Orogeny Landing Ideation Sprint

Plot:

Global setting:

2030(ish) United States - Successive national ineffective & oppositional regimes have resulted in a Dust-Bowl / New Deal -esque sweep in visionary legislation. One of which is the creation of a National Climate Response Agency. This office strongly mirrors the NRCS districts created during the dust bowl - local level solutions to bring localities into compliance with national initiatives while encouraging local economic success.

Main character role:

Due to being a member of climate disenfranchised group Main Char is given a job (moved to the front of queue if meeting minimum job criteria, as DOD does currently with Veterans) as the Climate Liaison to a region that is poised to be left behind during the climate transition. MC is not properly prepared or equipped.

Local setting:

Orogeny Landing is a town (fictional) built around a large coal train terminal where coal is loaded from trains that bring coal out of mines for a third of the state (state is strongly implied to be West Virginia and region has similar aesthetic, speech patterns, & geopolitical views/orientation to national interventions). Ultimately the industry that sustains the town and it’s identity is not viable if climate change is to be halted and reversed through atmospheric co2 levels being restored to pre-industrial levels.

 

Main challenge:

Main Character is tasked with making connections for the local residents to transition into work that does not have strong negative climate impacts & externalities and finding place and identity in a future that is viable for human civilization. 

Gameplay:

The player can impact the future of the town and its residents through dialog and securing opportunities for them as well as their cooperation pursuing them. Player actions are tracked in a score of the climate impact of the residents, their economic viability, and continued residency. When the game ends, a total for these is calculated for the town and each resident. These determine whether each resident has positive or negative climate impact, their economic success, and whether they remain in the town or not. These are also calculated for the town. If residents exodus the town the town does not persist. If the town is economically successful, but climate is not preserved the world impact is negative. If climate is successfully preserved but the town economy is not the town becomes a community in crisis etc… These are not viewed as win loss criteria but instead alternate endings (example early fallout games)

Key Gameplay Features:

Character NPC interactions:

• 1 NPC companion (Office representative/supervisor working remotely accessible via cellphone)

• 10 NPCs representing different typical oppositional challenges to effective climate transition.
• Character choice in navigating these dialogs should have impact on NPC futures, climate, economic, & inclusivity.

• Synergistic character interactions between characters, alluded to in dialog (NPC awareness of each other and character’s impact on town

Comic Book Styled Dialog and UI:

• Completed dialog sequences tracked via screenshots that can be loaded out as a completed comic at end of game
• Between dialog Navigation sequences w/ random occasional pans into comic layouts. (post process effect)

• Igor Kordey style page layouts for dialog UI

• 3 long panel vertical/ horizontal, Fishbone layout, small horizontal detail on event sequence, etc.

• Screenshot upon completed dialog sequence

• Dialog choices as scroll selectable speech bubbles

• Boom Cameras on character & npcs w/ planned shot perspectives, side profile, head shot, ground up, follow, approach, over shoulder etc.

• Render target cameras to UI as boxes w/ unique post process effects

• UI overlay in Gutter space linked to material parameter collection that tracks character process as a color gradient (economic success of town & climate impact of town. 

Open world concept w/ morrowind style doors to interior spaces

PCG generated level map 

• Three sided valley w/ river bank on one side
  • Vegetation static mesh foliage pcg w/ integrated moisture index based meshes (transformable color palette) (10 species overstory, understory, and herb layers - Sense of place building, story needs characters to have connection to landscape - minimum biodiversity for beauty & attachment

• Town foliage exclusion spline circle pcg

• Road spline pcg of town homes & businesses
  • Homes spawn along road spline
  • Spline intersection spawns business
  • Building BP actors with door interactor (level loading)
• Railroad spline excludes spawn of actors

• Railroad terminal & docks spline circle
  • Grid based layout
    • Various construction equipment, coal piles
• Barge loader & conveyor will need manual mesh construction & placement

Opening sequence:

Future Presidential inaugural address setting up the plot is overlaid with still photographs from the dust bowl fade in and out.

