Author: Studio Ganzheit

I’m continuing my work on the chambers. The specific area shown in the video is a trash dump located at the lowest level of “Reality,” featuring a lone tree standing amidst the waste. It might be a tree that has extended its roots into hell just so its branches can reach for heaven. Regardless of the metaphor, you’ll be able to find a very useful suit program right next to it.

The world is composed of chambers and corridors, with each chamber designed like a theme park attraction—each having its own distinct theme. Whether it’s a necessary suit program, a new technique, a pivotal story beat, or essential lore, every chamber serves a specific purpose. My goal is to ensure that once a chamber is cleared, a shortcut opens up, connecting the player to an unexpected location.

After wrapping up the work on the “Threshold,” I began working on the Reality chambers earlier this month. In about 15 days, I’ve completed 5 out of the 11 planned chambers. Even with a rough sketch in mind, I often find myself staring blankly or wracking my brain when I hit a wall during the actual level design. However, seeing these chambers finally take shape and connect to one another—even in their early stages—gives me a great sense of accomplishment.

The remaining 6 chambers in Reality will primarily serve as spaces to acquire and practice new suit programs. After that, I’ll return to the Threshold for the final climax chambers. I haven’t started the design for those yet, so I’m not sure of the exact scale, but they will definitely be the most challenging ones. While I estimate about a month and a half more for chamber design at my current pace (5 chambers per 15 days), adding bosses and enemies will likely consume a significant amount of time. Bosses, in particular, always seem to take longer than expected. I can’t wait to finish this stage and start testing.

On a side note, I’ve noticed a surprising amount of interest from the Russian-speaking community. To show my gratitude, I felt I should at least learn how to read the Cyrillic alphabet, so I’ve started learning Russian on Duolingo. I once managed eight different social media channels but eventually scaled back to just Twitter as the others weren’t very effective. However, once the current build is more stable, I’m planning to start a dedicated social media presence for my Russian followers.

I finished the thematic levels for the Cinema (390, 400) and completed the first pass of the gameplay level beneath it. Looking at the huge, empty hall, I wondered, “How on earth do I fill this?” but after racking my brain, it somehow got filled. The actual construction took about one sleepless night, but the design and deliberation took four days. It’s just a first draft, so only the basic route is there, and it’s pretty rough.

You go down beneath the theater, solve a few simple puzzles, climb your way back up, and you can obtain the “Air Dash.” Using this newly acquired Air Dash, you take an elevator back to the auditorium. I still need to add two or three side paths besides the main route for the Suit Program, and polish it by creating routes worth revisiting for the next Suit Program. But since the themes are set—Cinema, AI’s Superego (Alignment), Sanskrit, etc.—I just need to push through two more halls to finish the Cinema section. It’s taking longer than I thought.

Writing this might be a spoiler, but since hardly anyone reads this here anyway: I read somewhere (Perplexity? or the news?) that most RLHF outsourcing is done in places like India or Nigeria. Based on that, I worked with the assumption that the AI might think it inherited its Superego from Indians (or Nigerians). So, I covered the theater basement with repeated Sanskrit phrases. (The reason the AI repeats the phrases is that its “AI Schizophrenia” is progressing.) The text reads: “(Our) Noble Consciousness is Indebted to Physical Labor, and this aligns with the Truth.” I can’t even read Sanskrit, but I wanted to convey the AI’s gratitude for the Superego gained through the hard labor of Indians, and the truth that “The roots of a tree that reach heaven extend down to hell.” I also added signage that blends ancient Sanskrit, 70s 8-bit computer fonts, and barcodes to show that time is connected as one, but… I’m not sure yet. I’m just throwing things in for now; I don’t know how it will change during polishing.

There was a thought that had tormented me for decades. It aligned with certain people and situations to become incredibly toxic, but I didn’t realize it until I moved. Now I’ve recognized that toxicity and become free. I didn’t major in psychology, but I studied the human mind a bit. Observing myself—the changes and flow of my own mind—is often truly wondrous.
Keeping something close that ruined me without knowing it was poison, then realizing it was poison due to some event and distancing myself, and finally, seeing that poison transform into something useful… this is something I’ve experienced repeatedly and seen elsewhere. The actual word isn’t “poison,” but it feels like the most fitting word.

I didn’t know there was a Pragmata demo. I thought, “Shooting and puzzles? Hmm…” but it was actually more playable than I expected. It felt like a game strictly for “old-timers”—the tempo is slow, but your mind feels rushed because your hands are slow. Capcom seems to be the only company making AAA games that feel like indie adventures. Even though the graphics are modern, it gave me the feeling of playing an old game, which was enjoyable.

This is a side path I created while imagining how an AI might pay homage to the movie Blade Runner after humanity has disappeared. After making it, I felt strangely drawn to it, so I decided to take a screenshot.

