MIND CAVE
Role: Art, Game Design, Co-production
Duration: 2 Weeks
Platform: CAVE Virtual Reality Platform
Design Challenge: Creating a narrative virtual Experience
Tools: Autodesk Maya, Unity, Substance Painter, Perforce
Pollen Nation is a storytelling experience built for the CAVE platform at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center with a team of five members.
Personal Contributions
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Co-designed game mechanics interdisciplinary team of artists, programmers and a sound designer
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Co-designed the environment, characters, and overall look of the game
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Modeled, textured, rigged and animated the characters, set up the environments for multiple levels in Unity with lighting
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Coordinated team activities throughout the entire process
Game Design
MindCave is a unique CAVE game/experience that turns the CAVE platform into a giant memory machine.
The guest must go down a virtual elevator shaft into the memory space of a person dealing with heartbreak and erase bitter key memories until he/she is made to confront a situation where he/she must exercise moral discretion.
The guest starts on the platform, and is lowered into Blue's mind. In every scene, interacting with highlighted objects will produce memories told by Blue's subconscious. As the guest travels further through Blue's mind, they finally find the key memory. As the guest is about to delete it, Blue's subconscious changes her mind. The guest must make a final choice: to abide by Blue's original wishes and delete all memories of Red or save Blue from making this choice that she may regret. In the end, the guest must decide if it's better to get rid of your painful memories or remove them.
Environments
The other artist on the team, Daryl and I wanted to give each level/memory layer a distinct look. The office level had unsaturated grey tones. The bedroom was to have more saturate colors. The final limbo scene would be an intensely emotional scene bathed in the orange light of the setting sun. I modeled, textured textured and lit all the scenes in the bedroom scene, and tweaked the lighting for all the other scenes.
Characters
The two characters in the final limbo scene were inspired in part by the actual game named Limbo. I modeled, textured, rigged, and animated the characters. I also put together all the individual animations into the Unity Timeline to create the entire final scene that recreates the protagonist's deepest memory of her lover in which he gifts her an origami flower.
