a wide variety of games, with each game teaching us something new about the world (and worlds) of video games. Lord of the Rings Online introduced us to MMORPGs, while simultaneously offering an incredible remediation of arguably the greatest fantasy epic in recent history. Braid shows us the potential for video games to serve as symbols and metaphors for our humanity and our flaws therin. Papers, Please exemplifies the concept of procedural rhetoric by plunging the player into a world where morality is defined by laws of authority. Gone Home illustrates the lush storytelling power and potential of video games, and Portal combines many of these elements in an argument against the growth of human dependence on technology. However, despite the vast differences found in these games, they all have one thing in common that was impossible for us to ignore: they were all made by someone else.Creating Ozymandias gave us the unique opportunity to create something of our own. Although none of us thought it would be easy to create a video game, we naturally feel a newfound sense of respect towards professional game creators and of pride in our creation. This assignment gave each of us invaluable insight into the challenges and (sometimes) consequent triumphs of game making. Whether we were on the creative side of development or the programming side, we each now have a much greater understanding of and appreciation for game design, and we are excited about our future endeavors in the exciting and ever-changing world of video games.

Game Trailer:

Credits:

Game Development: Max Beck, Justin Yu

Game Design Document: Joseph Finkelstein, Peter Taylor (additional)

Trailer/Review Video: Alex Leroux, Pat Demarco

Audiovisual recording: Peter Taylor

Trello Board Operation: Peter Taylor