Blog Post #21 Order in the Brain
Su. 3/23/2025
Today I tried to do the Substances assignment for Texturing, using Substance Designer. I couldn’t figure out how to make the material apply to the plane/cylinder, nor how to make it 3D. I wanted to get some progress on my Seminar project, so I will go back to Texturing tomorrow.
I went into Unreal and attempted to create a workspace and repository for the Viewfinder mechanic replication project, but apparently only a few people in my program have the ability to create new repositories. I messaged one such person, requesting that he create one, and add me to it.
It was already getting a bit late (it’s 9:03pm now writing this), so I couldn’t afford to get into a big part of any project. So, I wrote and submitted an application for the Epic Megagrant! It wasn’t that involved. And while I don’t have a demo to share— since it’s still in the concept phase— I think I provided as good an application as possible without a demo! I’ll paste my responses to the questions below. It’s about my Seminar project, and requesting funding for summer efforts on it.
Elevator pitch: I am developing the core mechanic for my larger thesis project in which the player can "smear" the 2D image of the 3D environment with a weapon refraction trail, in a painterly, whimsical adventure setting.
Full project details: It's a bit hard to grasp, and I do not have a demo of it yet, unfortunately. My plan was to replicate the photograph mechanic of Viewfinder (2023) and pair it with the refraction weapon trail of the player character, which is seen from an intimate 3rd person perspective, similar in position to God of War (2018). I’m still working on replicating the Viewfinder mechanic— I found a tutorial series on YouTube for doing so in UE5, and I’m just troubleshooting some errors that came up in its development. I did recently create the refraction weapon trail— though I will be altering it more to look less gelatinous and more like brush strokes. The weapon trail functions with a series of screen-facing planes. I experimented, and found that 16 planes (the maximum) creates the minimum amount of visible lines between planes. Since the Viewfinder mechanic uses vectors to outline a rectangle— cutting where the edges of that rectangle come in contact with the 3D environment, and then superimposing the procedural elements captured in the “photo” back in another spot of the map— I am planning to simply make the planes of the weapon trail as the rectangles of the “lens”. They will “cut” and “place” almost instantaneously. The biggest challenge of the mechanic is factoring in the refraction aspect, so that the colors, shadows, and shapes caught in the trail are “smeared”, like wet paint— creating new geometry. This will take significantly more effort and research, but I am certain that it is possible.
A clear example of the functionality of this mechanic is as follows: You are controlling the pumpkin-headed warrior through an environment combining rainforest and swamp, and come across an impassable cliff face. To reach the objective, you will need to scale this smooth surface. There are trees to the right. Using this mechanic— called “alla prima” after the Italian term for wet-on-wet painting— you swing your giant honeypot stirrer club so that the refraction weapon trail starts on the trees and ends on the cliff face. It “smears” the colors of the trees onto the cliff face, creating handholds for you to use to scale.
“Alla prima” will also be used in combat. Boss-level enemies, titled “Formidables” will be invincible until you, as the player, accrue enough “Inspiration” to power “alla prima”, swinging your club, and dis-integrating the enemy.
The next steps of the project are troubleshooting the Viewfinder mechanic, then deconstructing it to “capture” through the “lens” of the weapon trail, and then making it “place” the “photos” after an infinitesimal pause. After that comes the real challenge— making the refraction of the weapon trail actually alter the geometry of the environment.
I intend to work over the summer on developing this mechanic, as well as doing the 3D modeling of key characters, including Sir Babbage, the pumpkin-headed warrior. (He has honeycomb arms and heirloom carrots for fingers.)
Next school year, I will be leading a Studio team in taking the characters and “alla prima” mechanic, and implementing them in a functional demo. I am also designing a 3D spatial inventory system— like 3D Tetris— where the player has to efficiently place items in the space of the player character’s rucksack; there won’t be quantitative stats, instead, a “tag” system (like “poison”) tied to objects in the character’s possession will grant qualitative buffs (like the aforementioned “poison” tag of a toxic mushroom buffing the character’s attacks, imposing a poisoned condition upon those struck). The 3D spatial inventory is the functional limit to the player character’s abilities.
Please tell us about some of the unique features of your project.
The “alla prima” mechanic is the prize jewel of the project. After that in significance is the 3D spatial inventory system, tied to the qualitative “tag” system, detailed above.
How do you plan to use the funds for the project? Please include a high level budget (i.e., $x funding for developer training, hiring UE engineers, etc)
The majority of the funds will go towards living expenses of myself and a prospective team, so that we can continue to work on the project during the summer. At this time, only I am included in those expenses. I am applying to live on campus over the summer, which will cost $3,500 for June through August. I am also requesting $94.99 for the EnGore Procedural Dismemberment product on Fab— in the larger project, there won’t be health points; instead, every enemy will fight as long as they have the limbs to allow for it.
