Flailing. A few issues made me abandon my idea for a doorknob controller plinth in which the doorknob portion revolves to select a “door”, reorienting the player- first the reintroduction of a projection screen into the space, which would make variable player orientation weird, and 3 or four mistakes in laying out an mdf laser cut that made the complicated revolving encoder/slipring assembly off center or needing hand drilled holes over and over, resulting in a lot of wasted time. The alternative (keeping the doorknob controller) is an additional spinner knob control on the top of the plinth. I don’t love it. The idea here is there’s a projection of a circular array of the doors in the room, with the color of the room and doors, a spinner revolves them, the doorknob tests them to go through.
This requires a computer running unity, which gives us the possibility for 3d ambient sound in the space, but means I have to hide a big hot computer somewhere. Also, it’s a whole new visual language for a 3d space again. I am experimenting with really minimal color blocks. I was able to really quickly get unity pulling from the grotto api to make doors arranged in a circle in a variable sized cylinder. As an experiment I tried using ZF Browser to spawn a web browser running Grotto on the surface of a map-like plane, but unfortunately it doesn’t render the pixi.js canvases, defeating the whole point. This pushes me back towards a new-unity-view representing lots of things (Lots of work!) or a minimal unity + printed book, which has some nice opportunities for the old-game-copy-protection interactions I mentioned before, but we don’t get to see the full game. Everest’s point was that the game looks good, and this is my chance to show it. They leaned towards some kind of cabinet or even just a computer in a cubicle. Just a computer in a cubicle + a stage light could work, but It feels like a huge step back in some ways, and I know it will disappoint at least one committee member. I had some discussion with Ariel about two screens, a projection of unity and a picoprojector inside a plinth projecting up into the opaque projector stage for a second small projection that only comes on when the copy protection interaction has been completed. Sounds complicated, + I’m not even sure if I have two walls to work with.
I feel really stuck and flailing. I want to show the full game in the space in some way that is tucked away, but I want a strong center to the piece. I want a conversation between the game and the space that feels solid.
