This week Shannon Hu, David Leyva, and I collaborated on a virtual sound walk using Unity. The goal was to build a wilderness themed maze using assets from the Unity Store and sound triggers. As the player progresses through the maze, they would encounter various noises triggered by invisible collision frames. Our sounds would be made up of recorded and found clips that we edited in Audition.
First, we tackled building the maze from a hand-drawn sketch. 
We found an asset package that included Redwood tree models that we used as the walls. From this point on, our problems with Unity began.
- Character Falling: We found that our character kept falling into the abyss when we hit play. After adjusting for gravity and weight of the character with no visible change, we removed the plane and used a cube as the floor. The cube idea seemed to work, but we’re not entirely sure why.
- Stuck Character: Visually, it appeared that we had enough room for the character to navigate the maze, but that wasn’t the case. Every few steps, our character would get tied up on a tree. I need to investigate if there is a way to map out the area that a character can and cannot walk.
- Sound Triggers: In our original world, the sounds played on a loop rather than triggered by the character. We later found out that we did not apply the trigger script on the trees.
The world quickly got confusing to work with, so we deleted most of the assets and started over.
For this second piece, we removed the idea of a maze and scattered trees simulating an old-growth forest of Redwoods. With the triggers adequately placed, the character can experience birds chirping, a wolf howling, bears growling, and a few other surprises. We also were able to import rabbits and birds that a player can find.
In the end, we would like to add more wildlife and possibly create some creatures. We would also like to make the forest denser without altogether impeding the character from moving.
Below is a working version of the world uploaded to simmer.io.
From this exercise, I believe that I started to grasp the basic fundamentals of Unity and look forward to creating more worlds!