Overview:
To express hate, I will focus on domestic violence for this section.
Emotion Tone:
Hate, hatred, mix with fear and despair.
Story brief:
The husband is the abuser and the wife the victim.
The husband has a habit of drinking, the wife is blindly put up with her husband’s violence.
The husband often beats his wife when he is drunk.
Until one day, the wife killed her husband.
Scene Setting:
Scene concept design:
-Inspiration：
Virtual scene shape is like a Lycoris radiata[1]. Lycoris radiata, known as the red spider lily, hell flower. Another popular Japanese name for Lycoris radiata is Manjushage, taken from the name of a mythical flower described in Chinese translation of the Lotus Sutra[2].
-Combine with theme:
Since these scarlet flowers usually bloom near cemeteries, some legends have it that when you see someone that you may never meet again, these flowers, would bloom along the path1. Thus, this kind of flower can be regard as signal of death. In the story, the wife killed her husband because of hate.
Hell flowers with different colours have different meanings. White hell flower means “desperate love” and “letters from heaven”, red means “the precursor of the extinction”, “the call from the other side”. There are 2 states of the scene: white and red. When players first entering the virtual scene, it’s white. This indicates that the wife is desperate about her marriage, and implies the death of the husband. As the story goes on, scene changes into red gradually, which means death and “other side”.
Level design:
You (the yellow character) are standing in the middle of the scene.
Around you there are 4 huge canvas. Canvas are white at the beginning, As time passes, the red colour spreads from the bottom of the canvas until it fills the entire canvas.
Under each canvas are objects that appeared in domestic violence events. They are:
- Wine Bottle
- A pair of shoes
- Telephone
- Knife
When players get close to one of these objects, they could hear some sounds about this object. ( The following descriptions are only rough directions, you can use your imagination to design sound for these parts )
- Wine bottle: the drunk husband intimidated his wife.
- A pair of shoes: the wife screamed because her husband was kicking and punching her
- Telephone: a neighbour/ friend called the wife, ask her if everything goes well, the wife said she was fine.
- Knife：the wife killed her husband.
Gameplay:
Players can choose any objects to interact. Interaction method is listening.
Players will stay in the scene until the exit appears in the scene.
Navigation:
Teleport.
Potential sound type:
Spatial sound. Some sounds could only be heard within certain range. There could be some ambience sound~
[1] Lycoris radiata, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycoris_radiata
[2] Lotus Sutra, one of the most popular and influential Buddhist texts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Sutra