Perilous Passage
2025
Made in Unity.
This game was inspired by when Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers. The two key focuses in this project were 1) designing a game that captured the difficulty and precision of the real-world act of walking a tightrope. 2) designing an environment/world that implicitly taught the player the rules and goals of the game.
2)
To teach the player that falling off is bad, I made the towers really tall, and even added lava at the bottom.
To alert the player of the wind, I placed a physics object on the path ahead so they can see the consequences of the wind and how they could get pushed off.
To give the player motivation to cross the gap, I put a home at the end and added some policemen behind them blocking the way down.
1)
Walking a tightrope is a very complex task involving the entire body, so I will have to stylize the act of tightrope walking but while still maintaining some sort of difficulty and precision. I leaned into the intense focus demand and reaction time that is required to maintain balance. So I implemented a wind feature that the player must always account for and react to or else they fall off. And a simple WASD control scheme so that the movement was as intuitive as possible (that wasn’t supposed to be the difficult part - like QUAP or something).
You control a cat who is carrying some money, trying to get (what’s on the other side - home? clear goal/reason to cross - or is something chasing you?) . You need to cross this deadly chasm along this path. It would be a trivial task if it were not for the violent winds that zip through the world, attempting to fling you from the bridge and into the certain death below.
Kitten Around
2025
Made in Unity for Oculus VR.
Making this game was an answer to the question: what can a VR game do that a traditional video game cannot?
My answer: physically embody a virtual character (specifically through controller and head tracking).
What virtual character did I choose? A cat!
I designed the gameplay scenario to encourage the player to play like a cat. You bat around a yarn ball that moves frantically, demanding your full attention (dilated pupils and all)! When watching people play the game, I noticed they stood more alert, knees slightly bent as if they were ready to start sprinting. Their movements became snappy and precise, hopping from side to side, arms jutting out to catch a yarn ball on the run. It was not only a joy to play but a joy to watch people behave like cats, and the game quickly attracted a crowd of spectators at our class’ showcase. People took turns, tried to beat each other’s high scores, and began to “ooh” and “ahh” at every game over and every new high score. They celebrated each other’s victories and reassured each other when they failed.
This reaffirmed my belief that games, and even VR games, are able to promote pro-social behavior, especially when they encourage us to get weird and embody modes of play we are not so familiar with. *** NOT SURE WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY HERE
Rules: Your goal is to get a high score. To get a point, you must have the ball be in the correct colored quadrant when the timer hits zero. However, there is a strong wind trying to push your ball in various directions. If the ball is not in the quadrant when the timer hits zero, it will bounce upward. If the ball falls off the table, it’s game over. (In addition, if you try to hold the ball in place together with your two paws, it will slip and fly high up into the air. So be careful!)
Immersive Worldmaking
2025
Interactive soundscape designed in Unity using Steam Audio.
I designed a world that I’d want to live in: a world where humans could breathe underwater.
I’ve always loved being underwater. It’s cool and calming. The sounds of the outside world fade away, becoming muffled and distant, giving way to a kind of peace that is hard to come by in a large city (where I grew up). Senses become dulled, and attention turns inward. I tried to capture this underwater escape in this soundscape.
**** I used steam audio like this: directionality (duck paddling - top is quacks, bottom is kicking and splashing), distance attenuation, doppler effect on the car(?), occlusion so that car sounds couldn’t reach underwater (didn’t do that).
*** underwater effect using low pass filter
Immersive Production
2025
Immersive video made in Unity. Audio preparation in Reaper.
Made with Eva Choi, Jiawen Mao, Zengdong Peng, and Ashton Touzeau.
We made an immersive 180° video of the performance of “Special Someone,” a duet with French Horn and Bassoon. When viewing, you have control over the volume of each source. You also can activate a stream of particles from each hand to mimic conducting.
We used a first-order ambisonic mic to capture the room, and added some spot mics onto each instrument so we could blend in some of the close and detailed sound as point sources later in Unity.
My main role in the project was editing and mixing the raw mono and ambisonic audio so it was ready to be implemented into the Unity project. I used dearVR’s AMBI MICRO plugin so that I could monitor the ambisonic recordings binaurally while I was mixing in Reaper, and then again when I was done to export the audio in B-Format for Unity.
****need video with audio
VIME
2025
Made in Unity for Oculus VR.
Made with Eva Choi and Zengdong Peng.
Have you ever wanted to craft your own custom soothing, three-dimensional, interactive ambience?
We turned a city park scene into an interactive musical instrument. The player can position various rainclouds around the scene to control what objects they rain on. Depending on the material of the object (like a stone, concrete, or bush) the rain droplet will make a different sound upon impact. This way you can design your own custom rain ambience.
In addition, you can control the wind direction of the rain to create real time variation.
And upon touching (with your virtual hand) any of the objects around the scene, you can initiate a musical drone that will linger for a little bit, allowing you to walk around the scene at a leisurely pace to build up however dense you want the music to be.
I was the sound designer on this project. I recorded the raindrop sounds by dropping water droplets onto different materials in my apartment using a Zoom recorder.
In the end, I think the idea is cool. I could imagine more sandbox games leaning into soundscape customization. Like maybe in Minecraft instead of all of the water falls creating the same running water sound, maybe depending on the height and size it would make a more powerful sound. So maybe if you’re designing a home, you could have a smaller water feature that’s like a trickling pond, but if you have a massive fortress you could have an imposing waterfall that would overwhelm villains if they try to invade.
I think the approach in this project that we took was a bit flawed. Simulating each rain droplet didn’t necessarily add up to a convincing rain-like soundscape (not to mention the insane amount of voices we had to use haha). I think what would be more promising is to blend between pre-recorded rain sounds (drizzle -> light -> normal -> downpour) based on an intensity parameter, or just like how many clouds end up being in close proximity.