Project Description
For my initial project, I wanted to focus on creating a space in the sky. I love the idea of standing on a floating island and looking into the expanse of the sky. I wanted to keep it close to what the Earth’s sky looks like (blue with clouds) and during the day instead of at night.
So I created The Land of Weilgalia (the name was taken as inspiration from the 2003 JRPG game Tales of Symphonia, in which there is a floating city in the sky filled with angels called Welgaia.) This project was completed using Unity in order to make it 360 VR. Furthermore, using an Android Build, it is possible for users to experience The Land of Weilgalia through Google Cardboard. The user should see islands around them, with only a small cropping of land beneath their feet that is filled with green grass. The islands around them are in the distance, and there is no visible way to get from island to island; only to look at them from afar.
Inspiration
This VR project was heavily inspired by the Gamecube Game Tales of Symphonia. Throughout the game, you use magical flying transportation to fly around the map of two interconnected worlds. These flying machines allow you to visit places above the worlds and in the sky, and as such, there are multiple towns you can land in and visit. I focused on their city in the game called Exire.
(Although the name was inspired from the city in the game called Welgaia which is the city of angels, but it had a very different, scifi and futuristic aesthetic which I was not looking for.)
In this game full of amazing, imaginary landscapes, I chose the floating islands due to the calm I think the environment can create. While the area can in theory look frightening, as you are alone very high up in the sky with no reprieve, it can also be very peaceful. With the correct lighting, sound, and some composition decisions, I wanted the user to feel transported into another world where they could explore the serenity found in floating islands in the sky.
I was also further inspired by other games and films with floating islands in the sky such as the feature film Avatar.
This was not an ideal example to follow though, as I found the close proximity of all the islands to give me a sense of claustrophobia. This was the opposite of what I wanted to accomplish, as I wanted the user to have more open space in the expanse of the sky they were viewing. I did like the amount of fog and cloudiness within these clouds, and wanted to take that element into my project. While it can add onto the claustrophobia, I wanted to camouflage the islands a bit within the cover of the clouds.
Another inspiration was from the game Zelda Skyward Sword. The user can fly between islands in the sky in order to go on different adventures. The entirety of the game takes place in the sky, and there is minimal landing onto the surface of the Earth.
The islands in Zelda gave me a good idea of what I wanted the shapes of the islands to look like, but I did not like the ever-present cloud cover under the islands. Again, this is why I defaulted to the Tales of Syphonia game in the city of Exire, as I found it to be a perfect example of what I wanted to create.
Process and Implementation
Since the beginning of the project, I knew that I wanted to avoid using lowpoly assets and use a more realistic or artistic interpretation of the environment. From there, I began to sketch out my idea from the Tales of Symphonia game.
From there, I began to explore the different asset packages I could to begin to create the environment I wanted.
***Apologies in advance, most of my screenshots are not maximized as I did not know how to maximize on unity at the time***
Originally my terrain was flat, but I had to change that in order to make it into an island shape. 
A zoomed out picture to show the distance between my islands. 
I experimented with the terrain tool in order to create my floating islands. 
I had to decrease some of the hills on the terrain in order for the sky around it to be visible. 
I inserted a song that I thought was a perfect fit for the scenery.
When creating my environment, there were specific things that I knew I had to avoid in order to make it feel serene.
Firstly, the viewer could not be standing on the edge of the floating island they were on. Although this would give me more room to work with in the visuals below the island, I knew that having the viewer on the edge would cause a slight sense of anxiety. Because of this, I situated my user straight in the middle of a medium sized floating island.
Secondly, I knew I needed to make the sky daytime in order to make all my details visible. I considered making the islands at night, but I thought this might give my user a sense of anxiety. I believe I would feel anxious if I were in the dark and I had huge, floating, and unidentified objects around me. I also thought that creating the space at night wouldn’t allow for the wide expanse of space to be appreciated; I wanted the user to see floating islands in the distance, and I thought that would’ve been harder to accomplish in the night.
Thirdly and lastly, I chose to use a semi-realistic landscape in order to connect to something the user is already familiar with. I wanted to take a patch of green grass which everyone is familiar with but place it in an environment that is hard to envision. But this small sense of familiarity would help connect the user into the environment by giving them something small to tether onto.
Reflections
Overall, I did face some difficulties in executing my project as I first intended. Originally, I wanted there to be cities in the distance on the floating islands. This was harder for me to implement, as no matter where I tried to position different buildings, I could not get them to the quality and size that I wanted them to be. This I think I can improve on in time, but within this first project, I really struggled with getting the buildings to look the way I wanted them too. (I also had a lot of trouble with some of the asset packages I would download for buildings. A lot of the scripts would begin to interfere as soon as I downloaded them and I was unable to debug the problems with some of the packages that best fit the aesthetic I was looking for.)
The bottom of the floating islands were also just an enlarged rock prefab from a certain package, and I found this to be very limiting when making the floating islands. In the future, in order to improve on my islands, I would need to find a more viable alternative on how to create the textured bottom of the islands instead of the one rock asset.