So, I am requesting a total of $3,594.99. Since I do not have a concrete team, outside of myself, this is as specific as I can get with the current information.
Now, the website for the Megagrant says that I’ll hear back in mid-June, which is a bit late— after the summer will have already started— but I’ve been saving up my school refund and I should be able to pay at least the first month’s rent for on-campus housing over the summer. I will be applying to other grants, as well. I’d love to be over- funded. That’d be cool. And then, I could pay my peers to help with the project, as well! Griff has expressed interest, but he never gave me a price for his labor— and I didn’t want to sleep on grant apps— so I only factored in myself for the Megagrant application. Dillon says that he can rig any models I make, and that he doesn’t need funding— at least, for during the summer. And Daniel has also expressed interest in helping with the UI/UX aspect— I have not received any funding requests from him, either.
I had an idea of a UI indication of the “Inspiration” resource! I’m going to pitch it to Daniel and see if he can make it a reality. I’m thinking that there’ll be a circular vignette around the center of the screen (centered on the player character)— but instead of being dark (like most vignettes are), it’ll be a luminous, pulsing aura of light, that will fill around the circumference and become more apparent as the player accrues “Inspiration”. I think it’s a cool metaphor for the creative process; the world will become more well-lit the more inspired the character is. I also don’t think that it’ll be overly-busy, visually. Oddly, I’m thinking of a rhythm game at a Barcade in town— it’s circular, and you have to touch the rim of the circle in time with specific notes.
I think I’m going to brainstorm for my D&D oneshot for, maybe, 20 minutes? I definitely want to bring that into my daily work— I’d love to run the session before summer, so that maybe we could have more sessions, continuing the story, during the summer.
F. 3/28/2025
I went to MACD today to meet with an undergraduate interested in my Praxis project, and to work on my overdue Texturing assignment. Both endeavors were successful! I made these— a janky old wood material and a jank gnome’s brick material. I am pleased with both! And I only spent like three hours today on it! I did start the brick one last night.
“Janky Gnome’s Bricks”
“Janky Wood”
I also have been messaging with Kaylin, the professor leading Thesis next year, because I had an idea about expanding my thesis. This is what I sent her regarding it:
Ok so it’s a lot. I want to research how to optimize a creative lifestyle for neurodivergent people. BUT I want to convey that information through prose— in the form of a gamebook (like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book, but with more complex mechanics), which I want to print and bind myself using traditional bookbinding practices.
She’s waiting to hear back from Amanda and the dean— the people who will ultimately decide if I can graduate— regarding the gamebook aspect. Something that I did not know, that Kaylin informed me of, is that our theses are supposed to connect to our praxis projects. Mine definitely will— I just had to explain how:
Well I’ve struggled this year with creative productivity as a neurodivergent student, and my Studio project is more ambitious than anything I’ve done this year, so I’d be applying my research to the process of creating my Studio project.
If the gamebook aspect is approved, I will start research this term (when I have time), and intend to complete said research early in the summer, so that I can start on the gamebook aspect. The idea is to have an interactive story that teaches what I will have researched. A benefit of this approach is that I will be able to apply my research to my creative endeavors from the very beginning, including Praxis. And it’ll show the spirit of the MFA program, instead of just telling information in an essay; it is “Interactive Media”, after all.
I love thick books. I would love for this gamebook to be rather wide. If I write six pages a day over the summer (manageable, I think, if I have prepared beforehand), three months (90 days) will net 540 pages. That would be quite the accomplishment. I think six pages a day is manageable, because I was writing three pages a day for my sister’s The Artist’s Way community, and that took only half an hour each day. Of course, a gamebook is much, much more than a traditional piece of prose fiction. I have some ideas for the mechanics— I’m thinking about having the stats from Elegy, my trading card TTRPG that I developed a couple of years ago (Mortal, Social, Ghostly, and Occult), with pre-gen arrays that the reader can pick from at the start of the book— different arrays will grant specific boons depending on which stat it has a 1 (the lowest) in, and will allow for different playstyles.
For the actual premise of the plot, I’m leaning towards my The Mouldy Underpass story— I think I wrote about it last post— a consignment store in San Diego sells magical artefacts and secret information. The protagonist is new to the “privileged” world, a world of magic and monsters, kept secret through the binding contracts protecting information on consignment. But when a new piece of information is presented to the store— information relating to a slew of murders stumping the “priv-less” police— how will our young new clerk handle the responsibility of the information that he is privy to, all while people whom he knows start to die?
A benefit of this premise for the thesis gamebook is that it has intrigue, and thus plenty of options, but is also not overly complicated. The premise is actually quite simple. And it would be easy to write, since I’m familiar with San Diego.
