Neon Dreams

Project Description

Neon Dreams is a short level design concept, designed around the theme of parallel worlds. This short demo was created to familiarize myself with Unity's terrain editing tools, as well as tell a short story through striking visuals.

Neon Dreams Demo

Implementation

Neon Dreams began by using the Unity terrain editor to create some terrain with mountains and hills, with a basic first person character controller to walk on it.

Afterwards, I duplicated the terrain mesh to create a second, identical world, and then applied different ground textures to set them apart.

Because I wanted the theme to be parallel worlds, I textured each world with two vastly different visual styles so that the juxtaposition when crossing through the portal would be emphasized. For the first world, I gave it stylized fantasy textures, and for the other one, I gave it textures inspired by the Vaporwave aesthetic.

I also created a small shack using Unity's ProBuilder tools to also familiarize myself with them for quick level blocking. I then duplicated the house and placed them at the same relative position within each world.

Finally, I decorated the first world with trees to make it feel more like a forest clearing, and added some runestones to give the setting more of that fantasy feel. These runestones were copied over to the parallel world in the same relative positions, just like the house.

Thinking with Portals

To create the portal, I took a shader online that would take the view of a separate camera, and map it onto a plane. I created two cameras for this, one for each side, and I programmed these cameras to move in the same relative transformations as the player, so that the view on the other side would be accurate. Each portal camera also renders their own skybox so that the illusion is enhanced when looking through the portal. Then I created planes for both portals and applied the shader to them.

Each portal also contains a collider that will seamlessly teleport the player to the other side, as well as changing the skybox rendered by the first person camera.

Finally, I added proximity audio sources that would play environmental sounds for each world. For the fantasy world, it was just the sounds of nature, while for the vaporwave world it was the song "Resonance" by HOME. This was to give the effect of the other world bleeding into the first one, and vice versa.