Man, I really wish I was better at keeping up with this blog. Throughout this phase, I have also been desperately trying to catch up with the write ups on the various pieces of work I have done. I’ve basically been doing double the amount of work I should have to do during this phase, and its a miracle that it hasn’t affected this phase more than it already has.
Despite all of the troubles I’ve had writing this blog up, I feel that, so far, this phase has been the best one so far, and the one I’ve done the best in. Yes, I did heaps of research into the different themes, and then looked at so many different series and media for inspiration for making transhumanism more than just Cyberpunk set dressing, but ultimately I came up with 4 great ideas (and the other one, but we don’t talk about that one), and made prototypes for all 4. I think that I’ve done well with coming up with very different ideas, each experimenting with a different approach to the theme, and honestly? I wouldn’t mind making any of these. Seriously, I like all of the 4 good ideas I came up with, and each have something unique and cool to them that would be super cool to make reality. However, that said, I had 2 favourites going into the presentation. While I liked the strategy games premise and novelty, I kinda like the control of other games a bit too much to be able to give it up almost completely, and the narrative game doesn’t really work as a smaller project that I can make on my own – oh, yeah, that’s a thing, I’m working on my own, at least for this phase and the next – and is honestly not the kind of game I get super invested in creating, so that leaves the last 2 ideas, the melee combat game and the VR puzzle room game. Both are great ideas, in my opinion, with the VR game being the most innovative, and the combat game being very much what I love in a gaming experience.
It was a hard decision to make, but only one could go forward into the next phase to be turned into a full game proposal.
Ultimately, while I had a personal “what I would play” preference, the decider was actually feasibility. Both had issues with feasibility; the melee combat game was an asset nightmare in the making, and already looked the idea that would take so much to make all of the assets and coding for if I had to make it alone, but the VR puzzle room game had a far more intrinsic feasibility issue – I’m not sure that some of the ideas that I had for modifications in the game are actually possible with current VR technology and documentation. One of the ideas was replacing the eye with an alternative. The idea would be that you would reach up to your eye, pluck it out – making the screen for that eye go black – and putting another one in its place. The problem here, however, is that you cant just turn off one of the two screens used in the better VR headsets. It’s just not a thing, at least not documented. So how would you do it? Well, you can make a material in Unreal that is only visible to one eye, make it pitch black and up against the camera, and only render it during the switch, but that’s something that hasn’t been tested, and if its loads of work for just this, then how much more will have to be worked out? How much will just not be possible to create, due to limits of software and hardware? It’s problems like this that led me to choose the combat game to take forward into phase 4. I just hope that I can sort out a way to lower the amount of work for it.
