In March of 2010 I attended my first Game Developer Conference. At that point I had never completed a game but I went to see if the games industry was something I wanted to get into. After three days I could see an overflowing excitement in everyone there. It was creative and different than what I was doing at the time.
So with the principles game design floating through my saturated skull, I boarded the Bay Area Transit car en route to the airport. Then, on the other side of the train, I saw this warning sign:
It was such a subtle image of absolute terror. Why were these people evacuating the train? How were they going to get out of this tunnel.
Warning signs are meant to reassure passengers of the vehicle’s extensive safety systems but in most cases they introduce me to potential dooms in ways I am not creative or paranoid enough to conjure up.
It was at that point that I decided to use this sign as a jumping off point for my next game. I wanted to explore how we use warning signs, how potential disasters are hidden between the images, and what all these mean in our current environment of terrorist warnings and national disasters.
So this is my game. Right now it is called “Tuesday Morning in the City”. You control a single man who must single-handily foil a terrorist plot. Of course it helps that you are stuck reliving the last 5 minutes of your life and therefore knows where every bomb is going to be placed and where every terrorist is.
