These last two weeks there has been a lot of progress, luckily!

One of the consequences of my ADHD is that I have a lot of trouble meeting deadlines, and when things get complicated I tend to miss deadlines and become very disorganized, besides relying heavily on willpower, which we know doesn't work.

That's why for some time I've been feeling the need to rely on someone who doesn't have this problem to help organize our work a little and assist me in being more consistent in the medium term.

Today I want to welcome Guido Gallego who came highly recommended by our old friend Sebastián Blanco.

Guido will be taking charge of the Producer's Whip and lending us a hand here and there with some programming stuff once he gets up to speed with Rust.

I am very happy to start this stage with him and see where it takes us.

Welcome Guido!!!

2dcl

After the result of the survey we conducted to determine whether or not to continue with 2dcl, we have been working on different options to continue with the project.

We consulted on Discord and privately with community members and maraoz suggested 2 important points to work on that well encompass the different things that were on my mind.

1. Make the process of uploading static content to 2dcl easier.
2. Make discovering content from others easier.

We also had a suggestion from MetaDodge to create a web client. It's a good idea that would greatly help with the incorporation of new users. I've been doing some experiments and I think it's possible, but we're going to have to make a few modifications to the current client, therefore for this grant we decided to set it aside.

Based on the previous points, we are going to create a grant to propose doing the following:

Simplify the upload of scenes

Our goal is to build an integrated authentication and signature workflow in the client, eliminating the dependence on the Foundation's CLI to upload scenes.

Improve content discovery

We plan to create an online database that will periodically update with the scenes uploaded to 2dcl. This will be accessible both on the web and from the client.

Simplify the login process

To simplify the avatar creation process, we will implement a login workflow with MetaMask, eliminating the need to edit configuration files.

Talk with others

We plan to implement the possibility to see other players and communicate with them. This involves implementing communication endpoints in our catalyst client library, and leveraging the new Worlds functionality.

We believe that with these features we will have a smoother and less "experimental" experience, and we hope that this will help to have more content and people navigating 2dcl.

Weekends in the Woods

In the last post, we mentioned that we were going to be working on a new smaller project than Laidaxai to try to launch this year; that project is Weekends in the Woods.

It's a narrative fantasy game where Abril, a curious girl, finds herself in a forest/maze talking to beings and helping them solve their problems.

The game takes place on the weekends, where Abril and her father go to the woods and she ventures into them to investigate.

The player will have to navigate forest mazes to meet the beings that inhabit the forest. These beings have problems and need help, but the weekend is short and on Sunday you have to go back home.

Upon returning each subsequent weekend, things will change a bit because time has passed and the problems may have mutated, gotten complicated, or have been solved without Abril's help.

Next week I'll talk a bit about the maze editor I'm making and how I'm designing them.

We hope something interesting comes out of this!

Laidaxai: Loading Hailok…

These days, we have been purely dedicated to design, working as a team.

✍🏽🎲 We have been merging narrative and gameplay. Laidaxai will not only be a great story to read, but through the game mechanics, we will be able to emerge from our dreams and explore the real world. Through the art and the spaces that will be represented, we will learn more about the Qom culture, performing actions, collecting objects, and interacting with characters.

🎨 We decided to redesign the graphic identity of the previous Laidaxai (2D Platforms) game, creating a new logo. Based on our new concepts made by Juli, we have started our Art Book to delve more into the aesthetics of the Qom culture. We were inspired by their thread games and their crafts, since, being a purely oral culture, it has been difficult for us to find graphic elements. We could say that we have used all our imagination and, in my case, I find inspiration while I dream strange things🎆.

♟ We focused on defining mechanics and systems to generate a diversity of actions and consequences. In the progression system, the player will gain new companions and chants (powers) as they progress through the tree levels.

🧩 In addition, we are developing challenging puzzles and mini-games, an example we are developing is the "Rhythm of the Spirits" (provisional name), where players follow the rhythm of the sacred chants of the Qom, which the piogonakas (shamanesses) use to heal.

This image has no sound but I can hear the siesta by the river and the sound of the Nvike accompanying.

cuentitos

The cuentitos runtime is taking us a little longer than we expected, but it's progressing.

We decided to create the necessary tasks for the runtime on GitHub, and Pablo is working on creating pull requests for each thing.

As I am very involved with Weekends in the Woods it's getting complicated for me to do code review, so what we might do now is mostly fix the bugs that come up when I run the Weekends in the Woods script, and later when I free up a bit with that, do a big refactoring between the two.

In the version-0.2 branch on GitHub, I left a tutorial that explains how to write for cuentitos using the palabritas language.

We are using that article as a reference to create the necessary features in both the parser and the runtime.

For now, we have some functionalities working: you can read lines of text, set the probability to display them or not, show and choose options, define sections and subsections, and jump to a particular section.

We still have a few things to fix regarding sections, but it's coming along very well.

Based on the above tutorial we identified the following features to work on:

1. Sections and bifurcations
2. Reacting to the state
3. Changing the state
4. Forcing the end of the flow
5. Marking blocks as unique
6. Tags
7. Functions
8. Changes of probability
9. Probabilities in options and buckets
10. Named buckets

When we have all that implemented we will be able to have the 0.2 version of the runtime finished and officially launch it.

Objectives

• Record 2dcl videos: As I mentioned in the 2dcl update, we are going to wait to have the deployment in the client to record the videos, it doesn't make much sense to film something that will be deprecated very soon.
• New 2dcl grant: We are going to publish the new proposal, let's hope it goes well!
• Weekends in the Woods: We want to have the maze editor and generator ready, and at least a first version of navigation in the game.
• cuentitos: These two weeks we want to finish everything related to sections, reacting to the state, and modifying it (points 1, 2, and 3 from the update).
• Laidaxai aesthetic pack: This is what we presented in this update!
• Continue with Laidaxai narrative: Applying changes so that dialogues work based on game design. We limited some character appearances. And others we set as a condition.
• Laidaxai cinematics: New art for cinematics, we are experimenting with a paper cut style or simulating it, story board + concept.
• Start streaming: I'm finishing the setup to be able to do this. Last week my CamLink arrived, I tested it with the GoPro and it works well, but I'm not sure if our DSLR will work. The lights should be arriving this week and I think I would have everything necessary. I will be doing some tests on Twitch and with a bit of luck in the next update I can announce the start of the streams.