This project is primarily a design study, both engine-wise and visually.
Inspired by and based on the carvings of Judaculla Rock, the game is set in Boulder Borough and its spiritual counterpart, a realm called Juthcal, between which the player alternates to accomplish missions.
According to ancient lore of the natives, from the moment humans are born into reality, their souls reside in the spirit realm, usually in the form of an animal or a similar naturalistic concept, depending on the name they’re given spontaneously at birth.
The chart below shows the composition of all world elements, of which only the life related layers on the left are relevant to (visualized in) the game:
As of the afterlife, it’s evident that only "good" persons – souls having reached a qualifying level of universal insight – deserve spending a happy life in the hunting-gathering-grounds, while "bad" persons – souls that haven’t yet learned the lesson – are damned to suffer boredom in the grunting-grounds for a fair amount of time until they get another chance to accumulate knowledge, that is, being reborn.
In fact, some of those unhappy humans might get so frustrated they develop a chronical aggression (to a degree of downright demonic insanity), eventually trying to escape their metaphysical prison. As it’s fundamentally impossible for the ones who succeed escaping to enter the hunting-gathering-grounds, they inevitably land in Juthcal, where they always have to reckon with being hunted, captured and brought back.
Therefore, those who know how to transition may dare to cross over into Boulder Borough – although the physical conditions of reality feel uncomfortable to them (in particular the entire range of solar radiation) and are even detrimental to their spirit bodies in the long run.
This quasi-photorealistic territory (in fictitious Wackson County) is a dry barren environment, defined by rocky grounds, canyons, swales, sinkholes, and sparse vegetation.
Territory (scale 1:1600)
It’s inhabited by a tribe of hunter-gatherer natives, who dwell on the lighter surfaces. All darker shaded areas, called lowlands, are generally avoided because they’re known to host dangerous fauna, mad hermits and allegedly other evil entities.
The natives live in tents/tipis grouped in little camps of which there are a handful in the territory.
... 7 rotten totems,
Sometimes players must visit Juthcal to get requisite informations or items, and there are few ways to initiate a transition into the spirit realm:
- Consumption of a certain drug
- ...
A mystical spirit realm, layer in the belief system of the natives and completely overlapping their reality, featuring exactly the same topological structures/landmarks, albeit mirrored and with differing details in positions of objects (e.g. bushes, trees, or rocks), their type (e.g. boulders instead of tents), and overall fauna/flora. A slightly surreal atmosphere, dominated by desaturated hues.
Most of its creatures are the natives’ literal souls (a few of which are lost souls), some are demons that managed to escape their grunting-grounds, a few are independent benevolent spirits acting as demon hunters, the rest is of unspecified origin.
Its vegetation is lush and diversified, a labyrinth of farns, bushes, and trees.
In places of Boulder Borough’s 7 rotten totems, Juthcal has portals (totems covered with mystical archaic native symbols), allowing the player to take shortcuts via teleportation, if a certain collectable item is applied.
To leave Juthcal, players have options to initiate a transition back to Boulder Borough:
- Consumption of a certain drug
- ...
While at birth a person’s consciousness starts as a blank sheet, the everlasting soul has stored and remembers all previous experiences. So during lifetime everyone exists as two (consciousness in reality, and soul in Juthcal) parts which are usually linked. These invisible linkages are only perceivable (as floating umbilical cords) in the otherwise empty shapeless liminal twilight space between those worlds.
Side note: It's possible to temporarily visit the twilight space while in a transition.
Although the main function of a linkage is to downstream a person’s experience to be recorded by the soul, it’s actually bidirectional, and sometimes memory fragments such as emotions or images will trickle upstream too, received by the person’s mind in form of inspirations, intuitions, visions or dreams.
When a person dies, its consciousness is channelled through that linkage into the spirit body, where it finally unites with the soul. Exhausted by the soul’s overwhelming flood of memories the completed human being plummets into a deep slumber from which it awakens in the afterlife as if from a dream, either in the grunting grounds or the hunting-gathering-grounds, depending on its soul’s maturity.
If, for whatever reason, a linkage is damaged, shutting down the mind-soul connection, there’s consequences on both ends: The person, bereft of its spiritual component, loses internal balance, gets disoriented and lastly insane, separating from its peers and retreating in the lowlands. Of course, upon death the consciousness can’t possibly make its journey to Juthcal; it simply dissolves.
Without the usual stream of human experiences, the soul stops accumulating knowledge, and even worse, may never receive the needed consciousness to leave the spirit realm, being stuck there forever as so-called lost soul.
While map textures exhibit top-down perspective, all objects appear in side view, especially the character sprites. To manage a decent front-to-back overlapping, we use horizontal stripes (simple DIVs) of 16 px effective height as sprite containers. Objects will be appended to an appropriate DIV depending on their Y position: the farther in the background, the lower/earlier their anchoring DIV must be in the DOM.
Given the main view height of 768 px, we need 768 / 16 = 48 DIVs to vertically cover the area, and with a largest sprite of about 128 px in height, 128 / 16 = 8 additional stripes are needed at the bottom to anchor objects that are located below, but whose top parts are still extending into the view.
In the case of vertical scrolling, the topmost (or bottommost respectively) of those 56 DIVs will wrap around and update its content.
The base image (2048×2048 px), a structurally truthful variation of the rock carvings stylized by AI, is cut into 8×8 pieces (each 256×256 px), which are upscaled ×2 to obtain the final 64 tiles (each 512×512 px). These are shown in the viewport with scale factor 2, hence the effective map area totals 8192×8192 px.
Side note: Upscaling – here from 256×256 to 512×512 – usually introduces a tiny (strip of 1 or 2 px width) distortion at the borders, which even gets amplified in postproduction by sharpening or similar steps. Although this effect is small, it's often still perceivable that the tiles aren't perfectly seamless.
A workaround could be to leave a border of e.g. 8 px width around when cutting, for an intermediate tile size of 272×272 px. After upscaling ×2 to 544×544 px, and eventual postproduction steps, we cut away the superfluous border (now 16 px) to get its final 512×512 px area. This overlap method ensures the tiles will touch without any visible seam.
The optimal method, however, would be to scale the base image up ×2 to 4096×4096 px right away, using a creative AI upscaler to reinforces stone textures, preferably with prompting and seeding. Then, cutting the result into 8×8 (perfectly seamless) tiles is an easy task.
Maybe it’s even possible to apply a style transfer to this upscaling step, to also create the spirit realm version of Boulder Borough.
Side note: Four tile areas in the top right and bottom left corners containing whitespace don’t require explicit representation, so we actually need only 60 tiles altogether.
Considering a bounding box of maximum size 64×64 px for a character animation frame, equalling approx. 2×2 m, our map has an area of 256×256 m, exhibiting the following conversion properties:
List of 1000+ real native names to chose from for character generation.
In some cultures a baby name would change with adulthood, and a person could have several names during lifetime, perhaps even different names (family internal, public, secret, holy) in parallel. Changing a native’s name during gameplay, which spans only a very short period, isn’t necessary, but a secret name for ritual purposes seems appropriate.
