<aside> 💭 For the trial project, we’d love to see your rendition of our world map. Read the following prompt, which describes the three regions of the city and its overall topology, think of how you might present such a city from a distance, and then create one (or more) concept sketches.
The concept doesn’t need to be high fidelity, as we’d like to cap this project at 6 hours of your time, and you can use any tools you feel comfortable with—e.g., if you’d like to block things out in a modeling program then sketch on top, or use Substance Painter for sculpting, or just paint it all in one fell swoop in Photoshop, it’s completely up to you!
In terms of stylization vs realism, we are looking for a more stylized approach, but don’t want it detached from reality. From 1-10, if 1 was perfectly realistic and 10 was maximum style, we are probably at a 6 or 7.
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Our game is set in Echograd Bay, a fictional peninsular city reeling from a climate disaster.
When a category 8 earthquake shatters its aging seawalls—the cataclysmic event colloquially referred to as “the roll”—the boundaries of the city are redrawn overnight.
Now fragmented into three distinct regions, each with its own environmental design, social structure, and political ideology, Echograd Bay is more a patchwork of subcultures than a unified city.
The Rind is the exposed crust of Echograd Bay—those areas at or below sea level when the walls fell. In the post-roll budget crisis, local officials declared it an exclusion zone, leaving those in the “sunken city” to fend for themselves.
Denizens of the Rind generally fall into one of two camps: bound together or exploiting thy neighbor. Though it remains a relatively lawless place, the more successful townships skew collectivist, complete with agrarian communes, flat leadership hierarchies, and scrap tech MacGyver’ed together to meet daily needs.
Culturally, the Rind casts a wide net across the have-nots: hustlers seeking anonymity outside the suffocating surveillance of the Core work side by side those unable to jettison their circumstances post-roll, along with the occasional moonlighter seeking an edgier crowd.
The city center, though humbled in its borders, remains home to several important corpos (most notably AshPond), and boasts a functioning retail district and low crime rate. Of course, these unique circumstances are only due to the draconian measures passed hastily in the twilight of the roll. Autonomous drones patrol the blocks, keeping tabs on passersby and enforcing curfew. Foot traffic is nonexistent, what few commuters remain opting to scurry in via auto-taxi rather than suffer the surveillance apparatus.
Once a nature preserve for endangered flora, after the roll this region became a safe haven for the ultra-wealthy. The Preserve is shielded by forces physical and intangible: with estate plots fetching prices in excess of $100M, the market serves as its primary gatekeeper. Yet, as a semi-sovereign enclave, the Preserve also maintains its own private security force. Secluded from rising waters and social unrest, inhabitants of the Preserve have embraced a form of direct democracy, casting themselves as modern Athenians.
For the geography of the city, reference San Francisco: