Isa Alsaba - MA Games Art
Folly of the New Age
Coming from Bahrain, I enrolled in the MA with a burning motivation to create my own independent game. The primary focus of my practice was gaining skills in character sculpting and proficiency in technical art disciplines, most significantly shader building. My final project fulfils this through exploring how game production techniques can be used to create evocative story worlds, while also striving to develop a novel style of rendering that diverges from what is commonly seen in major game titles.
Folly of the New Age is an adventure game, visually rendered with a custom shader inspired by Roger Dean’s paintings. The shader simulates Dean’s stippling and brush strokes by granulating light and shadows, synthesising his style's non-photographic realism with game production techniques. Set in an alternative history where secret societies govern the world's powers, the player takes the role of MI6 agent Folly, who must seek intelligence through glimmering flecks and rays across the surface of world corrupted by tyranny and war. She is accompanied by her familiar, a cheeky gnome called Bexley. The interactive scene is displayed through analogue monitors where Folly confronts an entity known as Binah, a divine emanation representing the darkness of the Great Sea.
