Postmortem

 Successes

• Able to create a digital environment that can engage people to stay and explore. 
• Create a simple system of exploration with a “goal”, but at the same time, players can just walk without any purpose. 
• Made several endings depending on exploration progress and objects found.
• Each time the player enters the scene the lightning (skybox) and music slightly changes, so every time the player can encounter different daytime and mood. 
• Match background music, sounds, and environment so it creates a special mood or even creates a neutral frame of mind. 
• Able to imitate some VFX, not exactly how I wanted them to look, but they have their function. 

Failures

• The robotic voice still sounds scary and creates a suspenseful feeling. (couldn’t change it yet with the one I would like, haven’t found any solution yet). 
• Transparency of the walls is still overlapping incorrectly, even rendered lightmaps couldn’t solve the problem. I think there is another solution, but I haven’t found it yet. 
• Some UI texts and fonts are still bothering me, probably I will change them because of style. In the beginning, I used classic ‘Didot,’ but turned out letters have too many thin elements, so it might be hard for the eyes. I replaced it with ‘Judson’ google font which also has thin letter elements but it has better readability. 
• Problems with VFX display. Many of them were created out of particle systems with billboard rendering settings and even if I set all the settings on ‘world view’ it is still facing the player when we move around. That creates some visual problems with VFX. 
• Initially, I downloaded too many assets and my project was too large, it was hard to find and delete unnecessary assets because some of them were unclear in their names. When I tried to delete unused assets I also accidentally deleted some I used. 

Lessons learned

• In the future, it would be better to create all models by yourself (but it is time-consuming) because many assets have problems either with code or textures, materials, etc. And they can be hard to solve. 
• I created many copies of the initial game scene and tried to operate the player to go to the different scene from the opening scene while the only things changing in these scenes were skybox and music, so I could make it in one scene and just randomize by code. And so I fixed that this way and saved a lot of space. 
• The loading screen was new to me and I wish I could think of it earlier and integrate it better than right now. Right now it is on the opening scene and takes time from the very beginning to load the game. I could create another scene with the loading screen and progress bar, but couldn’t mess with the scene numbers since I had reference to their numbers in several scripts. 
• Rendered lightmaps making the project times bigger, so I deleted all render after that. Some of them were 3-4Gb and took 3-5 hours to render.  
• I didn’t know about crunch compression and mipmaps functions in textures. So, by the right settings, we can save a lot of space in the project. That helped me to lighten the space I used. 
• Maybe it is better to call the scenes in the scene manager by name and not by number because I had some trouble relinking all the scenes by numbers again after I deleted unused scenes. 

Future Development

In the future, I would like to make more ‘rooms’ and places to stay that refer to different emotions in a space that is not there. I am interested in human emotions and their evolution under the influence of technology. We cannot stop the process of our stagnation in technology, but If we try to create a field for analysis, we can find something new in it or re-realize forgotten ideas.

Then I thought that it is not necessary to make the space more ‘interesting’ or ‘exciting.’ But on the contrary, to make places that only those who need will reach, those who will continue to be attentive. Initially, the project is not intended for a mass audience, but rather focuses on people who are looking for a digital outlet from the same digital world. 

• Make more ‘rooms’ and places to stay that refer to different emotions/states in space. Add more objects.
• I’m interested in human emotions and their evolution under the influence of technology and how we can explore them further.
• Make something for players to store their feelings/progress (game process, survey).
• Utilize SFX/VFX for better usability.
• Create a more responsive in-game system.