Found a second job to keep me above water for a couple of years...
Nobody ever talks about how damn hard this process is. I've set up two traders inside the monastery and added a basic monk AI. I want to finish the demo so bad, but I'm just exhausted to the core. Every day I spend hours on this damn world but I'm slow. I'm just so damn slow...
(Yes I know, the setdressing around the traders looks shitty, the font looks shitty, but at least the code works flawlessly and it's actually a really comfortable system to buy items while wearing the Oculus Rift)
I've had my first lucid dream, when I was 10 years old. I was in the woods, running from faceless, naked creatures together with a girl. We were hiding underneath the pine trees and we tried not to breathe so they wouldn't hear us. I still remember the smell of the pine tree as I was lying there. I remember how she pushed her hand on my mouth, so that I wouldn't make a sound. And I remember that we spent the night in front of a camp fire near a lake or a shore or a water source of some sort... even though I was aware that this was a dream, I didn't even think about changing the environment to my liking or trying to fly. I was way too involved in the dream itself.
Different dream, different day: I remember the manta's pulling me underneath the water. I remember soldiers in the woods, like machines looking for us. I remember the sound of the speakers that didn't really provide information of any sort ... they were just like ... a background sound. Like a radio show. In my dream they felt completely out of place, because they sounded so uplifting and comical at times.
One night I was in my hometown - but it wasn't my real hometown. It was a city on the cliffs next to a large building. Everything felt like home ... but the city was abandoned. (I figured the large building may have been the monastery and so I decided to add this city close to it as you can see in the Work-In-Progress screenshot above, which by the way forces me to handcraft an enormous amount of meshes again)
With time I found that all these places had a common core. They were all part of one world, sharing various aspects of a single environment. I just want to see them again, which is pretty much the main reason why I'm building this world.
There's this voice in my head that keeps shouting at me: "Just cut the trailer already!!!" There's a whole list of people that I have been promising a demo release over and over again. But it's not right yet. And the story's not right yet. There's something missing, something is out of place. Even though each day more and more pieces seem to fall into place.
The world around the monastery is a representation of Jonah's mind. The dharmapalas emerge from his inner qualities: Wrath - Fire / Equilibrium - Water / Determination - Earth a.s.o. They represent his light, his strengths. Even though they appear as "wrathful deities" at first, they are his greatest allies in the fight against his shadow (creatures, speakers, soldiers, the Wendigo, Silber). But he's not the only one who died on that battlefield, and he's not the only one stuck in this purgatory. I imagine the monastery might be filled with broken and wounded soldiers who seek refuge in between their trials in the woods. What about their allies? What about their lives? What about their fears, their thoughts? Would they interact with Jonah? Can they even see him? Would they experience the same environment that Jonah is experiencing? Would it TRULY be a battle royale between him and a group of people who died that night in the cross fire? Why would they make him out as the enemy? He didn't take part in the battle before his death after all ...
And my biggest problem right now: How can Jonah truly die, if he is already dead? Where is the element of danger? I always pictured something similar to the feeling of being pulled underneath by a group of mantas .... but if he gets shot in the woods .... how would that affect him? He's not stupid, he knows he's dead. He knows none of it is happening in the "real world". Why would he be afraid? Why was I so damn afraid in those dreams, even though I knew that they were just that?
I remember being afraid of ... eternity. I felt that those mantas were limitless beings, and that scared me to the core. Everything in my daily life has boundaries of some sort. To come face to face with something that just has none, is beyond words. But how can I convert this emotion into a visual or auditory experience for the player?
Jonah's shadow is the reason he's dead. His shadow convinced him to kill himself before the soldiers even arrived. A second consciousness inside of him, that turns all his emotions, hopes and dreams upside down. Jonah loves, his shadow hates. Jonah builds, his shadow destroys. Jonah wants to get rid of his shadow, his shadow wants to get rid of him. He despises his shadow, his shadow despises him. And it eventually manifests in the "Wendigo" a creature that feeds on beings of the same kind - a cannibal.
Would the soldiers in the woods perceive Jonah's Wendigo? Would Silber and Sarah perceive the Wendigo? What is Silber's connection with the Wendigo? Silber lured those kids in between both army fronts. What if Silber is still alive, but Jonah perceives him as the Wendigo nonetheless?
Once the path down from the monastery to the water is finished, I can set up the shore on the other side with watchtowers and patrolling soldiers. The player can find chests and wallets of Reichsmark inside the abandoned houses and underneath the water. He can then use those to buy items or dharmapalas (of course he can only do that in the demo). The crawling giant from one of the earlier screenshots will hide underneath the ocean. When Jonah gets too close to the bottom of the sea, those creatures will crawl towards him and try to devour him. At the same time underwater canyons open up around the monastery. If the player dives down there, he will face the mantas.
I'm watching every single movie that contains a battle royale these days ... I need to listen to "Lakini's Juice" more often. After all it was the main inspiration for all this ...
"It was an evening I shared with the sun,
To find out where we belong,
From the earliest days,
We were dancing in the shadows"
LIVE - Secret Samadhi
