i recently (several months ago at this point) made the kinda scary but ultimately beneficial decision to stop seeking external funding for this project. up until now i have been diverting my attention between working on nth and working on my funding applications. it's the done thing here in victoria (where i live) to seek funding from vic screen (film vic) or screen australia, but after spending literal years trying to get my application completed (i find this kind of process very taxing and disheartening) it was rejected for reasons which i still don't really understand. it was pretty discouraging because in the time it took me to put the application together i could probably have like... finished the game. lmao. so i've decided fuck it i'm going to take the well-trodden route of working on it in my spare time and not giving a damn about its commercial viability or audience engagement or whatever else.

this feels philosophically more in-line with my personal beliefs around art and its production, and it means that i'm no longer second-guessing myself when i choose to work on one thing or another. i found that while the prospect of funding was still a possibility i was constantly beating myself up over focusing on the "wrong parts" of development; not posting on twitter or tiktok, not building hype, not contacting influencers to get them to play the game. all this stuff is like... caustic to my soul.

anyway enough griping. what's next? well i took a bit of a break to get some distance from the project, so i could come back excited rather than defeated, and i've started work again and immediately made some serious progress: i've begun work on a fun secret level that i've been thinking about for years, i've switched input managers (i'm now using rewired which means i can plug any old controller in and it'll Just Work), i've implemented rudimentary local multiplayer (something which i've been wanting to do for soooo long), i've changed my rendering method to support arbitrary window/screen sizes better (this is so that multiplayer screens work properly) and i've got a shiny new triplanar shader which uses my preferred custom lighting method too (if i remember right it uses lambert instead of phong; basically it ignores the direction that a surface is viewed *from* so light/shadow is stable from all angles).

i don't think this project will be finished for like,,, ages. but at least it's being worked on again instead of taking a back seat to bureaucracy. in the meantime, i'll be posting on here much more as new work is done. for example: once i've got local multiplayer fully implemented i'll release a new demo with it included. that shouldn't be too far off but the new semester has just started so who knows how busy i'll be.

thanks for being patient with me. hopefully i'll be back again soon. in the interim, here's a sneak peak of what i'm working on: