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I just released a video game! It's a fancy-graphics remake of my 2013 marble-rolling puzzle game InFlux, and you can buy it on Steam or Epic right now, and I'd love it if you did, particularly if you left a positive review to reduce the likelihood of Steam never surfacing it to anybody and it not making any money.

Some years back I started making a remaster of InFlux on UE4 in my spare time. I just thought it would be a nice straightforward thing to do to keep InFlux playable and supportable into the future by moving it to a better engine, and I wasn't wrong, but I didn't consider how long it would take me to do it while also working. Now it's on UE5, and it's done, and you can play it. It's the same game, but with way better graphics and way less jank, having been remade basically from scratch in a new engine, sharing zero code with the original.

Initially, I had planned to do a relatively straightforward remaster, where the game would look, feel and perform a lot better just by being in UE4, but the art itself would be the same. Since I was only ever working on Redux in snatches of spare time and had to rewrite and redo everything, this took a couple years.

I had that version of the game ready to ship, with a trailer and everything, but got distracted, and coming back a year later, thought "this isn't remastered enough". I spent another couple years remastering it better, with nicer shaders, a more detailed world, etc, and had that ready to go, but got distracted again. Coming back a year later, I thought "this isn't remastered enough" and reworked most of the assets with higher polycounts, re-lit everything, added new photogrammetry-based assets, and had something really nice looking, and got distracted. By the time I came back to it again, UE5 was solid, so I reworked things again to take advantage of Nanite, Nanite tessellation, Lumen, virtual shadowmaps, and other new tech. So it's a remaster of a remaster of a remaster at this point.

The content is mostly the same, but there are some new things: some streamlined level designs and additional traversal puzzles in the overworld, some added interactions to give you more to do there than roll around, and a number of tweaks to existing puzzles. There's also an entire extra puzzle room that wasn't in InFlux that I think I must have just forgotten to put in, and a lot of minor quality of life improvements to smooth away a lot of the original's jank. Also, there are now hidden fireflies to find that unlock concept you can view in a gallery.

What kept me committed to doing this at the many times when I did not want to was the fans, who are not many, but are lovely and earnest, and also the realisation that a lot of folks played this when they were kids and would be excited to see it again. It's surreal to have an adult tell you that they loved your game when they were 9, but it's a big motivator too. Kids enjoy games on a better, less critical level than adults can; I really like knowing InFlux was that special thing for somebody. Thanks for the support, folks, and I hope you enjoy this thing.

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went to scotland, took some photographs

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Today Weird West gets its final patch! It introduces mod support, and includes the First Person Mod that WolfEye got me to finish up after I put out a vid of a much jankier version I pooped out a while back. Here's a kind of low-energy making-of I threw together.

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yawny babies

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I was on Weird West for a few years as a tech designer/systems designer, and post-release I spent some time mocking up a first-person mode. Janky and uncomfortable, but cool!

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silencer

I've been making an imsim framework in unreal for no reason for a couple weeks, basically Deus Ex systems, here's the latest thing, it's weapon mods, you can mod a weapon, or any item technically. I also have a grid-based inventory, keypads, doors, door locks, containers, weapons, melee weapons, picking up and moving objects (eg crates), health, objects can be breakable and if they break they drop any items in their inventory, yada yada yada

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here's the first video about my little imsim framework thing. it's called lebedev, after the character from deus ex