Developer Diary 76 - Amen

I'm going through my diaries and early notes tonight and just found something interesting from long ago. While studying for the conservatory entrance exam, I had written down a prayer one night. I must have been around 20 years old, and during that time, I was living for the first time on my own. I don't remember why I did that, or where it came from. The last couple of lines said:  


Dear God, ... 
Let me find strength, when all I feel is weakness,
Let me be brave, when all I feel is fear.
Let me be compassionate, when all I feel is rage,
Let me feel freedom, when all I feel is confinement.

Please let me be who I truly am and fight for what I truly believe in, 
And in return I promise to be myself forever....
Amen. 

And suddenly a thought hit me: At what point, does this stop being true? If this is truly a bargain, what if one of these two parties, doesn't keep their promise? It's funny because I suppose everybody secretly makes this promise .... I think it can easily be mistaken with: "Hey, as long as things are looking up, I don't need to start any crazy stuff."

But I do believe that all consciousness carries a responsibility to cure itself and to return to what it truly is. I believe that this is the true meaning of the Bardo Thodol: Consciousness won't automatically turn darkness into light. It is a long process of soul searching and self reflection. But consciousness has a responsibility to do so, and to take up the long journey towards light. Or it will lose it's own identity and purpose. It will remain in darkness and change into a different form. This duality is a defining feature of all sentient beings. And it doesn't matter what, who, or where your conscious center is. You either move away from the darkness and towards the light or change form and move even deeper into the opposite direction. But the potential for change and the constant ever changing current of thoughts and feelings remains present all over the spectrum. The final goal is neither light nor dark, but a satisfaction of the underlying curiosity that consciousness carries inside. And since (at least to my own understanding) this curiosity is insatiable, eternal and endless there is no goal, just experience and a (more or less limited) free will.

I choose light. I always will.

Developer Diary 75 - Moon

No, I'm not dead. But I'm doing a lot of things at the same time right now .... some of it is job related, some of it is money related. The more budget I can gather, the better the chances will be for this project to come to fruition in the future ...

That being said, I still keep working on the soundtrack. During the last couple of days I have been working on a piece called Moon, which is meant to be used as a peaceful underscore inside the game world. Yesterday night I finished the first part:

Developer Diary 74 - Gamedesign is Done!

I finished a 20 page game design document, including screenshots, music links, videos and SFX examples. The game is theoretically pitchable to a publisher now. I also have a demo level ready, but the FPS are not consistent across all parts of the level yet and I'd also like to add an area depicting the transition to another landscape chunk. But so far things are coming along nicely.

Developer Diary 73

Right now I'm preparing a Game Design document and a demo for future pitches. This is a Dharmapala palace appearing in the woods. I thought this might be the most impressive object to experience in a demo. After this is done I'll take screenshots of AI, Items and objects to incorporate them into the gamedesign document. As unbelievable as it sounds: This works at 90 FPS in VR.

Developer Diary 72 - Eerily Dark

It took some hard work, but the forest rooms are done. The mood is incredibly dark and strange. It's not exactly made for screenshots. All anyone can distinguish in the screen above is a spot of strange green light and that's it. But when you experience it in VR it reaches its peak immersion. The ground is covered with bushes and grass, and it has a really realistic feel to it. The next task ahead includes meadows and open areas. The difficulty here lies in creating a seamless transition from the dark woods into the bright light of day. Once I have a template for these open spaces, I can incorporate the maze from early 2017 and the dharmapala palaces in combination with the already finished bridges and towns.

Developer Diary 71 - Back To The Beginning

I finished the blueprint spawners, but when I traveled my own world it felt void, empty and dark. Without life and color, depressing in every way. As beautiful as those screenshots in "Developer Diary 70" looked, they lacked in atmosphere and character.

In late 2014 I came up with my very first concept for Lakini's Woods. At the time I had been working with Unreal Engine 3 and a couple of basic assets I took from the game "Thief 3". The idea was to set up the entire game as a forest maze, based upon a series of rooms that create the illusion of a very deep dark forest. I had no idea how to accomplish this at the time, but I managed to lay down a basic playable UE3 demo and created a couple of playable levels, that included zombies that would chase me throughout the woods:

The atmosphere and the overall feeling during gameplay was great. Each room had  a white ceiling and a point light, which was responsible for "faking the sky". This concept had many advantages: It greatly limited the amount of foliage visible to the player, there were no lighting problems related to dynamic day/night rhythms and it gave me the opportunity to plan each segment and each room meticulously so I could optimize VR performance in every corner of the world.

I think I found a way to merge the original concept with the landscape segments and the world creator blueprint that I built throughout early 2017. Instead of landscape segments, the world creator spawns so called "forest-rooms" in predetermined sizes (500m / 1000m / 2000m a.s.o). They will now snap together and connect accordingly, creating a fluent tunnel-like maze. The dharmapala palaces and the villages are contained in very large rooms, that use an artificial sky sphere to create the illusion of a very large and open space. These large rooms can also be implemented into the world creator blueprint. I just may have found a way to get rid of all my problems ...

Developer Diary 70 - This is what it should look like

This is a sample of a randomly spawned village next to a dharmapala fortress and a bridge structure.

These images have two purposes:

To give me a clear reference of what I want the blueprint spawners to do (the one for the bridge, for the palace and for the villages) and to boost my ego after days of failed attempts at dealing with destructibles.