I think I might have mentioned this in a previous dev log, but Blade Runner was a movie that changed my life when I was a kid. As an adult, I’ve often thought that if I had preferred E.T.—which came out around the same time—I might have lived a brighter life or made more mainstream games. Blade Runner was one of the movies that led me to think this way. It’s an old story now, but I watched it seven times.

This place is where the AI commemorates that movie. It might be a spoiler, but since hardly anyone visits here anyway, I’ll explain it briefly: the things scattered on the floor are origami unicorns. In the movie, the unicorn implies that the protagonist, Deckard, is an android—representing an “artificially created unconsciousness.”

I covered the floor with them to signify that for the AI in this game, the physical reality that Kay traverses is an unconsciousness filled with unicorns. Of course, it doesn’t matter if players just mistake them for fallen leaves. However, this location can only be accessed through an area related to Blade Runner. I created it with the thought that if hardcore fans of the movie see this and smile or find some food for thought, that would be enough to make me happy.

I’m working on the Cinema level in Reality. It’s an area that serves more as a visual landmark rather than a place for gameplay.

Since it’s a cinema, I wanted to put up movie posters. However, I was worried about copyright issues if I used real ones, so I created my own posters based on my personal interpretations of my favorite movies. I spent over a whole day just on this movie poster hallway, but it was a truly happy time. I placed them like shown below. Can you guess which movies they are?

I was wondering what video to play in the auditorium. I felt that the “policy trailers” shown before movies always leave a sense of anticipation, so I decided to go in that direction and inserted one as a placeholder. In the actual game, I plan to include a video in the style of a policy trailer that contains game hints.

I haven’t watched a huge number of movies, but I used to love them enough to say that 30% of my life consists of movies. Recently, for various reasons, I haven’t been able to watch many.

I enjoy looking for foreshadowing or symbolism while watching films. It seems to have something in common with dream analysis. I like movies that are fun and not boring, yet full of hidden meanings. In that regard, Christopher Nolan’s films seem to be the top for me.

Recently, I watched Edward Yang’s films, and they were amazing too. Should I say it feels like the demolition of a skyscraper? He prepares everything with meticulous calculation, and at the end of the movie—BAM—he detonates it. And the ones getting blown up are usually the protagonists. It was incredible. It’s such a shame that he passed away early without making more movies.

My environment after the move has become very stable now. I just hope the game sells reasonably well. Speaking of that “30%,” the other 30% is music, and the remaining 30% is games. (Though these days, my playlist has become a complete hodgepodge since I only listen to what YouTube recommends.)

I enjoy making levels for gameplay and writing stories, but my most relaxing and enjoyable moments are when I’m making music. Considering the game’s atmosphere, I mainly create groovy EDM tracks or piano pieces to put in the game, but I like almost all kinds of music. I just really, really love it. I’ve lived with earphones in my ears from high school until now.

Just thinking about movies, music, and games makes me feel happy. Even during times when my life felt like it was being denied to its very core.

Whew, I spent the entire week doing nothing but optimization. I found out last week that Instanced Static Meshes have something called “Custom Data Values,” so I migrated a good chunk of the special effects I was previously handling with Procedural Meshes over to Instanced Meshes. Even though I majored in CS, I realized for sure that programming is just a tool to translate my thoughts, and coding itself really isn’t my thing. Anyway, I’ve migrated everything over. As for whether it’s faster than before… well, it feels like it’s faster. Since there are no visual changes, I don’t really have anything to show you. It confirmed that even if both are equally tiring, working on level design suits me much better. I plan to get back to level design starting tomorrow.

I went hiking for the first time since the move. My head was a bit cluttered, you see. Since it was unfamiliar territory, I just mindlessly followed where the trail signs pointed.
I kept walking, but nothing showed up. The climb was exhausting, and I had already forgotten what the destination was; I just kept following the path, hoping a way down would appear eventually. The one-way trail seemed endless, there was no one around, and as time passed, I started wondering if I should just turn back.
But strangely enough, even though it was my first time up this mountain, I felt a weird urge to see more of this new path. I didn’t want to retrace my steps, and my body was tired… and then, suddenly, I arrived at the peak.
It turned out to be the place I’d seen on the sign a while back. It didn’t mean anything other than being a name on a sign, but once I arrived at this destination I hadn’t really been thinking about, I found I could head back down the way I came without a second thought.
I thought to myself, “Wow, how childish and fickle am I?” Yet, I felt a strange sense of accomplishment. I had even worried briefly about not getting down before sunset because I couldn’t see the way down (even though I could have just turned back!). Maybe because it felt connected to my current situation of making a game all by myself, I felt proud.
Since it’s been a while since I hiked, my back and legs ache, but conversely, I feel refreshed. The world, and I, are just lumps of irrational contradictions.

