Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Prototyping the Real World
in a Virtual Environment
It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future, where people actually live a life they can't ind
anywhere else in the world.
—Walt Disney speaking about EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow)
13.1 PROTOTYPING AND WORKFLOW: WHERE AND HOW
DO VIRTUAL WORLDS FIT IN?
How do you get from inspiration to a real life prototype? Let's look at the low of design ideation. As you
can see in Figure 13.1, each step of a design process lows into the next, and concepts from some steps may
possibly low into noncontiguous steps as well. Design thinking is not usually a linear process; it is more like
a “cloud” of ideas. In every step but the initial one, there is an opportunity for prototyping something as well
as developing a new layer on the previous prototype.
As you can see in Figure 13.2, your initial design concept may be inspired by an interesting eight-sided
goblet you found at a lea market. The octagon shape informs your design approach on every level. With
the pleasing symmetry of this regular polygon, rooms feel circular but are easier to build and furnish.
Interconnections between other rooms, buildings, and regions become simpliied and organized due to the
array of sides on this regular polygon.
Where do virtual worlds it in this design cycle? Well, if you think about it, they it in everywhere. All these
design phases lend themselves to virtual world utilization. For instance, the development of an octagonal grid,
created for a loor or for a city plaza, can easily be realized in any virtual world through the use of textures
with an octagonal pattern on them or with octagonal geometry. In fact, the octagonal pattern can even be
used on the land textures to visually embed the theme, and the terrain itself can be terraformed to octagonal
patterns, perhaps resembling columnar basalt or stepped terrain. As far as building structures and furniture
is concerned, you might ind it interesting “that numerous Americans, from Thomas Jefferson to Orson
Fowler, saw octagon architecture as a tool to cultivate new kinds of private 'selves'—stronger, healthier, more
rational subjectivities capable of negotiating an emergent capitalist and democratic society” [1].
How would you convey this octagonal concept to your client, your peers, or your class? It helps to “reverse
engineer” the worklow in your mind. Start from the date of the inal presentation and who will be seeing
the proposal. What are their needs, and how do they relate to the overall message? What methodologies
will you adopt to answer their needs and develop the presentation of that message? Let's suppose your client
wanted to launch a new resort and golf course called Octopus Bay in the Bahamas. Think backwards from
the future goals to plan your project. In your mind's eye you look past the elegant octagonal paperweights
that were printed as promotional items from the 3D model and think of how you spent lots of time discussing
eight-sided ideas with your client and codesigners. Further back, you remember eight-sided buildings and
furnishings that were designed and how they subtly supported the concept of eight-sided symmetry displayed
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