In the land of cubes the sphere is king
The story here isn’t as fully developed as it could be, rather this is an exploration of vaguely related themes and references. There’s blue things and red things and (hopefully) surprises and throwbacks. The non-deterministic physics of Unity threw off my plans of a predictably machine, so rather I tried to create the opportunity for little moments of delight, such as if you happen to see the red ball again, or you notice that your blue light is “winning”.
I started out hoping to make a zero-G Rube Goldberg, but as I was playing around with the rocket mechanics I discovered that it could be a lot more fun/interesting to have the rocket fly around haplessly in a gravitied environment, then crash and become part of the scene itself.
The zero-G plan turned into an anti-G plan, in which the ball activates a giant red button because of course there’s a giant red button. The giant red button flips the gravity of the world and all the falling pieces begin falling up.
I played around with how to handle the anti-G section for a while, and settled on a smooth camera flip a brief pause after the gravity flips. It seems to nicely accentuate the vertigo of switching the direction of ‘up’, and it’s a neat little mindf— that what were the bottoms of things are now the tops.
Finally, once one has in place a button for switching gravity on a whim, it is almost impossible for one to not put another button ‘above’ it. With no official end, this machine will keep on going until the physics breaks or the iewer gives up. It is a slow march from the joyfulness of bouncing balls and blinking lights into the endless despair of hoping something will change but knowing that it won’t.