Concept art for the red moss on characters in the game.
All art by Meg McCartney

The arc of the Red Moss was inspired by McCartney’s upbringing in Fayetteville, Arkansas, as well as conversations with friends around their complex feelings about staying in the South long term.

“The intention came from recreating the weird space you get put in when you’re coming of age and trying to decide where to go next,” she explained. “[Deciding] if you want to stay where people have hurt you or where you don’t feel safe. [The game] is trying to put words to that and also put a world to that.”

For McCartney, the game’s supernatural elements allude to these complicated feelings many her age share about the South. Surreal aspects like red and blue mosses covering characters’ bodies highlight increasing political polarization, for instance, and allow for a nuanced examination of place and the people living there.

“It’s scary, but the main character still loves it,” she said. “[It’s] their home, but you never know what’s around the corner.”

Though she entered the U of A planning to study biology, McCartney switched to studio art to explore her passion for visual art. A lifelong video game enthusiast and artist, she became interested in how games are created on both an artistic and technical level. She jumped at the chance to take Intro to Game Design with David Fredrick, an associate professor of Classical studies and director of the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design.

For McCartney, finding game design as a field of study opened the possibilities for combining art and science.

“I felt like I had found the intersection between art and STEM that I was looking for,” she recalled. “The course helped me grasp game design as a whole and [learn] digital humanities [was the] label for [the field of study] I was interested in.”

Creating Red Moss required a combination of project management prowess, artistic vision and technical know-how. McCartney first began writing the game’s scripts to plot out the decisions a player could make within the storyline. Getting into the game engine, she started prototyping the game to define the player’s view and other basic gameplay mechanics. Next was creating and rendering the 3D art that brings Larking to life.

McCartney’s experience designing, building and tweaking the different elements has highlighted the unique medium video games can offer storytelling.

“It’s the only medium you can throw yourself into like this,” she explained. “You get to curate every single detail of what people are experiencing, down to how they interact with the space, even though it’s through the computer screen. Your audience becomes part of the story.”

Following graduation, McCartney hopes to attend graduate school to study game design further. The experience of creating Red Moss by herself has interested her in a project management role, organizing timelines and risk for games. She also hopes that game design continues to grow at the U of A and allows more students the opportunity to explore new forms of storytelling across disciplines.

“I think digital humanities have the potential for a big place in curriculum and academics that hasn’t been explored fully yet,” she said. “There’s a place for technology in the arts, and [it is a place] science and the humanities interact.”