The concept for my scene was taken from Maurice Sendak's "While The Wild Things Are," when Sendak describes the way Max envisions his room not as a room but as a forest with magical beasts. My Unity scene represents a transitional moment, when bits of "reality"  (i.e. the bed and the desk) in his world are colliding with the world of his imagination.

Because I'd never used Unity before, a lot of this assignment was about me learning some of the more basic tools/the UI of the software and adjusting my thinking to match. I struggle with thinking of things spatially, and in reality, have a lot of trouble with depth perception and thinking in 3D, so this was definitely its own kind of challenge. Most of the learning happened through concepts we went over in class, supplemented by guess and check and googling.

One of the more helpful tips I came across was duplicating assets. Originally, in designing the forest, I was placing one tree at a time. However, I figured out (by just giving the keyboard shortcuts a shot) I could copy and paste whole sets of trees, which greatly expedited my proccess. I also figured out on my own how to select out individual parts of assets and change those textures (i.e. changing the bedspread and pillow textures to better match the illustration), which was helpful in customizing the scene. Eventually, I also started to pick up how to change the sizes and placements of assets more quickly through repetition. Similarly, shifting through the "hand" moving and "eye" perspective change views to better look at my work is slowly getting easier as I play in Unity.

Some of the questions I still have come around spatial orientation of the objects. In the beginning, I accidentally somehow "exploded" all of the objects away from each other, and couldn't figure out what I had done or how to reverse it, so I ended up starting over. On a smaller scale, I still have a bit of trouble placing objects in reference to each other sometimes. For example, I got the perspective of the bed / trees / monster right in the sense that I could figure out where to place the monster so it wasn't super obvious right off the bat that it existed. However, I struggled placing a small plant on top of the dresser; it would seem to be in the right position in one view, but in the game, it would be way off. I'd love to know if there's a better way to "link" or "stick" objects together. This also would've been helpful in placing the trees with the way I textured the ground (I was all the time catching them "floating").

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With this scene, I would want to expand this moment into the past and future. It would be really interesting to find a way to better walk through more of the room's transition, from 100% room to 100% forest. As the viewer would move through the scene (or maybe hit certain triggers?), the evolution would progress. In terms of the room, this would also mean creating some sort of wall system, so it would go from feeling closed in to open, which is a key point in the original story for Max.  Once meeting the monster, the viewer could follow it / the monster could serve as a guide into the next part of the story, in which they would go to another part of the forest, meet another monster, start an adventure, etc.. Maybe it would still be within Where the Wild Things Are, but this would also be a good gateway into another piece of children's literature.