Digital Audio Wasteland
Digital Audio Wasteland is a comedic first person exploration game where the players aims to restore a musical force known as THE GROOVE to a post apocalyptic wasteland. Pretty cool right?
The game was made with a group of around 30 students over a nine month period.
My role on the team was as the Lead Narrative designer. Below, I’ll walk you through my process in helping to bring our wasteland to life.
Bringing Life to the Wasteland
When we began, our broad concept was to set the game in an 80s inspired wasteland. Arcades, video stores, malls, retro-futurism, all that good stuff. We felt that this gave us a unique setting that typically wasn't seen in apocalyptic video games. Instead of having things be drab and hopeless, we wanted to approach the world from a perspective that essentially boiled down to “sure things are bad but let’s party about it.”
Our narrative team was about five individuals who obviously brought their own ideas. My first task was to put into place our narrative pillars which could help guide us through the creation process. Once we had an overarching standard we were trying to reach, we started sifting through ideas and started telling our story.
This over here is a screenshot from the earliest version of the Narrative “Bible” I wrote and compiled based on our meetings. We still had a ways to go, but this allowed us a point to jump off of.
To assist in our efforts to embrace whimsy, we decided that this wasteland would be inhabited mainly by robots, talking animals (mostly pigeons and rats) and sentient objects. The apocalyptic event wiped out most of humanity, and these non-human beings became the apex species. How these things became sentient didn’t matter to us, we wanted to lean into the absurdity of the situation.
We also decided that our wasteland would be inherently musical. Instead of water dripping normally from a pipe, it would sound like a drums hi-hat. It wouldn’t always quite match, so we needed to suspend some reality.
With setting in place, it came time to decide who our player was, their motivation, and what “bringing music back to the wasteland” even meant.
M.O.O.G and The GROOVE
As I considered our wasteland, I came up with the idea for a monastic order of DJ’s. I likened them unto Jedi’s in the Star Wars universe. Though all could have access to the music in our wasteland, a select group had dedicated their lives to harnessing that music and in turn, throwing dope raves. This group would travel far and wide, throwing raves for all those who would lend an ear.
We leaned into this idea, and M.O.O.G was born (the Monastic Order of GDJ’s) the “G” is silent. We really needed the Moog synthesizer pun. The musical force M.O.O.G would harness was called The GROOVE.
With our narrative in place, my next step was to inject it into the game. We broke out into 3 strike teams for each level in our game, The Mall, The Boardwalk, and The Tutorial/The Rave. While I focused on the Boardwalk and The Tutorial/The Rave, I had the responsibility of ensuring all elements of the narrative were reaching the standards we established..
Building out the World
To tie things together, we needed a little bit of extra exposition to introduce the world, the mechanics, and the quest. Our team of artists was slammed with final passes, so I outsourced to my wonderfully talented sister Ruby to help me animate an opening sequence I wrote.
When the intro sequence was completed and implemented, I dedicated my time to adding a little bit of extra color to the world. This included adding NPC’s whose soul purpose was to provide a hint and a laugh. This included characters like Big Dave the pigeon, Shirt Reynolds the t-shirt, and Skate Winslet the roller-skate.
Creating small character moments allowed players to feel like this world was alive. It allowed them to form brief connections, but hopefully meaningful, connections. The idea was to create a sense of accomplishment in the player when they saw all their friends gathered for the final rave.
I decided that after the rave, things should all culminate in an 80s style end of movie montage. A “where are they now?” for all the crazy folks the player met along the way.