Metaphysical Media Services

This project published on Itch.io is another collaboration with Grammy winning engineer and composer for the film ‘Super Size Me’ Steve Horowitz, and it’s an homage to a Randy Hostetler, a composer of promise who attended California Institute of the Arts but whose life was cut short only a few years after graduating with a Master’s degree. Steve had earlier written a piece dedicated to his memory called ‘Death’s Feather’ after a short poem by Dylan Thomas, but rather than a basic recording or recorded concert video he decided an interactive setting would be an interesting and engaging experience that would bring a different audience’s attention to Randy’s music and aesthetic.

We discussed various possibilities and settled on a FPS setting in a 3D maze environment. The piece would be the basic soundtrack, which would temporarily end musically by entering into special areas where players could experience a video of a performed piece by Randy or examine his influences. Once the player left the area the music would return. Eventually by visiting all four of these areas you were allowed to leave the maze by falling through it, which would trigger the ending and credits.

I handled all the level design and C# scripting for this in Unity which involved some usage of the Unity Timeline in the intro, as well as the ending and music management along with video clip playback playing on textures in special rooms. Also managed to find a text animation asset that created spooky floating text which was typed out for an introductory poem as well the basic directions. Overall a brief but fun project!