My intention was to bring some of my cultural background into the ludic digital realm. Magical, mythical and taboo, and representative of a socially oppressed minority, I believe this Afro-Brazilian universe to be especially interesting and so incredibly rich that it deserves to be explored and recounted through gameplay as a possible means of demystification.
In a non-narrative way, Orixás depicts the role of African divinities in the water cycle. The music track and the objects visually represented are charged with rich symbolic meanings. While this may facilitate the understanding of gameplay for those who are familiar with its iconography, it has the effect of displacing the unacquainted player into an experience of a strange culture. I was very happy to work on it and I might call it my first artgame prototype.
Distant from conventional game design wisdom, points are not counted, time does not matter, and there is no winning or losing state. There is no avatar per se. The player simply interferes in the given virtual spaces by disturbing their natural rules and causing the individual divinities to appear. Basically, the player uses the arrow keys and space bar to command and redirect the objects in each scene. Orixas was for me an opportunity to experiment with different mappings for the same keys interactions.
Procedurally speaking, I became engrossed in programming the interaction of the third scene. Using a sine function, I created a wave-like movement, an abstraction of the sea. I am proud of achieving its organic spring effect, even though it is visually very subtle. The wind tunnel simulation of the fourth scene was fun to design, making the objects appear and disappear in a manner that represents an endless cycle.
There are still many problems in this prototype. Some interaction responses are not clear enough and the first scene can even finish without any interaction. At this stage of prototyping, the lack of instructions is a problem. But as a personal goal and challenge, I want to find intuitive ways of making instructions unnecessary by creating games that have clear affordance qualities.