My Work
BVW Round 4 - Quadcorp: Workbot 259 - Design Decisions
It took us quite a while to settle on a story, but once we nailed the basic skeleton for it, we were able to firmly build on top of it. We created this world by modules, with each module representing each day on the life of the robot, which simplified the programming job. We were able to have a rough working version of the world working very quickly and so had a good chance to improve on the details.
As far as details go, one of our concerns was communicating the gender of the robots. For this, we came up with the idea of using the red bow to identify the female bot. It almost immediately occured to us that the bow could also be used as a storytelling element and so we created the scene where the bow is given to the female robot. The bow also helps the protagonist recognize the parts of the female robot when he goes in the trash room.
Another detail we wanted to focus on was appropriately conveying the feeling of time passage. To accomplish this we created different texture maps for the robots, representing increasing levels of rust. We also created different textures for the billboards that were visible in the main room, so that they displayed a different message depending on the different time period. Finally, we added the black screen that serves as a log of sorts, which also displays the current date.