Siete Colores / Argentina / Transmedia place storytelling

A year of photographs became a road through the mountains.

Siete Colores connects a photographic field journal of a year in Argentina with an interactive horseback journey through Salta and Jujuy. The project explores how a lived archive can become a digital place without reducing the landscape to a backdrop or the experience to a conventional game.

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SaltaJujuy

The land is the main character.

linked works

A photographic field journal and a browser-based 3D journey share one place-based story.

storyworld scenes

The game turns the photographic archive into a prologue-to-epilogue route across the landscape.

prototype tracks

Three.js, Unity, and Godot explored how the same world behaves across web and native engines.

central verb

Ride. The movement through the mountains matters more than combat, scores, or collectibles.

The premise

A place can be documented faithfully and still invite interpretation.

The first half of the project is a field journal. Its value comes from sequence, duration, and having actually lived the year it records. Photographs are allowed to hold attention slowly instead of being flattened into a feed or travel-content grid.

The second half asks what happens when those observations become a navigable world. Rather than reproducing every photograph literally, Siete Colores translates the archive into terrain, weather, color, clothing, movement, and conversation. The digital landscape becomes an interpretation with a visible documentary source.

The experience model

Look slowly. Cross the threshold. Ride toward the cerro.

01Enter through lived photographs
The field journal sequences a year in Argentina as a slow visual record, preserving changes in place, light, altitude, and daily life.
02Cross from document into interpretation
Locations, colors, clothing, and atmosphere from the archive become material for an explorable digital landscape.
03Travel with Luna
The player walks or rides through the Quebrada, meets people, and learns through conversation rather than a conventional mission system.
04Arrive carrying the mountain's memory
The journey culminates at Cerro de los Siete Colores, making arrival and attention the reward.

Transmedia structure

Let the photographs and the game remain complete on their own.

The journal is documentary evidence. The game is an interpretation. Combining them into one overloaded interface would weaken both, so each work keeps its own rhythm while explicit links reveal how one informed the other.

The journal preserves sequence instead of becoming a gallery grid
The game can be entered directly as an atmospheric experience
Shared places create a relationship without forcing one format to imitate the other

Core interaction

Treat the ride as the product, not transportation between content.

A horseback journey succeeds or fails through weight, acceleration, gait changes, terrain response, and camera movement. Dialogue and scenery support that feeling, but they cannot compensate for a horse that feels detached from the ground.

Walking and riding create two different scales of attention
Luna is designed as a companion with a recognizable silhouette
The journey avoids combat and artificial fail states

Visual direction

Use the mountain's real mineral palette as the design system.

Cerro de los Siete Colores already looks almost unreal. Beige, lavender, terracotta, green, brown, ochre, and cream become terrain bands, clothing, interface accents, and character cues. Stylization keeps the world legible and avoids chasing generic photorealism.

Strong color blocks keep characters readable at a distance
Sculpted forms and restrained post-processing support atmosphere
The landscape remains the visual protagonist

Cultural care

Ground the work in specific places, practices, and relationships.

Salta and Jujuy are not an interchangeable desert backdrop. Place names, local craft, gaucho references, Andean mythology, and Indigenous presence require specificity and restraint. The design avoids turning the region into vague exotic scenery.

Mythology appears through dialogue and ritual, not boss fights
People are presented as keepers of knowledge, not decorative quest markers
The tone stays warm, patient, and free of tourist-kitsch

Technical exploration

Prototype broadly, then focus where access is strongest.

Web, Unity, and Godot versions made it possible to compare rendering, controls, mobile input, and production workflows. The strategic value is in the experience, not maintaining three parallel products, so the browser build is the clearest public focus.

Three.js gives the project a no-install entry point
Unity and Godot remain useful research and native-production tracks
One shared design document keeps characters and scenes aligned

What remains

The prototypes proved the world. The next work is depth, focus, and feel.

Siete Colores already contains the core relationship between archive and landscape, a complete story route, character systems, riding, dialogue, cinematic scenes, and mobile-control experiments. The strongest next step is to concentrate effort on the public browser version and refine the moments that make a quiet journey memorable.

Next product decisions

Refine acceleration, gait transitions, terrain response, and camera lag
Connect individual photographs directly to corresponding places in the game
Add surface-aware hoof sounds, wind, silence, and a focused photo mode
Keep Unity and Godot as documented R&D rather than parallel public products

HAAM's role

One lived archive, one interaction system, several ways to enter.

Photography, creative direction, interaction design, and prototyping

HAAM shaped the photographic sequence, transmedia concept, world and character direction, browser-based Three.js experience, dialogue and traversal systems, and comparative Unity and Godot prototypes. The work is an ongoing experiment in turning personal observation into a place other people can spend time inside.

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