F.: What’s that huge document you want us to review about anyway
Aria: Basically my work is what if you read too much LessWrong and Dynasty Scans
Like any normal nerd, i have a long history of purchasing domain names for side-projects and letting them expire years later, having never worked on them.
Today, i purchased stars.pictures—not because i expect to put anything on it for months, but because i want the peace of mind i can mention the name online without being preempted. .pictures TLD are surprisingly cheap!
Since i’m very public about my creative process on social media, to avoid being too mysterious about my plans, let me explain some.
Vaporware alert. Vaporware alert. None of it exists in a tangible form yet.
Developing a real game is every nerd’s pipe dream.
When i was a tiny child with RPG Maker, times were simpler. It was just normal to steal sprites from every Super Nintendo game to make yours. Nobody expected otherwise.
Don’t Look at the Stars is a weird love story and posthuman science-fiction universe that lived in my mind for many years. Contemplative, and as gay as you’d expect, with a looming sense of tragedy, entailing complex questions of time travel, space travel, AI, comparative mythology, and things of that nature. It will explore dark subject matter—transphobia, sexual violence, genocide, to name only a few—yet i hope people will find it an engaging and positive story.
I am not making a game of it—i am not seriously making a game. Rather, i am learning Unreal Engine with a smaller goal in mind. Creating cool environments, posing characters in it, taking screencaps and short video clips of it, and turn it into a little comic. Who knows what happens next if it gets popular.
The plan is to turn it into a comic, but to make unique use of the options provided by delivery to a web browser: webtoons, the digitally native comic format, are little more than a big vertical jaypeg. I want to make use of the ease of translating text, of reactive layouts, of the possibility to have a dynamic soundtrack, of having long passages of text, of having interactive elements, of having limited animation, and so forth.
The environments would often make use of free Unreal Engine assets: Epic bought out asset packs off its marketplace to give for free to users every month, for years.
And as for the characters, i will use a character maker thing, with manual edits in Blender. I want proper anime-style characters, and none of the off-the-shelf options are good.
VRoid studio by Pixiv is a big favorite of VTubers, but it creates incredibly outdated models, with nasty topology, horrific UVs, tiny textures, and a very limited range of body types. The models take hours and hours of tweaking in Blender to become half-decent. And the models are also rather easy to import to Unreal Engine.
Koikatsu is a porn game, very often used to make adult illustrations—let’s not dance around that obvious fact. It is more popular as an anime character maker and poser than as a triumph of heterosexuality, however; in fact, before closing shop, the company that created it, Illusion, was offering a free all-ages version of the character creator. The legality of using it for my project is in the darkest part of the gray area. The outfits tend to be rather sexualized, but you can rein it in. Still: nothing compares to the quality of its output.
In either case, i hope to avoid as much as possible the “poser porn” aesthetic. It’s not a good one. It shouldn’t be in the back of your mind reading the comic. Unreal tech, custom shaders, and having a sense of taste will help with that.
If you have followed my path in the previous years, you know i’ve been positive about using generative AI for personal entertainment, but rather negative about its social effects. I think AI slop has no place in this project, and even incidental use as generative fill or to make generic textures would change the feel of a work. I will not write a long essay here: you can probably guess my thinking. It’s a pragmatic position of cautious moratorium more than one of full moral condemnation.
Vaproware alert. Vaporware alert. None of it exists yet. But now, when i post about Unreal Engine on social media, you’ll know why.