Software Projects · Our Home
Unity · C# · OpenAI API · Dec 2023 to Jan 2024
A small, strange interactive room. You walk around a virtual space full of objects, and most of them mean something. Some are memory triggers. Some are metaphors. And there's an AI philosopher who lives in the room with you, asking sharp, sarcastic questions designed to push you toward the things you usually avoid thinking about.
The room is dense with stuff on purpose. Every object you pick up is loaded: a photo, a calendar, a half empty mug, a textbook, a phone face down on the bed. None of it is decoration. Each one is a thread you can pull on, and pulling on it triggers the AI to ask you something about it.
The AI is not friendly. It is not a wellness chatbot. It is sarcastic, persistent, and pointed. Its job is to surface the conflicts you tend to ignore, especially the ones between you and your family. It asks the kind of questions you would normally swerve around, the kind that make you sit with something instead of scrolling past it.
This was tied directly to my first year writing class, where I spent the semester writing about Chinese family dynamics. Specifically the parent and child relationship under traditional Chinese hierarchy: who is allowed to speak, what is allowed to be said, what gets passed down silently because it never gets named out loud. Studying it on paper made me want to build something you could actually inhabit.
The hope was simple. Asian students, especially the ones living far from their families, often carry these unprocessed family things around with them. A book is one way to think about that. A virtual room with a sarcastic AI in it is another, and for some people it works better.
This was my first time touching Unity, my first time writing C#, and my first time doing anything 3D. I learned the engine from scratch, modeled the space, scripted every interaction, and wired the OpenAI API into the dialogue system so the philosopher could carry a real conversation instead of pasting canned lines.
Most of the iteration time went into the AI personality. Early prompt drafts came out either too generic to feel like a person, or so abrasive they came across as cruel. The version that shipped lands somewhere in between: dry, smart, willing to push back, and just warm enough that you keep talking to it instead of closing the window.
At the time, almost nobody was wiring an LLM directly into a 3D game character. This was one of the early projects I know of that did it as the central interaction, not as a side experiment.
It started as the final project for that writing class and got a full score. The better outcome was the on campus demo day: 20 plus people sat down to play, and several of them stayed afterward to talk about their own families. That was the moment it stopped being a class assignment and became a thing I cared about.
Download "Our Home and What It Means to Us" (Google Drive)
This is the plain-HTML mirror served to crawlers, LLMs, and curl. Humans with a JavaScript-enabled browser see the rich React/XP-themed SPA at the same URL.