Well hello there. This is a pretty fake design journal in the sense that
I was at the Museums Without Walls conference in Kingston over the start of this week and I gave a talk on Wednesday about various of my games that have featured museums. One of the topics was v r 2, an exhibition of elements from the Unity game engine’s GameObject menu. When I was writing (and editing) my talk, I kept thinking the game’s main flaw.
You see, the game was ostensibly an exhibition of possibilities in Unity - the kinds of “things” that can exist in its world displayed in a sort of principled way (though probably less principled than I’d attempt today). But I was also enamoured of Gregor Schneider’s work at the time (thanks to working on an homage game in v r 1) and this led me to hide all the objects I was display inside the plinths. So they’re not really displayed, they’re hidden. Schneider has a whole thing about the psychic resonance of hidden objects and I suppose I was going for that.
But hiding them, while ontologically funny, basically means you don’t see the exhibition and it muddies the idea of the game. Am I exhibiting these things or asking questions about their ontological/psychic status? Hard to do both. So in the end v r 2 is a bit of a disappointment in retrospect because it didn’t do what I think it should have (show the things), even if I think the idea of exhibiting hidden objects is in itself very nice and worth doing.
Anyway, while reencountering all this because of the talk I had to give (well-received by the way, thanks for asking) I had the (brutally obvious) realisation that I could just make the game again, except this time make the objects sit on the plinths instead of in them. And that’s what v r 2 is: it’s v r 2 but everything is just a bit higher up. Yes I am happy with the naming of the game, with the two being raised in a reflection of the objects being raised.
Making the game didn’t require a ton of effort, kind of two mornings worth of work just to get it running in the new Unity version I’m using and to understand how to get the webcam and video working (especially in WEBGL), and now here we are with a new game. I’m happy with it in the end, it’s a good one. Also it’s like a little microcosm of v r $.4.99, my major project right now, so it’s nice to just finish something off succinctly and move on - which used to be how I made everything.
That’s it folks, that’s the game.