Game development

I was going to talk about programming a bit. I’m learning about shaders. It’s not easy. Just rendering text is quite complicated. I’m trying to wrap my head around SDF texture generation… but then I remembered :

This is rendered on the GPU via WebGL!

The technical stuff just doesn’t really interest me that much anymore… Maybe because it’s a bit too much like work? I don’t know. Motivation is a bit low at the moment, but hopefully blogging about it might motivate me somehow (I hope!).

Instead, I will talk about my current vision for the game.

This is still early in the development cycle, it might be very different by the time I’m done (if I’m ever done!).

The game is going to be heavily text-based. At first, it’s going to look like a normal ebook, but it will slowly merge into a more interactive and confusing form. I’m thinking of a digitally inspired version of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

I want it to be a mystery novel. To progress, the reader needs to solve every chapter.

The game will also have a built-in comment feature. With the comment feature, the reader can leave comments in the text. The text will already contain comments left by “other readers” (me). I am drawing inspiration from S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst.

The aim is to create a sense of collaboration with other people trying to solve the game mystery as a group. There is also a meta-commentary layer to the narrative and stories within a story.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. Next time, maybe I’ll explore the mechanics of the game more or just discuss psychology again.