Alex Hetherington

Interiors using Weld in Anvil 1.4, my blender level design addon

@SomeHoopyFrood Always busy, will always find time to chat :). Will send a dm

@FootnotesFuture This is beautiful. Was starting a plan to build something like this for Blender (and Unity, and Unreal). I'd love to chat if you get time! Awesome work. More power to Level Designers.

I'm still a hater (vid in comments)

How it's going vs. how it started 3 Shots Left has some great crunchy picnic spots for your Valentines Day date store.steampowered.com/app/2902400/3_…

@Scearpo Economic forces are pushing games to become immersive slot machines, but you didn't substantiate that this is the logical end game game of 'mature' games artistically Watching AI is never going to replace watching pros (who watches AI chess?) Would love your take on Outer Wilds

The funniest part of AI's development over the past few years is witnessing the classic Jetsons future automation fantasy invert itself. Rather than having factory jobs and manual labor replaced, a majority of programmers, doctors, lawyers, artists, and writers now face obsolescence. There's a sort of poetry to watching machines rob of us of all of life's most leisurely and creative tasks while leaving us to toil in physical drudgery, a twisted irony punishing human beings for their inability to abstain from the eternal dangling carrot of capitalistic optimization pursuit. It's only logical that AI entities should start playing our video games for us. The video game is a medium still well within its infancy. Just as movies took half a century to properly escape the imitative motifs of theater plays and grow into their own mature medium, the vidya industry will likely take years and decades before we truly produce an original video game that properly explores its own format. Right now video games either attempt to imitate the raw function of a traditional game (board games, sports, war games) or they attempt to imitate storytelling mediums (movies and choose-your-own adventure books). Both of these are imperfect in that they depend on prior forms of human experience. The expectations that dependence brings tend to strangle potential for what a video game could fully be, a platonic ideal which nobody can truly comprehend until some auteur can properly execute it. This ideal likely explores the video game as a child's toy version of the metaverse concept, a simulated 3D world to act as the digital reality layer for 21st century socializing and communication. Video games and their various iterations throughout the past few decades reveal the biological phenomenons that occur when you interface with a simulated reality. Future generations will have grown up with a stable consistent VR reality, one which unifies all forms of media into a singular cohesive experience. Music becomes an auto generated seamless soundtrack playing in the background to accentuate your environment and actions, optimized based on your listening tastes. Movies, shows, books, and story-driven games are no longer separately observed phenomenons but rather ambient ongoing environmental narrative events with NPCs as characters interacting with you, the player, as the protagonist. Games that employ physicality or raw visceral mechanism would be mere activities within the world, reverting to a form of sport and likely painted with a costume of necessity to progress through the world. Information is processed through "lore dump" moments handed to you through in-world discoverable excerpts in a physical depiction of your research mind palace and the narration of philosopher and oracle archetype NPCs. What will a generation raised in this environment view video games as? Primitive primordial subdimensions which once captivated and enslaved ancestors. They'll view the backwards hopping of Super Mario 64 or the surf maps of CS 1.6 like we think of primordial paganistic gods flying through a fuckormless void and shaping the physical world through staged sculptings. They see the shifting of avatars and protagonists like Odin or Horus transforming haphazardly, wizards teleporting between the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th dimension into incomprehensible expression to feel indescribable experiences. The idea that man once began and ended games would seem oddly discomforting, an aberration to the eternally updated One Virtual Reality which becomes more real than life itself when the ungoggled alternative is the stained walls of a tiny occupancy cube nestled amongst one million of its brothers in the great favela fields of modern existence. That your great grandparents once began and ended dozens, hundreds of pocket universes with each slotting of a Nintendo cartridge, each wayward click within a Steam library, that would seem to you as if your progenitors were like God sending meteors to wipe out the dinosaurs and flood the earth the moment He grew bored of the nephilim. Yet they too would have access to these old games. They would have the opportunity to play these games within the Great One Game that is their digital universe, stooping over to look at the simulated boxy TV and holding a weightless formless Xbox 360 controller in their hands while camera sensors smaller than a grain of sand interpreted the fumbling of fingers in a dark musty room. Very quickly they would grow bored of this nested simulacra, seeing right through the pale mechanisms which captivate and enslave many of us today. The MMO would be like a bitter poppy's milk being fed to a hardened heroin addict who has no use for the flimsy primitive form of a refined system of sensory overload. Dopamine farming would surely be a sophisticated system of multitasked socially integrated achievements and points, a menuless cacaphony of events, outcomes, and digital possessions coming into being through seemingly serendipitous harmony. Karma, fate, destiny, and fortune being recreated through unintentional imitation. Yet the ancient simple forms of the games would still be fascinating, and furthermore, an opportunity for shelving into the great trophy case of 100%ing the Great One Game and therefore life itself. They would still want to indulge the sense of completion induced by fulfilling the simple A -> B metrics of the MMO grind, the sheer satisfaction of watching the numbers go up, watching the containers of experience filled into their absolute maximum. Unlike tales of antediluvian society, our descendants would have a much more visceral opportunity to explore the world their ancestors lived in, and furthermore they would get to be little sandbox gods themselves. Much gods, they would choose to experience this through observation and influence rather than burdening themselves with the chore of direct control. Like Zeus idly pricking the basin on Mount Olympus, they would peer into many different games played by many different agents, each one an unwitting slave to destiny. One MMO account grinding to max out like a Hercules climbing to power, another repetitively refreshing runs in a roguelike forever like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. The future of today's games is becoming tomorrow's terrariums, plantations of AI slaves acting out thousands of digital playthroughs for the true player to observe in their higher level dimension. Every game becoming a cell within a fractal body, each stunted sense of secondhand accomplishment siphoning in multitude to flow into the mind of the player, all experiences being subsumed into the world's greatest and final Cookie Clicker. It all begins with this, the obsoletion of the player. You will no longer have to play games to enjoy them, AI will do it for you.

I made a website. If you're a game developer and you want tools and you don't know who to ask: gamedevwishes.com

youtube.com/watch?v=dNbCiG… github.com/alexjhethering…

Sorry guys but I'm a hater (I made an addon to make it better - links in replies)

@Mab_Devv Mad respect for your work on the editor. Do you plan on supporting terrains?

And so the entire level is generated at runtime from this lower level data This effectively turns Unity into a BIM, AKA a Building Information Modeller, AKA Revit And as someone who got used to Revit from my day job it made using probuilder for level design all the more tedious

This is honestly a fair question, tho i have received similar questions before so just in case, ill put the answer out here in an overly detailed fashion in case anyone else had similar thoughts In short: I plan to make the entire campaign using my level editor In long :.. 🧵

Oops

This is what Ballistic Zen could have looked like had I been a capable artist (don't get me wrong, I am now attached to the more colourful style)

mbisonyes.gif

Exceedingly cool. Genuinely love this. But. How many different positions do you need to put skeletons in to make this worth it; or will a skeleton sitting up and a skeleton lying down position cover 99% of cases? What if you want a fetal skeleton position?

@_FollySoft Oh god is this my future

@FootnotesFuture What my kids see when they wake me up before 5 am

Creepy old man

@SilencedSolar My next game is all 3 oops

the thing is: indie devs need an ideas guy bc all we get from indie devs now is either retroslop, themeslop, or mascot horror

Wake up babe, one of the Straftat lads is making a first person brutalist parkour game

Love this stuff. Need more!

@128_mhz Are you up for sharing more? 1) How do you get the point cloud data (I assume you are using meshes? Or am I wrong?) 2) What algorithm are you using for grid movement? Does the character snap to grid on every movement? Diagonal movement feels weird even smoothed?