Game progress and some life stuff (Patreon)

Heya! This will be a bit rambly, so sorry in advance for that.

I figure since I'm spending so much (see: all) of my free time on this that I might as well update y'all. I alluded to this in my last post but since Nat and I have sharing a bunch of videos on Bluesky, I figure it's probably worth stating-stating that we're making a game together.

Will it ever ship? Who knows! I sure hope so, because we're working really hard on it. I can't speak to Nat but this has been, like, an all-consuming thing for me. I can't stop thinking about it. I've been writing a lot and if this manages to take a form we're willing to, like, share as a playable thing... it'll be really special, I think.

Our working title for it is Triathalon because we're kinda losers that way. We have a pretty clear source of inspiration but I think we've both come to realise it's a lot more exciting to let that inspiration guide us elsewhere, instead of what we were doing at first which was being very literal with our goal of "why isn't anyone making the Marathon game we want?"

I'm using it as an opportunity to learn a new game engine (Godot) but also learn 3D, which has been exciting and also challenging, mostly because UV sucks ass. Even with a really good plugin (ZenUV, thank you Eve!) it's a nightmare to wrap my mind around but I'm slowly learning.

Health and Shield terminals!

If you want a video of the first level we're working on, Nat posted a video of her progress on doing the level design for it. I can't embed videos here so you'll have to click the link but it's very cool!

https://bsky.app/profile/natclayton.bsky.social/post/3lshbaqakt22p

I've been doing a bunch of concept art stuff for the game, too, which I'm... finding myself really conflicted on sharing? I don't want to give away all the stuff that's really cool about our thing but it's also.. like. It's consuming so much of time that I don't really have anything to show for it because a lot of what we're doing is so incremental right now. I can show you a door? That's me trying to get a feel for what I want our texturework to be? A screenshot? A texture?

A door! A very unfinal door that is more experimenting than anything else.

A screenshot of me testing out some stuff with emissive textures! Which was mostly me realising that you can't make emissive light in Godot without creating GI probes, which I do not want to do, so I'm sorta faking it with some volumetrics, glow, and omnidirectional lights.

The splash screen for our terminals when you interact with them, except not really because I'm not sure how I want all of that to play out yet. The game does not have an AI you are interacting with because they are not artificial but... yknow. The vibe is the same if you've played Marathon. I don't want to talk about the plot until I have all of that locked in but I'm really excited about it! I'm excited to explore some ideas about independence and control and identity. I'm terrified about sharing any of it because I'm worried all of it will come across like I am trying to be smarter than I actually am. I have impossible degrees of impostor syndrome.

I'm just not sure how to talk about this stuff or feel like I'm not, yknow, neglecting my Patreon or anything. I don't want to force myself to do art for the sake of meeting a quota, especially not when I'm feeling more energized than I have in years, something I haven't felt since, honestly, I started this thing.

Maybe occasional devlogs are a good idea! There's a lot goin through my head that would be fun to catalogue and archive in some form. I dunno. It's all overwhelming. In a good way!

It has also been excruciating to work on because my body continues to feel like it's just irreversibly deteriorating. My wrists and shoulders are on fire constantly and I'm back to pretty regular RMT sessions because of it. Beginning to think this is a "this is my life now" kind of thing and it's hard not to be impossibly depressed over it.

Anyway. Folks who've seen what we've been posting on Bluesky have been really excited which is like... idk. An exhilarating feeling. If we're getting people that into our thing before we even have, like, textures or enemies in? Damn, we must be doing something right. I'd love to know what y'all would like when it comes to just... sharing stuff about it? Do you like dev logs? Are they interesting? Do you care about spoilers? Is stuff like "this is why I think 40px per meter textures might be better than 32" actually interesting to anyone other than my own mind?

I think, before anything else, we should figure out a final name for this thing so I can stop calling it something that's basically a joke lmao

💖 aura