Scope & Lovecraft

Today would have been H.P. Lovecraft's birthday and it seems a fitting time to mention my current design project. There are several things that have called to me from game design that I absolutely love, world building and story telling. Creating a world and story go hand-in-hand to me, you're creating the overall experience for the player something that they can get lost in and immerse themselves in for hours and hours at a time. Lovecraft's prose is an example of something that pulls together both storytelling and creating a world unlike any other beautifully.

With that in mind my current project is setting up my rendition of Miskatonic University. I've been pulling from some pictures found around online to get a good sense of building designs from the 1920s and 1930s for my floor plan and layout of the university. At the moment it is texture-less and just some basics in place, the walls for the classrooms/offices, some windows and doors and the stairs. I figured I should get the basics blocked out before working on all of the frills and details.

I know I want to put a clock tower on the roof, not sure if that's because of the time period of the building or because there just seems to be something ominous about this giant clock watching over a campus, deep loud bells tolling away every hour. There are some more unconventional rooms I want to add to the structure as well, a hidden chained door in a supply closet, a trapdoor leading to an occult archive below the school, as for now just the basics though.

The thought for this is to keep it something within my one man scope but to still make it impressive. I have this tendency to dream and think well beyond my doable scope, in fact scope was one of the huge things that we ran into during Final Project for my last three months of school. Need to realize what is doable in a reasonable time frame. I don't mind spending hours and hours on something that is going to turn out well, in fact I love it, but I need to be able to produce a result as well.

Just some things to keep in mind, I'll update later with some images I'm using as inspiration.

ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!