Simulacrum: Project Overview

I wanted to do a quick overview of the personal game that I've been working on of late. It's kind of been an experimental thing, as I didn't have much background in coding or animation before this last summer, but in any case, it's moving along little by little.

Simulacrum is a 2D side-scrolling "interdimensional" puzzle platformer based loosely around ideas presented in The Matrix. I say interdimensional because in order to make your way through the various levels, you have to travel to different layers of reality, all one on top of the other but largely inaccessible and often entirely imperceptible to those unawakened to their presence. The main character, pulled from his everyday reality by a splinter cell called Orion, teams up with a robot sidekick to take down the Ascendency, who controls pretty much every aspect of life for the vast majority of the human population.

The Ascendency uses Enforcers to regulate
life and track down Orion agents.

Within the world, there are four layers of reality:

The Root - the secure mainframe from which the Ascendency operates. It deploys soldiers called Enforcers and regulates life inside the second layer, or Hub.
The Hub - Everyday existence. People have jobs, live in houses, go to movies on the weekends. It's just everyday life, as prescribed by the Ascendency and its cronies.
Elysium - A pristine wilderness where the awakened go to escape the humdrum of everyday life. Here abide artists, philosophers, dreamers, etc. While the Ascendency is aware of Elysium's presence, they tend not to concern themselves much with this layer, as there are wild creatures and rift abnormalities that can prove dangerous to other layers.
Proteus - The ghost layer/server run by Orion. The Ascendency knows of its existence but has no access as of yet. Its location and access points are guarded fiercely.

The main character has to make his way through the various layers, avoiding traps and evading capture, in an effort to take down Ascendency power grids, military installations, portals between layers, etc. The Ascendency, on the other hand, uses a variety of devices and personnel to try to track down Orion agents and either eliminate them or reintegrate them into the Hub. Aside from this, the main character encounters a number of neutral hostiles like the rift hound below. Creatures like this emerge from the rifts between worlds and seem to be made of pure energy.

While the game includes a fair deal of (non-graphic) violence against the player, one thing that I really wanted to emphasize in terms of play is that we can still have interesting player interactions without actually perpetuating violence. As such, the core mechanics in Simulacrum are built entirely upon non-violent principles of evasion or disruption. The main character can run and jump and climb as one might expect, but his other functions, like his robot sidekick's gravity booster, only serve in helping him to move through the levels more easily and in ways that enemies cannot. I think if we hope to ever see an age where games can be used to tell truly beautiful stories, we have to start stepping away from some of the old assumptions like violence and taking in the best of all worlds. Simulacrum is, hopefully, a tiny step in that direction.