Take a moment to read over the article, I would appreciate your input!
The Game Right Now
Hello, I'd like to say firstly: Thank you for playing my game(s). If you have played all of them up until this point... amazing. At least 80,000 people have played my games which is simply hard to understand. It's really cool. I do need to move on.
The total number could be 500,000, but 80,000 is a safer bet to say for sure.
For almost 5 years DEAD has had consistent updates regardless if I have posted about it or not. It has been in my background for a long time relative to my life. I am 23 years old. A game that was once an offshoot of a survival game to kill time has now taken my time while the game that I was originally working on has become the background game.
The game in question is GIGASTRUCTURE. I've talked about the game before, vaguely, is what may be the best multiplayer game ever. The problem with a game like that is alone it would take me 20 years to finish it as I have never had the money to make something so fantastic. The money isn't even a server cost, it's a staff cost. It's just too much to do alone. That sucks.
If you want to hype yourself up for no reason go to gigastructure.com
You aren't here to dive into that game, you are here to know about the future of DEAD and possibly to know where I have been.
During the entire development of DEAD I have grown as a person as all people should do over a period of time like that. My focus has shifted totally. I am at a point now that has been built upon for years and that point is this: I cannot personally enjoy DEAD, maybe I never could, but I can admit that I cannot now. This information should not invalidate your enjoyment dear reader. It should, hopefully, give you an insight as to where I am.
Many people have enjoyed this game. Many people add me just to tell me that, or comment the same sentiment, post a review of said sentiment, maybe they enjoyed it so much they posted in every place they could on problems just to get my attention that I would reply to within the hour just to surprise them (that I quite enjoyed).
The view I have now and the view I hold along with my many personal shifts, and personal challenges is what is pushing me onto new things. I gotta go.
"So what's next, and what of my prior promises? What of Dead? What of Dead+?"
DEAD is not dead, but it is going to continue to be further and further behind me. You might have noticed that there hasn't been really anything new anywhere about this game. We will get to that a little later.
As of this post I am going to be ignoring this game (for the most part). There is still the personal obligation that every developer should have at every level in the industry of continuing the game. My personal obligation to finish overhauling every system so that I may leave it alone, throw it to open-source, and possibly talk about it to some nerd in ten years about how "this shit got them geeked" or "I played it when I was 10 and it shaped my reality" or something like that, is still there. The overhauled build will come out. In fact, it kinda already did but then I had to revert back to a much older build due to Steam policy. As an insight, it's already much better than the current state of things but not all of the maps are there. Whatever bugs are in the public build will basically just stay there until I can finish. It's a months old build at this point.
The primary reason for this is because there are no DEAD+ maps available in said build and Steam requires you to keep up with your DLC promise once people buy said DLC. It's a good policy*
Essentially, I work alone on this, so updating it in mass either requires months of focus or gradual addition. All I can say is that when it re-releases, it'll be a lot better because it already is.
"So what are you doing then big guy?" the straw man said:
VR
I am moving on, but to what? The next generation of VR gaming.
Like I said, there has been a lot of personal situations in my life. One of those situations is the limited time I have left to use my wrists. I cannot play a lot of PC games anymore, Having to actively hold down WASD, etc. is becoming a strain on my wrists to a level that I do not trust. I literally have a cyst on my left wrist right now that I do not have the money to deal with... possible two on the same wrist (Anyone have $2000?! woweee! gotta love doctors!). it'll just get worse with time. As of that happening suddenly I haven't actively touched playing or making games to a crazy extent.
I basically just spent 6 months playing Civ and Intruder. Two games with a lot of pause.
Playing GTA with a controller is great, making DEAD controller compatible and making sure all games I have worked on since being controller compatible has been important to me for years because I knew this would happen eventually. Now the pain is there. The situation reminds me of a character in the show Silicon Valley who is only beyond his prime because he cannot physically type anymore and it's a basis of a lot of the background problems in the show.
Word of advice, do not let your kid use a computer at 11. There is no real reason for them to do so, even now.
Despite Gabe Newel's general hatred for VR, it has come a long way. My favorite thought for what is from my experience now with hand-tracking. It is there, we can do it. How do we commercially sell lasers? (If you find that sentence hard to read, just move on, but know I am asking the right question as simply as I can).
