Author: Studio Ganzheit

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…

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.