Old Creative Stuff

Ceiling of the 'Arab' room

CARDIFF CASTLE HISTORY The history of Cardiff Castle goes back almost 2000 years to when the Romans first arrived and built defences here. In the 11th and 12th centuries the Normans built first a wooden and then a stone fortress here. The fortress can still be seen, and at the top there are good views over castle and city. The later stone fortress built by the Normans in the 11th and 12th centuries still stands proudly in the middle of the grounds, affording good views from its upper levels. THE BUTE FAMILY By the 18th century Cardiff Castle had come into the hands of the Bute family , from the Scottish Isle of Bute. It was the 3rd Marquess of Bute, John Patrick Crichton-Stuart (1847-1900) who transformed the interiors. The Butes owned vast areas of land in South Wales, and when the Industrial Revolution came along, and with it a great demand for the coal which was here in huge quantities, the Butes had more money than is imaginable. The 3rd Marquess was an unusual man, quite shy...

I wrote a bit of a more detailed insight into our few early ideas and their development: There is a collection of broken televisions dotted around the top of a desolate hill. Walking around these broken televisions, some crackle into life and open opportunities to escape ‘into’ the televisions. These televisions offer individual unique changes in games convention i.e. Changing the traditional camera angles of first person / 3 rd person / fixed camera, to something not seen in a game before, maybe under floor or mounted on some part of the body. Other ‘television rooms’ would play with light and dark, colour, and the senses. A level where you had to navigate using only proximity sensitive surround sound was planned. The aim was to escape each room, by completing each objective. It was further developed so an overarching omnipotent character orchestrated your path in an attempt to show you the possibilities of untapped games potential. Kind of like a dark underground indie-game t...

Third and final year, so that means creating a fully working verticle slice of a game concept. Me, Eric, Leah and Pat discussed ideas, concepts and design principles over the summer and spent 2 weeks sifting through the mountain of ideas we came up with. We are playing with light, colour and sound, but up untill yesterday didnt have anything to link them all together. We needed a form of narrative and context that we could use to say something aswell. Influences from the film Equilibrium led us to settle on the context and narrative of emotion subdueing drugs. This is reflective of contemporary worries for the prospect of a society driven by such drugs. Already encroaching into american culture this is a real issue and hopefully something we can explore in interactive media. More details as and when. let the games begin