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Country
Absurdity
Freedom

Showreel

Game Concept

King of the Assembly Line is an attempt to create a unique narrative using a game.
“Assembly line youth” is a group born under the grand history of China's urbanization. They refer to the rural youths who dropped out of school and migrated into the city to work in factories during the wave of urbanization. They often engage in simple and repetitive factory labor for no less than ten hours a day, living in rented houses or group dormitories.
Being in the city, but isolated from actual urban life, they are like peacocks that can never fly out of the factories. This is a narrative experience highlighting “conflict”: the assembly line youth’s unconscious rebellion against a world that denies their existence. This "rebellion" is more like a sense of conflict between the shiny, wild, free, innocent, and sensitive elements in them and the grey, absurd reality of their situation.
They are not merely steel screws of a giant machine. They are full of the wildest imaginations of life.

CONFLICT

​Introduction Video

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"The Pig"

The pig is very special imagery in many movies and literary works. For me, pigs also have a special meaning.
The pig is a rural pig, who will be free to roam, eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, and fall in love when spring comes.
The pig is a rural pig, but one day it wants to dance in the park in the city.

The pig is the primitive freedom, the pig is the naive fantasy, the pig is the instinctive intuition, the pig is the constant existence in the fragmentation and change, the pig is the most primitive desire in the absurdity and turmoil.
The Assembly Youth come to the city to look for their dreams, to look for true love, to look for themselves.

It is like coming to the city to look for pigs.

Game Visual

Storyboard

1. Long hours of work every day.

2. Mind wandering……

3. This is the only time I feel alive.

4. And we all do……

We are all different.

5. Dreams break very easily.

6. And we all do……

​We are all the same.

Mechanism

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  • Repetitive interaction behavior

Integrating narrative and core gameplay

In this game, players must repeat tedious tasks resembling working on an assembly line. This action comes from the extraction of repetitive work of assembly line workers.

Immerse in, wander out.

Yet, as the scenes progress, the spiritual world of a troubled soul slowly unfolds. Players are invited on a journey where their consciousness gets gradually “extracted” and merged into the story.

  • Two line narrative and gameplay

Repetitive Labor

Wildest Fantasy

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  • Passing rate

The pass rate gives assembly line workers a score for their work and measures whether the player is a competent assembly line worker.
On the surface, the pass rate looks like a measure of the proportion of players making a passable product.
But that's not how it's actually calculated - the pass rate is derived by calculating the proportion of time players spend working on the assembly line and touring the room.

Different Endings

Always Working

Passing Rate > 80%

At this time, you start to see yourself as a "human" in the mirror, and start to look at yourself, or look at yourself in confusion, not knowing yourself.
What does this "pass rate" really mean? Is it the passing rate of the product? Or is it the basis on which I, as a human being, am judged to be qualified?

The rankings are a feeble attempt to show "personal" attributes.

Thousands of unique selves, seeing the sky with fantasy, but still trapped under glass.

Wandering

Passing Rate < 40%

Healed oneself with fantasy.
Or, escaping and numbing the absurdity of life with fantasy, imagination makes life bearable.
It's like seeing a vast and boundless sky, but rushing up to it and hitting a wall, which turns out to be just a glass wall reflecting the sky.
Can one just live in the imagination all the time?

Dance alone in their imagination.

Working + Wandering

40% < Passing Rate <80%

Reconcile with reality, fill and smooth the cracks and collapses of reality with fantasy, so that you can live with hope in a self-consistent way; after all, in the imagination, you can still dance alone.
Or, perhaps in a way, become a more advanced perpetual motion machine.

We are not fundamentally different,
the difference lies in
the way we imagine the world

Narrative Design

Chapter 01

I wish I can be a peacock. Fly over the factory walls.

Cheap and poor-quality red plastic chairs are very common in rural and underdeveloped areas of China.

I rented a small room in the city village at that time.
350 a month.
It was small, it was my bedroom.
But the city was my living room.

At that time, you could still drive a motorcycle in Guangzhou.
We liked to go out for a ride.
The motorcycle flew over the Shibai Bridge.
And you held my waist tightly.

The unresolved solitude in the crowd.

The assembly lines in the small workshops are very rudimentary

For the assembly line youth in the urban village, saving money to buy the next small motorcycle is the courage to date girls.
In the day-to-day labor, in the southern heat of summer, occasionally in the cool evening with the girl for a ride, is the rare romance in their lives.

Urban villages: villages that appear on both the outskirts and the downtown segments of major Chinese cities. They are commonly inhabited by the poor and transient.

This plastic sheeting is cheap and strong, often used to build a bandage shade, or used to make luggage bags.

