Mindscape Sailing

In Mindscape Sailing, explore the sea and uncover each mysterious island. Dock into each island to claim it.

How to Play

Sail with W.

Rotate with A and D.

Anchor with E.

Spyglass with Shift.

Reflection:

Hi everyone! This game is called Mindscape Sailing currently. It was a game that I originally made for my Midterm Project in Intermediate Game Development in the NYU Game Center. In it, you sail your little boat through sharks and ships, to reach islands and light mystical beacons within what is essentially a nautical rendition of my mind. I chose this project because our prompt for the project was to create an experience based on a memory, moment or aspect of my real life. The reason why it is a sailing-sim, is because when I was a child in Japan, I would often frequent the little miniature ship sailing arcade game in Tokyo Disney Sea’s Fortress Exploration, and I wished to capture that same childhood whimsy that I felt then in this project. I modelled the game to look similarly to that game, while incorporating islands that represent very important components of my inner psyche. Essentially, the goal was to create a game that allowed you to explore my sea and my mind.

The process of making this game was extremely interesting. I had a lot of fun coming up with mechanics at first, but a lot of them were not great in actual playtests. While being a sort of walking-sim meets ocean, I originally had hazards, such as whirlpools and cannonballs. But players found that death was very distracting from the experience, and my original goal was to create a soothing experience, which was rather hard when 8 cannonballs keep falling from the sky every second. I really enjoyed making the camera controller script as it was very fun to make the camera transition from the player’s view to these wide panoramic shots, and if I had additional time, I would love to discuss this project with students who specialize in film or photography, as to increase the fluidity and wow-factor of each transition. Lastly, my most fun thing to do was actually something I started later into the project, which was shaders. I sort-of got into Unity shaders in the 3rd week, but I really started exploring it on the last few days. It seems so cool to make these juicy looking materials, and they really are very powerful tools that helped elevate the entire experience. Overall, I think I scoped well, but my main issue was that my original scope’s mechanics weren’t great. If I had to redo the project, I might discuss my mechanics with a group first before attempting to implement them. Doing so would have saved me a lot of time and effort, but I guess that's also part of the iterative process.