Where is Somewhereville?

TLDR: After hours of research and thinking about it, I don’t like any of my ideas, and after leaving class on my way home, BAM! hit with an idea of a place to focus on that I love, Sunset Valley.

The second assessment for Design Projects this semester, is creating a prototype travel app designed for mobile devices. The least fun part for me is getting to choose where/what place to focus on for the app, I always find being given the choice to pick anything, anywhere, whatever I want, to be overwhelming, I’d prefer more restricted options over it could be anywhere real or not. I suppose it’s just a personal thing.

Let’s start by explaining the ideas that I have for all intents and purposes, discarded. Now I did spend the week between being briefed and the next class trying to come up with ideas, however I was quite ill during that time period, so I thought of practically nothing.

discarded ideas.png

Here is the notes I drew up during class, quite a small list of location ideas, with my errant thoughts and little sketches scattered through out. Normally I would clean this up and create a proper, neat & tidy display of my ideas and thought process, however today you get the initial notes, as I would rather get these blog posts out on time and update them later to be nicer, I already feel terrible for falling behind on the posts for the last assessment.

 

Idea One: Monarch Hills

Screen Shot 2016-09-02 at 4.16.27 PM

Screenshot of real world location from Google Maps

The name comes from a nearby display home suburb, you know the kind, all the houses look really similar, I find them creepy to be honest, however I’ve always liked the name Monarch Hills. So this idea is pretty much make up a fake town that suits the name.

 

Idea Two: Sinnoh

The Sinnoh region from the fourth generation of Pokémon, is my favourite region. This idea spawned as somewhat of a group idea on the day the class was briefed, one of my friends from the class immediately suggested we should all do a different region from the game series as the group of us would almost be enough people to cover each generation. However on further thought I would feel uncomfortable if my project was too similar to someone else’s, most of the group appeared to agree as only the original suggester of the idea and the friend who has a different tutor for the class chose to follow through with Pokémon regions (as far as I know at this point at least).

 

Idea Three: Lemon Tree Passage

Of the ideas I came up with in class, this seemed to be the most viable, initially. I recall the name of this place from my early childhood, on the likely only real ‘holiday’ in my life so far. It’s basically a small suburb of Port Stephens, and now having researched it a little, I’m not sure why my family said the holiday was to here instead of just Port Stephens. The only attractions to Lemon Tree Passage, technically are outside of the area because its such a small place, that is a part of a larger town. I believe Port Stephens to already be a sort of large tourist-y town, which would be an immediate no go for the project.

 

Final Idea: Sunset Valley

I was trying to think of a fictional place, as I believed it would be easier to create imagery for whether it be photographic or illustrative, if you don’t have a set in stone ‘this is the reality of the place’. Nothing much was coming to mind seeing as the amount of books I’ve read has drastically dropped during my time at university.

The issue itself wasn’t just thinking of a fictional world, it was thinking of one that has roughly the same level of technology as us. A classmate suggested a town from TES V: Skyrim, or even somewhere from Westeros, the main continent in Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire, but my issue with choosing a place from a medieval piece of fiction, is the logic of it. Whilst I know the travel app wouldn’t be for the people within that world, I just, it would be a mobile app to promote travel to a medieval community. My brain just rejects that as silly.

Another suggestion from classmates was The citadel, or Omega, from the Mass Effect trilogy. Now, as much as I adore mass effect, my immediate reaction was no. I did a Mass Effect themed zine for this class last year, my quota on Mass Effect themed projects has been filled. I’m at the point where, even though I don’t know how to format a portfolio, I’m trying to produce designs that I could put in a portfolio, to show potential employers in the future, and having a bunch of designs that could just be called fan art, in my opinion, doesn’t say ‘hire me as a designer’. Outside of that, the citadel would be a lot of giant white walls as photographs, and Omega is meant to be a bit of a lawless slum city, happy go lucky tourists would be smart not to go to. Either way in the games both are giant cities (the Citadel being the BIGGEST space station city in existence, housing billions) if they existed, advertising and apps promoting them would be plentiful. HELL in game your character can choose to participate in advertising for the citadel, so choosing this would make no sense to me.

Now onto the idea for the location I’m doing, it hit me whilst I was leaving the uni for the day, “Why not a Sims town?” the Sims being a life simulator game, meant that the technology they have in the game is generally equivalent to our modern level of tech, (at least in the base game, the expansions like to have fun with it). Immediately my brain went to my all time favourite town in the franchise, Veronaville, which is based on the town of Verona, and includes recreations of many famous Shakespearean characters, and it’s amazing. The issue with it is, it’s from the Sims 2, a very outdated game in the series now days (still the best, alongside Sims 3) and I honestly don’t know if I could find the disks to reinstall it to get the information needed, like what attractions are in the town.

Following on from that idea, the base/starting town for the Sims 3, Sunset Valley, which is pitched in the game as a small thriving town, of course Sims 3 is now technically outdated, but we don’t talk about the fourth installation of the series. So it’s the most current game of the series to me, has equivalent technology to us, a bunch of activities and attractions that I could use as promotional stuff for the app   and is versatile enough that I could use photography, illustration or iconography and it could all work (not together I mean, that I could choose any style and I could make it acceptable). I chose Sunset Valley as if it was just the base game, over the later towns of expansions or even just Sunset Valley with expansions (although I might mention seasonal festivals), as even though later versions or other towns would have more things for tourists to do, there is already more than enough available in the base version, and it would be better to not over crowd the app.

So yeah, Sunset Valley from The Sims 3 is my chosen location for this app, I plan to present it as if it were a real place, rather than try to appeal to fans of the games. I’m currently installing Sims 3 on my macbook, it feels quite odd, this is my work only computer, I vowed never to install games on it, and yet here I am. And I really feel like playing it after talking about it so much, but I mustn’t.

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