Author: Studio Ganzheit

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…

Stage 2’s world design and event design are finished, and I can start building the levels. I also made music for the Demo 2.0 trailer. During the prologue, when I was still getting used to Cakewalk again and things felt awkward, I bought vocal stems for the first time and made a track – this time I reused those same stems to create something new. Writing a new song from scratch is fun, but it’s also enjoyable to buy vocal stems, reinterpret them, and create within those constraints.
There was a weird issue where the demo wouldn’t run properly the first time but would work fine from the second launch onwards. To try to fix this, I cleaned up the engine and did a fresh build today. Then I opened the editor and, oh my god, the props I’d placed were broken. Many had moved to the origin point, and all the auto-placed props were reset and needed to be refreshed. I was mentally checked out for about an hour before I came back. The silver lining is that gameplay-related stuff was saved in a separate sublevel and seems unaffected. Thinking back, I split a sublevel in two while making the Lotus One hallucination event in the plaza. During the split, when trying to move linked objects, there were cases where it asked “move even though the link will break?” When I clicked no, there was an editor bug that duplicated all the actors I was trying to move right in place. I discovered this later and manually found and deleted the duplicates one by one, but something must have gone wrong in that process… Even if I wanted to rollback, I don’t know which build to rollback to. In the end, I decided to just check all 50 sublevels one by one. Well, might as well use this as meditation time while cleaning up levels… but still, ugh… Back in the day I would’ve been devastated, but after making games solo for a few years, I guess I’ve gotten stronger – I was just flustered for about an hour, then played with my dog and felt better. Ah, I was planning to leisurely work on stages and events while gradually making a trailer, but… well.

I’ve been working on a tram for Stage 2 that travels from the Threshold to Lotus One. While designing the world, I realized that Lotus One is quite far from the Threshold, which called for some form of transportation. Filling the gap with more level content felt like it would compromise the skyline, a simple warp lacked charm, and I also wanted to create a moment for the player to rest. In the end, I chose to build a tram. It has no special gameplay function, but it ended up being quite a bit of work. I think I’ve spent nearly four days on it, and it still needs a bit more polishing.

A notice keeps popping up that Cakewalk by BandLab will no longer be supported as of September 30, urging users to switch to Sonar or Next. I’ve been using it since Cakewalk 4.0 back in the DOS days, and of course, I liked that Cakewalk by BandLab was free. To be honest, I’m so used to it that I feel like there’s no real alternative for me. I can still use it for now, but I’m not sure when the activation might be blocked.

I’ve never actually ridden a tram before, but after making this one, I find myself wanting to go on a trip.

Updated the demo by applying features and improvements I added while making Stage 2 to the first stage. Now when you first interact with the Veil, it also shows Lotus One once (this isn’t from Kim), and I’ve updated all the player attack animations. The player attack animations might be hard to notice as an improvement compared to the amount of work I put into them. Since animation isn’t my specialty, even the base assets seem somewhat lacking.
The foundation work is now pretty solid, so I thought I’d be able to make the game faster, but unexpectedly small additional tasks keep popping up and holding me back. The list of games I want to make should be getting shorter, but it keeps growing. More stories I want to tell keep emerging too. I wish I could make games faster.

I worked on this for 2 days, then thought about scrapping it since it wasn’t turning out how I imagined, but somehow managed to polish it enough to use. This is the screen that appears when you obtain a complex in Lotus One (Stage 2). It’s nothing technically impressive, but I made it with the goal of conveying the story with a kind of retro-futuristic digital art feel. I see a lot of digital art and installation pieces on Pinterest and at exhibitions – there are some truly amazing works. I’m not an expert in this field so I don’t know much, but especially the light-based installations I experienced firsthand at exhibition spaces were incredible. They were absolutely mesmerizing. I’m really curious what goes on in the minds of people who come up with these things. It’s so fascinating how they think of such ideas. Media art had that nice feeling of being directly projected onto backgrounds with movement, but it seemed like many had graphics that were not as polished.

This is an effect I added to try making Stage 2 look more like a virtual space. Stage 2’s story is roughly organized, and once I finish the Complex2 (temporary name) mechanic, it should be mostly done. Gotta keep pushing forward and making it happen.