Another question that needs to be asked, but solved soon is what we do about cancer. Cancer is half of the reason people do not have Jet packs. Think about it. "No!" "yes, I promise."
Controllers and VR have the key component in common that it is really easy to pick up and play because you are holding something and interacting with it like a monkey, and VR gets our monkey mode back while being in a fantasy universe to blow off some steam in a simulation. Even just watching a movie is a different experience. Being able to hold a tiny controller like what the Oculus has, or do what the Index does, or do what the Deckard... It's all really cool and is what my body is forcing me to do. VR helps move both towards a new future of development myself, but will provide a vision for the next generation of what it means to play in an experience. Up until this point I have only worked with 2D games, but my visions have been in 5D. I am seeing what is possible, and know what is to be done. I see where we are at now, and what was before us.
I wish Mark Zuckerberg didn't rebrand the Oculus (a perfect title for what the thing does) into a project name "We are on a Meta Quest! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Okay! Now our quest.. that turned into quests, is completed and we can experience meta." Super lame.
From where I am sitting right now, VR gaming is really shitty.
The gaming selection is kinda shit, and to a normal person it's pretty awesome so nothing is changing. Valve really thought that putting out a headset and putting out a really pretty vr game would shift an industry, but it didn't.. at least not immediately. The most surprising part is when they did it coronavirus was primed to have VR explode to a global level. After they failed because they didn't even make something as good as Quake, Mark Zuckerberg had an Identity crisis of his go public and went in deep on VR. Re branding a billion dollar, billion person corporation is wild. It's like when all the drug companies merge and name themselves a concept. Luckily, he had a solid system that didn't have a freaking wire, and an easy to understand, usable controller unlike anything else prior. Unfortunately, Mark isn't a creative guy in that way so he let his greed get in the way of making what had already come before. Meta Horizons was and sitll is a bust. It's just shitty roblux with a really solid avatar system. I bet Mark knows it.
Mark please make it better. It's just.. so bad. It can be awesome. So awesome.
These failures in product forefront from major companies have left games like Beat Saber, a Rhythm game where you hit blocks to generic songs unless you understand above average web ux and modding to add ones you like, or Pavlov, a super clunky shooter game that lets a rushed first build ruin an entire games visuals and performance. The space right now is one of e-waste. People buy a cool futuristic thing, play it for like 100 hours, and then get rid of it on Facebook or leave it in a room collecting dust. Worse case, they vomit because for some reason motion blur experiences are allowed to be published on platforms next to games that actually work and play well muddying the space. Everyone is too focused on over-creating bs, or pooping out products to make something fantastic. Palmer Lucky popped in, created something sick, and then went to go make money selling high-end sims and military equipment because that's what you do when you want to experiment with wacky shit.
Point is, the barrier to entry for all modern games is Quake. It was the first commercial full-3D game, it literally gives you the source code. It looks solid, and has probably the best use of a soundtrack in gaming still, We all have the same blueprint, but everyone seems to be stuck on DOOM.
Quake is great. Quake 1 is great. Go play Quake 1. Don't bother with the rest... just play 1. They invented and then failed the formula for all modern games, but 1 is the greatest game of all time.
I am building something that will change the game for VR, maybe it'll take a few months for it to come out but it'll be a changer.
"What has lead to where we are now and the feeling you have before you to lead anew is what is giving way to the future." This is what is in me. Big words.
I do not want to show off anything as of right now. It'll be great, but the point of this post was to talk about why you won't be seeing anymore of DEAD and what I will be doing instead.
None of this is to say I will fully ever abandon any of my projects. I do not think I am capable (blame my "parents"), but I do have to move on.... to something sick, or at least very interesting.
So what has AR have to do with any of this?
AR is in the same situation as VR. Nobody understands that we all just watched Pokemon GO rise and crumble. Microsoft and Mojang couldn't even make 3D blocks fun. The most fun thing to do on your phone shouldn't be to scroll. Nobody cares about the videos, it's all about the scroll and noise satisfaction. That's why a game like Pokemon GO works so well, Pokemon has very little to do with it.
I do not care to deal with AR right now, but for years I have had the same ideas for it and despite my lack of push in the space there is still nothing better than just opening tinder and swiping. Maybe 2048.
let me know what you think
[email protected]
@georgehennen on x.