The Last Survey: A Live Play Through

Discover the interactive story of a geologist averting a climate catastrophe through real-time choices and live musical accompaniment.

The Last Survey is an interactive narrative video game that explores a speculative future where the metals we use for electronics and green technology are in sudden short supply. You play as a contracted geologist who’s recently completed a survey for a global mining corporation and have returned to deliver the dire news of your research to the company’s CEO. The Last Survey asks players to make pivotal choices in order to steer the conversation toward progressive action, encouraging your employer to reconsider the ecological ramifications of depleting the earth’s minerals and metals.

The game is divided into four chapters and is illustrated with hundreds of hand-drawn digital, graphite, and charcoal animations. Based on player choices the narrative, animations, and dynamic soundtrack composed by the duo Big Dog Little Dog will vary. But players must be cautious, for their choices might anger their employer and lead to a premature end to your compelling arguments.

For this Kickstarter campaign, I want to bring The Last Survey into a cinema in New York and invite individuals new to  experimental video games to play and engage with the game . This live play through will feature a voting platform for mobile devices, allowing audience members to actively participate in the main character’s decision making and dialog options.

With your help, I can bring this project to life, commission my collaborators, and hopefully perform the project at future locations across the United States. Come join us!

Your contribution will directly support commissioning my collaborators, Big Dog Little Dog, to create a brand new score for The Last Survey. In addition to helping bring their brilliant compositions to the game, your contribution will also provide financial support to inviting them to perform live as I play The Last Survey at an event scheduled for June 26th, 2019. This event will serve as a culmination of my time as Creator-in-Residence at Kickstarter HQ, and will be held in their wonderful theater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Your contributions will also help document the event with the collaborative team Intrinsic Grey Productions. Their work documenting, video-taping, and helping produce live performance events and contemporary art exhibitions is unparalleled. With their vision, documentation of performing The Last Survey will help bring the projects to new venues, festivals, and other opportunities.

One of the challenges of this project is the physical labor of illustrating all of the animation cels one frame at a time. Though I’ve enjoyed this process very much, it’s time consuming and might potentially delay my full production timeline and ability to offer more options for framed print rewards. However, I’ve already completed more than half of the animations, and I’m on pace to finish the entire project by fall 2019. Another hurdle might come from finding more venues to show this work, but I’m hoping that a successful campaign, along with strong documentation of the performance, will provide lots of great opportunities for future events.