Final Reflective Statement
Introduction
This has been said in previous blog posts, but the idea for the capstone came as a clear vision all at once after watching Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev. Immediately I was hit with this idea to create an explorable cathedral which unlocked memories and stories that clued the player in to who they are both in and out of the game. Eventually, this combined with a fascination with the Baby Boomer generation and the various emotional hangups, ways of expression, and unsettled nature that I have observed in my interactions with them as family members and friends of family. Some of this fascination comes with my political beliefs, and the interest in understanding why a lot of people in that generation are open to the rhetoric of Donald Trump, but also it comes in examining various cultural evolutions and reevaluations that are easier for someone younger, like me, to adapt to than someone older. These are the two primary areas of exploration I wanted to explore, and will continue to explore long after this process has concluded, because there are no solid answers or perfect understanding to be reached, only half-measures of conflict which can be half-resolved. This is a document of that process.
Process and Methodology
I began by assessing what I needed to learn, and what I was comfortable doing. This boiled down to comfort in 3D modelling, sound, and writing, and a major learning curve in working in a game engine, which I have never done before. Luckily, Unity has a gigantic helpful community that answers questions and produces high quality tutorials on YouTube which make an engine that does so much slightly less daunting. I especially want to recognize the tutorials produced by Imphenzia and Brackey’s: two creators who provide excellent information and tools to make a vision a reality. The first few weeks were spent following tutorials primarily produced by these two creators to a T. This led to the creation of the cube platformer, which is critical for understanding things like the Game Manager and the basics of programming in C#.
Eventually, following more specific tutorials, the time came to produce a small prototype with interactive objects and a first person perspective. This required a lot of trial and error, but led to the creation of my Room. In hindsight, I would have used my time more wisely building out a small portion of the cathedral to test with, so that less time overall would have been spent 3D modelling. However, this process was still valuable in greatly reducing the time I spent writing code, since almost all of the scripts used are recycled into the final cathedral. This process took until around week 5, which means that the final product really is the result of half the time versus the whole quarter. After that, it was weeks of 3D modelling in Blender. Personally, I love working in Blender. It scratches the itches I have with sculpture and ceramics, but is faster, more detailed, and creates digital artifacts which can be remixed and reused in all kinds of ways. Needless to say, weeks of working in Blender was not a problem for me, and let me stretch my creative legs a bit in making the cathedral look exactly how I wanted it to.
After that, there was not enough time to implement everything I wanted to implement this quarter, so there need to be some scaling down and cutting. This is why there is not much visual stimuli in the work, as the original idea to have videos or interactive objects had to be slimmed down to singular things in otherwise empty rooms. Towards the end, the methodology became “How do I convey what I need to convey as quickly as possible so that people understand what this project is and where it will go next quarter?” That question guided every decision from week 8 onward. It meant that I had to settle with 3 stories, each a bit more confrontational than the last, ultimately culminating in one player choice to complete a character arc or leave it incomplete, which the character finds more comfortable.
This cutting process, ultimately, is why it is so relieving to know that I am getting another 10 weeks to work on this. There is so much potential I was not able to actualize because of the time and learning constraints this quarter, but given another one, have a much better chance of realizing. I also know now how much it would have helped to spend the whole time working on my project, rather than a smaller portion of it. I’m excited for what is to come because those ideas and themes are things that are rich, and have only been scratched on the surface.
Content and Themes
At the outset of my project, I wanted to explore, primarily, Catholic Guilt, or the phenomenon people who are raised Catholic, like myself, experience where they are made to feel a tremendous amount of guilt for being different than others and the wrong things that they have done. This can lead one down, in my view, three major paths. One is to leave the faith and chart a new moral course. Another is to remain in the faith and carry on that tradition. The third is to unplug from any kind of faith and just live life. While my solution for my life has been the first option, countless people I know pursue the final option. I think there is a great tragedy there, as some kind of spiritual understanding is valuable, just not in hardly any of the ways Catholics convey that understanding.
What changed over the course of the project, however, is that the focus, though still containing Catholic Guilt, shifted more towards a wider understanding of comfort in one’s own body and self. Guilt is, essentially, the absence of comfort with someone’s person-hood or actions. This is what began to raise the central question of the work, “Are you a good person?” It’s a simple question but it unlocks so much about a person. Nobody has a clear answer to this, and I would not trust anybody who would answer a confident “yes.” Least of all, a lot of people do not even seem to think about the question. When I asked my dad it in order to start researching how people of his generation respond to it, he commented on how he does not really think about that. I think this is interesting because isn’t the entire point of morality and spirituality to understand and become a good person? Is that not the personal arc one follows in pretty much every major religion? How is that not something people think about? Historically, though, Catholics have forced this question onto people by using imagery and architecture. There is a reason churches are designed to be overpowering, and images of hell are so gruesome and vivid. People have ingrained in them an understanding of punishment for the things they do wrong. That style of moral teaching has fallen out of vogue since Vatican II, but it remains alive in the church today, which is often seen as a relic of another era.
