What I did this week (Jan 17, 2021 - Jan 24, 2021)

This week I heavily focused on Unity tutorials and learning the skills I will need to know for the development of my capstone. Specifically, the introductory tutorials from Imphenzia on YouTube were incredibly useful for introducing the Unity interface and writing my first scripts in C#. All in all, I was able to produce a very basic, half-functioning platformer by following his tutorials. In the game, you control a cube that can collect coins that give it a super jump, bounce on some spring platforms, and break some blocks like Mario. While the experience I intend to craft will not be a platformer, the skills of basic scripting, program structure, and interface navigation are all present in this early platformer.

After getting this platformer working, I moved on to this tutorial which focuses on how to program movement and camera control in a first person game. While I want to make my project in VR, I have had difficulties with Unity on Windows, which is required to access VR drivers for the headset I have (a Valve Index). Essentially, Unity will not install correctly and keeps throwing Win32 exception errors which makes the scripts not work. It seems like the Unity library is just not installing properly no matter what I do, and after checking for solutions online, nothing seems to work. While I figure out how to fix that problem, I have been developing on the Mac side of my machine. If I cannot get VR working, I will make it as a flat screen first person experience, hence why I am learning how to create that now. Below is footage of what I have got so far, which is not much. On top of these Unity tutorials, I also have been studying what steps are necessary for importing from Blender into Unity, but I do not have any video recorded of that process yet.

Progress Reflection

I think overall, the biggest surprise has been how easy Unity is to pick up. Maybe that is the credit of the people who make the tutorials I have been watching, or maybe that is how similar C# is to Java and Processing. Either way, things have felt like they have come together to help me really process through the learning curve quickly. All of my troubles have been in the aforementioned installation issues with Unity on my Windows dual-boot, but I intend on talking to some professors and asking online for solutions to that problem. I also have been slowly adjusting my idea for the time frame of capstone (opting into audio for now instead of video, which I would intend to do next quarter) thinking a lot about how I want it to conclude, either with you having to stab your hands to inflict the wounds of Jesus, drowning yourself in baptismal water, or simply leaving the cathedral, or offering the choice of all three. I also have been thinking about how I want the cathedral to look, in terms of both architectural style and surreal elements added to it. Currently, those ideas are a gothic style, and perhaps creating a starry particle system that floats around the player, along with the flooding water and spot lights through the fog.

I think over the next week I need to get enough of the Unity background ready to start actually developing the real thing and modelling it.

Learning a lot of the technical background necessary to accomplish this project is a bit tedious, as it requires a lot of struggle and note taking to get a basic understanding of how to create what I want to create. However, this tutorial week has been rewarding at the same time. At the end of one of Imphenzia’s tutorials, he mentions how a lot of learning Unity is simply asking the question, “Can I do ____?” and so far that seems to be true. The spring platforms in my platformer are a perfect example of this. I was looking at how the jump was done with the physics engine, and I saw how a reflect could be done in a Breakout clone, and was able to combine those concepts into those platforms. Simply by asking, “Oh, could I make the grass-looking blocks bouncy?” led me into a creative problem and solution that cemented a lot of knowledge on interfacing with Unity’s physics engine in the FixedUpdate() loop. Starting general has been important just for figuring out how it works and what is possible, but now I think the most important thing for staying on track is narrowing my focus into specific lessons directly applicable to my project.

Inspiration and Research

When writing my project proposal this week for class, I needed to do some basic investigation into Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling as it explores many of the same concepts I am interested in for this project, such as the guilt aspects of faith, and the motivation to commit illogical or even contradictory acts in the name of faith. So, I read part of this Master’s Thesis which summarizes and explores Kierkegaard’s work in a succinct and academic way. I intend to explore the real thing, but for time’s sake in writing the proposal, the summary had to do. In the thesis, Pulliam separates Kierkegaard’s definitions of faith into “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness B,” saying, “Religiousness A is when the individual senses great guilt in the presence of God and has a strong sense of God’s immanence. […] Faith in Religiousness B is transcendent, taking its start from the paradox of Jesus Christ (the God-man) being both God and man, both infinite and finite. One who come to faith goes through a ‘paradigm shift,’ shifting out of a ‘human understanding.’” This helps create a framework for understanding my own approach to the project because that “Religiousness A” is sort of the exact feeling I hope to achieve in the audience. By showing them situations which they may or may not personally relate to, but are the embodied character’s experience, the guilt in the presence of the divine should make itself clear.

Artist Bio

This week, I want to focus on the chief inspirational creator for my project, Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a Soviet filmmaker born in 1932 (d. 1986) perhaps most well known for surreal, dream-like visuals, metaphysical themes, and slow pacing to his films. Many of his films are well over two hours long, and often deal with heavy spiritual and emotional themes. This is also reflected in his writings about both his work, and the arts in general. In his book Sculpting in Time, he posits that good art should present the viewers with a trial which, when they pass through it, should prepare them more fully for their own death. Much in the same way the spiritual life often features one passing through some sort of trial to purify themselves for the kingdom of Heaven (it should be mentioned that Tarkovsky was very Christian) art should follow that same process with its manipulation of our spirits and emotions. One of his films that especially embodies this theme is Andrei Rublev (1966) which is a biographical film about the painter by the same name, and his struggle to carry out a cathedral project due to his own spiritual disconnection and his worries about creating work that has an authority over people. Eventually, by watching a child organize an entire town in a bell-casting project, he discovers that he does not need to be entirely sure to still paint, with the end of the film, which had been black and white up until this point, a full color exploration of the paintings Rublev created.

When I first watched this section of the film, with the camera exploring the painting with haunting beauty, the idea for my capstone project hit all at once. I find that often it is emotional moments that swell up in artworks that can inspire things in my own. This moment here just alters my appreciation of paintings that I would normally look less closely at by using the music and the close shots to highlights aspects of the paintings. Applying this model to a life, you end with something similar to my capstone idea. My idea does differ from Tarktovsky’s, however, in a major way. Notably, Tarkovsky was creating the film from a pro-Christianity angle. My work, on the other hand, approaches it from a conflicted position of both appreciating an upbringing which focuses on a set of stories to draw moral conclusions from, while also carrying the guilt and anxiety of leaving that religion when realizing some of those moral conclusions are wrong. In my work, I hope to impart that conflict onto the viewer, which I think is why having multiple ending choices is valuable, as “what to do” in that conflicted situation is not something I feel confident in prescribing, even in an artistic surrealist sense. All I feel confident in offering is logical conclusions, while remaining open to feedback in testing to other options to resolve that conflict.