Keeping it real...

As I mentioned before, we attempt, in the creation of this game, to portray as much an accurate picture as possible in terms of historical and archaeological information. In the introductory scene, which takes place in 13th century Bologna,  we will be using a scientifically based 3D reconstruction of the city, which was done by Cineca . The game itself takes place in roman Bologna, for which we have also a scientifically based 3D  reconstruction of the city, created by the VHLab in ITABC, CNR (Rome). The people in both Cineca and the VHLab are playing a very big part in the creation of the story in terms of what was possible and what was not in the relevant time periods in Bologna.

Once the hero, or the player is in roman Bologna, he/she is no longer viewing the city, but interacting with the environment. The environment is based on specific archaeological sites that were excavated and played a central part in the daily life in the roman period. The nature of the archaeological data is that it is almost never whole and you end up with a picture with many missing pieces (sometimes you just have a frame...). For this reason, some buildings could not make an appearance at all in the reconstruction and some will be displayed only from the outside, so as not to give false information. For instance, it is known that there was a temple for the goddess Isis in roman Bologna, but as exotic and interesting addition it could have been in the game, we hardly know anything about it's structure, so sadly, it cannot be displayed in the game. Another example for the challenge of "scientific integrity" in our game is the case of the basilica, of which only the foundations have survived. It was possible to reconstruct a general look according to the floor plan and similar buildings in other roman cities, but to show the interior for interaction purposes in the game would be misleading.

A display of the basilica floor plan in the archaeological site, Bologna

To summarize,  it is a question of where you draw the line - finding a balance between the actual archaeological information, the researchers' interpretation of it and the needs of the game's environment.

A reconstruction of the basilica (VHLab, ITABC, CNR-Rome)

A true story

In the (long) time that has passed since my last post, which included some vacation time for the holidays, I have been working on the narrative for the game.

The subject of narrative and video games and whether a narrative even exists in video games has been long debated. The question lies mostly on the definition of narrative, a term that in the last 20 years has become very broadly defined (Juul 2001). However, when talking about adventure games, a narrative is part of the definition: "A video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle solving instead of physical challenge" (Rollings and Adams 2006), or a more concise version: an adventure is the deterministic intellectual problem solving in the context of a story" (Newheiser 2008).

In our case, some aspects of the story such as location and time are predefined. The location - the city of Bologna and the time, or actually times - the protagonist's time of origin which is the 13th century CE. and the time he finds himself in, which is around the 2nd century CE. Both time settings, of course, effect the story in terms of what is possible and what isn't. For instance, one of the challenges we faced was trying to connect somehow the Medieval 13th century bologna with the 2nd century  Bologna by placing a roman object or element in the medieval setting, so that our hero would be drown to it. The problem here is the fact that in 13th century Bologna they didn't care much for roman artifacts or any of the old stuff we refer to as "antiques", so there was no reason to keep a roman artifact or to be drown to one.


To solve this issue we turned to the afterlife and gave the role of the roman representative to a ghost. Where is the ghost coming from and why? Well, without giving away the plot, lets just say that there is a dog, an urn and a somewhat paranoid roman ghost.

We need to keep the historic and archaeological information accurate, but there is nothing wrong with using fantasy and imagination. I think  players will not be mislead to think that ghosts were part of the daily life in the medieval or roman times, and if they end up believing in ghosts who am I to say that they are wrong...