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I've seen a lot of shit.
But the most beautiful scenery.
I've never seen it so far.

Is the most beautiful scenery only for the rich?

Inferiority to the city because of poverty.

Chapter 02

Art. Scrap. Freedom. Sewer. Love. STD. Fantasy. 

Such small ads as "cure for sexually transmitted diseases" have gradually receded from the poles of big cities over the years, but can still be seen in some rural or urban villages.

Yet aspiring for the most romantic love.

There are roses here,
let's dance.
It's now or never.
I would love, love, love to kiss your face.

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Shamate - style wall spray paint.

Shamate is Pronounced from the English word "smart". Shamate was a phenomenon that swept across China in the mid-2000s that attracted hundreds of thousands of young, usually rural population. The Shamate huddled in “families” defined by outrageous hairstyles, clothing, and makeup. Yet, behind the neon green hairstyles was a generation’s longing for recognition.

But fate is really, really unfair.

The world of rich people is really colored, isn't it?

Various kinds of spray-painted words can be seen everywhere in the urban village.

The texts on the left are:

- Recruit.

​- Selling scrap.

- Promote production, promote work.

- Take away your love.

- Fall in love, people who will be separated one day.

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The most chaotic life,
The purest ideal.

Will there be true love and freedom
among the junk and debts.

Small ads mostly refer to illegally printed, distributed, posted, and sprayed advertisements. Posted and sprayed on poles, walls, and even residential building walkways, a variety of small ads, known as "psoriasis", the content of which there are many suspected of illegal crimes, such as recruitment fraud, false medical advertising, prostitution, ecstasy drugs, guns, aphrodisiacs, etc.

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Chapter 03

We live in our imagination.

We imagine in our lives.

Wu Tiao Ren is a veteran group of folk-rockers from south China’s Guangdong province.

The main members of this band are exactly factory workers who live in urban villages, and are also used to sell pirated books and Dakou for a living.

The band’s frontman, Xu Renke, said he fell in love with the accordion after watching a film by an Eastern European director, Aki Kaurismäki, and the accordion eventually became the soul of Wu Tiao Ren.

Aki Kaurismäki's film is also filled with absurdly fragmented reality and the purest dreams.

Dakou: the import of illegal, cut CDs from the west (Dakou CDs) in the mid-1990s marked the revitalization of Chinese rock culture.

I see cracks in life.

We face collapse,
we are in a difficult situation,
life becomes lonely again and thus noble.

Floating in an infinite universe.
Looking deeper into daily life,
You will find it very psychedelic, disorienting,
and it is incredible.

Can I save myself?

In the Movie The Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismaki. Mr. M and a group of people living in straitened circumstances, playing music and singing in the dark of the night, holding concerts in the containers they lived in.

Southern vulgar and noisy dance halls, skating rinks, and pool halls, are their few entertainment venues,

Inside the dance halls of the South,
only headaches are cured, not dreams.

Redemption, dignity, fantasy.

The maneki-neko is a common figurine that is often believed to bring good money to the owner. They are popular in southern China, often displayed in stores and restaurants in urban villages.

Man is a solitary note in a piece of vast music.
Let me keep my soul sober and my shirt clean.

In the urban villages of the south, Dakou (or Cut-out) cassettes and CDs and street vendor literature, often pirated books, used to be the major, and often only spiritual world for people.

There are novels about secret affairs, sex scandals, or losers' counterattacks. 

There might also be Slavoj Žižek' books, sometimes.

Profoundness

We have been able to use technology to reach outer space,
but we still cannot reach the universe inside a person.

Xiao Wu by Zhangke JiaThe

Great Buddha+ by Xinyao Huang

The Man Without a Past <Mies vailla menneisyyttä> by Aki Kaurismäki

Black Cat, White Cat <Црна мачка, бели мачор> by Emir Kusturiča

Super 8 Stories by Emir Kusturiča

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We are not fundamentally different.

The differences lie in the way we imagine the world.

Citation
Movies:

Xiao Wu by Zhangke Jia
The Great Buddha+ by Xinyao Huang
The Man Without a Past <Mies vailla menneisyyttä> by Aki Kaurismäki
Black Cat, White Cat <Црна мачка, бели мачор> by Emir Kusturiča
Super 8 Stories by Emir Kusturiča

Music
《城市找猪》by WU TIAO REN
《匈奴王》by WU TIAO REN
《食醉狗》by WU TIAO REN
《一些风景》by WU TIAO REN
《梦想化工厂》by WU TIAO REN
《Talijanska》by Goran Bregovic
《Kustino Oro》by Goran Bregovic

《Tango》by Goran Bregovic
《我希望在你的爱情里》by Rose Zhang

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