Role: Concept, Design, Animation

Bucolic is the concept for a video game that takes place in a post disastrous future where mankind has retracted completely from the natural world. Genetically modified grass that emits airborne toxins had poisoned the lawns of our cities and invaded all other ecosystems. The only hope was to retreat to man-made environments with no tolerance for any kind of plant matter. Over generations, the prolonged separation of humans and vegetation caused a cultural shift towards a collective fear of the natural world. The game takes place in the lush forests that are looming outside a human dwelling called Ossifera.
    
    Without necessarily knowing every detail of the background story, the player will experience the contrast between our striving for green today, and this collective fear of the bucolic. The player finds the character waking up in the middle of a forest, which - in colors and plant aesthetic - is represented as the place of fear and danger she perceives it to be. Since she has never come anywhere near a live plant before, she is terrified of everything around her. The horizontal stripes on her body represent her state of mind and are moving according to her level of distress. Her anxiety increases particularly in sunny clearings, which are known to be the habitat of the toxic grass. The character will slow down and panic the closer she gets to such areas. The goal is to stay under the shade of the canopy and guide the character home without hyperventilating, before the toxins from the grass become fatal.

The horizontal stripes on her body represent the character's state of mind. They are moving according to her level of distress and become increasingly irregular and chaotic.

assets

the story

In a post disastrous future, mankind retracted from the natural world to avoid the dangers associated with it. Defined by impervious surfaces, extreme density, underground societies and the complete absence of vegetation, mankind has found safety in Ossifera. However, it is hard to believe that such a grey future stems from a green past:

Throughout the first half of the 21st century, the Western world undertook large scale greening operations across its cities in response to climatic change. As a result, the encouraged use of green infrastructure, soft systems, and vegetation, marked the historic Green City Movement. At the height of this movement a terrorist organization secretly constructed a biological weapon known as S.O.D (Seeds of Destruction). The objective was to target one of the most prized emblems of the green city, turf-grass. The S.O.D weapon was a genetically engineered turf species that released a fatal toxin upon contact with human skin. Being an extremely hardy grass, the seeds were planted abundantly throughout the Western world to replace common turf. The delayed onset of the plant’s toxicity gave the invasive plant enough time to spread across lawns and dominate natural ecosystems as well. The result was a mass retreat of billions into artificial environments where S.O.D grass rarely grew - one of them being Ossifera.

Stench and smog-filled air are products of extreme density in Ossifera. Claiming any more of the surrounding natural territory seems too costly and dangerous. In order to avoid building outwards, the city is thus growing vertically and open spaces are virtually nonexistent. As a result, life takes place on the inside and elaborate underground infrastructures become the life-sustaining base of mankind. Society is layered vertically from the unsanitary, congested underground tunnel systems, up to the high-rise apartments. In an effort to completely eliminate plant material from their world, people have restricted their diet to animal protein derived from species that can live off of the products of civilization: rats, pigeons, insects, pigs, dogs and cats. Water is seen as a necessary evil that is closely linked to nature and plant growth. It is collected as rain water or from lakes and rivers through long pipelines. Such infrastructure is maintained by the "Pioneers", the only people that ever leave Ossifera and venture into the Bucolic.

At its perimeter, Ossifera is surrounded by abandoned wilderness. Flora and fauna thrive in lush forests and meadows that accumulate to a picturesque landscape. However, it is precisely this verdant nature that elicits a communal fear in society. Over several generations, people gradually shifted their attitude towards nature and have managed to exclude anything associate it from their lives. Such a prolonged exclusion propagated fear in a civilization completely unexposed to nature. Plant matter, wild animals, rocks and even symbolical representations like the color green are demonized. Frequent incinerations of pavement cracks and overprotective laws prohibiting water spillage, exemplify the extent of societies paranoia to foster any kind of plant matter.

in collaboration with Jeremy Hartley