Mind Dimension

The mind is a landscape and can be traversed as such. This week I created a surrealist game experience that attempts to express the other worldly nature of the human mind. I created a traditional virtual terrain and began to fill it with objects and sounds from inside my own imagination. I added animated whales that act as deities swimming above the environment in space and there are earns located throughout the landscape that are guarded by butterflies. The earns act as vantage points throughout the map more so than checkpoints and the animated butterflies surrounding the earns act as beacons for the player to locate. I recorded a soundscape for the game with a guitar and a moogerfooger delay to add to the surrealist theme and I even recorded some clips to use as sound fx for the player movement. I ended up only using my own recording for the jump action since the “crunch” “cronch” spoken sound fx got old very quick when playing. I am also working on a driving game but I have a lot of work still on that so I will save that for another post.

I am enjoying making these virtual worlds but I did run into quite a few script problems that seem to be related to assets that I was downloading. At one point I was in a loop of correcting errors by downloading missing assets from the unity store but when I would download the assets it would cause script errors with the fps controller. I finally got my script corrected by going through each line and seeing why the errors were there. I also found that RJ’s second method of updating the fps script worked while the first method left the errors in my code. After fixing the script and re installing the problematic assets everything started to work and I was able to focus on creating the environment.

I enjoy the process of creating scores for these kinds of experiences. For me sound is crucial for adding the immersive element to the gaming experience. Sound is often an indicator of how we as viewers/players should be feeling and I wanted to generate a soundscape that was eerie yet pleasing to listen to.

I’m looking forward to seeing how others navigate the landscape and what changes I can make to enhance the immersive aspect of the experience. Now that I am getting the basics of environment generation down I want to focus on game play mechanics next. Having objects that change and morph over time is interesting to me and I also want to learn how to make more complicated sound triggers either by object or by location. I think crafting a surrealist task list might be a lot of fun for the player.