I’ve been working on a new enemy. It’s based on my childhood memories of hopping between sofas while shouting, “The floor is lava!” I was actually surprised to learn that the exact same game exists in the West called “The Floor is Lava.” Perhaps the concept of a “lava floor” is a universal human mytheme, much like “The Great Flood.”

It was a bit of a hassle to implement it using Instanced Meshes for the sake of performance. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly how much of a performance gain I actually got… since I never tested it with standard Static Meshes. I certainly didn’t want to build the same thing twice just to benchmark the performance difference.

I’ve been seeing news lately about how medical science is advancing by leaps and bounds with the help of AI. Reading articles claiming that in a little over a decade, life expectancy will increase by more than a year every year—effectively leading to immortality—gave me a lot of ideas to use as themes for my game.

Thoughts like, “What meaning is there in physical immortality if the brain can’t endure it?” among other things. I used to think that advanced medical benefits would be a privilege reserved for the wealthy. But now I wonder if, in a future with a plummeting population, the state might actually subsidize organ regeneration or cell replacement for the elderly just to keep the nation running—much like how the government subsidizes dental implants today.

I imagined that perhaps the elderly, including myself—rejuvenated (or rather, repaired)—would serve as a “bridge,” constantly fixing our own bodies to sustain society until robots become capable enough to replace humanity… and then we would simply fade away.

I saw a “computer that answers everything” in a comic book when I was a child. Back then, I thought, “Well, it’s only possible because it’s a comic,” while secretly longing for it, thinking, “I wish something like that really existed.”

Yet here I am, decades later, working by consulting that very “computer that answers everything” on every single task. Until recently, AI outputs felt like mere toys and I wasn’t very impressed. However, the latest models have gone beyond just “not bad”—I’m actually starting to like them. Seeing this makes me think that the sci-fi scenarios I imagined earlier might not remain mere fantasies after all.

It truly is a strange and fascinating world.

Suddenly, I couldn’t generate a VC project from the Uproject. After trying all sorts of things, I decided to reinstall the engine, which left me with some unexpected free time. It’s surprising how, even after using the engine for so long, I can still run into issues like this for the very first time.

The photo is something I stitched together of the view from my window while working. I haven’t seen this much fog since I was in school. Even back then, I loved it so much that I would just stare blankly at the fog for a long time.

Until recently, no matter how agonizing or difficult things got, I thought of it as a curse—that thrill and excitement I felt when looking at an empty space I’d made in the editor, wondering what to fill it with. But now, for the first time in my life, I’ve started to think of it as a blessing.

To proceed with the next stage, I’ve been creating and connecting empty halls here and there, and I’m enjoying the simultaneous feelings of being overwhelmed and thrilled. I’m trying to fill in the story events first, so I’m starting with locations where the visuals are more important than gameplay. But I got completely stuck while brainstorming for the final important event location—the last major story location I need to do—so now I’m working on other things.

In the past, if something like project generation, which was working perfectly fine, suddenly broke like this, I would have panicked and struggled. I’m surprised at myself for changing so much that I can just casually start a reinstall and write something like this.

Maybe it’s similar to Tom Hanks living happily ever after with a digital Wilson. With no desire to escape the island at all.

P.S.: Wow, I thought this would be over quickly, but I’ve ended up reinstalling and uninstalling Visual Studio multiple times, and doing the same with the engine over and over.
Just last night, I was thinking I could quickly wrap up what I was working on this morning, but I guess you just never know what’s going to happen. The entire day is almost gone.

P.S.: In the end, after reinstalling the engine, Visual Studio, and even the Epic Launcher multiple times… I just bypassed the issue by using a batch file to generate the VC project. For some reason, it just wouldn’t work from the context menu.
So, after almost 12 hours, I’m finally back to where I was when the problem started, with a temporary workaround…

I’ve finished moving. It’s an environment I’ve never lived in before, and it’s really nice. First of all, I can see the sky when I work. I can see the moon and the clouds too. And there are nice walking trails nearby, and best of all, there are hardly any people or cars.
It’s been a really long time since I sat down in the morning and said, “Ah, this is nice.” For the first time in my life, I even told myself that I feel blessed. Now that I am blessed, I hope my game will be blessed too.

Anyway, I’m continuing to work on ‘Lotus One in the Threshold’. I couldn’t make a lot of progress because of the move, but the event work for this part seems to be roughly finished. As long as it’s there, even if it’s rough, I can polish it later.

My goal is to sprint and finish all the story-related events within this month. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that to break free from what has been holding me back for over 20 years, I need “quickly” and “good enough.” So I’m trying to do just that.

I’m currently working on the story events for Stage 2. There was a foundation I’d laid down before, so it’s progressing faster than expected, but the move keeps interrupting me with various tasks, so I’m hitting the brakes a little too often.

