If you've read my recent post in the "What games are we playing" thread on the Gaming board, you know how much I love Antichamber. In fact, I love it enough that I've spent most of my free time over the last four weeks trying to come up with a way to map this 3D puzzle game that features some heavy non-euclidean geometry. And although I'd love to spend all my free time for the next year or so working on this further (actually, that's a big lie), I think I might have to call it quits.
I mean, I've managed to come up with my own working isometric art style that fits this game's graphics and where everything aligns in all three axes, so I didn't do all of this for nothing. And it's not that the whole project is unfeasible, because I think it's totally doable. It's just that it would probably take me several years of taking measurements while playing, of agonizing over how to separate the various puzzles rooms, how to present the whole game space and how to display in a readable format spaces that need to be visited from the inside in 3D to be correctly understood. Add to that a lot of coloured lighting that I have no idea how to replicate without making it exponentially harder to edit certain sections later on and you probably understand why, again, my limited skills and impatience are making me stop before wasting too much additional time on this.
And the thing is, I don't want to drop this, not really. This is one of those games whose map just fired up my interest and my *need* to attempt to depict it. Few games provide me with this much motivation, but I fear that I might never be able to do justice to how I imagine it in my head. It's almost like a dream where you have this clear picture of a plan that is so logical and would totally work to solve some great problem like world hunger or war, and then waking up and trying to write it down only to end up with a few meaningless steps that are nothing like what you saw in your sleep. That's how this feels to me: in my head, I can imagine an amazing isometric map that's comprehensive, yet clear and easy to understand. In Paint, all I can come up with is two good looking views of the starting puzzle room and everything else immediately feels daunting and impossible to represent.
Sorry if I'm having an emotional moment here. I *have* been working on this for a month with little to show for it, so I'm kind of invested. Lo and behold as attachments, the only presentable and somewhat finished pieces of a month of work on Antichamber.
