Statement
Assets used:
https://www.epidemicsound.com/track/bXBGV27828/
https://www.lmhpoly.com/tutorials/unity-urp-tutorial-orthographic-fog-plane-shad...
When I was revealed the theme "love", my initial thought was the action of pushing something off of a table, my cat would do that, I guess I miss her very much. But as I was exploring the possibility of building a cat related prototype in my head, I couldn't think of any "pulling" action that would make sense in this context, but the idea of doing something involving the "push and pull" on a literal level has stuck with me.
As I started to work in Unity, what first came to mind was the visuals, very minimalist using only the standard mesh that come with the engine, it's kind of inspired by Monument Valley, I was thinking a tower standing above the clouds, or fog. So my first step was actually trying to build a scene that looked like that in engine, without any actual function. It wasn't particularly complicated, just simple shapes and post processing, but getting the color right was tricky, tuning everything took some time.
Only a simple name would do this minimalist visual justice. The word "love" came to mind. Last year in a research class I wrote something along the line "we're born into this world all by ourselves, lonely and afraid, we spend our entire life trying to reduce the distance from others, but we'll always just be by ourselves, and then we die, which is always a lonely action". But I guess love is an anecdote to that. That word can mean a lot of things, and I want it to be opened to different interpretations.
I have done prototypes before that taggled the concept of "gravitation", that experience fits naturally with this idea. Having not touched Unity for months, I don't want to go too far from the technical aspect. I didn't have trouble identifying which direction I should go. The game's function revolves on the magnetic push and pulls between the player and npcs. The player has to traverse a crowd of npcs which they would push away magnetically to eventually encounter one which will be pull to them through this magnetic force. Magnetic force and gravity work the same in Unity, they are just forces applied at a direction, applying the Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, I was able to make it work.