Somehow managed to finish the first pass. The list of things to fix, refactor, and add is enormous, but I think everything that needed to be designed from scratch is done. What’s left is assembly, polish, cleanup, and improvement.
To reward myself for finishing, I visited a place called Museum SAN. Since so much of what I build has to be indoors, I’ve become very interested in physical spaces wherever I go. The artworks on display were impressive, but the exhibition spaces themselves were remarkable. Of the three things that stuck with me the most, one was a spiral staircase whose horizontal cross-section is a Reuleaux triangle — a triangle made of circular arcs. A normal spiral staircase would feel claustrophobic, and a perfectly round one might feel dizzying or unsettling, but this triangular spiral felt genuinely smooth and impressive. Another was a second-floor gallery that doubled back almost to where you came from, forming a sharp point — and I realized you’d never see a shape like that outside of a mountain trail. More than just “a master architect built this,” it felt like the building itself was speaking. The last was a dome-shaped ceiling with an opening, like the roof of the Pantheon. What made it special was how sound reflected inside — my own voice came back from above my head sounding like someone else’s. Mathematically it might be nothing remarkable, but experiencing it in person, with light pouring through the opening, was something else. The reason I’m writing about this here is because I want to try recreating spaces like these in the game. One thing I’ve been thinking while making this game is that if I’d known about architecture, I might have gone in that direction. I enjoyed the work of conveying feeling through spaces and the flow between them, and I enjoyed experiencing it too. Of course, coming from a completely different field, this is all at a beginner’s level of appreciation.
Anyway, assembly finally begins. The story has been coming together in my head and I’ve been wanting to get it properly in place, along with cleaning up all the placeholders. But I know once I start, it’ll be the usual — this is hard, my brain won’t cooperate, I can’t think — crawling through the work. Still, the end is genuinely in sight.