Deliver
As the project developed, I continued refining how the experience was structured and presented. I made the intentional choice to narrow the scope of my final deliverable. I decided to keep the memorial at a high level: four rooms representing life stages—childhood, college, adulthood, and reflection—rather than recreating every milestone or event in granular detail. This allowed the experience to maintain emotional clarity without becoming too literal or overwhelming.
The memorial hall structure helped frame each phase of life while still leaving room for exploration. It created boundaries that made emotional transitions more legible, allowing visitors to intuitively understand the mood and tone of each space. This decision turned the experience into something more reflective and less like a digital scrapbook.
Challenges Along the Way
While building the experience, I encountered several technical limitations that shaped the final outcome:
There was a significant learning curve with Unreal tools and cinematic scripting.
Fortnite Creative places restrictions on media hosting; for instance, video is only supported if it’s Fortnite-branded, limiting my ability to include personal archival footage.
In this phase, I also encountered challenges publishing the experience to Fortnite Creative. While I successfully launched my map in Fortnite, lighting and textures often looked distorted in-game. Some assets couldn’t import cleanly. These setbacks slowed down real-time interaction but led me to develop a cinematic walkthrough video to preserve the intended experience.
Looking Ahead
There’s still so much I want to explore with METAMEMORIA. Some key next steps include:
Refining transitions between rooms using more cinematic sequencing
Collaborating with developers who are fluent in Verse to build scripted interactions and dynamic moments
Digitizing more personal media—like letters, audio recordings, and film photographs—to better represent the pre-digital phases of my life
Exploring institutional partnerships—schools, archives, museums—to see how this format could be used to teach history or preserve community narratives
While METAMEMORIA began as a personal memorial, it’s grown into a larger reflection on how we remember, and how interactive design might reframe legacy as something ongoing, participatory, and alive.