Digital Project Plans

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

Over this summer, I am starting a new digital project to explore the planar geometric projection options I defined in my Taxonomy of Digital Spaces. I plan to create a digital game where the spatial qualities of the game can be changed on the fly, in order to partially show specific spatial paradigms that, I argue, are unique aesthetic qualities of digital games.

The final project should be much like a virtual museum, where different spatial concepts may be explored and examined in an interactive manner. This will be similar to another project I created a few years ago, Traversing Virtual Dimensions (after which this blog is named). In Virtual Dimensions, the player is able to experience some of the earliest developments of a player avatar able to navigate through virtual space in digital game history. Unlike that project, Taxonomy will allow a player to set different methods of projection for the virtual environment and navigate that environment in a game-like manner.

This project also has some similarities to other games that I've written about where the game environment is modifiable during play.

The following are some screen shots of my initial tech prototype:

Game environment test with oblique projection.

Game environment test with orthographic projection.

Game environment test with perspectival projection.

I am using the Unity game editor as my development environment because I know that game engine very well and can work in it relatively quickly. My tech prototype uses the Kenney Game Assets All-in-1 asset pack for game characters. The ability to change the type of projection with Unity's camera is thanks to Art Leaping's Camera Perspective Editor scripts and the background cityscape seen in the prototype. All assets are used under license.

Creating all of the custom art needed, by hand, to project the same environment in many different methods of projection would be an insurmountable amount of work for one person. While I would relish the chance to create several different tile sheets of environmental sprite art and matching 3-D geometry as an exercise in different digital game art styles, I simply don't have the time to tackle that and everything else the game needs. However, if I am able to replicate 2-D game art methods by using a modified game camera, I can project the same set of 3-D scene objects to the screen in many different ways with different camera settings. Adapting to this technology should save a lot of effort.

The first goal for the project is to make project where the navigable environment may be changed to use the different methods of projection outlined in my research. The next step is to be able to change the other two conceptual image planes on the screen: the agents (characters and interactive elements) and the background/foreground objects. Once that is complete, I plan to have different player avatar characters that can move around the virtual environments in as-yet undefined methods of player affordances. These two elements together (the graphical spatial qualities and the player navigation affordances) can be used to define a game's spatial paradigm.

The final goal of my research is to define game aesthetics by their spatial qualities dealing with the embodied phenomenon of navigating virtual spaces, a cyberkinaesthetic experience. I posit that specific aesthetic trends and styles can be traced through our young art form's history and create a new diachronic "art history" of digital games in the process.