This week we continued to work on our Unity project. I'm still trying to map out exactly what I want to make for the final project, but I've been playing with some ideas and trying to find the best way to coalesce them into something. Lately I've been interested in imaging post-human worlds and thinking about what we'll leave behind as a collective culture, mostly chicken bones as it turns out. But aside from that, we have all this media that we generate and consume. I'm interested in exploring how we chose to represent and interact with the natural world through technology, and how that changes our viewpoint of the environment that we spend less and less time entrenched in, and have continued to distance ourselves from in the face of the largest climate disaster in human history. Right now I'm exploring that media that we consume and produce, somewhat tongue-in-cheek and want to create an environment that's reflective of some of these ideas.
I wanted to create layers of earth to represent the passage of time, but embedded in those layers is decades and decades of technology that we've discarded over the years, some of which mysteriously continues to broadcast noise - images, videos, holograms, interactive animations of a world that doesn't exist anymore, of creatures that don't exist anymore. The lines of reality are blurred, and the understanding of what the world used to be is difficult to discern amongst the XR, home videos, nature documentaries, cat videos etc.
The idea is that you play as a creature in a post-human future, coming across an attraction representing a pinhole into what the world used to be. You are drawn in by a light glow of a television screen. You look up and see more glowing boxes and decide to vertically traverse the layers of history, in an attempt to get to the top and see what lies beyond the walls of rubbish. It's not going to be so much of a game as an experience, but I do hope to add some interactivity to enhance the experience trying to climb to the top.
It sounds pretty ambitious to me, but hopefully I can get a working prototype completed by the end of class. I'm interested in experimenting with different types of interactions and story telling elements - things that I don't have a lot of experience in creating.
So far I'm trying to establish the lighting and mood of the world, which still needs work but I found some assets to help me get started.
Here are some screenshots of what I've done so far. I might change it up, I still need to marinate a bit more on the ideas.