After the speech completes Main character's voiceover begins with a character introduction monologue. 

Monologue fades out and the game is introduced. Main character stands in town next to a poorly renovated abandoned post office building, next to a vandalised gov’t issue EV. - the player will be walking in this game. - introduces the character to the town sheriff…. 

First-draft Address

A century ago with her economy in shreds, her people divided, angry, and desperate for work and purpose America faced down the coming storm of what would become the second largest human caused environmental disaster in the history of the world. This was the first time the lesson was learned that humanity could change one biome to another, potentially forever. Due to actions taken for reasons purely economic, and perfectly natural, without malice but also without understanding her people tore their very breadbasket asunder and spread it to the sky. 

Amidst all this strife, after years of mismanagement, when it seemed like it would be too late her people elected leaders with visions of solutions. These visions, like the leaders, were not perfect. Not all of them worked, or stood the test of time. But the willingness to try them with conviction and follow-through not only pulled the people through to prosperity again, but mended the breadbasket, America’s plains would not give way to desert, at least not yet.

Today we face a similar fate, not as a single country, but as a whole world. Our climate is torn asunder as America’s breadbasket was a hundred years ago. Our people are divided, but ready for vision. In the depression riddled dust-bowl Roosevelt established what would become the National Resource Conservation Service, democratically organised soil conservation districts to lead conservation efforts at the local level. Each watershed with its own districts, its own solutions to bring the people and the land into a future where they could both prosper. Districts had to change how they did things, but doing so on their own terms in the ways that worked best for them, allowed those communities a place in that future. This solution, among others, worked. To this day the three thousand NRCS districts help our people prosper along with their land.

Just as before, we’ve squandered the easy years, mismanaged too long, but now we have a new bold vision and the will to act. Our people must change their livelihoods for their own sake as much as those to come, as did those a hundred years ago. But, just as it was then, they will not do it alone. 

Today my administration, as the first act in service to our bold new vision, announces the creation of the National Climate Response Agency. This new agency mirrors the spirit and model of the NRCS, but this time the mission is not the soil, but the climate. Our people must change their livelihoods for their own sake as much as those to come, as did those a hundred years ago. The changes are not limited to soil, but to all sectors that touch climate. But as before, if a solution is to be successful and not undone, to stand the test of time it must be on the terms of the communities who must do the changing. The first districts will be established in places whose vitality currently depends wholly on providing fossil fuels to the rest of us. These are the people whose sweat and blood brought us the prosperity we have enjoyed through the industrial revolution. As thanks for this they have been blamed, lied to, misinformed, and mistreated. There is no place in the future for the industry on which their communities depend, but if we are to be worthy of having a future not ravaged by climate change we cannot leave them behind in the wreckage of a bygone age any more than those stricken by the disasters of unchecked warming. So it is there we will begin. 

Presidential Inaugural Address 2029

First Draft Main Character Intro Monologue

It was this grandiose address by yet another in a long line of over-promising political animals to seek national office that would give me my first good job. It led me to Anthracite county. The place I would eventually call home. I had just graduated college, the recruiter who interviewed me said it really didn’t matter what I studied or how I did. See I had checked the box indicating that my family lost our home to a natural weather related event in the last ten years. She said that made me uniquely suited to be a Community Climate Liaison. All I could think about was how I’d be the first person in my family to have real health insurance and a retirement account. They were even going to provide a company car. It didn’t take long into my first day for me to be pretty sure none of that mattered and that I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

Quotes for potential ending sequence transitions:

To visualize the full enormity of land impairment and devastation brought about by this ruthless agent is beyond the possibility of the mind. An era of land wreckage destined to weigh heavily upon the welfare of the next generation is at hand. - Hugh Hammond Bennett - 1928

We have been too wasteful for too long in this country—indeed, over most of the world. We had so much good land in the beginning we thought the supply was limitless and inexhaustible. Hugh Hammond Bennett - 1943