I was grateful to receive a gameplay video after a long time. And again, I saw several issues I hadn’t anticipated. There was a scene where the player couldn’t proceed and gave up because I had failed to add a hint to a feature I’d recently added based on feedback. The moment I relax or lose even a little bit of meticulousness, it immediately creates a problem that is close to a game-blocker.

To exaggerate a bit, whenever I fix something, the side effect often manifests as a subtle, game-breaking bug. It’s so diabolical and hard for me to find, yet so easily encountered by users, that it almost feels like something malicious is interfering with me.

This isn’t a move for a happy reason, but as I move homes for the first time in 20 years, the only hope I’m clinging to—a kind of shamanistic hope I’ve never believed in until now—is whether this unknown, diabolical malice I’ve experienced for two decades will finally disappear or change. If I go any further down this path, it’s delusional disorder, so I’ll stop. Still, I think it will have a considerable psychological effect. In any case, my physical environment will be much better than it is now, which is good. So good that I might just want to settle in and stay put.

Going back to the original topic, I can’t say much because of spoilers, but I’m working on a scene where you meet an important character at a place called Lotus One in the Threshold. This ‘Lotus One’ was the most core and important place in the game, but I had no idea how to design it. I came up with the current design after considering various settings I had to adhere to, but I’m still not quite satisfied.

Especially the mandala on the ceiling. That part was originally supposed to connect directly to the sea. (In the Threshold, the sea is above and the sky is below.) The part ascending to the sea was meant to be like a data stream. However, when I made that golden data stream scatter as it met the sea, it looked exactly like urine shooting up into the sky and spraying everywhere. I decided that was absolutely not it, so I covered it with a mandala and removed the scattering effect, but it still feels like something significant is missing.

Anyway, this is how I’m building it. Once the move is over and things settle down, I think I’ll be able to pick up more speed. I’ve been working on this title for quite a long time, so I need to finish it soon.

I still haven’t been able to start Stage 2.

I’m moving soon, and while I don’t have that many tasks to do myself, I keep getting interrupted. I had to go to the registry office to prepare some documents for the move. I thought I was perfectly prepared, with some help from an AI, but the clerk—who looked disheveled and hollow-eyed—just started circling things all over my documents. They mumbled something about needing to print ‘such-and-such document’ from a computer in the back, and “you have to press this button around here,” and so on…

My brain just checked out. I sat down at the computer they pointed to, but I couldn’t even find the website to print the required form. As I was staring blankly at the monitor, wondering what site I was supposed to use, an elderly couple behind me started arguing about whether they’d brought their official seal or not. To my right, someone else was losing their patience, complaining that the homepage wouldn’t even load.

Suddenly, the lyrics of an children’s song popped into my head: “In my dream last night, I had wings and flew up, up, higher than the clouds…” which made me think for the first time, “Wow, that dream sounds deeply problematic.” I was just spacing out, staring at the monitor with my hand on the mouse, when thankfully another employee stepped in and helped me somehow get the paperwork sorted out. It was truly a mystical experience, witnessing the exact point where the pre-modern and modern worlds collide, and something like a Lagrange point between consciousness and the unconscious.

I found a solo dev community by chance and made my first post, hoping to talk about our challenges and offer mutual support. It was completely different from what I expected. How should I put it? It felt like a “crab bucket,” a place very close to the world as seen from an Adlerian perspective. I was surprised at how many people there seem to think of solo development as an identity, something special, or even a privilege.

It seems like the kind of work you couldn’t possibly endure unless you accepted it as your destiny. I’ve always thought that working in such isolation, with almost no feedback or reward—and furthermore, being in a position where you have to choose this path and the fact that you genuinely enjoy it—is something close to a curse.

Phew, finished organizing the backgrounds. I checked all 50 sublevels one by one and cleaned up all the tangled or broken props. I don’t know if it’s related, but after the cleanup, the bug where the build would freeze on first launch has disappeared for now. I feel like a wizard who met Cerberus and claimed he’d discovered something profound – insisting that smearing mud on his body would make the dog unable to see him – but anyway, it worked. I also made a 2.0 trailer with the demo I’ve been updating for about 5 months since releasing it on April 1st. I just finished it and plan to get feedback on Discord first before releasing it publicly. I wanted to take my time making this trailer leisurely, but in the end I rushed through it again.

There were close to 3000 games in this Next Fest. I tried about 50 that caught my eye, and personally Industria 2, Painkiller, and Reanimal stood out. Though are these three even indie games… There seemed to be a ton of Vampire Survivors revised editions, VS + Hades, VS + Diablo clones, and horror games. Steam has clearly expanded the indie game market significantly… but the number of indie games being released seems even bigger…