Journal

The actually exploration week has passed, but I'm having to much fun and so I carve out a few hours on the weekend.

I clean up a lot of the systems. Fix locomotion again. Make clouds and new branches.

5th day.

End up spending a lot of time on shaders. Generating moss and stratified rocks.

The entire thing sorta works and I'm not quite ready to let it go.

Day 4.

More work on the vegetation. Lighting. Gamepad and keyboard controls working. Walking around the scene. The old man looks around at random points in the scene.

Day 3.

Animation the entire day. Back and forth between Blender and Unity.

2nd Day.

I made a bunch of trees and built out the scene some more.

And I modelled a protagonist for this tiny vignette.

Exploration Week Fall/Winter 2025

Last exploration week of the year.

This time I wanted to do something that incorporated a lot of the things I've been wanting to get back to for a while now. Character control logic and animation is a big part of that.

Began by sketching out a scene in Unity and get started on all the structural parts — the skeleton of a system.

I stripped out most of the old lighting code. Made my own light buffer so I could control falloff (and a bunch of other things). Chucked the entire idea of cast shadows. Once I decided to stop wrestling the Unity light system and bypass it, things resolved surprisingly quickly.

Sunk cost and the spaces between things

After I completed the first playable version of Vesper I wrote about drifting from aesthetic simplicity into ornamentation. Humans do this. We doodle in the margins. Perhaps it’s a our ceaseless pattern-recognition projected outwards, causing us to slowly fill in the negative spaces around us.

The thing is, we need that space. It’s what the imagination moves through. It’s what gives everything structure. Without spacing everything blends into a senseless blanket of noise.

I’ve spent a lot of time over these last few months working on the lighting in Vesper. Especially cast shadows. Once upon a time I started with a very intentionally limited approach to lighting. Then it started to slip, slowly. Everything began to fill with noise. Looking at it now I can’t help but notice the receding edge of negative space.

That’s not to say all that time was a waste. I’ve explored, discovered and learned many things. I’ve also made useful (and even some lovely) things.

Still, now it looks like I need to clear a lot of this out. Re-establish a sense of spacing and visual clarity.