Welcome to Gemino city

From the forest to the city

Hey! This post assumes that you already read the entry Vessel’s plot draft. If that is not the case I highly encourage you to do that first, or jump into the next section. 

Since you decided to keep reading, let's begin with the fun part! Until now, Vessel’s story was set in a forest surrounding an unnamed town. While this works, there is an issue with it: It’s not iconic enough. Forests in game are rarely a settled point in the map, they are usually transition spaces or decorations. If we think about the first draft, the story was happening in a forest but that fact wasn’t important at all. In that draft the forest was only a way to fill up and decorate the space.

The main reason for choosing that environment was (as you can imagine if you read all posts) to save money. When the idea was conceived, art was a heavy constraint. Building the game in the forest allowed me to buy some decent assets, and use procedural content creation tools (like houdini) to build up the space with enough quality; meaning that I only needed to pay for characters. But now that an artist joined the team this is no longer needed. 

Without more dilation I invite you to discover our new setting! 

Gemino City

Gemino is a Spanish coastal city that rests over an estuary between the Geminia hills. Once an infamous tourist trap the city has long past its glorious days, now the service, historical, and buried passages are left as an abandoned maze. Most of its few citizens prefer to live at the surface scattered all across the periferia. 

History of Gemino City

The ruins across the area suggest that the city's history began with a Celtic settlement on the right hill. That settlement evolved over time with the help of merchants and was established as a portuary node during the roman empire when it started to bleed over the left hill. After non-transcendental medieval and modern periods the city started to dig in its roots during the early contemporary era. 

During that research, they discovered an ancient ruin on the left hill. That temple proved to be a challenge to date and the agreed date is still questioned since it implies that there was a pre-tartesic advanced civilization in the area that disappeared without trace. The challenge and the mystery attracted a lot of academics to the city that built a University of history and anthropology around the ancient ruins.

The city was prosperous until the civil war when it was nearly destroyed by the bombs. Abandoned during the early dictatorship years, the technocrats decided to use the mysticism around the city ruins to attract tourists and build an economic engine for the area. They repurposed the old university as a museum that had access to the temple and rebuilt the city around it as a thematic touristic resort. The other half of the city was repurposed as a military naval shipyard. 

After some years, the military base was moved into a more strategic area and the shipyard was repurposed to be a commercial one. Following the economic transformation of the country the city started giving more funding to the touristic section, eventually killing the naval shipyard and converting it to a naval cemetery. Time proved that this decision was against the interests of the citizens when there was an exodus of the highly paid workers from the shipyard that moved out of the city with their families that worked on the service fields. This marked the starting point of the decadence of the city.

Nowadays the city is sustained by two kinds of tourists: dark tourists and academics. Neither of them are enough to sustain the city but they are enough to make it hardly survive. 

City Areas

Touristic District

The touristic complex that surrounds the museum, and therefore the temple, is an open botanic garden hosting an artificial city that only aims to build a pleasant experience for visitors. It uses resources that are common in amusement parks like Disneyland, in example: unrealistic building sizes, decorative spaces with no real function, etc. In this area the city mostly offers attractions of different types: sculptures decorating any square, coffee shops, pubs, and restaurants. 

With the decay of the city the botanical garden has been slowly growing out of control, most of the eating places are closed and a few bookshops and specialized shops for academics and dark tourists have started to appear. The locals started to avoid this area since the mixture of the visitors has led them to think some sort of cult or sect is starting to own the place. 

The Underground City

The underground city features a mixture of different tunnels. The most recent ones aimed to serve as a mall and cinema for the tourists and provide them with a climate agnostic place to spend their time (and money). Those tunnels were built using the University's old passages and corridors that were created to investigate the ruins and the temple as a service passage for workers. While some of them were adapted to that purpose and have some proper lighting and construction, most of them are still built like mine tunnels. 

Gemino’s decay had a radical impact on this iconic area. Some of the tunnels are collapsed or closed for safety reasons, most of them are no longer safe to stray alone due to vagrants and addicts. Few of the modern installations are still operative and being used as shops or meeting points though. 

This is still the fastest way to move across the Geminias and even if it’s not a safe travel it is the only option for some commutes. 

The Geminia’s History Museum and Archives

On the surface Gemino’s museum is a three story building that combines different architectural styles. The third floor, the top of the building, is used as the city townhall and police station. The second was used to host exchange academics from international programs that were focused on the study of the temple and peninsular history. Finally, the ground floor holds the proper peninsular history museum that descends chronologically and physically until it reaches the temple ruins. 

This down spiral museum ends with a central altar in a circular room that can be accessed by several tunnels that come or go to the underground city.

Naval District

It doesn’t really matter if you arrive at Gemino by the road or the sea, the first thing you encounter is the naval district. This features a pretty big harbor full of storages and mostly abandoned heavy machinery. Then it continues to the ship cemetery. This is a maze of interconnected massive semi-dismantled boats interconnected by service structures. These boats include several cruises, and military ships.

Similarly to the touristic area there are some rumours of strange people and lights being seen inside the boats during recent times. Since those started to appear when the cruise Circe’s Palace arrived at the cemetery some locals started to believe that it was a ghost ship and blamed the city decay on the arrival of the boat.

The Military Facilities

Inside the naval district there is a small military fort. The army left the place a long time ago and the building was repurposed as the main harbor offices. All the registers of operations, controls, communication systems, etc. live in this place.

And that’s it for now!

Resident Evil has Racoon City, Bioshock has Rapture and Columbia, Dishonored has Dunwell, Silent Hill has, well, Silent Hill. Games have tons of examples of iconic places. I truly hope that Gemino will come to the mind of any player that tries Vessel. As always things can change, but that’s it for now. I’m really interested to know your opinion. Do you have any good forests in games? Do you think there is an iconic city that I might not know? Leave it in the comments, I’m reading you!