At the end of the Yes / No Rooms you’ve gotten into bed and floated into the netherworld. This seems like a good time to switch things up and take you into Hall of _________. It’s a funhouse / nightmare world designed for an animal / something to be packaged and consumed. 

 

I’ve always found amusement park shooting galleries both alluring and somewhat nightmarish. I first visited a shooting gallery as a young child along a boardwalk in Seaside, Oregon. It was a cavernous space that resembled a diorama in a natural history museum, albeit displaying an eclectic selection of relics: a man seated at a piano, liquor bottles lining a shelf, various taxidermied animals posed on fiberglass rocks or stumps. Indoors and outdoors merged into one convoluted space, the only unifying element being the small targets affixed to each item. 

“A Tribute to Arcade Shooting Galleries” perfectly captures the sensibility:

“Like some nightmarish Disney tableaux, this gallery mixes the cute woodland creatures with the stark reality of frontier living. See the pianist, forlornly plying his trade, oblivious to the reality that the saloon has disintegrated around him.
A small dog rests on a crate of high explosives… just one of nature’s creatures lured by the pianist’s bleak lament… lured to their imminent demise at your brutal hand. 
Don’t reveal all your cards in one go, though: why not toy with them by first shooting a spittoon or lantern? ”

Below is documentation of a work-in-progress shooting gallery:

 

 

In my early experiments in Horizon, I tried to pack many ideas into a single world, which caused a number of problems. The primary problem was memory limitation: in one world, I built a maze-like funhouse that led into a dining room which led into a fully stocked grocery store aisle. Each required quite a number of assets and scripts to work, and I found that I quickly hit the 100% limit / maximum capacity.

And then I embraced the idea of a world of worlds in Horizon.

Normally, each world is a self contained space, or at least that’s what I’ve encountered so far while exploring existing Horizon worlds. But what if a world was just a scene from a larger movie, or a track on an album?

I’m working on ten to twelve different worlds right now, each a standalone experience but linked to one another through common characters, themes, and sensibilities. I haven’t decided on an ordering of them, but imagine that you could start in a shooting gallery world, and after achieving a goal take a portal to a graveyard, where you would follow a path and read the headstones. From there, you might find a portal to a working factory, where you attempt to package x number of products before the timer runs out, and then on to the next….