Just finished roughly organizing the Stage 2 story and about to start working on events. The attached footage shows Lotus One (兀蓮), a network security system. I created it as a motif of a metal lotus floating on the sea, but since the sea is positioned above, the lotus appears upside down, transforming its silhouette into something monster-like – the complete opposite image, which I liked.

Lotus One was originally 兀然 (Ol-Yeon), meaning “standing alone with dignity.” But when I decided to use the lotus motif, I noticed the Chinese character for lotus (蓮) had the same pronunciation as “yeon” in Ol-Yeon, so it became 兀蓮. Same pronunciation as Ol-Yeon (originally Ol-Lyeon, but let’s just say it’s the same as Ol-Yeon), but now meaning “a lotus standing alone and upright.” The English name also changed from simply “Ol-Yeon” to “Lotus One” (not Lotus 123). It ended up fitting well with the story content too.

I didn’t even know the character 兀 before – I happened to see this Chinese character that looked similar to pi, and since its meaning was good, I ended up using it. Even creating the threshold feels like something that drifted away from my original intention. Beyond is the virtual world where most people live, so it should be bustling with people and more similar to reality, which would be difficult and boring for me to create alone. So I conceived the Threshold as a cache-like virtual space, but due to spoilers I can’t say much – though story-wise, the necessary space and reasons naturally attached themselves to it.

Looking at how all these elements came together, even though I created them, there are so many meaningful coincidences that it doesn’t feel like I made them. I increasingly feel like I’m just fishing things out from the back of my mind and bringing them into reality. I once read somewhere about someone dismissing this kind of experience as nonsense, which I found fascinating. Maybe they’ve had many experiences of their own experiences being denied or not understood.

Working on organizing the story for the next stage. Planning to emphasize the story aspect more in Stage 2.

Since I’m working alone, I find myself talking to AI a lot while developing the story. AI doesn’t create stories or come up with ideas for me, but just the act of discussing with AI helps me draw out ideas and thoughts from within myself.

I’ve been wandering between note apps for nearly 20 years. I think I went through Evernote → OneNote/others → Joplin → Evernote → Joplin. I don’t need many features, but they were all somewhat lacking. I wanted to build my own, but had zero web app experience and knew nothing about server configurations. Recently, I built a memo app using Gemini and I’m extremely happy and satisfied with it. Even though it was imperfect, Gemini created a migration app from Joplin. The best part is being able to add or modify features immediately when needed. It really made me think AI has genuinely improved.

Still, I recently canceled GPT-5 because it would give random responses without actually looking at the images I uploaded. I was trying to get design feedback on images, but something felt off, so I checked and found it was responding without viewing the images. The explanation was lengthy but ultimately didn’t reveal the real reason. Maybe it was for efficiency. After this happened several times, I tried Gemini again and found it had improved significantly and was even free, so I canceled GPT-5 and switched to Gemini. However, Claude still seems better for translation and writing reviews, so I continue using Claude.

This made me think that current AI approaches might be hitting their limits. AI works well as a table that converts A to B, but for tasks requiring contextual understanding and creating genuinely new outputs, it still seems unusable (and maybe always will be). This might be because I haven’t tried more expensive models.

Plus, it’s too slow, restrictive, and unreliable. Even with paid models, you hit limits quickly when using advanced features. Every model still has hallucinations, and the problem is you have to check everything to identify what’s hallucinated. In other words, you can’t trust it.

While dramatic miniaturization like ENIAC’s billions of times more computation in a phone-sized device hundreds of thousands of times smaller is unlikely to happen again (though quantum computers might be different, idk), unless there’s a paradigm shift allowing current AI to run real-time on smartwatch-sized hardware, or a change from understanding the world through text to understanding actual 3D space and physical laws (which might have already started, idk), I wonder if there’s much point in continuing the current approach of just throwing massive amounts of electricity and hardware at the problem.

I had hoped that in about 10 years, I could use AI to create games at a rate of one per month, whereas making all the games I want would be impossible in my lifetime using past or current methods. But that expectation is starting to fade.

Anyway, creating stories is still the most enjoyable and thrilling part.

Taking a break before starting Stage 2. I say “break,” but bug reports keep coming in and other tasks pop up, so I’m not completely resting. Still, it definitely feels more relaxing than setting targets and pushing hard, and I think it’s having a positive effect.

