Learning how to create interactive scenes is a huge step toward making more immersive experiences. In "real" reality, all actions have a reaction. Allowing a user's actions to have impact in the virtual world helps to make the user feel like he or she is really there.

My interactive scene features two main interactive elements. The player starts off in dark tunnel, but as he or she walks forward, lights overhead turn on. As the player moves away from a light, it remains on, but dims to a less powerful level. The light closest to the player will always be the brightest one. I accomplished this by using a trigger enter event in the FSM.

As the player exits the tunnel, he or she sees a massive UFO with a light beam coming out from under it. In front of this UFO is a button. In order to instruct the player on what to do, a voice says, "Press the green button to abduct the human" once the player approaches the button. I recorded myself saying this phrase into a voice changing app on my cell phone, and then emailed this file to myself to open it up in Unity. I wanted the voice to sound robotic to fit with the alien theme.

If the player clicks on the button, an animation in the human is triggered to wave, and then the human ascends toward the UFO using the iTween action.

One of the main problems I had in creating this scene involved lighting. I wanted the tunnel to be completely dark except for the overhead lights, but the reflected light from the massive beam underneath the UFO leaks into the tunnel. It also pours across the landscape, making all the hills green. This is a cool effect, but I wish I could have more control over how the light interacts with the other objects in the environment (it would have been nice to disable the walls that I created from reflecting the green light).

I created the walls by generating a cube in Unity and then adjusting the dimensions to wall-like proportions. I downloaded a texture pack and then applied this texture to all sides of the wall. The industrial lightbulb model and human were found in the Asset Store, and the UFO was downloaded from Turbosquid. I created the button by generating a cube and sphere in Unity.

I also tried to manage my hierarchy more efficiently. For example, I grouped the UFO, light beam, and node point for the iTween movement together in order to be able to easily move them. As my scenes become more complex, I can imagine how important it is to properly organize their components.