/01 Author: Henry D
Our (Open) Journey
In between projects we set ourselves a challenge to seamlessly bridge WebGL (sturdy persistent worlds keeping costs manageable) and pixel-streaming (Unreal or Unity, mostly used for single events because of exploding server costs) in a single solution for brands.
The result is an ongoing framework we decided to call “Open Journey”, representing the two sides of the same coin.
Frameworks are pretty boring to discuss, and because we are obsessed with how a great story can be the best way to package technology and tie it with a nice ribbon of emotion, we decided to approach this differently:
“Let’s create a coming-of-age mini-game blending, Al techniques, WebGL and Unreal Engine in the shape of PixelStreaming!”
What could go wrong? 🙂
Ok. You heard the man, let's make a game.
Our game is centred around the 5 stages of grief as experienced by a young teenage girl (Nina) who has lost a parent and is coming to terms with their death.
Internally we are calling it “The Light Within” and we intend to blend point-and-click puzzles, first-person interactions and full open world exploration to experience Nina’s emotions and journey towards acceptance in a beautiful, atmospheric game that’s both touching and captivating.
We believe that games can be more than just entertainment – they can be a powerful tool for storytelling, empathy-building, and connection. Through our game, we want to help players understand and empathise with the experience of grief, while also engaging them in a fun and immersive gameplay experience.
Concretely it means lots of Al-collaborative techniques, 3D mapping, Unreal Engine, dozens of tips and tricks, using GPT-3 and 4 in the co-writing process, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion in conception but also in different steps in the production.
The game will hopefully come out at some point, but as we’re building this without funding and only when we get a chance, it may also never do, and this is why we’re excited to share our journey with you all. Especially those patrons interested to fund further development on their platform!
A little glimpse
To whet your appetite here’s a mashup of some of our progress from the last few weeks involving Move.ai, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Controlnet, Unreal Engine 5, LORA skyboxes and Metahuman for Nina – and we are just getting started!
Our (Open) Journey will continue
As we work to bring this game to life, we want to share our process, insights, and expertise with you in this DevLog. Be warned it will flit from concepting to protoyping to other R&D and other things along the way as we only work on it when various resources become free.
Our hope is that our journey will not only be an inspiration to other game developers, but also a demonstration of the power of game development to create emotional connections with players and drive meaningful results for brands.
Let’s create something amazing together!
Oh and again – always accepting patrons 🙂
English
Español