A slow-cial media
Row your boat through the greyscale waters to find messages left by other players. Fish up these messages and leave replies. But those replies are never delivered, instead just becoming new messages in the void, for others to fish up.
I made this project using free art assets, trying to tie together a collage of various objects using shaders and post-processing. I was interested in leaning into using what designer Bennet Foddy has referred to as “Trash”, that being found assets which don’t quite work together. I rolled that “trashy” aesthetic into the theme of the flooded and polluted city you travel through.
Midnight Ceiling is an experiment in designing a game to shape social interaction. Social media is designed around a logic of encouraging maximum engagement. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it is interesting, and it is often done to the detriment of peoples behaviour on those platforms. An shouting person is undeniably engaged. I wanted to see what might happen if you instead designed a project which purposefully adds impediments to that interaction, and removes the possibility of a clear response. I was also just generally interested in the sort of messages people would leave in such an environment.
Ultimately, though, I have mixed feelings about this project. The system is designed to be inaccessible, but it also is not as optimized as I would like and so is slow on some devices, especially on the web build. When I started this project it looked completely different:
Original Art
It was initially just a survival fishing game, with day-night cycles, a story and a pixelated colourised look which was more Wolfenstein 3D than the current aesthetic. I originally benched the project as I wasn’t finding it interesting enough to continue, and later reworked it to the new system. However, those layers of adding more and more elements definitely reduced the efficiency of the project, and I might have been wiser to rebuild it from scratch.
Some additional notes:
- The original version had a heavy focus on fishing up objects with Dark-Souls-esque embedded narrative
- “Midnight Ceiling” is a name generated by the “Random Game Name Generator“. I generated a bunch a while ago, and am trying to work through them. Someday I shall make “Duck Wastes”. Someday…
- Much of the level layout is done using the random placement feature of the Unity Terrain tool. I originally was just using it to test, but I liked the surrealness of the layouts
- There was originally a boss. Part of the original concept was there was an inherent pressure from being followed, but needing to stop to fish, and not being able to look over your shoulder as you hear a beast approaching
Tex Barnes 