Making TESSELATE - Part 0

00//seeds

I first worked with Erickson on some Oculus Rift demos back in October of 2014. We were a bunch of groups messing around with the VR tech, and the game dev department was super supportive and let us present our games at the Philippine Game Festival expo.

We had several groups working on their own ideas: one was a Dave Chappelle haunted house, another was a first-person rockstar simulator. One of the demos Erickson handed to me was a simple working mechanic: a first-person character that could pick up an object, hold it and rotate it, and drop it into a "receiver" or "activator", which would then cause a bridge or other object to appear or disappear. Good, clean, malleable code.

We focused on creating a wide variety of demos and a lot of the ideas never really progressed past the "working concept" stage. Despite that, we were able to present our ideas at the expo and even got the attention of Oculus. (As a side note: If you haven't yet tried VR tech, you are missing out. It is the future.)

Erin, Erick, and I at PGF2014

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In January 2015, I attended the Global Game Jam hosted in DLS-CSB. I love game jams. Surrounded by passionate people that left their homes, sacrificed comfort. All to come together as a community and be productive together.

As is my custom, I walked into Game Jam without a group.

Luckily, I found a team with my friends Josh and James. Josh would be the ARTEEST and producer, while James and I would tandem code. We even got help with music from our friend, Xion. James is really good at programming, btw. I felt such shame whenever he suggested a better way to code something. And every time I came back to the project to see how much progress he made... He also did some of my parts. Wow. I never felt so inadequate. and damn, his code is fucking beautiful.

.. anyway

The theme of the jam was "What do we do now?" Very ambiguous, but we interpreted it as something that two scientists would talk about after they blew up the planet. The player controlled an "atom" and the game was about collecting debris to increase the player's mass.

I was experimenting with different ways we could move the debris around the screen. I inadvertently created a realistic gravity script, debris would orbit around a central point. It looked really cool in motion, but we couldn't implement it because we focused on 2D gameplay.

In the end, we placed 3rd!! I attribute that to our very strict work ethic and focusing on what could be accomplished. One of the judges even told me that we got graded highly because the game was seemingly "complete". (That's for another post.)

Me, James, Xion, and Josh

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In July, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time and it blew my mind. The cinematography was stunning, the scenes were all very deliberate and meaningful. I felt like an ape, a primitive human. 2001 was a black obelisk that I came in contact with and it inspired me to reevaluate the way I perceive the role of media. What are humans exposed to that creates the complex thought structures that drive us. What do we see? What do we do?

The mere existence of the obelisk inspires humans to question, "What is out there?" The movie revolves around the characters trying to understand what the obelisks are, where they came from, and what they are for. What beguiled me is that the movie didn't try to explain at all. The point wasn't the answer, but the search for it. It was about our species as a whole and how we deal with the unknown. It was about evolution.

I spent the rest of that summer working on a prototype. I got enamored with the idea of gigantic geometric shapes and ominous monumental objects floating in the distance. I wanted to capture the feeling of smallness that only the unending cosmos can provide.

Using the gravity script and a bunch of other effects I developed, I visualized a game where the player would walk around and wonder where all of these monuments come from. Who created these majestic sculptures? Where are they now? It was about wanting to understand who the aliens were and what lessons we could learn from them.

It was called Tesselate.

perspective (Layog, 2015)

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A month before thesis, I was deeply into The M Machine. Their music perfectly captures the unknown grandeur of the cosmos. While programming, I would listen to their music and it helped me get a feel for what I wanted players to experience. Their choice of instruments and the way they compose their music is otherworldly, and that is what I wanted the game to be like.

In my quest for cooler EDM, I stumbled across vaporwave.

Vaporwave was my aesthetic af.

The sarcasm, the 80s references, the glitchy computer effects, the memes. Almost everything about vaporwave was so funny to me. I liked the music. It evoked a feeling of nostalgia, hints at a time when computers weren't so hi-fi. The vapor art was mesmerizing. Modern culture has shifted to remixing things from the past and making them "new", trying to appeal to what people want now. But vaporwave remixed things knowing that people would recognize it as a remix, as a sample, as a reference.

Vaporwave art targeted aesthetic for aesthetic's sake, highlighting the absurdity of commercialism. A callback to the time when 3D graphics were impressive, used to sell products, to lie to consumers. It touched on themes of misguided optimism and the inevitable obsolescence of technology. The usage of Roman and Greek architecture and sculpture makes us consider an even farther past, one where aesthetic was also highly valued, how we misinterpret the artifacts of those left behind. I wanted people to feel the same way I did when I discovered vaporwave. I wanted to capture that exhilarating moment of Discovery.

I shifted the prototype accordingly.

The aliens left not monuments.

They left the commercial artifacts of their voracious consumerism.

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I ended up grouping with Erickson, Soya, and Paul. I've been classmates with them in several subjects and worked with them before. The guys were very open-minded and let me explain my prototype to them. They loved it! And the meeting right after the assembly was one of the best brainstorms I've ever been part of.

I felt such synergy between the members, ideas flowed freely unto the table. Possibilities and suggestions met with realism and feasibility. We were honest about what we could possibly achieve within the next three months. We talked about what we know for sure we could provide as individuals.

A week later, Erickson sent me the working prototype again. Updated.

Just as good and clean and malleable as it was a year before.

The plan was set.

Alea iacta est.

And we called ourselves, Project Theta.

testLevel

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If you made it this far, I wanna thank you for taking the time to read this post! I know I didn't really get into too much specifics about actual dev. I meant for this post to kinda explain where a bunch of the ideas came from and how everything came together in the end to make something awesome!

The next post will be about the first level we worked on, 04//WHEEL.

to be continued~