Concept
Somnis is a very experimental game prototype made during the 2014 Global Game Jam, in which me and my ad hoc team of strangers tried to create the experience of a blind person, slowly trying to discover his surroundings.
You can download the prototype from the Global Game Jam Website.
The player starts in a pitch black environment and is, at first, unable to see anything. Gradually, as players start to move around, they will notice something changing. There’s these dot’s here and there on the screen, and these dots represent surfaces.
As a blind person would try to sense his surroundings by touch and sound, so does the player try to inspect objects more closely, and from many angles, before they coalesce into a somewhat recognizable shape. As the player moves further away, the objects fade back into obscurity.
The experience is quite surreal, and hard to describe. You really need to try it out to ‘get it’. Preferably in a not too well lit room.
For that reason alone I consider this prototype a success, even though we had some fierce disagreements in our team about it’s direction, which left us without enough time to actually implement any fun gameplay elements to go with this core mechanic.
Disclaimer: All of us in the team have perfectly fine vision, and blindfolding makes us stumble around like fools. The experience of being blind portrayed within the game may not be entirely accurate.
I wonder how this would play using a VR headset…
(I haven’t been able to jump into working with the Occulus or other VR devices yet, mostly because of limited budget and aging hardware)
Sanderman0 