Regarding the feedback that I received after my Seminar presentation this week— regarding the future of alla prima and how it can be achieved— I looked into “vertex shaders”; that’s not going to work, I don’t think. I’m also going to look into “computer vision” (not really sure what that is), and “image to mesh/geometry”; the latter seems promising— it seems like I could just take the image of the refraction weapon trail and generate new geometry based on that. Seems like it might require AI, which I’m honestly fine with, because it’s not like I’ll be using it to generate assets that a human could’ve been tasked with making; it’ll be just for distorting the environment.
…
I started doing a new journaling practice, which is in line with my thesis proposition. Before yesterday, at the end of every day, I sat down and wrote answers to the following six questions:
1) What excited me today?
2) What drained me of energy? (I stopped doing this one relatively recently; it was bumming me out.)
3) What am I grateful for? (Three things.)
4) What magic did I witness today?
5) What did I learn?
6) Was I better today than yesterday?
But yesterday, I was endlessly scrolling, and came about this YouTube video, aptly titled “The only thing that stopped me from infinitely scrolling”. It described a journaling practice that I have started implementing. Per that video, whenever I feel an urge to go on my phone, I instead take out my journal, and I write— I write down the time, the catalyst for the urge, and that I felt an urge to go on my phone. For example, today at 6:43pm, I was “waiting for burrito to cook; felt urge to check phone.” I started doing this yesterday, and I had quite a few incidents just in the evening alone.
Next, I am replacing my six questions with the following:
• Storyworthy (write about one thing from the day that was worthy of being in a great story).
• AMWAP (write down As Many Wins As Possible from the day).
That bit was the “Review”; I follow it with “Preview”. I write down all of the tasks that I could hope to accomplish the next day, then I write “3 Key Tasks”— three of the aforementioned tasks that must be completed in order to make the day a success.
Like my proposed thesis project, this shows whether a day was successful, instead of me just asking the barebones question, “Was I better today than yesterday?” It also sets me up for success better. I’m definitely going to include that video as inspiration in my research— for neurodivergent people, stimulation has to be carefully controlled, because we are 1) more susceptible to stimulus, and 2) over-stimulation can be taxing for us— resulting in a dopamine spiral of either indulging in more pointless stimulation, or a forced recovery period where productivity is not beneficial nor feasible.
…
I didn’t get a chance to look more into researching for alla prima, and I am going to be getting ready for bed soon, but there is one more thing that I wanted to write about. I’ve never been a big gamer. Sure, I played Wii as a kid, and occasionally borrowed my high school friends’ 3DSes when they wanted a break from Super Smash Bros during lunch, but I never played many games. One of my favorite games to this day is Bosconian, a 1981 Namco gem— and that fact just represents how few games I’ve played. I also, since starting this MFA program, have indulged in a habit of purchasing new games, despite not having time to play them, in addition to having an increasing list of unfinished games. So, I’m dedicated to whittling away at my playlist. I made this live document, which I will reference as I decide which games to play, and in what order. Here’s what I have right now.
The Forever Winter ★★★
Sept. 24th, 2024
Steam
$29.99
South of Midnight ★★
April 8th, 2025
Steam
$39.99
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 ★★★★
April 24th, 2025
Steam
$49.99
Blades of Fire ★★★★
May 22nd, 2025
Epic Games Store
$59.99
Hell Is Us ★★★
Sept. 4th, 2025
Steam
$49.99
Crimson Desert ★★★★
2025
Steam
?
Games to finish
Hogwarts Legacy ★★
Final Fantasy XVI ★★
No Rest for the Wicked ★★★
The Thaumaturge ★★★
Cyberpunk 2077 (the Phantom Liberty DLC) ★★★
Avowed ★★★
Red Dead Redemption 2 ★★
Mad Max ★★
The stars represent my current excitement to play the given game. Wait hold up, I don’t have Bloodborne on there. Let’s see.
Bloodborne ★★
I’m resisting temptation to buy The First Berserker: Khazan, because I’ve heard that it has really satisfying controls— which I want to be true of my praxis.
Oh! One final thing. Yesterday, before watching that fateful anti-scrolling video, I watched this video, “15 Tips That Will INSTANTLY Improve Your Playing in FromSoftware Games”. Ever since I first heard of Bloodborne or Elden Ring, I’ve wanted to be “gud” at souls-likes. I just never had the skills to allow for any prolonged playing of them— which, ultimately, disallowed improvement. But that video had some really good, basic tips that I am eager to put into practice. One of my favorite visual artists, Crom, a London-based comics and tattoo artist, had a bunch of Elden Ring linework around the time the game came out, and I wanted to be just like him. Or like that other guy on YouTube, who filled a 1,000 page sketchbook with watercolor art from his playthrough.
Ok I really need to just publish this. I’ll write more, sooner.
