Dreamscape Inc.™ Let us help you.
Dreamscape Inc. is a fictional company that researches dreams and promises people they can help them get rid of their nightmares.
Together with my two teammates, Manasse van Krimpen and Desmond Dorival, we made an interactive storyline about the medical malpractice going on at Dreamscape Inc. Inspired by other Alternative Reality Games (ARG) such as The Cipher Hunt, the Dema storyline by twenty one pilots and Cicada 3301, along with fictional company SCP Foundation, we created an abandoned website for a company primarily active in the late 90s and early 2000s.
My roles in this project were:
Technical Director
Web builder
Web designer
Logo designer
Animator
Sound designer
Technical Director
Being the technical director, I would help out my teammates with basically anything they needed. I really loved this role as it allowed me to do several different jobs throughout the project, learning a lot of new things in the process. For example, we made a commercial for the company. This was our first time using professional camera equipment, lights, a greenscreen room and clip-on microphones. I absolutely loved doing this! My job was to make sure all the footage was good and ready.
I also made the music for the commercial.
I also made the music for the commercial.
Animator
All of us dabbled in animation, but I was in charge of all the animation being made and helping my teammates out where needed. For the commercial, I used After Effects to make an "old-looking poorly-made" infomercial. It's supposed to look a little bit stiff.
I also made some experiments using mixed-media animation, ranging from hand-drawn animation over some footage, stop-motion animation with some effects, and 3D animation. During the pre-production phase, I made some test animations with the concept of "dreams" in mind.
Web builder & designer
Using the regular old Notepad++ application, I coded the entire website by hand. This was quite the learning curve, as the last experience I'd had with HTML and CSS was in my last year of high school, which at that point, had been 4 years prior. But it was a challenge I was willing to accept, so I started coding.
The site (currently still online, you can find it here dreamscapeinc.eu) was coded like this; every page was written by hand. It was a lot of fun to do and I continued coding in my free time after! Really glad I decided to take a gamble and try to do this myself.
Before coding I worked on the design of the web page. Scouring the old web by looking at archived webpages was a lot of fun too. I figured out a way to get an extension in my browser to make every website load in their old layouts; using this, I visited various news and health websites that are still popular today. Using this as my inspiration, I made a design for a website and made a mock-up in after effects.
The images and video shown in the quiz were made by Desmond. This is not footage of a real website, this was all made in After Effects (except for the Dreamscape Inc. logo, which was made in Illustrator).
The quiz/the "Kruuda test"
Through the website, the player could take something called the "Kruuda test" (as described in the infomercial). By using hints found in the images and on the website, players are able to enter hidden databases if they entered the right information at the right places. Desmond and I made the puzzle walkthrough together; Desmond then made visual work to support the puzzles & hints the player needed to discover as I focused on making the quiz. I used Twine 2.0 to make the quiz, which was also a very fun and useful experience.
You can take the quiz here, if you'd like.
