Update December 2023

I've been working on improving the visuals for the many levels in the game.  I just realized I never really talked about what that means.

When I make a new level it is first just made out of perfect hypercubes (some of them moveable) with very simple textures, and sometimes extra objects required for gameplay. This is sometimes called "greyboxing." The level is playable from start to finish, and so we can evaluate if it is fun to play, and maybe change it a bit. I playtested the whole game that way with a bunch of people. 

But the level looks boring, so improving the visual means doing many things on top of that to make it look great. Many of the levels in the game are in that state, and I'm going through them one by one. The levels are grouped by gameplay mechanics, and similar levels share visuals, so a lot of the work is reusable. 

Understandability is very important to me: I didn't want to make a game that very few people can understand. Because of this, a fundamental and very important way that the game is set up is that each level is thought as being made out of certain number of worlds. 4D space can be thought of as many 3D slices next to each other, and so each world of a level naturally is a slice of the hypercube grid along the 4th dimension.  It's what changes this game from a game where you're just messing around barely understanding what happens, to a game that actively teaches anyone the 4th dimension step by step, and from which you emerge with a great understanding of how the 4th dimension functions. 

I first decide which world is going to contain what, such as biomes, trees, vegetation, 4D objects and architecture, and general color scheme.

I add hills and valleys to make the level feel more organic and realistic. But often levels that contain pushable blocks need to be flat in the areas the blocks can reach. 

I then decide which procedural texture to use for the different ground types.

I add vegetation such as grass, bushes and trees. That is both 3D vegetation (extruded in 4D) and 4D vegetation. The reason I have both is again for understandability. 3D vegetation still looks like regular vegetation when sliced, so it's easier to understand what is going on. The larger trees are also used as landmarks for the player to orient themselves.

I add arbitrarily shaped rocks here and there, and I bevel or slice off the edges of the hypercubes to make them look more like rocks. It's very important for gameplay understandability that the cubes stay cubes, and I didn't want to mess with that for a long time, but it's actually still possible to bevel the edges without messing too much with how understandable the game is.

Many levels contain custom made 3D buildings, which we concepted and modeled. Most of the buildings are done at this point, but sometimes the other slices of the level that contain them are not done. The buildings make the game feel like a world instead of a math abstraction. They connect to the story and the themes of the game. The building scenes contain NPCs with dialog.

We are finishing up 5 small buildings right now, with 3 more to go. And we need to clean up 4 buildings made a long time ago. 

The 4D objects (vegetation or architecture) are modeled and textured procedurally. I am currently working on a few more to help fill out the scenes, and because it's fun.

Happy Holidays!