Name: Petrichor

Description:  “Petrichor” is a cotton-candy lo-fi world of floating mountains, rainy weather, and a lone moon. The title itself is a word that is defined as “a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather”. Calm and soothing, it encourages you to stop for a moment within the chaos of a busy day and take a breath.

Instructions: Use the WASD keys and the mouse for navigation throughout the world. Press “B” to use the visualizer and “N” to view the narrative.

Screenshots:

Video:

Production Build: Download

Files: Zip file

Additional Thoughts: I knew that I wanted to visualize audio as rain from the beginning – I love the rain (when I’m not outside in it) and the cleansing smell of it after it stops. I wanted to create a world that was calm and healing – something that I, and hopefully others, could look at and feel soothed for at least a brief moment. I love the look of minimalistic, realistic worlds that also have a slight feel of otherworldliness, so I decided on mountains floating on rain clouds instead of having the mountains beneath. I took some feedback from the milestone critiques during class and added in a moon, camera motion, and improved spectrum density distribution.

The main difficulty I encountered was writing the ChucK code for the narrative portion, but I learned a lot from looking at provided examples. Other difficulties included integrating different pieces of code in Unity together as well as wrestling with Unity to bring my design ideas to life (e.g. the particle system component I used for the rain + audio visualization). Another memorable difficulty was the design process for the project – I found the whole assignment daunting and oftentimes did not know where to begin. Decomposing the project into smaller pieces and making my way through each piece helped, but I could have done so in a more organized, logical, and systematic way.

I relied on a lot of open-source platforms for this project. I used the Low Poly Nature Pack by NeutronCat and the Skybox Extended Shader by BOXOPHOBIC from the Unity Asset Store for the low-poly mountains, clouds, and colorful rotating skybox. I also utilized the code for controlling the camera with keyboard and mouse inputs written by @gunderson on GitHub.

Milestone 1

Progress Report

Currently, I have been playing a few low-poly models for mountains and clouds to add to my scene, and I flipped the audio visualization spectrum to make it seem like rain. I'm exploring how to do bloom effects as well. Not much of the audio visualization aspect has been changed since I was finally able to get it working the previous night -- I couldn't figure out my error for a long time -- but I plan on making it more dynamically responsive to the environment (changing colors, changing speed, etc.). I still need to implement the history of the spectrums -- I will probably need a 2-dimensional array and shift the values down the rows over time while making the graphics fade out in color on screen.

Tutorial Reflection

I really enjoyed going through the tutorials. In particular, I found Rollaball very satisfying and helpful because it was my first time using Unity, and coming out with a fully functional basic game was very fulfilling. I’m very daunted by the learning curve I’m experiencing regarding both ChucK and Unity, but I’m simultaneously very fascinated and excited to develop more familiarity with both over the span of the quarter. I love how visual Unity is - I like moving things around in space, seeing components attach to each other, etc. - and it helps me understand and navigate the complexities of many moving parts. I can also foresee places that I may mess up (e.g. forgetting to link certain components together), so I will have to take extra care to make sure I am thorough in my work by testing the play area often. 

Regarding the visualizer aspect of the homework assignment, I had a few rough ideas. I have an affinity towards open-world-like settings, and I wanted to establish a background world for the player to interact with (e.g. a mountain on a sea of clouds) and have smaller pieces of that world correspond to the audio visualization. I love bloom effects and I was thinking of having fireflies that would respond to audio cues and density of the audio signal. I also had an idea of turning the sound wave visualization sideways by 90 degrees and having them come out of the clouds like lightning bolts. Beneath the clouds would be a storm with the lightning-soundwaves, and above would be a serene view of nature. I love illustrating contrast and exploring visual/thematic dichotomies, so this is the rough idea I had in mind so far.