Someone left a comment saying they know many male and female voice actors and to contact them if I need voice recording. It was an unfamiliar username, but the profile picture looked somehow familiar.

A few months ago, I created an account on a new social media platform and posted there for a while. Then one day, someone called ‘G’ asked if I used AI for content and whether I’d keep using AI for the final version. Something felt off, so I checked their account – they were going around finding games that used AI and bombing them with negative ratings and comments. I could see them discussing with a few others who seemed to be part of the same group, having spotted AI-used content on my Steam page.

I believe there should be no alienation due to AI, and while I can’t afford recording right now, I was planning to at least record voice acting properly when circumstances allow. So I told them straight – that I’m using AI for in-game billboards, translation, and voice, but I want to record voice properly later when I can afford it.

Then I got an email from someone called ‘I’. It was very aggressive and rude, saying I had the money for voice recording in my previous game, so what billboards am I talking about that require AI. I was furious but held back and marked it as spam. But the username ‘I’ seemed strangely familiar. I don’t know how I have such ability. I looked it up and found it matched a subscriber ID on my YouTube. I checked that subscriber’s channel – the profile picture looked like someone who works in sound. Maybe it’s a small chance they’re not the same person, but it seemed even less likely that someone with the same uncommon name would coincidentally be interested in my barely-known game at the same time.

And then I saw the voice recording comment I mentioned at the beginning. Different username, but same profile picture as the account I suspected was ‘I’ who sent me the harassing email. I don’t know if they’re using a new account to follow me around and comment to see if I’ll actually do recording, or if they think I won’t recognize their name and commented, or if it’s genuinely a coincidence with the email sender.

I wanted to unleash profanity that would make them soil themselves, but considering the less-than-1% chance they might not be the same person, not wanting to escalate things, and needing to focus on fixing feedback and creating the next stage, I gave them a reasonable response.

As I mentioned, I believe we should minimize alienation due to technology. But I also believe we shouldn’t blindly reject technology either. We need to find somewhere in the middle, and I do plan to record voice acting when things get better for me. But seeing people like that makes me hate my own thoughts terribly. I also hate how such thinking might grow into various prejudices because of people like them.

August has flown by in a blur. With the work on the collection system and FX additions, most of the core systems feel more or less complete. I probably pushed myself too hard, and toward the end I was quite exhausted. I’ll need to take a few days off. Maybe the heat hasn’t helped either, since I haven’t been able to exercise and my condition hasn’t been great.

Now it’s time to get back into Stage 2. This stage will focus more on Qyuri Kim’s story, the Threshold, and the intertwined narrative with Pi. Compared to Stage 1, the story progression will be emphasized more, and the puzzle difficulty will likely be a bit higher as well…

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve finished moving over the UI that Lori created, and throughout the update he gave feedback every single day. Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone work like this even in a company. The past two or three weeks have just been a cycle of making, fixing, and applying feedback. I’d wake up and check feedback right away, spend the day fixing and building, go to sleep, and then wake up to check feedback again. It was exhausting, but seeing the game improve made it feel like no effort at all. There are still a few things left to improve, but for now it’s more or less wrapped up. Since I was running nonstop, I didn’t post anything on social media or Reddit for over two weeks, and Steam traffic has completely dried up—but that’s okay.

Another player, ZZod, also sent me gameplay videos. He told me he does speedruns, and finds bugs in the strangest ways. Some of them I couldn’t even reproduce myself. A few were so bizarre I had to wonder if he was even human—but thanks to him I was able to fix several potentially critical bugs.

And Look played through not the demo but the test build, over and over from start to finish, recording and sending me videos each time. He even did it once on Normal and once on Hardest, filling out more than 100% of the map and collecting every complex and item. He even cleared some halls in ways I hadn’t thought of, which revealed gaps in the puzzles I didn’t notice before.

These are the kinds of things I’ll probably remember on my deathbed. I never imagined I’d receive this kind of help from people I didn’t even know. There’s really no way to put it into words.

Starting tomorrow I’ll get back to posting something every 2–3 days as usual, and begin work on the farming system. Once farming is done, it feels like the game systems will finally be complete.