Having taken the feedback from my play testers, I continued to work on the project by implementing some of their feedback. The first thing I did, was make a brief control display in the bottom left corner. I wrote some code so that the text would fade after a set amount of time so it wouldn’t take away from the users attention on the world changing.
I then proceeded to look into potentially having the environment become a forest but found quickly with some testing on using grass textures that it would look rather unusual. I want the experience to feel seamless, and evolving, with the ending transforming the original place. But the key part is communicating my feelings about the world around me, rather than reinventing it. I looked on sketchlab to find some building assets that could fill in the template of the buildings around the user, and found an excellent set of buildings by user Burunduk. These buildings are not only low poly count, so it’ll be optimized for a low-spec computer experience, but they are all aesthetically identical, allowing the transformation of the environment to be gradual and still align with the original forms. I moved the buildings into unity, added a mesh collider to each building to prevent the user falling through the ground and tested out how the buildings would look without colour. I quickly found that the buildings without colour, could still communicate what I want, but contain just a bit too much detail for it to be a transformative experience. I found an excellent compromise after experimenting with the code and settled on the solution of having the buildings replace the original white form that stands in its place.
This keeps in with the vision I have for the expression of my mind learning to see the world around me for what it is, while also allowing the environment to constantly evolve as the user interacts with the blocks. I also decided to remove the blocks once the user jumps/steps on it, as this adds to the effect of the dream world becoming reality. That the parts or “blocks” of life have quite literally been overcome, and as a result, brought the world one step closer to being unified. To help finalize this concept I also settled on having one specific block transform the ground to a seamless black, akin to a road, so that by the end of the experience, the user can walk around the city and recognize just how different it was because of their specific actions.
In terms of music, I experimented using various copyrighted songs that I like in order to get a feel for how their general rhythm could change the environment, and ultimately settled on a ambient/low-fi experience. I felt that, in providing an experience that is originally bleak, but evolving, that having a song that could let the user feel reflective would be most effective. I looked around on various music platforms, and settled on “Dreamer by Hazy”, which as a song, effectively communicates that evolving experience, while also not being too overwhelming to drown out the visual experience. I provided this finalized version of the experience to the two friends who tested my original demo, and they found it significantly more effective than the basic colour transformation. In having completed my experience, I feel extremely satisfied in having met my goal, of turning my own life experience, and overcoming my own personal hardships in life, into an interactive experience where a user can realize the significance of their actions and draw parallels between overcoming the ‘blocks of life’ to see the world around them in a brighter light. I also decided to create a custom icon based on the experience. Since the experience is about stepping on cubes, I thought it’d be a nice touch to make the icon also cube related, so that the user can get a preview just by looking at the icon after a download.
Lighting Up Your week 