Thought Police is a thought-provoking narrative experience that explores the limitations on the freedom to express one's thoughts and why certain expressions are punished. The experience explores a moral dilemma in which the player must choose between siding with the written law to protect the country at all costs, or if their personal biases and empathy come into play and object to the regime, possibly causing future harm to themself from the regime. Overall, the theme of our experience traverses a grey area in what is considered to be morally correct in society and when it is okay to bend the rules for the better of humanity. The goal of Thought Police is to put the user in a strenuous situation to reflect on their personal beliefs and when they believe it is justifiable to oppose the law.
I was in charge of designing the environment's aesthetics and integrating assets using Unity and Blender. Most models were sourced online, assembled in Blender, and exported into Unity as textureless models. I then applied textures, holograms, and characters in Unity using various shaders to achieve the desired aesthetic.
Art Direction / Environment Design / Animation / Scipting
Thomas Tran: Scripting, Narrative, Animation / VFX / Rigging / Model design
Avril Yang: VFX / Editing / Filming
Zaac Agnes: Art direction / Environment
Design / Rigging
Hanna Luu: Narrative / SFX / Scripting
Alvin Leung: Music / SFX
Unity
Figma
Adobe Premiere Pro
Final Cut Pro
Blender
Maya
2 months
I envisioned a monochromatic colour scheme to evoke an altered reality, fitting for a game set in a totalitarian state. Constructivism and brutalist architecture enhance the feeling of being trapped and hopeless. The player interacts with faceless individuals to read their thoughts, and a highly realistic visual style could be too unsettling. Instead, I deconstructed elements to clearly separate the virtual world from reality. I also explored futuristic fonts, with red as a fitting accent colour to set the tone.
Final Poster:
We drew inspiration from Thom Yorke's Last I Heard video and aimed to recreate its visual style in Unity. First, we created a shader that converts objects to black and white, using fog to enhance the effect. To achieve sharp shadows and highlights, we explored cel-shading, which creates clear contrasts between light and dark areas. Combining a pastel texture with a distortion shader produced the desired visual result.
Simple noise that is offset to create the "sketch" texture.
When Sketch texture is added with the Screen Position Node, it gives a displacement effectaround the edges. With multiple objects with this shader applied to their materials, it mimics theeffect as if the world of drawn.
The shader used has a posterized simple noise which acts as an alpha map to simulate the dissolve effect. The Dissolve Amount determined by input is multiplied by a sine function so that the output is ranging between -1 and 1. I used the output to determine the amount of white and black pixels shown, to then determine the opacity. By using the same texture output, I used a small amount of white pixels to create a texture with slightly more white pixels and subtract that with the noise texture used for the alpha map. The difference produces a noise texture that shows a white border which was used as an emission map to create a glow around the edges.
The particle shader shown above extends the basic sample particle system provided in the VFX graph. By adding a Mesh Position block in the Output, each particle is mapped to the vertex of each mesh (which determines the areas where the particle clusters are).
I also helped design the character identification cards, drawing inspiration from sci-fi elements. The hologram card is showcased when the player scans an individual character, appearing on the side of the panel.
Project summary:
This project taught me a lot, especially polishing my skills in Unity. It allowed me to become more familiar with its functions, such as shaders, particles, and assets. I gained valuable experience in creating immersive environments and refining gameplay mechanics. Additionally, collaborating with a diverse team provided insights into effective communication and teamwork, enhancing not only my technical abilities but also my interpersonal skills. Overall, this project made me more curious about virtual enviroments and designs in video games and gave me the desire to grow as a graphic designer.