2.2026
(Don’t mind the cryptic title, it just refers to the new legendary ring in GW2. Crab-dance time!) Heya, Alec here, checking in from a hectic start to the year. (Can you believe it’s already past mid-February!) Some new machinery arrived at work, an extremely cool milling center. There has been a lot of work in setting up and learning this device (alongside other things), but it’s been really rewarding to see it in action. Machines like these change tools by themselves — there is a large tool magazine at the top of the chassis, which rotates a tool to sit just about the machining center. This tool is then grabbed by the machine and fitted into the spindle. It’s terrifyingly fast, and was thrilling to see for the first time.
On top of that, Jade Spring released, woohoo! I can never thank everyone enough for their support and enjoyment of the game. Just the other day I got the most wonderful fan art from Kyris, and I keep going back to look at it. I think I’ll have to add those raupō plants to the game! My time in Guild Wars 2 itself has kinda stalled a little (thanks, life), but I’ve been doing some relaxing map completion with a good friend, and I need to do my LNY annual achievements sometime soon! In spite of everything I managed to finish working on The Minstrel this weekend – so pretty, so beautiful.
Coming up with a framework for a wholly new game has been challenging. It’s not so much a case of having too few ideas, as it is having far too many, and struggling to hone them and fit them together! I have a lot of old work and experiments, and I’m trying to look at it all through the lens of my experience on Jade Spring to work out what this next thing is gonna look like. Here are some disorganised thoughts which have guided how I’m feeling about Dwelt:
I don’t think I’ve talked about it that much, but my broad goal with Slyllama is to make worlds and places — mechanics (and, to an extent, even characters) being tools to help map out these places, furnish them with depth and history, and immerse the player in them. Here are the original components of the brief opening that I had worked out:
Cleanse and rebuild at the end of ages in Dwelt: Iron Solstice, a steampunk cleaning and decorating game set amongst a band of robots preparing an overgrown earth for the eventual return of humanity. Dwelt is largely built on the foundations of Jade Spring, but aims to provide more polished, unified, and diverse game-play, as well as be an original piece of art which builds on previous game attempts like Scruffy, Dwelt (the old version), and Soul-Scrap. As a player you are put into a world which has been torn apart by some calamity – perhaps a vicious, short-lived, magically-driven world war – and which now rests as innumerable fractured islands.
You are a small brass robot, one of many who were left behind by humanity when they fled the broken planet (the ‘Armatures’). You (and those around you) woke from an EMP-induced stasis to find the scars of devastation overgrown with greenery and flora, stretching over molten crevasses and crushed steel girders like scabs patching and healing the land. The Armatures, advanced as they all are, can keenly feel their own grief at the flight of their human overseers and kin both. Yet there is more: the pain and anguish of the earth itself, radiating from its counterparts, as it seeks to comprehend and remedy its loss.
It is within this situation that the Armatures determine to participate in the recovery of the world, emboldened by the hope that humanity will return and permanently resettle in a world which has been calmed and reconstructed. And this is Dwelt’s key objective: to clear and settle the blights and persevering wounds which prevent stable settlement; and to construct and decorate housing for certain figures and groups that the Armatures are expecting to return.
I have some fun ideas for how Dwelt would work with that concept of having every kind of object, decoration, creature, or otherwise descend from the same base ‘thing’. But just recently, I realised that I’ve been a bit blocked in terms of working on the project because I feel a little emotionally disconnected from it. I was originally going to jump into writing a full-on pitch, but I’ve decided to just make art, write, model, and compose for a little while! The world, place, and histories are the things I love, so I need to start there and hone into what this place means, and what its vibe and potential richness is. Even just this thought is giving me new excitement for working on the game!
As a quick side note and reminder to myself, so many interesting things have been happening at work! Things involving maths, engineering, and possibly even more horrifying stuff. We recently got some new machinery which allows us to do really cool things with metal, and I wanna talk about some of the vector and programming work that goes into that! In the mean time, thank you so much for reading.
