This project took a very strange turn.

About a week ago, I found myself in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Slowly but surely I was beginning to realize that all of the ambitious things I had set out to do with my Unity project, were completely unrealistic given my very limited abilities. We all learned so much so quickly in this course, but I think I fooled myself into believing I could do more then I was capable of. To illustrate this point, I've prepared something called the Toppling Tower of of Dreams, which serves to illustrate exactly what ideas and objectives I had planned for my Unity project when I first conceived of it, and how each and every one of those ideas had to be killed because they proved too difficult to implement, and the time necessary to learn them (read: learn C#) would not have been cost-effective.

Geological hightmap-generated Terrain

Generated Terrain

Good looking terrain (it actually looks awful)

Fluid Water bodies

static water bodies

Two dimensional water meshes that could be moved using playmaker (I didn't manage to move them, so I made several and pretended they were the same one in a different place)

Video file Assets in unity

Image file Assets in unity

Non-blocky non-Arial 3D text in unity (it looks terrible)

build imported for daydream

Build imported for cardboard (you're not getting any of these without at least C# and Java)

Build imported for Vive

A second scene

In the face of this monumental failure, I realized I was left with basically nothing. Whatever project I could scrounge together would be fundamentally unrecognizable from what I had originally pitched. I was deeply upset with myself; upset I had not realize this sooner, upset that I had neglected to ask for help, upset that I could not use the many tools and skills I have acquired over the course of the semester to fix this problem.

Rather than give up, however, I decided instead to focus on what I HAD learned and what I WAS capable of doing, and instead I produced a work that ended up being only sort-of about climate change, but also sort-of about my own process coming to terms with a brutally compromised final project. It is the admittedly very high-concept story of the player (you, me, us) realizing that they inhabit a world that they have built for themselves, but that is virtually unrecognizable, and that they have only themselves to blame. One small condolence is that it ended up being heavily scripted (both figuratively and literally), and actually betrays a cohesive and linear story, albeit not a very good one.

I named it "Failure" and two days overdue, here we are!

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