Welcome Home is a project that was born on a shitty year. In the early autumn 2020 I was not doing so good when it came to my personal life and the pandemic was once again picking up which meant that places were shut down, plans cancelled and the people who I used to meet with drifted even further.
At that time I lived in a small two-room apartment with a roommate, meaning that my life became very much confined in my bedroom where I worked, slept and even ate. A mixture of limited options and depression, where I did occasionally hope of just dying, had turned my lovely room into a sort of perverted tomb.
That is when I started exploring different realities existing in the space we live in and as part of dealing with the hopelessness I felt in my life I decided to recreate this parallel world that existed in my head as something I could actually try to experience in a digital format. It might seem strange but it felt almost comforting to step into the version of my room that I had imagined on some of the more darker days. In the end, besides the physical world there exist multiple realities of the same space inside our heads based on our experiences, feelings and mental state.
Hope you enjoy peeking into one of the parallel worlds in my mind.
The main menu
Dylan records
View from the other side
Pictures on the wall
Working with Unreal
This was actually one of my first projects in Unreal Engine and having previously used Unity I can say that the overall usability and performance is much better than of the latter.
The biggest obstacle was perhaps the lighting, as it is generally not my biggest strength and I wanted to create a mixture of eerie feeling and an evening scene of a dark bedroom without forcing the spectator to be in complete darkness.
