My Pandemic Brain: A Post Mortem

The COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted us all in different ways. For me, it was listening to an artist that I recently discovered a Japanese hip hop artist called Nujabes. There was a lot of pathetic fallacy in his music. I feel that Funky DL one of his first collaborates, puts Nujabes's style perfectly. He describes Nujabes's music as

"jazzfuled laid-back, almost melancholy lamentful hip hop... it almost feels sad but uplifting"

One of my favorite tracks was Luv (sic) pt 3, a part of a hexology of the artist Shing02 falling in love with hip hop. Spotify made me aware that I listened to that song, and Nujabes in general alot in 2020.

So I wanted to make an experience of what it was like to be Vinay's brain during the pandemic. It also accidentally became a tribute to Nujabes. Who sadly passed away a decade ago in a car accident.

Development thoughts

Unlike my previous game, this was built over two weeks. I wanted to allow myself the time and space to do things right rather than hack something together to make it work. It also allowed me to schedule my time more sustainably, and achieve any stretch goals I wanted to accomplish.

Giving myself the two weeks meant that I was done a day early, and I was able to use the extra time to implement something that I thought would be cool, the cherry blossoms. I also used this time as an opportunity to learn and understand blueprint communications, a concept that was a bit confusing for me up until now. You can view the entire developer commentary here

Credits

I leveraged several resources to allow me to make this game. I will try to list all of the media that I used, as well as any tutorials that were pivotal in putting this game together.

1. Luv (sic) pt3 by Nujabs (funnily enough even though this song is in the public domain, someone has decided to copyright claim my video. I understand that I can't make money off of someone else's work, but how can they?)
2. Patrick on a Sea Horse
3. This Tutorial on creating the Cherry Blossom particle effect
4. The Unreal Engine Blueprint Communications Quick Shot Guide