The Night Journey

The Night Journey

The Night Journey was one of the first experimental art games ever made. It uses both game and video techniques to tell the universal story of an individual’s journey towards enlightenment.  Visual inspiration is derived from the prior works of Bill Viola, which provide reference for the game world, while source material for the in-game “reflections” is drawn from the vast archive of his video footage. Textual inspiration comes from the lives and writings of great historical figures including: Rumi, the 13th century Islamic poet and mystic; Ryōkan, the 18th century Zen Buddhist poet; St. John of the Cross, the 16th century Spanish mystic and poet; and Plotinus, the 3rd century philosopher. 

I have worked on The Night Journey for 3 years. Our goal was to recreate The Night Journey in Unity so it could be distributed to PC, Mac, and PlayStation 4. Early in the project, my job was to translate the original game code into Unity and to recreate the behavior of the original game for PC and Mac. Later in the project, we focused on stabilizing the build for PlayStation, and implementing PlayStation specific features. The Night Journey has taught me a lot about console development, game design, and the process of polishing a game before bringing it to the public.