Unwaking is a short-form interactive vignette where you inhabit a weary soul wandering through a monochromatic world of layered ink and manga frames, and searching for meanings for their own existence.
A class stemmed project in CTIN-534 at USC, 2025.
Genre: Experiemental Interactive Fiction
Roles: Designer, Artist (Team size: 2)
Built in Unity.
Key Features
Inhabit a Living Manga.
Navigate through a world rendered in stark, high-contrast ink and layered 2D frames that bleed into one another.
Shift Your Perspective.
Transition seamlessly from a distant, voyeuristic point-and-click observer to the first-person eyes of a soul drifting through a paper-thin reality.
Seek a Final Rest.
Experience a compact, 3-minute existential journey designed to be played in a single, quiet sitting.
Processes & Decisions
Origin & Purpose
Unwaking began as an experiment: can a short vignette make players feel like they’re wandering inside manga frames — drifting between 2D and 3D as if the page itself is a navigable world? The goal was to explore transitions as meaning, not just as a visual trick: switching dimensions becomes a way to express memory gaps and emotional distance.
Design Thinking
I designed the experience around framing. Each “panel” is both composition and navigation rule: what you can see becomes what you can reach. I worked backward from the feeling (quiet, suspended, slightly unreal) and built the pacing around short beats: enter frame → read the space → cross the boundary → arrive in a new interpretation of the same moment. The key design constraint was clarity: the player should always understand where to look next, even when the world shifts.
Difficulties Encountered
Players may not immediately understand how 2D/3D transitions work.
Risk of the gimmick overshadowing emotional intent.
Camera and depth readability can break quickly with small layout changes.
Proposed / Next Solutions
Introduce a “first transition tutorial moment” that is diegetic (a panel edge that visually invites crossing).
Add consistent transition language (same sound cue + same edge treatment) so players learn the rule once.
Build a small set of composition templates (wide panel / close-up / corridor frame) to stabilize readability across scenes.
Credits & Disclaimer
Sound Effects: Various sound effects sourced from free online libraries (Freesound); used for non-commercial / educational purposes.
Music: Music generated with AI tools Suno, edited and arranged by Yanran.
Art & Assets: Some 3D assets are from paid asset packs from Unity Store. No ownership is claimed over these assets; they are used for non-commercial / educational purposes.
All third-party assets remain the property of their original creators. If you recognize your work and would like explicit credit or removal, please contact the author.