Final Project

~ Maze ~

The Unity project for my maze may be found here. To play the maze, open the Unity project, navigate to the "Intro" scene if necessary, click the play button in the Unity interface, and follow the instructions.

maze intro screen

All the main components of the maze serve two purposes, two different interpretations of "play": one gamified, one artistic. The gamified maze is to be solved, typically as quickly as possible, but the artistic maze is a structured canvas for audiovisual expression, which is not a timed pursuit. The player is offered audiovisual breadcrumbs for the gamified purpose of strategic navigation through the maze. However, the crumbs are over-specified in number and audiovisual evolution such that they become artistic elements. Many of the crumbs evoke physical processes, such as water droplets falling or wind whistling; the function of this is to transform the player's perception of what may be in the maze with them. I call these objects breadcrumbs because, relative to a maze game, that's what they are, but really they effervesce too much to truly "be" something so minor as "crumb" would suggest. While playing, crumbs can be dropped with the key corresponding to the first letter of the crumb color. Color options and audio descriptions are given.

The crumbs all evolve with a similar duration, providing a clear imprint of the passage of time physically on the maze space. Additionally, a "sun" rotates slowly about the maze, gently referencing real days passing (though, of course, a maze day lasts much shorter than 24 hours). In this way, game time is kept, but it is not enforced (getting to the end faster is not rewarded), again for artistic space and exploration.

The up and down arrow keys allow the player to move forward and backward, and the left and right arrow keys allow the player to turn. Additionally, the player has two more keyboard options, which expand their view into the maze.

The player must drop one or more crumbs to earn a top view; this incentivizes the player to use crumbs liberally. Further, the player may not advance through the maze while in top view (can't make it too easy). Once the player has dropped a few crumbs, the top view camera reveals a new visual canvas for the crumbs, juxtaposing soft glowing spheres with the sharp corners of the maze structure.

Jumping is strictly whimsical.

When the player exits the maze, they are presented with statistics about their use of maze features (number of jumps made, number of days passed, etc.), but no judgement is passed regarding the quality of those numbers.

In addition to their duality, many of the maze's features are hyperreal; software is an apt medium for the maze's realization. The following video demonstrates one of many potential ways to play the maze.



~ Milestone 2 ~

The Unity project for my milestone 2 maze may be found here.

Since milestone 1, I completed the maze geometry and composed several more crumb options. I took care to compose crumbs that would be musically cohesive with each other, as well as experientially meaningful in the context of a maze and navigation. Many of the crumbs evoke physical processes, such as water droplets falling or wind whistling; the function of this is to transform the player's perception of what may be in the maze with them. Less obviously to the player, I experience mild synesthesia for a variety of (musical and nonmusical) sounds, and the crumb colors are tuned to my synesthetic experience of the accompanying audio. The crumbs all evolve with a similar duration, providing a clear imprint of the passage of time physically on the maze space. While playing, crumbs can be dropped with the key corresponding to the first letter of the crumb color. Color options and audio descriptions are given.

The up and down arrow keys allow the player to move forward and backward, and the left and right arrow keys allow the player to turn.

This project is turning into an exercise in contradicting forms. The player is in a maze, and theoretically the point of a maze is to get out of it, but audiovisual artistry of the crumbs entice the player not to rush through it. The maze is obviously a game, but somehow it's also a soundscape? In the game, the function of the crumbs is strategic navigation, but they develop and differentiate beyond what's realistic in the physical world.

As I continue to work on it, my favorite part of this project more and more is the hyperreality of the scene. Obviously mazes exist in the real world (looking at you, Midwestern corn mazes), and I could totally imagine a game or challenge in which a player was given colored "breadcrumbs" (maybe like glow sticks or flares) to strategically navigate through a maze. In a very high-tech version of this challenge, I could see those colored crumb objects also emitting various sounds, and maybe adhering to the wall so they can be placed somewhere other than on the ground. However, in all of these physical possible cases, the audiovisual features of the crumbs are not intended to be an audiovisual experience in and of themselves -- their audiovisual nature exists only to provide dimensions of distinction among them to the player for the purposes of navigation. My game crumbs are designed to create an audiovisual experience including an aesthetic dimension that is distinct from the function of navigation. Further, my crumbs would be severely more difficult -- if possible at all -- to recreate meaningfully in the physical world.

