My motivation for going through Unity's LEGO microgame tutorial (plus associated exercises) was to learn Unity Editor in the hopes of building something for ART.HAPPENS, a community virtual art show. I didn't expect to build anything significant with my meager skills, but I made something with the skill I have. It definitely fit with the theme of everyone sharing works that they had fun with, and learned from. I arrived at something I felt was a visually interesting interactive experience which I titled Bouncy Bouncy Lights and, if selected, should be part of the exhibition opening today. If it was not selected, or if the show has concluded and its site taken down, my project will remain available at my own GitHub Pages hosting location.

There are still a few traces of my original idea, which was to build a follow-up to Glow Flow. Something colorful with Pixelblaze-controlled LED lights. But I decided to move from the physical to digital domain so now I have random brightly colored lights in a dark room each reflecting off an associated cube. But by default there isn't enough for the viewer to immediately see the whole cube, just the illuminated face. I want them to observe the colorful lights moving around for a bit before they recognized what's happening, prompting the delight of discovery.

Interactivity comes in two forms: arrow keys will change the angle of the platform, which will change the direction of the bouncing cubes. There is a default time interval for new falling cubes. I chose it so that there'll always be a few lights on screen, but not so many to make the cubes obvious. The user can also press space bar to add lights faster than the default interval. If the space bar is held down, the extra lights will add enough illumination to make the cubes obvious and they'll frequently collide with each other. I limited it to a certain rate because the aesthetics change if too many lights all jump in. Thankfully I don't have to worry about things like ensuring sufficient voltage supply for lights when working in the digital world, but too many lights in the digital world add up to white washing out the individual colors to a pastel shade. And too many cubes interfere with bouncing, and we get an avalanche of cubes trying to get out of each other's way. It's not the look I want for the project, but I left in a way to do it as an Easter egg. Maybe people would enjoy bringing it up once in a while for laughs.

I'm happy with how Bouncy Bouncy Lights turned out, but I'm even happier with it as a motivation for my journey learning how to work with a blank Unity canvas.