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Thomas Newlands

You Just Keep Falling

 

 

My thesis work, "You Just Keep Falling" is a first person physics driven mobile game, drawing on the tactile relationship between the player and their phone. The game offers a way to explore psychosomatic sensations through a phone interface and interactive physics. Using touch gestures: pinching, dragging, swiping, and twisting, players pull their avatar’s ethereal body through fog-enveloped structures. Within a surreal landscape of narrow rock bridges and spiraling mountain precipices the player continually climbs and falls. Along the way the player might encounter strange conversational characters dwelling there.

This game is an offshoot of a prototype for falling I made in 2017 and subsequently put away. In the experiment the player turns the avatars view with their phone as their body drifts downward forever. The controls are simple, only allowing the player to look and grip, briefly pausing their fall. My goal in revisiting the experiment at the end of my undergraduate career has been to complicate it by giving the player more agency and sense of place.

thnewlands.com/

 
 

Prototype Progress Walkthrough, In game recording, 2:51, 2020

 

 

 PLAY THE GAME AT: thnewlands.com/youjustkeepfalling

 
 

 Early Climbing Prototype, In editor recording, 0:32, 2019

 
 

Early prototype footage, In game recording, 1:28, 2017

 

 

 
 
 
 

Oculus Medium Prototyping Demonstration, HMD recording, 0:32, 2020

 
 
 
 
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 Encounter Sketch #1, Digital Drawing, 2019

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Encounter Sketch #2, Digital Drawing, 2019

 

 RELATED WORK:

 

 Negotiation Body, Videogame, 2019

 
 
 

 Untitled, Kinect, 2020

 
 
 

 Nth Century, Video Piece, 11:27, 2019

 
 
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