For Project #1, I was thinking of re-creating a scene from the film Escape Room since it reminded me of my experience with my friend at the escape room, but I just realized that the idea was already taken by Yiran, so I changed my mind. Last semester for Mashups, I gathered the Air Quality data of my home city during the past 5 years and created an online simulation of how it feels going out on a specific day with a certain level of air pollution. Here is the link to my project: http://yg1262.nyuad.im/airqualitysimulation/simulation.html
My idea for Project #1 is to build upon the aforementioned project and make a game that teaches players how their life choices influence the Air Quality. The environment I will be creating is a crossroad of a city, and players can look around at see how the air quality is. Then by making several choices (such as whether taking cabs or walking to work), players can see how their choices affects the air quality on a larger scale.
After talking to Sarah, I realized that my understanding for our project one was not accurate. Instead of having the possibility to interact with the scene, we, as represented by the camera, will just be standing still at some point within the scene and looking around. Thus, rather than designing the interactive experience in my scene, I should just be focusing on the layout of the environment.
During this winter break, I watched a Chinese Sci-fi movie called The Wandering Earth. The scene looked like below. The whole story was based in 2075, where the Sun is gradually dying out. The people of Earth are trying to build giant thrusters to move the planet out of orbit and sail to a new star system. I was really impressed by this movie, not only because this is the first legit science fiction movie produced by China, but also because its theme which differs from most Sci-fi movie. I do not want to ruin it, so I will stop talking about the details.
So I decided to create a apocalyptic scene for my first project, which kind of connects with my original idea about air quality simulation: if we keep polluting our nature, we will end up entering apocalypse without any uncontrollable factors (say, the sun dying out). However, rather than a recreation of what’s currently happening on the planet, a preview of the future which human beings might witness within the next century should serve as a more effective warning to trigger concerns about our environment.
After deciding the theme of the project, I started to search for sets of skybox materials online that resembles the scene in The Wandering Earth – abandoned city covered in snow. At first, I used “abandoned city” as the key word, because I thought I could always change the color tone and brightness of the image. So I found the following material and modified it a bit.
Then I started to think, what I should add to my environment. Where should the user be, when they entered the apocalypse?Or put it in an extremely pessimistic way, if I come to the end of the world, which place do I want to see before I die? A place that brought me happiness, for sure. A place that I usually went to. A place that could trigger my memories. Thus, I decided to put the user at the center of a community park. When I was a kid and before I entered middle school, I went out for a walk everyday with my mom after dinner. There is this community park we usually went to where I called “home”, because the first time I went there (when I was three or four I think), I was reluctant to leave and said to my mom the park is where my home is. Although we moved to a new community when I entered middle school, my mom and I still joked about that whenever we passed by the park.
So, I started to look for pre-fabs online that could make up an abandoned park, and I found the package: “Apocalyptic City 2”.
As you can see, Apocalyptic City 2 has assets for a video game of zombies, and after adding the assets to my scene with the background of an abandoned city, it looked just like a city invaded by zombies, which differed from my original idea. All the assets somewhat blended in with the background, so that you couldn’t really tell which are the objects I added. Plus, I failed to change the color tone of the image to a level that resembles the snowed city, so I decided to change the skybox material to snow, and the conflict between the color of the assets and the color of the background worked out quite well.
As I entered play mode, I was disappointed to find that my skybox looked like a box: there are edges between each side. It was because I didn’t change the “Wrap Mode” of the image from “Repeat” to “Clamp”.
Also when I planned out the layout of the assets, I didn’t take into consideration the angle of the camera: in fact, I thought I should be able to see everything because its in 3D. However, because of the height of the camera and the scale of the assets, some assets might be blocked by something behind it so that I couldn’t really see it. After testing in the play mode for several times, I moved objects around so that everything can be view clearly.
At last, I added a background music to my scene, which sounded to me had a mixed feeling of sadness & creepiness, and happiness from the past.