PHASE THREE

Brainstorming

Coming together to create a team of three, myself, Lewis Hill and Joshua Lyons were swift to begin our journey of game creation. We began by sharing our items of research and the interesting points we wanted to further explore, while Josh, whose chosen topic was Controversy, offered his expertise in visuals, sound and audio, and game design, which proved to be most necessary in order to bring our decisions to an agreement. 

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To launch our process, we had decided that the best way to do so was to create several mindmaps about areas of dreaming we were most interested in, and list out the different ideas that come to our mind, having outlined six different design areas: audience, mechanics, art/visuals, audio, narrative and purpose/goal.

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The underlined in green ideas/goals were what we extracted to serve our best interests.

1. Virtual Reality/Trial and Error:
   - Repeating actions to perfect choice - taken from real-life experience of trial and error, we thought we thought we wanted to incorporate this driving force as much as possible in our game in order to provide the player with fulfillment and sense of achievement
   - Psychedelic - we were certain that we wanted the artistic expression of our game to resemble an "acid trip", full of incomprehensible movements and arbitrary objects
   - Surround sound - while the term "futuristic" surfaced more than once in our brainstorming, we decided that what would work best for our essential experience are auditory stimuli that submerged the player fully into our world
   - Offer a personal experience - this aspect might be self-explanatory for any design project, but considering the unique relationship between a person and their dreams, we thought this was necessary to point out
   - Offer a new experience or a lens of perspective - natural to any artist, we focused on delivering a product that was different from anything currently on the market, or, well, visibly unique

2. Divination:
   - Predict future events - drawn out of the whole concept of divination, we thought it might be entertaining to play with foreshadowing and predictability, be it from the player's or game's side
   - Stop bad things - this idea fed into the above-mentioned, as how dreams are therapeutically used to bring a person's attention to certain aspects of the self
   - Basic shapes - we knew that we didn't want something overly complicated or too realistic, for we wouldn't have the time nor the skill to quickly create graphics and animations that would compete with AAA games
   - Low-poly - this aspect derived from the basic outline we wanted to follow, clear enough to define the world but not too detailed in order to resemble the confusing nature of dreams
   - Images of religious events - taken from the various Biblical events of whispering angels and revealing demons, we were inspired by what dreams were considered as in the past and how they were employed as truthful and real messages of higher powers
   - Use dreams as a clue to the events that will occur, you then have to stop those events from happening in real life - drawn out of Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's interpretation of dreams and further connection to real life aspects, we considered employing this aspect as a game mechanic/storyline

3. Dream Interpretation:
   - 2-player Dream Doctor game - this idea was inspired by the nature of therapists and psychologists, and the usage of dreams as clues to one's psyche
   - People come to you with your dreams, you need to help them - doctor monitors dreams visually through a screen, connected to the patient. The dream appears blurred and unfocused at first, but will gradually clear as the doctor starts to analyse its aspects

4. Control:
   - Control-heavy mechanics (i.e vibration) - we knew we wanted to interpret the different dream aspects such as paralysis, lucid dreaming, shifting environment, nightmares, blurred imagery into our game, and the best way to do that was through direct player interactions (inspired by Dr James's first workshop)
   - "Snake" on LSD - incorporate random rules - with the unique topic at hand, it was only appropriate for us to milk as much of it as possible, and play with both our and the player's imagination
   - The player is limited in what they can do - akin to how you always run in one spot, or how you lose balance in dreams, we thought it would be entertaining to force the player into uncomfortable and unexplained situations
   - Focused/Unfocused mechanic - this mechanic was inspired by the inability to focus on certain shapes in your dream, i.e a text will appear differently each time you look at it. Its basis evolves around the player being required to inspect a certain object more than once, or revealing objects by focusing on the greater picture in order to uncover more detail
   - Mazes - like the perplexed nature of dreams, mazes seemed like a suitable puzzle to have included in our game ideas
   - Minimalist - like mentioned above, we wanted to keep the visuals to the minimum in order to best transcribe the concept of incomprehensible dreams 

5. Saving progress/Dream Journal:
   - The only way to save is by completing a certain actions, i.e writing your dream in the dream journal - this was inspired by the human inability to remember one's dreams unless they have been very provocative or written down in a journal
   - Repeat a level in order to notice new clues that were previously hidden - this mechanic was considered in order to allow greater replayability, feeding into the previously mentioned focused/unfocused mechanic
   - Bring the player's attention to mechanics/clues they wouldn't normally think of/remember to do - taken from the aspect of lucid dreaming, we wanted to play with the idea of having areas of the game, be it mechanics or visual cues, that are not explicitly showcased and presented to the player, but are still there to offer a boon to the gameplay