This is not a game, but an interactive scene made in Unity for a project in my second year of schooling. Each student was given a mostly blank Unity scene, with a 3D model of a temple in it. The assignment was to take this scene and utilize lighting to match it to a specific “Element” and “Mood”, which would be randomly distributed to us. I was randomly assigned the “Fairy” element and the mood of “mourning”.

The first design problem that I ran into was that it was difficult to develop the mood of a scene without knowing what the context of the scene is. To assist with this, I decided it would help to create a small story to go along with this scene, so that I can have a firm handle on what kind of scene I’m trying to create.

The story I came up with was that this temple was the grave of The Queen of Fairies, and that fairies from all around the world were coming to pay respects to her. It was a very simple narrative, but it gave the scene context and it gave me a clear image of what I wanted to scene to look like. From here, it was just a matter of making that image a reality.

I populated my scene with many multicolourd fairies. I did my best to give each of these fairies their own “personality”, and that the colour of the fairy reflected this personality. Some are sad, some are angry, others are playing with each other. I also used the Unity Tree Editor to create a forest scene, and I added “fireflies” using Unity’s particle system to give the scene a feeling of mysticism. Finally, I added light spilling out of the coffin in the center of the temple to invoke curiosity in the player.

This was my first time working with many of these tools, such as Unity’s lighting system (including baked lighting) and the Unity Tree Editor. I had used Particle Systems before, but this project tested my knowledge and I learned alot about how to create truly engaging particle systems.