On top of these ideas, there was a lot of self-exploration in the narratives of the stories. While I watched and studied and listened to a lot of people in my parent’s generation talk about things in their life and their hopes and regrets, the content of the stories themselves pull from many moments in my life. The windchimes pull from my experience regretting ways in which I would causally tease someone and then poison that relationship for the rest of my life, or simply never see them again. The Tom Jones story, though taken directly from a bit my dad literally did as an altar boy, also explores my relationship with substance use, and my abstinence from heavily drinking and smoking anything at all as being partially guilt-based in seeing it as not living up to expectations of myself or others. The divorce story pulls from friendships that I messed up and ended, and the mutually toxic relationship I had earlier in college. When the character says, “Which one of us was more cruel to the other is not for me to say,” that is entirely my view of that relationship. And so it explores these vignettes, all sort of connected to guilt of some kind in my experience or the experience of others, but handles it in a way that, from what I can gather, studying trends among people I know and follow, is aged up to an older generation.
Variations from Initial Ideas / Plans for BFA
I think I have discussed a lot of my variations already but this is a bulleted list of things that changed from the original idea
Audio instead of video
Cathedral architecture and style from traditional to stylized
Text based choices changed to one final choice
Colliding rooms and environments changed to single objects in empty spaces
Drowning yourself at the end to floating endlessly in space
Flowing water in the floor to not having that at all
A central screen in the middle with a bleeding cross on it to not having time to implement that
A focus from general Catholic Guilt to something more broad
With that in mind, I find more value in discussing what the future holds for this work both to make sure the ideas are written and not forgotten and to outline clearly my understanding of what is missing and needs to be present in the next iteration.
Exploring VR
Rich, adaptive soundscape
shorter stories or fragmenting the stories across multiple interactives
a central gameplay loop, my idea is to explore looting an area looking for these memory objects, each one filling in a piece to a puzzle which is the story or the point which needs to be made by that story. I also want to have interconnected objects, so picking up something over here affects what something else looks like over there.
better framerate and optimization
Cleaned up and better writing, quite simply, because there was not enough time to give it the multiple drafts it really needs
Return to the colliding environments and perhaps explore non-Euclidean level design
Have the video screen as a central focal point which visualizes aspects of the memories or relays follow up question
Fading in and out UI elements, it is simple but would help so much
Unexpected Discoveries
A lot of the unexpected discoveries that came with this work were ideas that perfectly helped foster the feelings I wanted to convey. For example, I knew the Cathedral needed to exist in this subjective surreal space, but did not know how it looked. Eventually, just messing around in Blender with the Decimate modifier, I came across the ability to turn high poly meshes into low poly ones easily (though this would cause some difficulty as it tends to create meshes which are self intersecting, which Unity does not like very much). This led to the idea of the metal geometric structures that invade the cathedral and corrupt it. It is a place that exists in timelessness and modernity at the same time, which is an idea that came directly from that geometric invasion. Another good example of this was how I discovered the texturing I wanted to do for that metal. Originally, I tried experimenting with noise-based rotations for the floors, so that the tiles would warp, but it did not look all that great. However, the noise texture for the metal ended up being the perfect thing for conveying that it was an otherworldly metal and not some black steel or something. Because Blender is what I was most comfortable with, and spent the most time using in this project, the design of the cathedral itself is where the “happy accidents” occurred. It was in figuring out the sun ball that illuminate it, or the spotlights on the lecterns, or the metal claws that make up the upper archways, or the giant pipe in the middle. All of these things were never planned, but improvised ideas that make the space dynamic and interesting to explore.
Statement of Praxis
From the onset of this project, I knew it had to be a game. The feeling of guilt is an interactive one. You can only feel guilt for things you feel like you have done, and so the audience needed to embody the character in order to feel the things the character is supposed to feel. There is, I think, too much disconnect in the current state of the work between the actions described in the stories and the player’s actions. In the interaction I want to have more participation with what the character regrets doing in his life, and this will be heightened by VR in the future, as you move your real body to do real things. For example, the player may have to throw a bowling ball at “Botches and Belts’” head in order to trigger the memory about making fun of him too much. Participation in these memories will trigger more guilt by association and align the praxis of the piece more closely.
As it exists in its current iteration, however, the praxis is limited to the first person perspective and the choice made by the player. I don’t believe that art should know what the right answer is to anything, especially something messy and complicated like morality. I find that when art tries to preach something to another person, it comes off as looking corny and encourages a lot of people to immediately write it off. That is why it was so critical to have a choice at the end of the work to give yourself the stigmata or not. I don’t want to claim to know what the best answer is to the regrets that we have in our lives, so I would rather offer two bad solutions, either selfish ignoring or self harm. If people don’t like either option and come up with a synthesis between the two that is actually a healthy way of dealing with guilt, they are more likely to internalize that message than they ever would be if I told them what to do. Only a game or interactive story of some kind can offer that kind of dialectical approach to decision-making, and that is what I hope to achieve with the final version of the work.