Entry 4: Functionality

What I did this week (Feb 1, 2021 - Feb 9, 2021)

This update comes a little late, as I had a very busy weekend and wanted to get a bit further along before posting another real update. These past few days, I have been focused primarily on finishing the prototype room, and setting out plans for the next phase of production, the real thing. Let’s start with the prototype room. Carrying on from the room I created in Blender last week, I was able to bake all the textures, normals, and animations, and port the assets into Unity. Once there, I was able to figure out how to rebuild the materials, since those do not transfer so nicely, and separate out the animations so that they can work and be interfaced with. Then, I used an external script that came with the functionality to highlight interactable objects, and coded it (with the help of YouTube tutorials) to function properly with my first person camera looking at them. Essentially, the big coding challenge of the week was mastering raycasting. Pressing ‘E’ on highlighted objects triggers their functionality, from playing a video, to turning on and off a fan, to opening and closing the drawers, as can be seen in the video documentation. The video I used was an old video art project I made back during the beginning of the pandemic, and I chose it because it had a lot of stereo panning, which I discovered needs to be separated out into different audio tracks for Unity to recognize it. So that’s good to know for future reference.

The second half of what I did this week was plan for the final project. This involved a lot of thinking, sketching and organizing. Looking back at an old video project of mine, I realized that artwork has a very similar plot to this one, and so I began thinking about the variations and expansions on that work that could be applied here, based on what I like and don’t like about that work. (linked below). While I am changing the protagonist, who you play as, a bit from that video, making him much older and blending his memories and experiences (which are being drawn from stories and imaginings based on home movies and stories from my parents and family) with my own. Each memory segment, I decided, would be placed in different times of life, at different ages, the younger end focusing on my experiences, and the older end on others. Older characters are rarely explored in media, I find, especially in games which have been rightly critiqued for always having a young adult white male protagonists with a bit of stubble. I think oscillating between my own experiences and reflections on my own aging, and what I can glean on others will make for an interesting writing challenge in the weeks ahead. Also looking to that video, I decided to recast my friend Jack, who stars in it, to do voiceover for this work. Similar to these collisions of memories, I altered my vision of the cathedral to be collisions of memories in that space, with rooms colliding into rooms and arches leading to different spaces entirely. Not only is this more of a heightened surrealism, it matches with my approach to the character. How this will look is reflected (admittedly in a difficult to read way) in the sketches.

Reflections on the Week

Not much of my perspective of where I am progress-wise is different from last week. I still feel behind where I need to be. However, with the room prototype pretty much done, and knowing that most of that code can be directly copied into the final project, I feel good knowing that a lot of it is asset creation, and not too much fiddling with the engine is left, which is good because creating assets is what I am much more comfortable doing. I think the idea generation time that I spent sketching and planning were the most valuable asset of the week, even though they did not do much to move the progress bar along. Really getting some clearer pictures of what I was thinking about down on the paper allowed me to have a much clearer vision of what the next few weeks will look like producing it, which makes me feel less behind. My other major reflection on the week is that I need to be doing more research for inspirational materials I can pull from to inspire ideas. This will be clearer in the shorter “This Week’s Inspirations” sections but I’ve been so wrapped up in getting this prototype room working that I haven’t had much time to step back and consume media that might find its way into the work. This is a valuable part of the process, just as much as making the thing is, to ensure the product is original and capable of speaking a language people will understand, because previous works have helped pave the way for that language. However, I have not been doing too much of that. In the coming weeks I’ll be sure to dedicate time to simply researching VR works, art games, and reading poetry or fictional works that inspire the creation of the character, since scripting the audio experiences is around the corner.

This week’s Inspirations

This week, much of what is “inspiring” me is music. While working, I have been listening to a lot of different stuff, and trying to piece together various musical works that create a similar sonic identity to the artwork I am trying to create, which will be helpful later on to draw from. I also get myself into the place of thinking about the work after listening to songs that brought the ideas in the first place. So in lieu of something more relevant this week, here are a couple of songs from the Capstone Reference playlist I have been creating and why they are inspirational to me, or what specific idea I have for the project that the song inspires.

• La Strada - Nino Rota

  • I was just casually listening to this song when an idea came to mind of how I could end this experience. I’ve had the idea of the player self inflicting the stigmata for a while, and when they do that, I think it might be interesting to have their body disappear, and then have the lighting change, and gravity change, having the various objects strewn about the cathedral start to rise and spin in a low gravity environment. While that happens, using a song that sounds much like this as you sort of glide through this area before fading to white.

• I Feel Like the Mother of the World - Smog

  • I think much of this song’s lyrical content is going into my work. The way Callahan effortlessly blends the divine with the domestic, especially in the music video, juxtaposing the lyrics about authority and its shortcomings with a maid observing the world burning around her. It brings all of the lofty ideas of questioning the feeling of having some authority over the world to a very comfortable, familiar place. It’s truly a brilliant song, and achieves many of the same philosophical goals and relationships I am looking to achieve, just in a different medium.

• Leonard’s Lake - Lil Ugly Mane

  • An interlude on his incredibly harrowing and spiraling album Oblivion Access this interlude track offers a break from his paranoid obsessions that fill much of the lyrical content of the record in favor of the sonic equivalent of massive, overpowering, space. Opening with a cavalcade of harsh metallic squeaking sounds and ending with this huge echoey sample (Didn’t it Rain by Norfolk Jazz & Jubilee Quartet) falling under control to the beat and bass, the trajectory of the track mirror’s Mane’s mental trajectory on the record, from manic to controlled in his thoughts. He slowly goes from being confronted with the harsh realities of today to finding some sort of place in them, and this trajectory is exactly how I want the player to feel as they explore my work. At first overwhelmed by the experience, but finding a comfort in it which leads them to accept the ending options.

• Law - Little Kid

  • I’ve been mentioning this band since day 1, because I love the way their songs, like the Smog song above, blend domesticity and divine spirituality. This song, seeming to cover the first touch of lover, and that overwhelming feeling felt in the body when that happens, which you ultimately have to surrender to, and how that relates divine contemplation, and surrendering to that powerlessness. This could quite literally be a moment I recreate as one the ‘memories’ the player has to listen to and encounter. It’s something that is pretty universal, but brought into a greater understanding with that comparison to the divine. It could be argued to be a divine moment in and of itself.

• Anything You Sow - William Onyeabor

  • I find it really difficult to explain what it is about Onyeabor’s music, which is incredibly simple both musically and lyrically, that appeals to me so much. Of course, some of music is just incredibly catchy, but his perspective is one that, much like John Maus’ music, feels intentionally simplified to amplify a larger message. Onyeabor doesn’t mince words here. “If you sow hatred / expect hatred to be your harvest / my son,” is about as clear as you can get. But that matches with the Casio synths and nostalgic sound of the song. It feels like an old adage you heard as a child and forgot over the years. I think it can be easy to over-complicate things, but the whole focus on domesticity and how it relates to spiritual concepts is to simplify those concepts, so William is always a welcome example of that.