I have a few features in mind that I would like to implement to smooth out the mechanics and package the game. Beyond that, I would really like to run with the hyperreality idea and let that shape a few more details of the experience, such as what surrounds the maze, whether the maze behaves in any particular way, potential player control over crumb modes or behavior beyond drop time and location, and how the player is prompted to experience the scene.



~ Milestone 1 ~

I implemented the sonic breadcrumb sketch below. The Unity project may be found here. Currently, the maze network is partially complete, and the player has access to one breadcrumb variant. The up and down arrow keys allow the player to move forward and backward through the maze, while the left and right arrow keys allow the player to rotate. The gamified goal for the player is to navigate successfully from the start of the maze to the end. In order to strategically supplement the journey, the player may drop a pink crumb at their current location by pressing the "a" key. The crumb evolves sonically and visually in several stages. At the end of its approximately minute-long evolution, the sound quietly continues emulating in the background; the crumb becomes invisible when the player is near it, but glows through the cross section of the maze hall from a distance. The time scale of crumb evolution encourages the player to continue through the maze. The crumbs introduce an artistic dimension to the game. The discretely spatialized and independently evolving crumbs create an audiovisual installation in the maze. I think this would actually make a fascinating installation in real life, but of course the floating crumbs as they appear here aren't super accessible to us muggles; the digital medium is obviously better suited to bring us closer to this kind of magic.

My obvious next steps include building out the rest of the maze geometry and creating multiple different crumbs. I want each crumb to be differentiated by audio content, color, and perhaps small details in their evolution (though they will all follow the same arc). I want the crumbs' evolution to be narrative, and I want the different sounds to cohere; that way, the player will find the crumbs inherently artistic, as opposed to fun but uninspiring noise makers. Additionally, I want the maze to do something more interesting that just sitting there as a pile of walls, but I'm not sure what that function should be. I think mazes are pretty scary in general, and I definitely don't want this maze to be aggressive or foreboding. I'm considering having the maze shape-shift every now and then, but that might be a little too Goblet of Fire for our purposes here. Alternatively, the maze could react when certain crumbs are placed in certain locations, either musically or structurally.



~ Milestone 0: Preliminary Sketches ~

This first sketch depicts a guided DAW-like musical prototyping tool. The user pre-selects a tempo and meter, then sings up to four-measure phrases to be recorded by the tool. The tool analyzes the phrases and extracts approximate pitches and onsets for resynthesis; ideally, this step would not distill out the musicality of the phrase -- pitch and onsets would not be quantized so rigorously as to sound mechanical. Once a phrase is recorded, the user can edit its register and timbre for resynthesis. The user can layer many clips to generate a phrase for playback. This tool is distinct from a DAW in the restrictions placed on musical specificity: in real mastering situation, if the user wants to hear a violin, they record a violin, but that procedure is strictly forbidden here. In lowering the user's expectation of realism, this tool can alleviate some of the frustration of say, hearing your composition bastardized by Sibelius's MIDI rendering. On the other hand, the restricted output would ideally sound very specifically like a musical beginning, to encourage creativity.

mixer for prototyping sketch

This second sketch depicts a maze game with sonic breadcrumbs as a guide for the player out of the maze. The user has free choice of several varieties of breadcrumbs to drop as they navigate. Breadcrumb types vary in their audio emission, color, and details of their evolution. Generally, breadcrumbs start as a small sphere (or crumb). Visually, the crumb grows in size, evolving to become a sheer curtain of color through the entire cross section of the maze hallway, then peeling/shattering/deteriorating down to fragments resting on the ground, which eventually fade away. Sonically, as the crumb grows, the audio gets louder, distorting in curtain form, granulating and further abstracting, eventually returning to its original sound as the visible fragments fade. This evolution process occurs on the order of a minute. This somewhat slow evolution is designed to provide a clear timeline of motion -- the player knows in which order they placed the crumbs. Additionally, the juxtaposition of several crumbs in different stages of their lives distributed throughout a space will hopefully be artistically meaningful; perhaps the player will drop some crumbs for beauty above wayfinding. Finally, the eventual visual disappearance of crumbs and sonic stationarity motivate the player to continue moving forward toward the end of the maze.

breadcrumbs sketch