Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 2:15

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Back in 2015, I started work on a short, adventure game adaptation of the classic 1910 short story by William Fryer Harvey.

I was originally programming the project in C++ with DirectX components, and it was designed to incorporate a point-and-click interface whilst navigating between still screens, and further augmented with a small inventory system.

This test build was merely designed to gauge the mouse interface, in addition to some of the dynamic lighting effects, complete with the surrounding ambience of a looping thunderstorm sound and the one and only music track I had composed for the game. I've also tacked on one of the screens, which represented the kitchen segment of the apartment that the player explores during the game.

As you can see, the artwork has been purposely presented in an abstract format, with distant buildings rendered in a solid blocks, and crude pencil drawings indicating foreground objects within the apartment. T

The adaptation of the 1910 story, as I had originally intended, would have incorporated numerous changes. In this particular case, the game would have been situated in the modern day, with certain modernized elements used to substitute some of the components that were presented within the original story, but ultimately culminating in the same implications.

Instead of London, this particular adaptation of the story was to be situated in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the pivotal events transpiring within an apartment inside the real-life municipality of Springstreet.

Instead of "James Wittencroft", the protagonist goes by the name of Jeremy Winslow, and the subject of his original sketch is not that of a overweight middle-aged man, but a fit, college-age female, also being pronounced sentence in a courtroom.

While strolling down toward the local swimming pool, he bumps into a young college student (Cassie Yuen) who fits the spitting image of the woman in his sketch, currently sitting down on a picnic table while typing on a laptop computer. She's apparently a journalism student at the University of Pittsburgh, who is currently working on an assignment on obituaries, and accordingly is instructed to compose an assessment on the demise of a hypothetical individual.

As Jeremy strikes up a conversation with her, she asks him to proofread her assignment. He's naturally alarmed when he discovers that "hypothetical obituary" happens to have been authored in reference to the apparent death of "Jeremy Winslow", with today's date listed.

When pressed, Cassie maintains that she had never heard the name before, and merely pulled it off the top of her head. She herself is equally surprised when Jeremy reveals the sketch to her, while he himself contends that the subject of his drawing was that of a woman he had never seen before.

With both parties mutually struck by the notion that the circumstances may be more indicative of the hands of fate rather than the biproduct of elaborate coincidence, Cassie suggests that it may be too dangerous for him to walk home alone, as this presents innumerable possibilities for death. Instead, she suggests that he come up to her apartment and wait until midnight, by which point he hopefully will not have died.

The actual gameplay begins in Cassie's apartment while the two are mutually awaiting the time to pass. During the game, you (as Jeremy) explore the surroundings, inadvertently traversing upon details relevant to the previous owner of the premises, and further uncovering a connection between him and Yuen.

Ultimately, a self-fulfilling prophecy unravels, and this time, it's not the "stifling heat" which drives the implication of the pivotal moment in question.

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