Final Project

Max Jardetzky
MUSIC 256A (Fall 2021)
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Final Presentation: "Light, the Way" (12/9/21)

If you are having trouble loading the 1.2GB video file, try this lower-quality YouTube mirror instead.

Files: video performance, macOS .app build, Unity project .zip

Since the last milestone, I focused most on the "vertical slice" aspect of the project. I took this to mean focusing on building an immersive world and a raison d'être for the player.
One of the first ideas that came to mind was having the player find out they were in just one of many mazes, living one of many lives, but only after they fought tooth and nail for freedom.
I put the walls back in the end screen, generated 120 random mazes around the player, generated one randomly placed light for each of them, and set each light on its own flicker pattern.
There is supposed to be utter asynchronicity between the player and the rest of their world. Sometimes one can only groove to the beat of their own drum. We're all searching for our glowing, spinning cube, aren't we!
The next big thing was redoing the sound mixing. I wide-spatialized the backing track to the spawnpoint so in the middle of the map one experiences a sonic tug-of-war between past and future, comfort and uncertainty.
Then, there were the bug fixes. This is the most unstable Unity project I've ever created, but it hasn't crashed on me in hours, so it's a miracle. I smoothed out the texture and lighting movements as well.
Thankfully, I had accomplished much of what I had been aiming for in the prior revision, and I was able to dedicate all my energy to the tiniest things such as optimizing camera clipping planes and object instantiation.
I can't remember any other work of art I've made that gives me chills so easily. I think I was able to encapsulate so much about my life philosophy and experience in such an abstract, allegorical concept.
I'm infinitely indebted to you for taking the time to watch, read (and perhaps play!) my work; you are the reason I can say that I would rather be doing nothing else at 5:30 AM than writing this.
Thank you for all the love. I hope you find emotional insight in my work.
Until next time,
Max :)


Milestone 2: Minimal Essential System (11/29/21)

Files: video demo

For this milestone, I focused on an aesthetic reevaluation, which began with reimagining the sound palette. It has two layers: a mono backing soundtrack and a spatialized lead.
The backing soundtrack is built out of three BeeThree FM organs, with one static bass and two that climb octaves, with one of those playing the Amaj pentatonic scale.
The spatialized lead (Rhodey layered with Wurley) plays the A maj pentatonic scale over each singular chord and attends to the same linear distance-based octave, LPF, and rate adjust as the organs.
Once I dialed the audio in, I began by attempting to create audiovisual correspondence. This started with color automation on the point light behind the player, picking random hues each time.
Next, I ensured that the view bobbing was actually on time with the audio, as well; you can see everything go faster (texture offset, view bobbing, color fades) as I get closer to the cube.
I scrapped the creepy cave texture that I had from the last milestone, and used this wonderful seamless line art texture (thanks narinbg! all credit to you). It brought everything together.
Then, I stored the player's entire path history in a LineRenderer with adaptive thickness and color! By the end of the game it has almost tens of thousands of points.
Finally, I drafted a looping, tasteful end-screen flyover animation with no inner walls to show you your entire path to the cube, take you to the start, and regenerate the maze at random!
The project is almost as I envisioned it on the day of the first milestone; just a few more touchups and it should be stellar! It crashes so, so much (inexplainably), by the way :)
See ya around,
Max <3


Milestone 1: Proof of Concept/Core Mechanics (11/17/21)

Files: video demo

I chose to implement the "3D, first-person, dimly-lit maze game where the player uses ambient/droney/progressive sound cues to assess progress" idea from my design sketches.
This milestone called for baseline implementations of the audio, visual, and interactive subsystems for this final project. I would say I reached that level!
I consulted a few resources in the making of this demo. Credit to Sandeep Nambiar for the maze, procedurally generated through recursive backtracking.
Thanks as well to Brackeys for the first-person camera controller, and Terramorph Workshop, who made these seamless natural tiling textures.
The glowing cube at the end will probably be tossed out in favor of an glowing exit animation/cutscene washing the player in light/beautiful music, but it was necessary for this demo.
I needed to prove that I was able to spatialize and adjust parameters of the audio according to distance (oscillator frequency, volume, and ADSR trigger rate here) like this. For now it's just a square wave ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The primary thing that I want to innovate and adjust for the next milestone is an overhaul of the soundscape, with a greater focus on an ethereal and ambient sound palette that builds and layers naturally.
Since all aspects of the sound self-adjust based on the bird's eye distance between the player and the cube in the opposite corner, there is no seamless way for the player to know whether they're on the right path.
That's the second most important thing. If I can figure out how to solve the maze in code, I can calculate the player distance along the traceable solution path to adjust the sound that way.
I would probably keep the direct spatialization, but you can hear it chop in and out on quick camera pans. I wonder if that's fixable or an unfortunate bug.
Right now it's pretty janky and you see me make a couple wrong turns as I'm misled by heading closer to the cube but into a dead end.
I also want to add footstep and collision sound effects to make the traversal more immersive, and maybe rehaul the textures.
I may also want to fix the lighting to make it more aesthetically pleasing and maybe readjust the maze hallway scaling and player camera height/FOV/bobbing as well.
I might even add direct reinforcement sound cues at junctions to affirm whether the player took the correct turn or not!
In the end result, I want the player's sense of hearing to be a beautiful leg-up, filling in the gaps of the limited affordance of vision.
The goal is for it to not just be a maze with a gimmicky audio system. I want to approach a sublime experience here, not one that's claustrophobic or horrifying.
Will update it all soon!
- Max <3


Milestone 0: Design Sketches (11/10/21)

Check out my three sketches! In order, the ideas are:

  1. 3D, first-person, dimly-lit maze game where the player uses ambient/droney/progressive sound cues to assess progress
  2. 2D, Geometry Dash-esque platformer with discrete "powerups" that take the role of various synths/drum tracks in a song
  3. 2D interactive drawing canvas that sonifies brush strokes depending on many variables with replay/export functionality