Project Updates + Story Time! (Patreon)

Happy Saturday to everyone who is experiencing Saturday! Today I have thoughts, as well as a story, which I wish to share with you - but that will be a separate text post coming after this. First, thoughts.

- PROJECTIONS -

I mentioned it briefly in my Discord server a couple weeks back, but PROJECTIONS was featured as part of the bundle sold for the 2023 Jingle Jam hosted by Yogscast, recently. That's kinda cool right? I don't know. I fixed a few things in the game, but I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd have wanted. The game now loads much faster at least! That actually had to do with some really noob mistakes I made regarding how the audio files (you know, like 30+ huge music files) get loaded. That's a lot smarter now, so the loading screen where Aranactha is drifting toward your doorbell camera is practically useless. 

The Wolfgun concept also got his missing move kit, for which the animations already existed, but no attacks had been ascribed to them. That was a major failure on my part due to the development crunch I pushed upon myself at the time, made worse by life circumstances which were out of my control. ONE (1) new entity was added to the game, "DNA", and while the code / assets exist for three more, I was unable to debug them in time for Jingle Jam's deadline, so... Oof. 

I would say something like "Next update!" but the fact is that I doubt I will put much more effort into PROJECTIONS, thanks to a lot of factors, but very certainly thanks to Unity being awful and a thing I no longer wish to invest time learning. This flat sucks, because I've spent the last five years dedicating myself to grasping Unity's workflow, the C# scripting language, and more. However I have been doing a lot of research the past couple weeks and I have decided I will begin working toward comprehending Epic's Unreal engine, which I'll talk a little about now.

- ARANA SLEEPS -

So, if you were following me on Twitter early last year, you probably saw some images low-resolution looking landscape art which I posted here and there, cryptically, and with no accompanying information. I was working very obsessively on a project I had started back in 2019 during the development of PROJECTIONS, which is called ARANA SLEEPS.

Arana Sleeps is a special game that for me holds a lot of very particular and unusual feelings. I could describe the way that the game plays, but it wouldn't convey exactly what it will feel like. It's enough to say that this incarnation of the game sees the player entering seeded dimension which have unique characteristics that determine their features - generated color palettes, generated textures, procedurally constructed unique plant-forms, and importantly, the shape of the land which sprawls before you. I would call it a survival game, but there is no way to win, and there are several ways which the game can actually be ended.

The biggest hurdle for me has been trying to work around Unity's float precision, as Unity does not use doubles to store information about the position of objects in its scenes. These dimensions are technically infinite. The terrain will generate procedurally based on the unique rules for each dimension, in every direction, as far as you can walk, endlessly. To make this work there is a completely functional world origin shifting system in the game as it is right now, but I do not really like the solution, and I am not sure how it would scale as the game would continue to grow in size.

I call it a survival game, but it is to me more of a game about managing your choices under stressful pressures which the environment puts upon you. Arana is sleeping, and your goal is to avoid being noticed. Arana does not sneak up on you though - they are everything. The environment, the trees, the sky, the land itself - Arana's consciousness is everywhere. 

You can mine materials, like Immuria or Soot, and construct Monuments to shield yourself temporarily from his sleeping eye, but his Watchers will ultimately seek you out. You can build turrets to help yourself fend off the encroachment of Corruption, but when Arana splits the sky, they won't help. You can try to slip into an unstable space, but it would be impolite to talk about what you might find there. There are several ways to escape Arana's Tomb, but in every case, Arana wakes up. That is the doom of Arana Sleeps.

At least, that would be the doom of Arana Sleeps, if I could finish the game in Unity. Well, I make that sound like a bad thing - I'm actually very excited about moving to Unreal Engine for this project for a lot of reasons, both technical and artistic. There is even the potential that I could give Arana Sleeps a cooperative multiplayer mode, with Unreal Engine, as it will allow me to do away with world origin shifting, which was to me the most confusing and impossible block toward such an experience.

Although such a move would require me to learn all of the systems of Unreal, I do feel that it would be fairly quick - The enormous majority of time spent working on Arana Sleeps was coming up with the technical systems which powered procedural terrain that I felt inspired curiosity, making it fun to explore. I do not want the land to simply be a stage upon which these events play out. It has to have character, real variety, and genuine organic beauty all on its own. Everything which occurs on it will then be that much more beautiful and horrible as a result.

Transitioning that code to Unreal Engine shouldn't be difficult then, based on my research. We will see!

- MOUNTAIN GRASS -

The last, though not certainly the least thing which I will mention is that I am working on a surprise single, titled Mountain Grass. I call it a Surprise Single because I did not plan it at all, it just erupted very organically from some playing I was doing last week. First it wasn't. Then it was!

It's a beautiful song that I plan to finish within the next two weeks, possibly within just a few days. So, be on the lookout in my Discord server for announcements about that.

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Thank you for reading this far, and thank you of course for continuing to support my artistic endeavors through Patreon. It is actually thanks to all of you that I have been able to fund a couple bits of hardware that will greatly expedite the work on ORACLE, also known as The MARS Project. 

Oh, and be sure to look out for the short story I'll be posting here in a bit!