It's time for updates again! There has been a lot of silence around here, more than I would like, but given the circumstances, I'm happy to be able to write this post.

🇦🇷✈️🇨🇦

The main culprit for the lack of updates is me: Aldi and I moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It's a beautiful place, full of nature, sea, and people who let you cross the street.

Moving to a new country involves a HUGE number of steps, more than our poor ADHD brains can handle at once. That's why I'm a little burnt out, and it took me a while to focus and write these updates, but here we are, in an hour I have to go sign the lease for our apartment, and instead of preparing everything, I'm writing this. Speaking of ADHD.

Besides that, obviously: Eurovision and tomorrow is my birthday!

Anyway, without further excuses, let's see what the team has been working on in these weeks.

Cuentitos and Palabritas

After trying to write some things with cuentitos, I realized that what I had designed had some friction for writing stories that had a combination of linear parts and dynamic parts. That's why I decided to redo the language to support these things. This led to palabritas, a new approach to story creation that we started implementing with Pablo.

Learning from what we did well in 2dcl with documentation, I started designing the language from the document that explains how to use it. Nothing better than that to communicate it to Pablo!

We've been using Pest to generate the language parser and it was a pleasure working with this library. Very quickly we could have the parser running and the language definition is very easy to modify, something that was a bit complicated before with the manual parser I had made.

Now we have to start implementing the compiler that transforms what the parser returns into the data structures we need and the runtime for all of this to come to life.

2dcl: the last run

Pablo has also been working hard to close our project with the DAO of Decentraland. The idea is to launch the project in the coming weeks (I've been saying this for a month!). This time it's serious: we have all the heavy lifting done, you can create scenes, upload them to catalyst, walk them, and automatically generate the avatar by entering the ETH address.

Here's a sample:

For reference, this is my avatar:

Now I'm going to pass the microphone (?) to Dani, who will tell us a little about Laidaxai.

Entering the world of dreams (by Dani)

During the last few weeks, we have been working on Laidaxai and the Black Tree, and we want to share with you a fragment of our process.

🌟 These days I've been researching and making maps about the Qom worldview, to better understand the relationship between constellations, environmental phenomena, and us, the incarnated/human spirits. This research has allowed me to discover new characters (which I hope to present to you in the future) and to better understand what the links are, and in what ways we can implement them in our game.

💫 For the Qom culture, every part of nature has its own guardian spirit, as each element is important, everything is interconnected and has its reason for being.

🙌 We have been in contact with members of the Qom community, showing them the progress we have made in the project, and this was one of the reactions we received:

It gives me great joy to know that we are on the right path, in these last years I have learned a lot from them, and I choose to believe in everything that is happening around "Laidaxai".

🔥 During my research process, I discovered the existence of the Piogonakas (female Toba shamans), which led me to remember several experiences during my life where I encountered them without knowing it... But I'll tell that more later.

✍ As I discover fragments of this narrative universe, I begin to write shamanic episodes in "Palabritas" format, things that I remember and others that I imagine. I hope to be able to share some of that process with you soon.

Our team is working to represent this oneiric journey in the best way possible, I share with you an image of the beginning of this journey🌟.

Goals

For the next 6 weeks, we have the following goals:

• We are going to publish 2dcl. In the end, we will launch all the features together. Including uploading scenes, walking through them, and assigning an avatar.
• Define and start a prototype for Laidaxai. We are already working on defining the scope of what the game prototype will be. The team is working on figuring out what technical limitations we have.
• Cuentitos. We want to have the compiler and the runtime up and running. This will be the foundation of the narrative runtime for Laidaxai and possibly several games that we will make in the future.
• We will start streaming once a week parts of the development of our games and trying out nice things that other people are doing. In a while, I have to go sign the lease for the apartment in Halifax. Once we are settled, I will consider the possibility of setting up something there for streaming. In theory, we get the apartment on Monday the 15th, so I estimate that by the end of May I will have this sorted out (or canceled). We'll see!