Josh Daghir

I expected using Unity to be extremely difficult for me, but after creating my first scene, I realized that I have done things like this before. When Prof. Pacheco was mentioning the student who brought his origami to class, I thought, “I must not be a 3-D thinker, I’ve always been terrible with origami and sculpture and any other 3-D project that students do in a high school art class.” But after working with the software, I realized that this type of work is what I loved to do when I played computer games as a child. My first email address was “tycoonwiz” because I loved all Tycoon games: Zoo Tycoon, Roller Coaster tycoon, Mall Tycoon, Ski Resort Tycoon, etc. (I was a tycoon computer game connoisseur).

With the tools in these games, I did the same thing that I did in Unity. Modifying the terrain, adding buildings, and orienting everything to make sense in the physical space are all things I have done before.

I tried to create my world with the immersive qualities of virtual reality in mind. The player starts out in the shadow of some object, and my hope is that curious players will look up to see what is causing the shadow (which is a giant spaceship). I also put an astronaut off in the distance in the hopes of causing the player to move to that location. As a little in-game Easter egg, I made a cherry visible in the distance behind a mountain. If the player walks toward this cherry, he or she will discover an area full of giant food.

In placing these objects, I tried to get the player to move from one place to another. The shadow hopefully causes the player to look around and up, which causes him to see the astronaut, which puts him in position to see the cherry. I would be interested to put other people in my world to see if this is the path that they actually take.

I ran into a few difficulties while creating my scene. The spaceship’s shadow was a key part of my design, but some of the ships in the asset store did not create a shadow when placed in the world. Other assets simply did not work because they were created in an older version of Unity. Lastly, I expected to be able to jump on the giant foods, but my character walked through them. I suspect this to be because these objects were only in a “models” folder, not a “prefab” one.

I hope to learn how to make my scenes more interactive in the coming weeks. I would like to learn how to make the astronaut walk, leading the player from location to location. I also think the use of sounds could greatly improve the immersive quality of the scene. With this first project, I was able to see that Unity is a fairly powerful program. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface, so I am excited to continue exploring its capabilities.