Malayali ano?
2D Unity Project - Individual Project
We were introduced to unity basics and were asked to create our own project. I wanted to explore 2D games and spent time working with the narrative and the visual style. I made a game titled “Malayali ano” (translation; Are you a Malayali?). Malayalam is the language spoken in my state, and in the game, you are a tourist exploring my state, Kerala. The idea stemmed from my first month in Copenhagen, where I was new to the place and felt like a tourist. I have plans of working on the project more where other places and experiences can be included. I worked on Procreate to create the assets for the game. I found it challenging to figure out the technical details in working out the 2D player controller and movement in Unity but learn a lot at the end of the week.
Gameplay
Awake, but barely living.
Story world Building - Individual Project
“Where you come from and What moves you”
With Jakob and Michael Valeur, we were introduced to storyworld building.
I decided to fix my character for the storyworld first. I wanted to pick a character that moved me and chose to base it on my grandmother who is struggling with dementia. Since the character struggles with memory loss, I researched the country that has the highest number of dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, which was Finland. I built a storyworld where you see a contrasting world of the old and the young. The old are attracted to the memory tanks, built in the dilapidated parts of the country, like flies to honey. And the young live in the more futuristic, vibrant part of the country carrying on with their lives and forgetting the ones that brought them up.
Concept Art
Helsinki, Finland
The state of the old in the real world and the World of memories they disappear to in the Memory tanks
the pressure booth - VR
Physical installation and interactivity - Group work
The inspiration for The Pressure Booth was from a group members’ storyworld, "The Cosmic Egg", where there is an elevator capable of traveling between different layers of consciousness and subconsciousness. The project focused on the element of the elevator, with a wood framework representing a physical elevator and a VR counterpart to experience the virtual environment.
As you push up the weights in the physical environment, you start traveling down through different levels in the virtual environment. Simultaneously, the roof starts lowering down on you in the physical and virtual settings.
The first level is a normal space, with typical elevator music playing. As you start to travel down and the roof is moving down on you, the space starts getting more confined and claustrophobic. The next level has a warped version of the elevator music, high glitching sounds, and a room full of neurons with their eye concentrated on you. If you go further, the lights get darker and you’re in an empty space with just destructive voices and sentences being thrown at you.
The experience is a metaphor for struggling against one's own thoughts and self-doubt as well as the pressures faced by society. The lowering of the ceiling by the participant's own hands also shows the self-destructive nature of those thoughts. We chose to use virtual reality as a platform to immerse the participant into the environment and experience better across multiple senses.
Physical installation
exhibition
Fog and Debris in gameplay
Gameplay
garden beyond - vr
Shader Art - Group work
We started with figuring out the interaction we wanted to do, Water a flower.
The visual style was developed using “Notes on Blindness” (2016), a VR movie as a reference. We decided on a mystical, galaxy-space theme as the setting, and we wanted to treat all the senses of the users and elicit a feeling of fascination and calm within them. I worked on a water shader, glowing trail shader, fog, and debris particles. I also made an Aurora Borealis shader graph.
Aurora Borealis shader graph
Gameplay Screenshot
Glowing Trails, Water, Glowing debris, Fog
Ana'a story
Game jam - Group work
I worked on the ideation, building the game in twine and two of the background images in the game.
We made a text-based, choice-based game for the game jam. The theme was Ouroboros and the idea we picked was an interview loop. A little girl in an orphanage is going to have an interview with her potential adoptive parents at the end of the week. Throughout the week though, a fellow child in the orphanage tells her scary stories of rumours he heard about the parents. The story takes place in the morning time, and in the night-time, her dreams morph into scary nightmares. On the day of the interview, does she (you) choose to go with them or not?
Background Images
The Things we carry
Entrepreneurship/Design Law - Group work
I worked on the ideation, creation of the business model, budget and timeline and illustration for gameplay.
We had to design a game and pitch it to Rami Ismail.
Inspired by the game “Unpack”, we designed a game that revolved around the theme of travelling, packing and unpacking, and planning as the player explores each new country. As the young woman travels around the world, she also slowly starts unravelling her own story.
Features of the game;
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Unpack your things and see if you brought the right things.
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Piece a story together from small, animated chapters hidden in some of the places.
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Learn about cultures
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Plan, strategize and organize
Business Model
Gameplay illustrations
