Welcome once again to our blog. These two weeks have been "calm": we are preparing to return to Buenos Aires. The upcoming presidential elections make me somewhat nervous, and we are going to vote to prevent the fascist right party from taking power. Unfortunately, this means that I have very little free time to devote to Hidden People Club, so I'm trying to reorganize myself a bit.

2dcl

2dcl is undoubtedly the project that has made the most progress.

Login

I asked Pablo, Dani, and Guido if they could take a look at the graphic design of the login. I'm truly very happy with the result.

With this, we consider the login workflow to be completed. This feature will be part of the next version of 2dcl along with the deployment workflow.

Deployment

After a small battle with catalyst, we managed to understand a bit better how scene deployment works in the real world (a bit different from what the documentation says, or rather more complex).

We now have the code running to validate transactions and upload scenes to Catalyst.

Things on My Mind

With all this scene-related stuff, I've been pondering more and more about architectural matters.

Right now, we are reusing the Scene entities from Catalyst. These entities were created for the 3D scenes of the official explorer. The way we're using them is by creating a 2dcl directory and uploading everything related to 2dcl there.

While we were working on deployment, I wondered if it would be possible to make our own scene (Scene2d or something like that). While browsing the documentation, I noticed that Catalyst servers validate the format of the entities (which makes sense to me). The consequence of this validation is that one cannot create entities beyond the existing ones, and with no "Custom" entity available, one cannot use a wildcard in this manner.

The reasons might or might not be valid. When I asked, I was told that this would turn Catalyst into an S3 bucket, and practically speaking, the door is kind of closed for anyone to arbitrarily upload scenes. I won't express an opinion on this because I genuinely feel I don't have the complete context of the implications of this.

However, it doesn't end there. The recommendations to solve this problem were twofold, and both seem incredibly interesting to highlight because they clearly demonstrate the open and distributed nature of the project:

1. Set up our own Catalyst for 2dcl. This would allow us to create whatever entities we desire. We won't be doing this in the short term, but the fact that this is feasible is an advantage of Decentraland over other multiverses. It's crucial to understand that one can simply have their own content server, replicate what's in Decentraland, or create something entirely new.

2. Start a process in the DAO to add the Scene2d entity: This, in my opinion, is most interesting. The fact that someone not involved in the foundation or anything can send a "bill proposal" to modify the platform and prepare it for a use case neither foreseen nor of interest to the foundation is a process of direct democracy in action. If anyone is intrigued by this concept, I recommend the book The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan. It's available to read for free at the link I provided.

In conclusion, I found it interesting that both solutions are oriented towards decentralization, which remains true to the project's vision. It's lovely when there's coherence in the world 😁.

Woods Folk

Characters

Having been somewhat preoccupied, I didn't have time to work on Woods Folk 😞. However, Juli has been working hard and creating many character illustrations.

Here are some concepts for you:

Logo

At last, we have a first version of the logo... what do you think?

cuentitos

Oh my poor cuentitos, we have you forgotten. But not entirely.

Unity Integration

Originally, I wanted to release cuentitos with some tool for making visual novels. Given my current availability, it seems too ambitious, so I sat down to think about a good next step, and it occurred to me that we could integrate cuentitos with Unity so that people who use this engine, so loathed cherished by me, can create dynamic and probabilistic stories.

I proposed the idea to Guido, and he liked it. He has some experience in Unity, so between the two of us, we should be able to get it running relatively easily. I have done integrations in the past with Bloody Service and Nubarron, so unless it has changed drastically in the last 2 years, everything should be fairly straightforward.

It's possible that once this is done, we might then take the time for an official release..

Laidaxai in progress! ✨

🛠 Prototype: In the last few weeks, we've been creating a prototype for Laidaxai. We tested all the content using Unity, which allowed us to bring an early version of the game to life.

📖 Limited Version of the Visual Novel:
For now, we are exploring alternative (non-dynamic) narrative lines and testing the interaction of the text with images and sounds.

🎮 2D Environment: Our artist, Juli, has been sketching backgrounds for Laidaxai's village, for the explorable scenarios where Laidaxai will need to perform actions.

👷‍♂️ Testing: In the coming days, we will continue to pour all the content into the prototype to evaluate gameplay and art. Meanwhile, our team is considering the possibility of integrating cuentitos into Unity to add another dynamic dimension to the narrative experience.

Goals

In the next 6 weeks, we want to work on:

2dcl

• Login with Metamask (2dcl Grant): Completed 🎉.
• Deployment (2dcl Grant): It's ready on a functional level; it just needs some user interface improvements.
• Deployment videos: As soon as we finish implementing the simplified deployment, I'll record some videos to document the entire process of scene creation.

Woods Folk

• Scene loading: We're going to finish implementing scene loading from SVGs. Done!
• Stream about scene loading: In the end, I implemented the scenes and didn't stream. 😞
• Implement the map on stream Done! Here are the recordings of the map and the map scroll.
• Character movement: Pablo has already implemented this, I need to do a code review and merge.
• Visual Novel features: We've already started integrating cuentitos with Bevy on the stream. We'll continue with this.

cuentitos

• Integration with Unity: We're going to create a package that can be downloaded with pure Unity integration and an Asset in the Asset Store with more tools (we'll see if we make it paid or free, depending on how much it costs us to do it).
• CLI watch mode: Among other things, I want to have a watch mode where the CLI is listening for script changes and asks you if you want to recompile and reload.
• Launch: We're going to launch version 0.2 (Finally!). This involves creating a page, a blog post, setting up the documentation, and providing the download on GitHub.
• Record explanatory video: I want to record a video or do a stream on how to write scripts in cuentitos.

Laidaxai

• Continue with the Laidaxai narrative: Applying changes for the dialogs to work based on the game's design. We limited some character appearances. And others we set as conditions.
• Laidaxai cinematics: New art for cinematics, we are experimenting with a paper cut style or simulating it, storyboard + concept.
• Continuation of the GDD and prototyping: We are continuing with the GDD, incorporating all necessary information. Meanwhile, mechanics are being prototyped in Unity.

Community

• Start streaming: We've already started! Tuesdays and Thursdays on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/hiddenpeopleclub/schedule and YouTube. Streams are suspended until further notice!
• Add comments to the blog: The blog now has comments!