Higher Creative Thinking - Left to Think
For my Higher Creative Thinking project we were tasked to explored a question. How do we express the emotions that music creates in us? I started by looking at my own relationship with music through reflection and personal emotion diaries, then interviewed my parents about their experiences. What stood out was that music isn't just about sound, it's deeply connected to memory, mood, processing emotions and creating moments of escape or focus.
I decided to create three interactive spaces designed around this insight. Each one tells a part of a personal story about self-worth, vulnerability and growth. All things I realised I was using music to navigate. The spaces are called 'The Waiting Room', 'Foggy Streets' and 'Golden Hour Train'. I made them as a game, built in Godot where you move through environments that respond to narration and music to create an immersive emotional experience.
The whole project pushed me to think about how physical and digital spaces can hold emotion. I got to experiment with things such as: layering audio, scripting personal narratives, designing environments in Blender and thinking about how subtle things like lighting and fog can be just as important as what's actually happening on screen. I really loved finally getting to create a project that expresses some emotions that has been on my mind for ages.
I started by taking time to really listen to my own relationship with music. I kept an emotion diary for a week, noting why I was listening to specific songs, what mood I was in and how the music made me feel. I then interviewed my parents about their musical journeys which gave me a completely different perspective. I also researched existing immersive experiences like TeamLabs Tokyo and the Camera Obscura in Edinburgh to understand how physical spaces communicate emotion.
I built three spaces in Godot, each with 3D environments modelled in Blender. The Waiting Room is deliberately minimal. Just chairs and simple lighting that becomes more complex as sound and text layer in. Foggy Streets uses volumetric fog and British architecture to create a liminal almost dreamlike feeling. The Golden Hour Train features a real underground station model I simplified made for a different project, transitioning into a cloud area with golden hour lighting. I recorded and edited my own voice for the narration, wrote custom scripts in GDScript and animated everything to sync with music through Godot's built in animation system.
Gameplay footage of a walkthrough of the three spaces. The experience is designed to be played through in sequence, with each space building on the emotional narrative and the previous one.