This week we had a huge meeting with a lot of the MA students in the canteen to all get together with people that shared our interests and exchange ideas. Despite 25 people having written up their interests in the topic of everyday object to fantastical object only 6 showed up to the meeting. As a result the range of ideas presented wasn’t very large and not many people had a solid foundation for an idea that I wanted to explore as well.
Later on though we were able to roam around and look for other groups that might have ideas that interest us. I was able to come across two groups, one that wished to make a stylized game about a Cat Kaiju, meaning a giant cat that would destroy a city.
The idea is fun and cute and has me interested in working with a stylized approach to modelling and effects which is something I wish to try.
Another group that interests me is a VR game that would use hand tracking to track the play using hand gestures to exorcise ghosts based on East Asian folklore. They were inspired by Ghostwire: Tokyo for the hand gestures which in turn are based on Kuji-Kiri.
As a horror enthusiast and someone who grew up in Singapore with a lot of these ghosts as part of my upbringing it the project does interest me. However as it stands the group that was looking for VFX people still is uncertain about if they will go with this angle and the only thing for certain is that they want a VR game reliant on hand tracking, an example of such a game would be Elixir by Magnopus on the Oculus Quest.
As a result I’ve tentatively gone with the Cat Kaiju game as while it doesn’t interest me as much the team there already has a very solid foundation for their idea. They have an agreed upon premise, they have a style in mind and a clear vision for what they want. As it was very difficult for me to find any groups that weren’t already full or didn’t need a VFX student I am more likely going to go with the Cat Kaiju game as it is the more fleshed out project.
For certain the most difficult part of this week and likely the entire project is getting started. Trying to find a group and something that interests and challenges me is not easy and getting this enormous task underway is incredibly challenging, but if I pace myself and organize my time it is most certainly do-able.