My final project was created in Unity. This is a first-person narrative game in which you can move around with array keys or WASD, jump with the space key, look around with the mouse position, and switch the scenes by clicking the return key.
As I started to explore VR and AR, I wanted to create fantasy worlds and let users explore them. This ambition drives me to do this project in which the user will play one of the robots walking toward different fantasy worlds.
My points of reference include the animation Adam by the Unity team https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA, and Top 100 3D Renders Montage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBs9l8jS6Q.
In the last scene of Adam, the main character and other robots are walking behind Sebastian and Lu toward the new world. I take that scene as an inspiration and take Sebastian and Adam as a reference for my avatars.
I wanted to create a first-person narrative. I hope that the users feel they are moving with other robots. We walk through times and different fantasy worlds, and for some scenes, you will feel like you are running into different planets. They have their own creatures, cultures, religions, environments, etc. I want this experience like playing an open-world game. You play as a character and move around the world freely, and you are not alone.
In my midterm project, Katherine and I made a third-person narrative game, and the main reason we did not make it first person is that we hoped audiences feel like they were this chicken, this animal, instead of a human being. So, when I started to think about my final, I kept asking how I would make my audience feel like they were a robot. My final solution is to put the character inside a group of robots and add a robot walking sound to the character. When users move with arrow keys, the walking sound plays. When they release the key, the sound stops. So, no matter where you walk, you can hear the sound of a robot.
The first scene is a cyberpunk feeling city. In my storyline, it is where the robots were created, and they are following their leader to escape from being a slave. You can look around and move freely to wherever you want. I used the bloom effect of post-processing in this project because I really hope that I can make things look shiny. The Bloom effect gives the illusion of extremely bright light. For example, I added that in the robots' eyes, so their eyes look like a source of light.
The next scene is a load road in the space. In my story, this is a bridge that connects the Earth with other planets and the world. The robots are walking on this bridge, looking for a place to live their own life.
The following one is a deserted planet with this huge aggressive creature. They fight all the time and are hostile to us. I intentionally make them large, creating an intense feeling. I think if I make it VR, it will be much cooler.
The next scene is about a planet with rhinoceros-like creatures. It has a beautiful natural environment, and some clues show here might be a stone-age civilization. Looking at these stone statues of human faces, I want to present that they have their own rituals and religions.
The last thing I want to show is a super cool asset I found online, a fictional scientific warehouse. You can go inside and walk around. It is vast, like a world in a bigger world. Reminds me of those secret portals and caves in a world exploring the game.
Here is a video of me playing it on desktop computer.
And here is the link to the game
Because of my time and effort on this project, I learned and improved a lot. I am happy with the visual experience that my final project covered, and I am glad that I got the opportunity to try out different effects and coding in Unity. I am looking forward to exploring more about the Unity platform.
The critique was super helpful for me. I took my project as a demo of a long epic game instead of a coherent story. I would make more transitions and tell a story if I got more time. I might add dialogues and conservations between robots and make some animations during the scenes, presenting the story of how and why robots escape from the Earth.