The second level is a city made up of significant locations from each city I've moved to: London, Vancouver, and Honolulu. As I've worked on different documents to add to the game, I've had a better idea of what exact buildings/locations could be used to represent the time and place related to the objects from my memory box. I've used a combination of Google Earth and Google Maps screenshots as well as photos from my own photo album to create a map and other reference photos for Joud and Stanley to recreate for the game.
STEP 1
I asked Stanley for a birds eye view of the current city layout to give me a rough idea of the space.
STEP 2-3
Since I'm no cartographer, I have no idea where to start designing a map. So I started by sketching a general idea of where each area might fit. The result is a nonsensical map of scribbles but the vision is there.
Pink = Cafe Nero/Maggie's Corner
Purple = Mag One
Light Green = Golders Hill Park
Dark Green = Koko Crater
Brown = Band Stand
Navy Blue = Kaiser High School
Light Blue = White Rock Pier/Beach
Teal = Kuapa Pond/the marina
Yellow = Charlie Don't Surf
STEP 4
I took rough cutouts of the areas I wanted to include and overlayed them on the city according to my previous scribbly ideas.
STEP 5
Golders Hill Park - I began trying to match the landscapes and roads up with the existing spaces.
STEP 6-7
Koko Crater & Kaiser High School - Since the high school I graduated from was at the base of a mountain in Hawaii, I thought that landscape could match up best with the grassy area of the park.
STEP 8
Rosslyn Hill Rd. & Hampstead High St. - I added the roads across the street from my secondary school in Hampstead where the buildings Joud made are and connected them to the roads of the other areas already in place.
STEP 9
White Rock Pier - I decided to combine the waters of White Rock Beach and the water running through my neighbourhood in Hawaii to add a ocean front/shore side of the city.
STEP 10-13
I then traced over the main roads to make them clearer and used white to mark where each significant building checkpoint would be before labelling them in red. I tried to spread them out as evenly as possible. This is the final map I sent to Stanley for reference.
STEP 14
I added starred points in blue for reference photos of specific features in the area for extra detail.
Reference photos:
In-game City Walkthrough:
In-game Bird's Eye View of City:
Sorting Memory Box Items by Location
Celeste sent me some later diary entries where I had written a catch-up of sorts years later every time I found my diaries again. Since the only time I'd remember their existence was when I came across them packing or unpacking in another move, the entries were pretty regular updates between the ages of 14, 15, and 16 and structured similarly. I thought this was a perfect representation of past version of myself communicating with future ones and decided to recreate the pages for the city checkpoints. I then went through some of my more current diary entries and songbooks to bridge the gap of 18 and 19, providing a more complete story of my own development from my teenage years to adulthood.
Reading all of these now feels like I always planned to exhibit my innermost thoughts in this way. It's a perfect chronological timeline of my journey of mental health and identity formation that maps out my state of mind the same way I've mapped out this world representing my memories. I fear it'll be too wordy and disrupt the more fast-paced gameplay of the city but I think it says something important about my story that I don't have time to represent more symbolically.
As I added more documents and diary pages I kept changing my mind about what areas I wanted them to be in:
CHARLIE DON'T SURF (Vancouver, BC)
(14 years old) June 25th 2015
Cedarwood pamphlet
Nonno's 84th birthday photo
BC student withdrawal
NERO/MAGGIE'S CORNER (London, UK)
(15 years old) November. 6/2016
(16 years old) Saturday 02/06/18
Dear Arwen letter
MAG ONE (London, UK)
Note about Art homework
15th Birthday card
Milton painting
GOLDERS HILL PARK (London, UK)
Ex letter
Photograph with ex
KAISER HIGH SCHOOL (Honolulu, HI)
(18 years old) TUES 31/03/2020
(19 years old) 04/07/2021
Purple painting
Cellophane tabs
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