Memories From a Future Past

This world is made by the community.

Memories From a Future Past

Card of a blurred picture of the world with in the foreground a text saying "Crystalline Shard Memories from a Future Past".

Created By

Crystalline Shard

Published On

2024/02/27

Tags

MMC24, World, Misc, Adventure

Memories From a Future Past is the MMC24 entry of Crystalline Shard.

The world is published at the following resrec address: resrec:///G-1PKo3MiLeDY/R-6e2ab238-1d97-4668-a87f-15f70bdcba82

It is recommended to play the world itself before reading this page.

Basic Information

Team

Art	Tech	Testing
PsyEx	J4	Feyyore
Firefly	Sharkmare
Drazion

Background

The original idea behind Memories From a Future Past was called "Impressive Stills". It would have been a world containing a series of scenes made to maximise immersion in different environments.

As the discussions with the team went on, we decided to scope this project down as making photorealistic environments would take too much time for the MMC timeframe (life also getting in the way for some members). At this point, random ideas started flowing and some remained:

• Walking simulators, everybody loves them!
• We also love immersive stuff
• Retro hardware? Sign me up! (also in par with the MMC 2024 announcement playing in that style)

It's that this point that work started, without real tangible goal at first. The spawn room was pretty much made in that mindset and introduces the columns seen thorough the map.

One first iteration we had of the world would be that the player had to walk towards a tower in the distance during a sand storm. On the way, the player would encounter multiple objects and structures (POIs -> Points of Interest) with the storm getting stronger at each checkpoint. Upon finally reaching the tower, their vision being almost completely occluded by the storm, the experience would end.

It's at this point we also started experimenting with ways of starting the experience itself. Instead of having a large button to press or whatever, it was cooler to have an in-world interaction, needing to insert a floppy into a computer. This ended up working great, plus minus some failsafes needing to be implemented to avoid people re-grabbing the disk and garbling the intro sequence. Some directions were also added given not everybody knows how to use floppies.

The world was barren at first as we only had the desert landscape and not much to put in there. Some ideas were thrown about making some glowsticks and modern tiki torches which are now sprinkled around the place. Columns were also made (with a broken variant) to highlight some parts of the world. After experimenting a bit, we also placed massive columns and objects around, giving the world a surreal and vaporwave-y look.

The last two weeks of the project were definitely the most active with new ideas going everywhere and new stuff being made quasi every day.

PsyEx, one of our 3D artists, also had the idea of the obelisks at the end of the map at the last moment which turned out to be pretty cool. Some other choices such as making the world darker and having a fog instead of the original sand storm were also taken due to the lack of time and energy at this end of month.

Overall, it was an interesting project though sadly we didn't go with the original idea. We might later revisit that concept over a longer period of time outside of MMC.

We hope you enjoyed the map as much as we did making it!

Written by Jae AKA J4, lead of this MMC entry

Trivia

• The floppy present to start the experience is a Commodore 64 one, meaning it is not meant for the type of computer shown in the world
• The floppy is in fact called "the floppy" and not "the save icon"
• You can see all the dev notes and tests by opening an inspector and toggling the Dev container on in World Build
• There are some remnant of old placeholders all around the map

Inspirations & References

• Lifeforce - Andromeda Software Development
• Monolith - Andromeda Software Development
• The Legend of Sisyphus - Andromeda Software Development
• For Your Love - Andromeda Software Development
• FR-041: Debris - Farbrausch
• Desert Dream - Kefrens
• Journey - Thatgamecompany
• Warframe Whispers in the Walls/1999 - Digital Extremes
• Dear Esther - The Chinese Room
• Commodore designs
• Early IBM designs
• Early Apple designs
• Sega Consoles designs
• Vaporwave aesthetics