New Beginnings

Only a week or so ago, I started working on a game idea I've had in my head for the past year and a half. It's relatively simple in terms of the idea, but it's such a complex task to plan for. As CW as slowed down a lot due to lack of funding, I thought it might be a good idea to peruse another avenue.

This new puzzle experiment will hopefully be great, but we'll have to see. I have nothing but the best hopes for it, especially considering the amazing people I have supporting me. The only issue, however, is stress. I still have a lot going on in my life to balance, and as a naturally disorganised person, this latest task is a nightmare. I'm going to start having to plan out my days, create checklists for basic activities, and figure out a better system to work under. The first of these is this blog. Usually I wouldn't post like this about my life, but I feel it may be great stress relief, and I hear it's often recommended in therapy, and hey, who knows... Maybe some day if any of my projects do well, this'll be the sign of a new beginning for some random YouTube video.

Background

Let's start off with where I've come from. I originally worked on tiny mods for random games ranging from Minecraft to SCP: Containment Breach. I've worked on tons of tiny projects including audio books, game voices, music, 3d modelling, but have always been drawn to the more unique ideas driven by people that are passionate in what they do. Now I'm not sure whether it's good or not, but I found myself stumbling around in the SCP community quite a lot early on, and I am in fact still partially in it helping out with projects such as SCP: Fragmented minds, SCP: Nine-Tailed Fox, SCP: Ground Zero, and SCP: Dark Confinement. While SCP is a super closed in community, it has its perks. I feel like I've been able to make some very important connections that've only served to speed up my progress with everything I do. As it's still a relatively young community aside from the lucky few, there are new projects popping up all over the place, and they're what have given me most of my experience I can still use to this day. Learning from the mistakes of many many many others. I was never the most social person, so I'm still surprised that I managed to make this work.

When I was younger, I was dead set on being a voice actor or a 3d artist/animator, but I know now that those probably aren't my strongest points. But with time I settled into my place and I feel much more comfortable with management, music, and game design. I'd say my first faux management position was for a project called "Dimensions". Oh lord that was such a waste of time. It was run by someone that lied about basically everything and managed to make everyone's lives a living nightmare simply by the way she acted. I of course tried to take the lead with another fellow internet pal that goes by the name "Sayori is Baeori". Sadly the project flopped in the end, and the saddest part is that I gained no new friends or connections through it. However, I did get the nifty name "Minirow230x". Now while trying to run this group was like attempting to repressurise a damaged space-ship by breathing out heavily, what it helped me to do was gain an understanding of what being in charge is. It isn't simply about being the bossiest person around, but (also? instead?) being someone that's dipped their toes in a little bit of everything and is able to act as a bridge between everyone to get work flowing smoothly. Personally I just wish I'd opted in for a less DOA project, haha!

These earlier projects were basically failure after failure, but in a way I'm glad for that because it means I had a chance to see the weak points of each group. Aanndd I'm boring myself trying to think of random history, so I guess I'll move on.

Hyperity

Why Hyperity? Why not. I kept seeing people all over the place with different skills to do something awesome working on their own projects that tended to never extend beyond practice or hobbies, so I decided to try and bring them together. It's actually crazy how much Hyperity has changed since its inception back in 2018. In the early days, it was just a few game guides written by one other person, but around 2020 they started to gain a lot more traction for some reason. By mid 2021, it was a full team of people working to create full length guides, a website, and even videos. One person in particular I have to thank specifically is Scordi. Without him I don't think this would have gone anywhere. He started off humbly, just helping out with Blender stuff here and there for a few upcoming video renders, but quickly started taking over once we realised just how talented he actually was. I still remember how excited we were for our first "proper" video. We stayed up all night and into the early hours of the morning just to release it in time for an update for an SCP game. In fact, we got there before everyone else thanks to some early info (I was a part of the studio responsible for the game at the time). He created some cool renders for the intro, and a nice one paired with music for the outro. While a lot of the videos are unlisted now, there are still a few fun ones up. The last "proper" guide related video we did was this one, and I can't get over how nice that intro is. In a way I miss these early frantic days, but I'm also glad they're over with. Thanks to our publishing history, I still have a few early test renders saved.

I think they hold up pretty well. Also, I'm aware this is a lot of image spam, but here was the team at the time. Pretty good in my opinion.

The only shame about these people is that almost all of them ended up overpromising and underdelivering, either getting too busy, never completing anything, or constantly making up excuses. While not everyone was bad off course, neutrality hurt the project just as much. I'm glad to say that the main exceptions were Scordi, Tails, MrNeon and Avemir, whom I'm still in contact with to this day... Tails not so much. He got busy with real life, and I didn't want the project to be a greater burden on him. All of this to say, the team chart went from that, to this...

I'm sure a lot of video game players would be impressed by the optimisation, and I'm pretty happy with the new structure. At this point we were jokingly talking about making a game with the sheer amount of 3D assets we have. To test out a theory, Scordi remade SCP: SL's map generation in a shockingly short space of time, and that's when we realised something of a larger scale would actually be doable. Starting off using my SL proposals as a baseline, we began to plan a game. It was pretty barebones, but I was dead set on creating a unique concept from most other SCP games. Spoilers for the future; it ended up being so far removed from most other overdone SCP concepts, that we dropped the SCP tag entirely. Very fun. Anyway, that's basically the history of that. Also Oliver joined in near the end of 2021 to help with legal stuff and finances, although that's since shifted a lot more towards community management, documentation and representation.

Puzzle Game

I guess that's the big stuff out of the way. For now nothing more than the logo and a cube for the puzzle game have been made public. As far as gameplay planning goes, we're not planning to release this game, as it's just a proof of concept experiment.

I felt I should share that cube (my apologies for the lack of looping). I think it looks pretty cool with an infinite inside. It's a lot less confusing than the originally planned 4D cube. Anyway, thanks to the 0 people that read this for reading this, and hopefully I'll start posting more updates in the future. I hope to do these whenever there's more content that isn't under NDA. I'm still torn between making every update for the studio public, and keeping it private. I made CW public during development and it came back to bite me due to pressure from others, slowdowns making the project appear publicly dead, and basically too much to handle in most ways. For now I'll definitely stick to keeping it private...

Thanks for reading...