Eusapia, the City of the living and the Dead

This prototype explores Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” Eusapia Chapter. You play as a hooded brother transporting a member of the recently deceased to the city of the Dead, which exists beneath the city of the Living, mirroring it. You pass by mirrored shrines as your journey, catching glimpses of the Dead City, until you reach a portal that allows you to access the other city.

Team: 6 people (Master and Bachelor students)

Role: Game & level designer, 3D Artist

Timeline: 2 weeks

Project: Art Direction for games 2020, MA Visual Game and Media Design, Det Kongelige Akademi

Project goals:

Create a piece of interactive media based on a chapter from Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities".
Collaborate in groups with Bachelors students, and give each person a role. As this was the beginning of the corona situation, we needed to figure out how to work together remotely.

In the chapter "Eusapia", Calvino describes two cities of the Living and the Dead, that mirror one another, not knowing where one begins and the other ends. The look of the city is based on sun soaked Mediterranean towns that are quiet and timeless. The city of the dead reveals a darker version of its sister city, but full of life and bustling with the activities of the dead.

Level Design

My role was to concept and blockout the levels of both cities and divide them into several scenes that could be worked on at the same time, with several people set dressing. We were able to work collectively on the project by having multiple scenes - one for the greybox and master layout, and the others were for level dressing and characters.

The level spirals down until you reach a covered fountain, symbolizing a descent to the underworld, and rebirth in water. In this fountain the Player flips 180 degrees to enter the City of the Dead, and spirals up again to place the recently deceased in their new home.

Environment Art

As a team we developed modular buildings and props to add to the scenes, each with decimated faces in Blender to make the models feel worn and old. The low poly stylized art direction allowed us to work fast and to build models that would fit no matter our level of expertise with the programme, meaning we reached a nice level of polish for a short 2 week project.