creator statement

For my Videogame Media I created a hologram map that emanates from a gadget that sits on the players knuckles. In the upper left hand corner, there is a Main Quest listed that describes that the player needs to leave the city undetected. In the upper right hand corner there is a mini map that shows a zoomed in view of where the player is located on the map. The main map itself is more detailed. It shows the layout of the entire city, the names of areas within the city, as well as the path that has the smallest margin of error. 

Creating a main map with the path out of the city, a mini map that shows the player’s location, and a main quest descriptor were all specified as elements I would need to complete for my project to be successful. Having done all of these, I would say that I met my proposed goals. They also didn’t change at all throughout the project. When I created them at the beginning of the project I purposefully made my goals relatively easy to complete, as well as provide enough information that I felt was relevant. This made it easy for me to follow my initial plan.

Overall, my media aims to share with the player that they are exiting the main, high tech city in the game, and into the unknown of a technology-less society beyond the city. I try to convey this information primarily by including no information on the map about what “The Drift”, or the area outside of the city looks like. As they have no technology and individuals from the city do not enter this area, there is no known information about it. I don’t know if the audience will be able to actually gain all of this information from my map. I do, however, think that the absence of information about “The Drift” on the map would lead the audience to try and piece together that there are key differences between the city and the surrounding area. 

In creating this project I did use a lot of AI. For the background of the media, I used an image of my own hand and an image of a dark background from the internet. I combined them and put them through AI to create a completely new image. What it produced provided a better version of what I had wanted the background to look like. The map itself is also AI generated. I searched for images of a city map on the internet, focusing on maps that only showed roads. I then chose one that I felt best suited my needs, fed it into AI, and it created an altered version of the map. For both of these AI generated images I had the program use about fifty percent of the source images I fed into it, and the text I had input created the other fifty percent. For the titles of the areas within the city I also used ChatGPT, but not all of the names are directly from it. I used the results from ChatGPT as a way to promote ideas for “name suggestions for a cyberpunk city”. I ended up taking bits and pieces of the suggestions, or using words that I related to some of the suggestions.