Absence of Light

Inspiration

The idea behind Absence of Light started when I did a lot of self-analysis of my feelings of being lost in the direction my life was headed up until a few months ago. I wanted to portray that it is okay to feel lost sometimes, as long as you keep trying to find your way through the darkness in your life.

What it does

Absence of Light is a VR game that places you in a dark maze with unknown mystical light beings, where all you are given is a gun that shoots lights that will help you navigate through the darkness. While it is different for each person, as you traverse through the maze, you begin to question where you are, what purpose do the light beings serve, and what is your purpose in the game. Absence of Light solves the problem of nausea by movement with joysticks by putting players in a dark environment and enabling the player to move freely with the joysticks. This allows for greater satisfaction of locomotion than teleportation in VR and causes very little to no motion sickness.

How I built it

I built it in Unity using C#.

Challenges I ran into

There were many challenges that I ran into regarding gameplay. I needed to be able to represent the differences in good vs. bad in other ways than light vs. dark. I put in new models that I designed in Google's Tilt Brush and imported them into my project. There are metaphors that I incorporate into the game, where blue represents all that is good and red is evil (as is the norm that society portrays these colors to represent). The blue light being that you see in the beginning when you spawn acts like a guide; it is all that is peaceful and positive within the world and you must follow the good in your life if you want to become one with it. The red light being is a harmful, hunting being that represents evil; it represents harmful thoughts and negative emotions that you must fight and destroy in order to be freed from it. Now, the white light beings are interesting, as they are neutral. My intentions were to have the white mystical light beings to give you a sense of sonder; they are neither harmful or helpful to you, but they simply exist along with you. You eventually learn that they are connected to you, but as you will eventually have to make sacrifices in your life and cut connections out, removing them from the game (by shooting them) will cause your light to glow; making sacrifices in your life will allow you to grow.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

As this is the first game I've ever made, starting with a VR game and having very little experience in coding made it quite difficult. However, through the help of the internet and the guidance of my fantastic instructor Andrija Zoric, it was an extremely fun learning process.

What I learned

Not only did I learn many things about coding, it helped with a lot of self-reflection and what games meant to me to begin with. I was able to take my own emotions and implement them into the gameplay of Absence of Light.

What's next for Absence of Light

Eventually, I would take the player out of the maze and into an open world and make it more of an experience-type game rather than a maze shooter. Portraying the messages that I intend to show would be a lot easier and I think the game itself would be more enjoyable.

Built With

• c#
• unity