Thalamus
You can download and play the game on itch!
For my third semester at the UE Berlin I had to create a game each week. This game was made for the fourth theme "toys & playfulness".
My two friends and fellow students Martina Marchio, Daniel Røskaft and I decided to team up. Thing was: At the time, all three of us just had three intense projects behind us, where each of us overworked ourselves to the brink of burnout. We were all very, very tired. We stil wanted to create a nice game, but as we were discussing what to do, we agreed on one thing: We wanted to have fun with this one. We wanted to play around and experiment without too much of an ambitious goal pressuring us into burning the midnight oil. We thought it was a cute idea to use the theme of the week as directive for our work, to be playful with our project! We decided to use the framework of a digital art exhibition to which each of us were providing "rooms" to walk through.
My two friends and fellow students Martina Marchio, Daniel Røskaft and I decided to team up. Thing was: At the time, all three of us just had three intense projects behind us, where each of us overworked ourselves to the brink of burnout. We were all very, very tired. We stil wanted to create a nice game, but as we were discussing what to do, we agreed on one thing: We wanted to have fun with this one. We wanted to play around and experiment without too much of an ambitious goal pressuring us into burning the midnight oil. We thought it was a cute idea to use the theme of the week as directive for our work, to be playful with our project! We decided to use the framework of a digital art exhibition to which each of us were providing "rooms" to walk through.
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For my first space, I played around with generative art code. I wrote a script that self replicated its gameobject, randomizing its growth with each iteration - basically a tree! I never made anything like that before and had a lot of fun figuring out the parameters, what impact changing input had and how I could set up a randomizer in order to create beautiful "trees". I also used this exercise to teach me some more unity shader graph: I wanted to have each iteration use the same material - but look different depending on its space coordinates. It took me some time and in the end it was more experimentation than actual understanding, but I got it to work! I also added a mirror plane with a universe skybox, as I wanted to create an ethereal feeling. Helping that, I made some ambient synth sounds to set the mood.
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A code generated tree with coordinate based shader.
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The rings and their control panels.
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For my second space I wanted to create a machine for players to play with. Earlier in the weekly games I had made a drum machine game, so now I wanted to do something with harmonies. I wasn't sure at first, how I was going to do it, I just knew I wanted to create an armillary sphere for it. So I created a set of rotating rings that are depending on each other and played around with them. I found out, that you could use their rotation as modulation: If you put an audio source on a ring and have the ring rotate, the doppler effect creates a weird audible sensation. Adding a bunch of these rings together and suddenly you have a drone! The issue was, it got really complicated. Not building it, necessarily. Just operating it. I wanted the space to be very minimalistic - but in the end it was just hard to understand. I don't think any of our playtesters got what the room was supposed to do! Which taught me a valuable lesson: A complex machine can be as intricate as it wants - if users don't get it, it might as well be not there.
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I also helped Daniel add some sounds to his scenes, where I learned another curious lesson. For his pink ball room, I added my voice. I made fun sound effects for the ball explosions - a super simple trick. But for many, this was their favourite room! I believe the joy many felt was related to the spaciousness they felt from the echo on the sounds, combining with them filling up that space with colorful balls. There was a childlike fun in the way people played in that room and watched the balls fly around! It taught me that there doesn't need to be something very sophisticated under the hood in order for people to enjoy an experience.