Entropy — Yidan Xu

Project overview

Entropy is a game-development project from my time at the Royal College of Art: a VR shooting game, built in Unity, played in a headset.

It is set fifty years in the future in West Westminster, the part of London with the lowest recycling rate and the most serious environmental problems, which is also a centre of the city's homeless population and sits at high risk of flooding. The premise is that fifty years from now the flood carries the rubbish back. Everything the city threw away returns to the street it was thrown away on, and the player has to deal with it.

Concept render of a flooded Westminster street at night: water at knee height between Victorian buildings, gas lamps still lit, a lone figure wading towards the camera and a tower silhouetted in the mist — The premise in one frame: the water is up, the lamps are still on, and somebody is still walking through it

My contributions

Game environment concept design
Game modelling
Storyboard drawing
Interactive environment building
Video editing

Design point

The teaching problem came first. Recycling instructions are text, and nobody reads text in a headset. So we put the lesson into the two things the player's hands are already doing.

The mechanics are built around shooting and picking, with waste types tied to the colours of real recycling streams. Sorting stops being a rule you are told and becomes the thing you are physically doing: aim at what can't be recovered, reach for what can. The game never explains the colour system, it just makes you use it.

Concept painting of the flooded high street: a figure in a long coat stands in the water with rubbish drifting past, and a hoarding overhead carries four coloured dots in blue, green, red and black, the recycling stream colours the game borrows — The colour codes live in the world rather than in a menu. Blue, green, red, black: the streams the player sorts into, hung above the street like signage that outlived the council that put it there.

Storyboarding for a headset

This is where the project stopped resembling anything else I had drawn. A flat storyboard assumes a frame: you decide what the audience sees and crop away the rest. In a headset there is no frame, because the player owns the camera. You cannot compose a shot. You can only compose a place, and then earn attention inside it.

So the boards got drawn twice. First the conventional way, to settle the story beats. Then again on a curved canvas matching what a head actually sweeps through, with front and rear views laid out together and a top-down view added, so we could design what sat behind the player at each moment as deliberately as what sat in front of them.

The flat storyboard: panels in ink and yellow highlighter showing Westminster Bridge in the rain, hands holding a help-me sign, figures wading through floodwater, a face in close-up, a drowning figure underwater, and a boarded-up church doorway — The flat boards, drawn first, to settle the story beats

The VR storyboard: the same scene redrawn across three curved panels representing what a player sweeps past inside a headset, with dashed sightlines marking the centre of each view and rotation arrows beneath them — The same scene as a VR board: curved to match the sweep of a head, sightlines marked, and a top-down view added. Drawing it this way is what made the space designable rather than just illustrated.

Building the world

We analysed each scene as a full 360-degree space rather than as a view, then modelled and edited the in-game geometry against the concept design and the storyboards.

01 · Street

The primary space: a flooded high street where waste drifts past at eye level, close enough to reach for and far enough to shoot at.

Painted scene of a person swimming through churning grey floodwater thick with bottles, bags and debris, their face just above the surface — Concept for the street at its worst: the waste isn't scenery, it's the thing you are in

02 · Sewer

A darker, tighter space underneath it. Less room to aim, more to reach for, and the claustrophobia does the work a difficulty setting normally would.

Concept painting of the sewer level: a figure stands waist-deep in still water inside a brick tunnel, reaching up with a grabber to catch a floating plastic bag, with debris and faint coloured light in the distance — The sewer: waist-deep, low ceiling, and most of what's worth recovering is above your head

In play

Captured in engine.

Interaction 01: shooting

Interaction 02: recycling

Flooding street environment

Sewer environment

Demo test

Characters

Character

Two endings

The game can end either way, and that is the argument. Sort well enough and the water goes down far enough to live in. Sort badly and it doesn't. Nobody has to say the word "consequence" out loud.

Ending: death

Ending: survive

Watch it run

The full film of the game, cut from the playtest footage.

Video not loading? Watch it on YouTube ↗