The Shakespeare project is one of the largest projects you’ll encounter at Design for Virtual Theatre and Games. The idea is to take a Shakespeare play and turn it into something completely different. We got King Lear and decided to do a background story game for the bastard son Edmund, in which we imagined how he had become such a.. well.. bastard. The game was to be called Black Page. Completely in the style of DVTG , we threw in a zombie infestation as well.
The main goal of the Black Page trailer was to persuade our fictional financiers (read: teachers) to invest in our fictional game company (read: shabby gang of zombified insomniacs) by overloading them with the atmospheric mood we had in mind for the final game. It paid off too; they just wanted to see it again and again and again!
Credits: The trailer was made by Joost Peters, Stephan Duquesnoy, Ziggy Nauman, Rob Engels and myself. It was composed of animation cutscenes we made ourselves and various suggestive shots from movies like Dawn of the Dead and The Machinist. The musical score is from Batman Begins.
On a side note: we never did finish the actual game. We got a lot of things done, but we were working with a game engine that just seemed impossible to program. If, and that’s a big if, we were to do this again, we would soooo pick the Half-Life 2 engine :p
p.s. Don’t bother going to the website mentioned in this trailer; it’s completely offline.
