The Junkie
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The Junkie is an abstract 3D adventure game. The concept behind The Junkie is to allow the player to assume the role of a nameless drug addict - who aimlessly wonders the streets of a unknown city, looking for the dealer character so that he can score his next hit. The levels in the game alternate between the streets of the city and various stages of a drug trip as experienced by the protagonist. The dealer in the game is represented as a small man with a yellow balloon. The yellow balloon is symbolic as it is often used as a graffiti tag in real life by vagrants to identify places where they can abuse drugs discretely. In the city centre area of Dundee, Scotland (where I currently live), certain places such as building and stairway entrances are tagged with this graffiti logo.
The game objective is very simple. You walk the character around each of the levels and look for the dealer character (the little man with a yellow balloon). When you approach him, press spacebar on the keyboard in order to interact with him. This will take you to the next level. The levels repeat themselves, representing the purgatory-like and nightmarish hallucinations and experiences of the protagonist. However you also have the option to walk away from everything in the last level of the game.
The main reason why I decided to create this game prototype was to attempt to describe my experiences of living in the city centre of Dundee and often seeing drug addicts around my area. I tried to imagine how they would see the world around them in some sort of abstract and perhaps meaningless way.
In terms of visuals, I was inspired by the literary works of William Borroughs (mainly Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded) - as he himself struggled with heroin addiction. Additionally, I was also influenced by the visual style of the NSK political art collective, drawing inspiration from their totalitarian, conformist and morbid symbolism. The Junkie game prototype is something like a poem represented through a series of ten different scenes - where each scene can be thought of as an interactive artwork (perhaps comparable to a painting).
The Junkie was developed using XNA 4.0. Some of the notable technical features I implement for this prototype include basic crowd control using randomly generated waypoints, the ability to switch between different levels and more advanced and peculiar post-processing effects (improving on the post processing I implemented in my previous game, Enforcer). The effect of chromatic aberration was added into the post processing shader in order to create the effect that is something of a cross between a CRT screen and a cheap camera lens.
The music track for The Junkie was written by James “Axyss” Webb (who is the main collaborator for most of my game prototype projects).
The game objective is very simple. You walk the character around each of the levels and look for the dealer character (the little man with a yellow balloon). When you approach him, press spacebar on the keyboard in order to interact with him. This will take you to the next level. The levels repeat themselves, representing the purgatory-like and nightmarish hallucinations and experiences of the protagonist. However you also have the option to walk away from everything in the last level of the game.
The main reason why I decided to create this game prototype was to attempt to describe my experiences of living in the city centre of Dundee and often seeing drug addicts around my area. I tried to imagine how they would see the world around them in some sort of abstract and perhaps meaningless way.
In terms of visuals, I was inspired by the literary works of William Borroughs (mainly Naked Lunch and The Ticket That Exploded) - as he himself struggled with heroin addiction. Additionally, I was also influenced by the visual style of the NSK political art collective, drawing inspiration from their totalitarian, conformist and morbid symbolism. The Junkie game prototype is something like a poem represented through a series of ten different scenes - where each scene can be thought of as an interactive artwork (perhaps comparable to a painting).
The Junkie was developed using XNA 4.0. Some of the notable technical features I implement for this prototype include basic crowd control using randomly generated waypoints, the ability to switch between different levels and more advanced and peculiar post-processing effects (improving on the post processing I implemented in my previous game, Enforcer). The effect of chromatic aberration was added into the post processing shader in order to create the effect that is something of a cross between a CRT screen and a cheap camera lens.
The music track for The Junkie was written by James “Axyss” Webb (who is the main collaborator for most of my game prototype projects).