The game is called SWEYET(etc.) and I'm massively excited to be putting my first project on steam! I'd love for you to check it out :)
At this point in the story there's a character that's wealthy but lonely, I modelled the house off Bill Gate's residence, that adapts to the visitors, playing their own music and swapping out photos to be of them, even changes the temperature to suit them. Remove the friction and what's left? Are you even sharing ideas with the visitors?
Although i can only really change your room warmer with bad code i've had to instead settle for borrowing your files (photos, music) at runtime to populate the building, here's a bit of a hypercut of it in action. Outside also changes to match your country, so you wont have ANY trouble adapting to your new surroundings.
Dunno if it needs to be said but obviously no none of your files are being uploaded or edited during this ahah.
I ran an early version of generative AI on my development machine to create alternative versions of the textures in the game. Blinking is a mechanic of the game, sometimes things change on blinks. One of those things is swapping a texture for an AI distorted version of it.
To get the alternative textures I developed a custom app to slice up the texturemaps and generate the alternatives. I think early models have this great ghost-like quality where you can feel the combination of human experience going into them, I cant help but see it as anything other than Jung's idea of the the collective unconscious.
I have unfortunately been having a lot of pushback for AI integration into the game, journalists declining to cover due to worry about how their readers will perceive it. Occasional negative comments depending on the sub, etc. Some developers i've spoken to have said i shouldnt disclose the AI usage, but i think it's a very interesting tool.
Here's the link if you're keen to check it out the demo or wishlist, it's coming out next month so any support is greatly appreciated https://store.steampowered.com/app/3063200/SWEYETetc/ :)
Video might not be the most engaging, but i think it shows the concept the clearest.
Game is called SWEYET(etc.) (wishlist/demo if you wanna check it out!)
I wanted to make the game psychedelic in both visuals and controls, but sometimes players were getting frustrated and quitting, thinking that something being obtuse was them being dumb (very far from true!).
Put together some clips of how it works, essentially there are these "globs" that you pickup in each level, that fill tablets into the dream world, where you brain rolls around looking for those things you dont know you know.
The game's coming out in a few weeks, here's the steam page if you'd like to wishlist or play the demo :) https://store.steampowered.com/app/3063200/SWEYETetc/
There's a lot going on but i thought i'd just combine the clips together for a bit of a level overview. My favourite part is around 00:16 where the text becomes Chinese, that sometimes happens when you blink in the game.
In my surreal adventure puzzle game SWEYET(etc.) I've built a system that adds a tombstone at the finale of the game for each user in the discord, with better looking tombstones for more active users. I figure it's a great way to give back to the community, and ideally works like including kickstarter/patreon names in a games credits, without requiring a payment.
Lately I've been trying to drum up wishlists and build this discord community around the game. The plan being that by incentivizing discord activity people who are interested in the game can spread it via word of mouth.
I've been running into trouble though when it comes to sharing the discord channel, the game doesnt have that much buzz on social media, and little engagement on short form media attempts (yt shorts, tiktok). I uploaded this youtube short to promote the idea, but it only had 1 view in 12 hours so i figure there's some kind of shadow banning for discord links...
Whats the consensus on sharing discord links for your games? Do you think it seems spammy? Should I just leave it to discovery? Some amount of people have been able to naturally find it from the Steam page but idk.
There's a steam page for the game if you'd like to wishlist or play the demo :) https://store.steampowered.com/app/3063200/SWEYETetc/
Getting the dynamic pixelization to give the alien double resolution was tricky, but im happy with how it turned out