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.
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
Encounter Sketch #1, Digital Drawing, 2019
Encounter Sketch #2, Digital Drawing, 2019
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Untitled, Kinect, 2020
Nth Century, Video Piece, 11:27, 2019