What is Pareidolia:
Pareidolia is a psychological narrative-heavy visual novel and walking sim. It uses the mix of 2D and 3D to explore the theme of reality versus perception in the Unreal 4 engine.
My position:
Creator. I came up with the concept, wrote the story, created the 2D art, designed the game, and programmed it into existence.
Short List:
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Created concept
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Performed pre-production
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Drew concept art
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Wrote and edited script
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Designed the visual novel system
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Worked extensively with Unreal 4's widget system
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Made a papermap and created the 3D level in Unreal 4
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Painted and digitally retouched 2D background art
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Created character art
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Wrote in-game documentation to progress the narrative and fulfill world-building
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Designed UI
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Programmed the game
Overview and Scope
Pareidolia is a game created with the Unreal 4 engine and is half 2D visual novel and half 3D walking simulator. It combined both narrative heavy genres to contrast the theme of reality versus perception. It's a bit on the meta side.
The word "pareidolia" is a term used in psychology which describes the phenomenon where people recognize patterns from something vague. For example, sometimes you might see a dirt smudge on a sidewalk and think it looks like a duck. One of the most common forms of this is seeing faces, even perceiving emotion into two dots and a line.
In my "Pareidolia" the player plays as Persephone Verres, an engineer who lives in a post-apocalyptic 2D visual novel world under attack by murderous robots. It's a world of survival, not an easy life, but there's hope of making it better. Persephone does her best to fix things and create technology to make things easier. She has friends, a purpose, adventurous quests.
Persephone's on a normal mission until the everything freezes and she's informed by a 3D cube who claims she's actually in a VR videogame. She wakes up in a strange rehabilitation center and has to search for clues as to what exactly is going on. In the end, Persephone, and the player, must choose which world to stay in- the reality she perceived with all her relationships and purpose, or the "real" world.
So in this case, by "pareidolia" I'm using the title loosely to refer to seeing life in the virtual world. Persephone sees her virtual life and friends as real. The player puts emotional effort in making a choice as to which "reality" is real when from our realities standpoint both are equally 1s and 0s. It's a game to investigate what "real" actually is, and more importantly that maybe as our relationship with technology evolves so does what we can count as "real" life. Maybe, as the online and offline blend, we all have to recognize a balance is in order.
The goal was to explore this theme thoroughly and produce a narrative heavy game. I wanted to tell a story and encourage the player engage with it. It was an interesting time.
DESIGN
I had two very distinct looks to come up with. I needed there to be a visible difference between the virtual or 2D world and the "real" 3D world. It wasn't enough to just let the different dimension do the work for me.
Very early on I decided I wanted the color pallet in the virtual world to be dark and grimy. Dark browns, sickly earth tones, and greens that popped... that was my aesthetic. Busy. Dirty. Rundown. This was a world that was lived in, almost punk in survival.
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I played around with different art styles. Blocky cityscapes, and then for a while I tried out editing photographs together to get a somewhat surreal vibe. My thought process was to stitch together pieces of reality to make something new and not real. However, I wanted more distinction from the 3D world so back to the drawing board!
I decided on handpainting my backgrounds with acrylic paint and using oil pastels to add emphasis and sketchy details. I tweaked the color balance slightly in Photoshop to really keep that grungy, dark feeling to it. I didn't want anything too bright.
I wasn't going for realism and made the backgrounds obviously a drawing. It's fake. It's false. It's art. All the better to characterize a fiction within a fiction.
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If green was my main color for the 2D work. Blue and sterile white was the vibe for the 3D world. As the player gets closer to the discovery, the environments shift more to that aesthetic to help bridge the gap.
Another important consideration was the character design. For Persephone's best friend, I needed a character who could really connect to the player quickly.
Her name is Constance, which is somewhat of a research joke given that consistency is one of the main principles of perception. Constance is constantly on Persephone's side. She's friendly, funny, and protective. Her build is that of a spy and she has emotional intelligence for days. Now, what was the best way to visually show this?
I made her hair round to try to communicate her friendliness, but also gave it some personality. She's dressed kind of punk and her signature maroon color lets her pop against the green backgrounds. I gave her a skirt with incalculable knives hidden in it's bounciness as kind of a parallel of her being a cute friend and yet utter steel underneath. She has shorts because freedom of movement and practically are important.
The other important character is Wundt. Like Constance, he gets his name from something perception related- this time from the researcher who identified the importance of contrast. And, indeed, it is Wundt's role to be a contrast. Instead of being supportive, Wundt is dismissive of Persephone. He doesn't seem to respect her all that much and he likes to call her all sorts of variations of the word nerd. He's not so much as her enemy, but someone who makes Persephone's virtual life not just surrounded by yes men. He's grumpy and sarcastic, but all in all a good ally.
For his design, I did not want to add too many frills. He's ready to rumble, not walk a runway. Like Constance, I wanted him to have plenty of storage space, so he has a utility bad and an extra pocket. He had a belt to holster weapons and spikes his hair somewhat unsuccessfully.
Initial Concept Art-
There was a point in which I was going to have Persephone have a visible character sprite. However, I decided that it would be better for the story if she remained faceless and therefore more of a player avatar. Her dialog tags are still teal, which was going to be her signature color, but other than that she is whatever the player wants to imagine.
The 3D section, also known as the Alice Group Rehabilitation center, needed to feel completely different than the in-game game world. I focused on making it look clean, immaculate. I wanted it to feel impersonal and unfeeling. The documents that Persephone finds on herself seem to hint that one of the reasons she fell so hard into VR was that she felt unconnected to reality so I wanted to reflect that with this laboratory environment.
The lighting, especially in the more "researcher" areas is cool toned. There's a lot of white, light grey, and blue. There aren't a lot of personal touches around. The shelves are sparsely filled, open and empty.
I did try to give every room it's own flare and set up a few scenes. For example, this is the office and therefore the place where the Alice Group employees can show the most personality. There's a work bench where a piece of technology is being worked on. One of the desks has an excess of candles and a few decorations. Even though this area has a blue cast, the lighting as a whole is more white light to warm them up.
I used color to my advantage to have the different rooms be distinct while still sharing the same general aesthetic and furniture models.
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I also used light to direct the player into the areas with important documents to find, and let location play some clues to further information.
Another important part of designing the Alice Group was that since most of the narrative for it needed to be found, I had to create several different documents which develop the "real" world. One of the ways I did this was with patient files.
The player could find several files for different patients and each patient has a story that for one reason or another they turned their back from reality and dove into the virtual world. I wanted to make each story different, each presenting either a reason for withdrawing from the world or why they saw potential in technology. One patient couldn't see a successful future for herself, another wanted to use VR to live without her chronic pain. Some files are haunting, while others are more optimistic. I wanted to have a good representation on the issue, as well as something give something for the players who likes digging into lore. I certainly had fun with the dates in these documents.
Other than the patient files, I also wrote things like a brochure for the Alice Group to describe to the player exactly what this place was.
Another document was a news article to try to explain how the whole "trapped in VR" thing was supposed to work. I also wanted to get at how frustrated that society was getting with people who chose to do so. By moving their consciousness to VR, for their physical body to survive they had to depend on others. And yet, as some of the patient files get at, a lot of these people have real reason or at least feel trapped enough to where they don't see another choice.
Treating the physical and the virtual as totally separate, presenting it as a binary issue, is causing this society problems. There's no understanding from the news article or like documents as to the why this is happening.