Studio 1 - Weekly Progress - Week 6 HH

By Harry Hughes

This week I made a massive leap into the world of "scenes" in Unity. The leaping off point was wanting to make my "waterslide" game into a more polished product, with an opening menu, a settings menu, and a pause menu. I also happen to really like menus and the idea of programming buttons - I find them sort of fun; you can make them as weird as you want, but then they have this functional nature which makes them feel somehow important. So from following some tutorials I quickly slapped together a menu with 'enter', 'settings' and 'quit' commands, and then also a separate 'settings' menu. I wrote a code for the 'enter' and 'quit' commands. The 'quit' function was simple enough, you just tell the application to close when it is clicked. With the 'enter' function, I had to tell Unity to activate a separate scene. Prior to this I had only been working in single scene projects so there was a steep learning curve here but it was a very valuable lesson. I also made some weird music for it: https://vimeo.com/452397238/60141e09b0

Armed with this new understanding, I had the idea of making a multiple-scened video project, and decided to use a short film I had made in semester 1 as a central element. The film Little Lion was thrown together fairly hastily; the story is very lacking, and I think I made it in a few hours for a class very early in the semester when I was very unconfident about my abilities as an animator. But visually I think it is pretty interesting and was worthy of this injection of energy. I decided I would figure out how to make a "DVD menu"-esque scene in Unity, and then figure out how to make a separate Unity scene which just plays the full video. This turned out to be fairly straight forward, and so I decided to add a scene-selector element to the menu (even though the full length is only 45 seconds). Ideally, with each scene selection button, I will eventually learn how to tell Unity to not only jump to that scene, but to start playing the video from that specific point. As I couldn't figure out how to do that, I just made multiple scenes, each with a duplicated and then trimmed version of Little Lion. So if you click to just play the 'ending' scene, Unity jumps to scene 7 where there is a video player and a canvas that play a video that is just the last 10 seconds of Little Lion. Obviously this feels inefficient but the final file size was not much of a deterrent.

I am really happy with this little object I have now created. At the end of each of the 6 scenes, a 'home' button appears, so you can go back to the main menu (scene 0), making the whole thing a loop (though ideally I would like to be able to write a script that tells Unity to return to scene 0 on its own when the video finshes playing). This idea of having a functional menu element is actually something I've been wanting to make for a few years now. From 2015- 2018 I used to shoot and edit videos almost every day. The whole rigmarole of uploading videos and sharing them really started to bore me, so I started thinking of making "DVD-style" programs where viewers could open up the program, browse the menu, potentially read some info, view some additional content etc. But I didn't want to make physical DVDs, I just wanted the contents of a DVD that I could send around online with preferably a small file size. It is so exciting to think that I have finally achieved this, and I'm very excited to think about what else I can do with this knowledge.

I am also a bit interested in the interactive menu being a part of a video. I am so used to making and sharing linear work that perhaps I really only know how to share things that are not interactive.  I made and then shared this screen recording where I interact with the menu and then play the film: https://vimeo.com/452398215/5efc69fcde Even though the video itself is obviously not really interactive, I think it gives an intriguing layer of meaning as a precedent to the film itself. All of a sudden it's not just a short animated film- it's a bigger, creepier project about someone who makes DVDs for their 45 second animated films AND a short animated film. Hmm.... lots to think about!

Of course, this Little Lion project really has nothing to do with what I set out to do in Folio 1. But I really was and am feeling a bit burnt out after making the waterslide game, and the idea of leaping into making another full game was just exhausting. I suppose next week (or after the break) I should try and get a bit more focussed on building towards a single project. But at least I now feel like I've already made a couple of things I'm quite proud of and that I have a strong skillset to perhaps think of and then make some even more interesting works than I could have conceived of earlier.

Specifically I want to focus on making a game in Unity that has an actual "game" element, instead of another world explorer. I also want to wrap my head around uploading Unity projects to the web, which was one of my initial goals for the semester.