Log #39: May/13/2025

  • It was fun while it lasted
  • Helpless Level Design
  • The Future

I promised previously that this would be my last blog post on ERASE, but now I'm not so sure. With the deadline for our project on Thursday, I know it will be at least a month more until we put our game on Steam (which I believe our team decided to do), and I may do additional work after the final deadline to additionally polish things.

In any case, I believe I have wasted these past few days doing level design, while there has been bigger priorities. Despite my hopes, I haven't done sound effects, nor have I made much of our game look presentable. And our kanban has lots of tasks on it still.

I definitely don't see us doing everything we had hoped to do, but I'm still optimistic we will be able to pull the functionality together for our game's endings.

Going forward, I hope I can polish up the game's levels to look as presentable as possible. The main thing I regret is procrastinating the project, and being afraid to work on it.

In any case, whether this is the last blog post, or the second-to-last, we still have some MATH SEGMENTs to go through!

MATH SEGMENT: Geometry

I have spent a lot of my time reworking our game's level layouts. Unfortuantely, do to me being stupid with source control, I lost yesterday's work on our Lounge level. However, I continued on it today, and am close to where I was before.

A particularly interesting piece of the level design for me has been fitting our light models into the ceiling. because of their rectangular shapes, I have to carefully size the pieces of our ceiling based on where our lights are. To make things easier, I make tilable patterns that I can copy-paste across in a nice regular shape.

I also noticed a funny visual flaw with our in-game pillars. Because our brick wall texture is world-aligned, the texture is not based on the individual objects. This allows you to line up differently-scaled walls without worrying about how their textures will look, but when you have tilted pillars like I do, the texture cuts through the cylinder like strange parabola.

a pillar leaning forward slightly, with a seam line which stays straight up despite the slanted pillar, resulting in a parabola shaped seam on the pillar.

The slant in the pillar does not influence the direction of the seams on the wall texture. We see the "straight up" lines of the texture show up on the pillar like a curve.

Making use of the basic transformations like scaling, rotation, and translation, I continue to build our in-game areas. Wish us luck, and I'll be more careful to push my changes to another branch at least to avoid losing my changes entirely!

MATH SEGMENT: Algebra and Functions

You may recall from an older post how I showed off the logic used to decide our game's endings.

Well, these mechanics are being implemented now, and this plan has turned out to work pretty well. I was happy that the implementation seems to be working alright.

We ended up simplifying the actual endings to just be blurbs of texts, rather than the more ambitious "end states" which I originally imagined would cause effects in the rest of the game's levels (similar to an Earthbound or Undertale ending).

I did additional planning work a week or two ago to flesh out these endings, and now that things are being built now, it seems like everything is going to plan.

I had to plan out each point of interaction and each change but it was worth it, and now we'll just have to hope there isn't some huge bugs we will encounter last minute.

Another logical problem worth noting is how we actually have two separate "final levels." Because the two main game endings have parallel versions of the game's end, there is a lot of overlap on what happens at the end, just with different NPCs. Because our coders wanted to simplify things and avoid overwriting each other's code, they actually split the map into two separate but nearly identical maps sharing visuals but containing different NPC interactions.

While this practice is NOT the best, I think it helps declutter our workflow, even if has impractical consequences. We now have two levels to edit instead of the initial one.

To end on some famous last words, "Do we really have time to make things work better?"

As always, I appreciate you're attention for this blog post. If this is goodbye, thank you.

-Luke Knotts


Okay, so I don't want my email to be scrapped by bots so I'll explain it to you. First you write my name, but with an 'f', all lowercase. So you get, 'fluke', got it? Okay, then you add an 's', to really make the email say 'flukes', all lowercase still. Then there's a dot, like a, erm, period. You know. Those things we use in writing. After that is the word 'targets', like the things you miss in life. Then there's a 0, or a ZERO, if you prefer it written out. From there it's the typical, '@icloud.com', you know, one of those 'at' signs, but the symbol, and then it's followed by an 'i', the word 'cloud' and then another one of those dot things (.) and 'com', which I think is short for company. So that's my email. Hopefully that helps.