NPC Concept Sketches + Story Summary/ Pitch

 By now, we've refined our concept for the game - our chosen brief is microplastics and their effect on the human food chain: taking place in a world were most humans had evacuated earth in the early 2000s due to climate change, the player crash lands back on earth in the year 2307. the landscape is covered in rubbish/ waste/ etc*. Since most people left, two main factions have formed: people who embraced all the excess plastic, this includes people who either denied or otherwise gave up trying to stop climate change, and rich millionaires + billionaires who kept drilling for oil and producing products + CO2 emissions. The other group of people, are those who chose to try and re-integrate themselves into nature, ending up living in vast, sprawling underground ant colonies, where the ants have harnessed and begun to farm a plastic-eating fungus. Microplastics are everywhere, and people will deal with that in different ways - they will also have started to integrate themselves into people's bodies, causing them to mutate in various ways, such as having fully or partially plastic bones, which could be targeted by the fungus being farmed by the ant colonies. The game serves as a warning to try and encourage people to be more environmentally conscious.

*I'm realising now on the day the project is due that the earth would also be potentially boiling or freezing, either way there would be extreme weather - which could've helped shape the clothing choices. I guess most people covered up to protect themselves/ shield themselves from the elements.

 

My role in the group is one of two lead 2D artists, I ended up focusing on the fungal ant colony part of the project, but I did also do a couple of concepts for the plastic tribe/ society. During class, we were discussing ideas about what the two factions might look like, so I started sketching some ideas as we were talking:

 

 

This first sketch is of what people from one of our tribes/ clans could look like. The idea for these guys is that because plastic is literally everywhere, they decided to use it to help them survive post whater apocalyptic event happened. After a while some of them may have devloped Pica and started eating plastic, for others their mental state may have just deteriorated and the result is a group whose lives revolve around plastic - microplastics have been shown to negatively affect the brain (Li et al 2023), so we took that concept to the extreme here to make for some cool designs.

 

This next sketch is a very similar situation, except these people took to harnessing the plastic-eating fungi instead, more on that in a future post.

 

 Here is my research document again just in case: