Nishra's Fortress of Solitude
Some of the words my family so lovingly (not really) use to describe me are ‘Introvert’, ‘Anti-Social’,
‘Night Owl’, ‘Loner’, ‘Shy’, ‘Awkward’, ‘Weird’, ‘Withdrawn’, and other lovely phrases (not really)
of Gujarati Language (a language originated, and used majorly in west-India), whose translations are honestly
quite difficult to explain 😃. Staying with family during the Pandemic has made us all amusingly aware of each other.
I find it quite fascinating to learn how my parents become so happy if once in a blue moon I decide to go out of my house.
It feels like I am the only person whose mother gets excited if I decide to go for a drive after 10 pm. Whenever
I go out of my room, it feels like a celebration to my parents, since they announce my presence and make a fuss around me.
I cannot get over the fact about how privileged and loved I am! Nonetheless, it does not change the fact that they do not
miss a single opportunity to take a jibe at me for being the black sheep of the family when it comes to being a normal (
what even is normal?) and social person.
But what is missed by everyone is that I have my entire world in my room, and no amount of time is enough to
explore all the adventures I can have in there. Hence, I decided to create a portal to my world and let everyone
have a peek at the world I live in. Behold, Nishra’s Fortress of Solitude!
Why Fortress of Solitude? Well, I do not want to offend ‘real’ comic book fans by claiming myself to be a fan, but
I do love comic books, and so I decided to steal (borrow?) the title; and also, to pay a homage to my family’s image
of me in Solitude. Just as Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, mine is a world unknown to most except Lois Lanes and Batmen of my life.
P5.js sketch | Nishra's Fortress of Solitude
Thought Process, Design Process, Reflections and Observations
I find myself to be a highly introspective person. My designs and work of any kind always reflect my experiences,
because I believe no matter how much you understand something, the truest understanding comes from experiencing that something.
Thus, reflecting upon that thought, I finally decided to take a different direction to code for this game.
Firstly, I often become highly competitive when it comes to winning or losing, and although it has its own psychological perks,
I took this opportunity to design an experience-based game, rather than a reward-based game. Secondly, while learning this new arena of coding,
I have always been unknowingly focussing on the trying to utilise this new skill-set in the smartest possible way; however,
here I decided to take a slight detour, and use it as a tool or a medium to express my narration, rather than let it narrate
my expression. Hence, this game is an expression of my introspective artistic side.
I often document my experiences, thoughts, observations, reflections, and feelings through paintings and photography,
and that is what is reflected in the art-style of the game. Each asset is a hand-drawn artwork, which was one of the centre
points behind opening doors to my Fortress of Solitude, since it is an important part of the said fortress.
Once the concept was clear, I started visualizing the experience:
I eventually settled for a simplistic, and more literal translation, where the viewers can just walk through
the ‘Room’ and interact with the objects. I wanted to translate the phrases “looking closely” and “entering
a new world”, hence I made the interactivity such that the viewers literally have to go close to enter the new world.
Another thought that was crucial to translate was to let the main character Nishra guide the viewers, and the experience
be represented as such. And that is why, as seen in the below GrayBoxing, the viewers are the viewers on the other side
of the screen, where as the character Nishra is guiding them. It loosely translates to the notion that one cannot
simply explore Nishra’s Fortress, and if they do so, it is through guidance.
For the GrayBoxing, since the distance and interaction depend on the artworks and their sizes,
I just included one sample object using Class and Object, so I can simply add the other artworks’ positions when done.
The change of Scenes using switch() statements was fairly simple using conditional statements based on distance of
the character from the object, however, the coordinating movement of the character through the frame and the movement
of the room was challenging.
Most of the artworks were initially developed at larger printable scale to have them available for personal use.
The following are the ones, developed at a larger scale before resizing and re-editing to be compatible with the canvas size: