Project Different Reality

Project Different Reality is the working title of an Unreal Tournament 3 modification that I and a group of classmates are making. It’s a single player experience that takes place part in the 1930s, part in present day. Chester Hunt is a private investigator who slowly realizes something isn’t right with the world he’s living in. He’s got a voice in his head that comments his moves, he’s hearing strange music coming from everywhere and nowhere, he sometimes loses control over himself, and some surfaces in the world are covered in a chequered pattern with a text mentioning missing textures…

For days on end without sleep, Chester’s been tracking down Mushroom Jones, a villain who is handing out Tommy guns to every thug in Dalton City. And now, Chester doesn’t know if he’s going crazy or if the world is imploding on him.

I won’t spoil any more of the story, but expect it to play a big part in the mod, and to include plenty of twists and turns. It would be impossible to tell it in any other medium than as a game.

Because we’re modding Unreal Tournament 3, we have an extremely powerful editing tool in our hands. Another bonus to modding UT3 is that if you have bought the game for the Playstation 3, like I have, you will be able to download the mod, put it on your PS3’s hard drive, and play it on your TV. Way cool!

We’re currently in pre-production, going into production next week, and expecting it to be finished at the end of May 2008. Hopefully, it will be up on the Internet for download soon after that.

Update from 2009-03-11: This project was canceled a few weeks after pre-production started. We had a finished script (written by me and my classmate Niklas Karlsson), cast the voice actors, some models and level design work was being done, and we were investigating the technical aspects of UnrealEd. The reason we started the project in the first place was because our previous game design teacher had left the school (our class and the one before us had pushed for this to happen), and we were waiting for the school to find a new game design teacher for us. We didn’t know how long that would take, so we decided to start a game project together, figuring if the school wouldn’t provide us with something to do, we’d do it ourselves, and hopefully something we could put in our portfolios too. Alas, the school found a replacement sooner than expected, which was fine because our new teacher is light years ahead of the previous one. The project was put on ice, and is now effectively canceled since there is no will to start it up again.

The script for the mod can be downloaded from here. Story by Arman Borghem. Written by Arman Borghem & Niklas Karlsson.

I first came up with the idea of a game character breaking out of his world and coming into ours several years ago. We decided to set the mod in a stylized 1930s Dick Tracy-esque world.  The whole existential question about our existence being a game is hardly anything new or thought-provoking, and we certainly had no such ambitions in the script. It was all used for entertainment and suspense. Interestingly enough, when I played The Simpsons Game on the PS3 a couple of months ago, the very same theme is adressed throughout the game. The Simpsons Game even ends in a way eerily similar to our script for the mod. Ralph looks out of the TV screen and notices the player. In the PDR script, we end with two characters looking out of the computer screen, doing the same.