Building a Tree

Last week was such a welcome break from screens. I finished most of a pencil, all of its eraser, and filled up a sketchpad. Little pink eraserpoops litter the floor around my desk, each a tiny shrine to an idea invented and discarded on in the rapid, playful process of prototype iteration. 

I’ve been living in a make-believe world where you get to play a humble god who lives to serve its creatures. Now I’m trying to make it real. 

Luis’s pencil-and-paper strategy worked a charm. The less effort I spent building an idea, the less attached I was to it when it didn’t work, and the easier it was to change it into something better. By the end of my 40th and final chungus last week, I’d finished drawing the designs for every scene (“level”) in Gaia, we’d figured out how to simplify the mechanics to something that a UN member could enjoy, and written a truly crushing-yet-hopeful end to the story. This week it’s time to digitize all of it.

The process of paper-to-vr is a bit bizarre. Check out the video. I import my sketch into Unity, then use software called Probuilder to draw the level in digital space. Step one was learning how to use Probuilder. Step two was building the level. Step three through a million will be making the level actually feel like a story. 

When you reach the first room in the tree, you’ll have to pick up buds and throw them at a bare branch. When you hit your target, they’ll spring open into leaves and the tree will thank you for helping it eat. We’re flipping the idea of shooting on its head by taking a violent mechanic and making it vital for sustaining life.  

But right now, we're just moving through hallways picking up cubes. Art, which is to say, everything that’ll make it actually feel like you’re inside a tree instead of a concrete bunker, comes very last. We’re a month (months?) away from that. Now is the time to make the computer act like the make-believe world we have in our heads.  

There are too many ideas and plans swirling in my head to share here. But Gaia is shaping up to be a deeply unifying, gratifying, and soul-expanding participatory story. I’m so excited that we get to work on it. 

Now we just need to figure out who wants to pay us to make it.