My thesis is the concept art for an original first person sci-fi/horror videogame that I am calling Gloom. Concept art is the visual development that precedes and accompanies actual production of a video game (or movie). Concept artists are tasked with drawing and painting characters, environments, architecture, weapons, creatures, technology – basically fleshing out a fictional world from a very broad standpoint all the way down to specific elements.

Gloom would be a surreal horror first person shooter with role-playing story components. I have designed it this way with specific gameplay and narrative elements in mind. These elements dictate what I see as the difference between a purely entertaining game and a game with more important implications as an interactive experience. Ideally, Gloom would stretch the boundaries of unsettling experiences within a game, and push existing categorizations of game, story, and narrative.

Players of Gloom would control Ana Tristov, an astrogeolist prospector who finds herself in the middle of a bizarre and terrifying alien attack at a small colony in the far reaches of space. These intelligent aliens are able to control the visual cortex of the human mind to mask their presence, and are picking off the colonists one by one to feed on their cerebral tissue. As the game progresses, the hallucinations that these aliens generate grow in complexity. Soon there is no immediate way to determine what is real and what isn’t.