Twinsen Quest

Today, time to return to the world of Twinsen, but to do this, we need to talk about the official version of the universe. 

Little Big Adventure, or how I knew it, Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure was released in 1994. My first contact with it was thanks to a friend who lent me his CD version of the game. At that point, I could not leave prison. I did not get this game, partially because I did not understood english very well and there was no Polish version. 

Years later, my uncle gave me Twinsen's Odyssey, which is also known as  Little Big Adventure 2. Released in 1997 was my real entry into this universe. I started playing it, and I love it. Finished it quickly, and I decided to try the first game once again. Then it finally clicked, and till this day I remember how, with the rebels, Twinsen attacked Fun Frock base. To this day, I remember my excitement from that time. 

But this was kind of the end of the story. I was looking forward to the next installment, but it never came. There were rumors, sketches, but nothing leading to a new game. So around 2010, I decided to remake the first game. I got in contact with the owners of the rights to the universe and got their approval to do a fan remake. In the production, there were a lot of good and bad decisions. I had a lot of hopes for it, and things were progressing well. 

In 2022, things changed.  There was a big announcement: LBA is back, but not in the form of a remake that I was doing. It was an official game where the official creators were involved. As much as I wanted to pretend this hit me hard. A combination of panic and sadness resulted in a slowdown in the progress and birth of the Tribute. I secured approval from the team that worked on this official remake to work on Tribute in the cut form: single island. 

Just two years later, on 14 November 2024, Little Big Adventure – Twinsen’s Quest landed on Steam.

In the fanbase, there were mixed feelings. Some liked it a lot, others were ok with it, and some hated it. From my past experience, it is hard to make everyone happy. I played on Switch 1 and finished before the first patch was released. Which is unfortunate, as I heard that it resolved some of the issues I saw in the game. I like the graphics style. I liked some of the changes in the locations. Sadly, in the end, the feeling from the first full playthrough was missing. If this was a fault of the game, my high expectations of it, or just the fact that I'm a more mature player, it is hard to say.

What I can say is that fear of exactly that led me to restart six years ago. I was catching up then Uncharted series, and while playing the first game, I knew that what I had would not be enough. Some may think that I was paranoid, but my biggest fear was of hurting an already fragile franchise.

Anyway, I was planning to buy the next instalment: Little Big Adventure - Purple Empire. Then, in August 2025, another news hit: The project will be delayed.

So here we are. I'm no longer so young, and with all the stuff happening in life, sometimes it is hard to find enough time and energy to continue. But against everything, I still want the Tribute to become a real thing. This is why I am inviting you to experience with me the design thoughts behind the Tribute, in tomorrow's post. 

Return to the wonderland (Pt. 3)

Part 2 concluded with a sense of despair and futility. I would want to think this is a case, but a discussion with my fiancée made me realise that maybe I've missed something, and there is another side to the same coin. Some people doubt, but there is also a group of people who are full of confidence. They finish some training and behave as if they are experts in the topic. They are confident in their opinion, they promoting themselfs as experts and people believe and trust them thanks to this confidence. Sadly, this confidence is not always accompanied by knowledge or experience. 

Anyway, I'm not one of them and can only speak for myself. These days, I understand that doubt is just a part of life. 

At the beginning, I did not care too much about stuff and was only playing with making games. Then came the time when the industry matured, and some people using middleware after a month of development could show "game engines" which could render nice visuals, have physics animations, and particle systems. I was then still struggling with shaders, animations, and did not even think about physics. How could they achieve so much better in shorter times? 

Then came the time when people stopped making custom engines and switched to Unreal and Unity, which in some way became the standard of the industry. Bigger companies wanted to save costs on production, and indies wanted to make games, not technology. Somewhere around that time, making engines stopped being cool, and devs moved on. They could have a playable demo in a day when, for me, even the most basic things took forever. Should I still be doing my own tech?

Now we have times when AI is everywhere. People Vibe Coding, where I am still polishing my skills and trying understand how things work. Should I switch to doing stuff using AI?

In the end, does answering any of these questions really matter? I like to understand things in depth. I like doing my own tech. I like to crate game in my own way. I will also use AI, but not as an omnipotent solution, but as a tool to achieve my goals. It is just annoter supporiting tool like Stack Overflow. Anyway, in a lot of cases, it does not even give me the answers that we need.

Do I despise middleware? I would be hypocritical if I said yes. I'm using them in my own project. Do I despise Unity and Unreal? Not really, they are just another tool to achieve our goals. I worked for Unity Technologies and met a lot of talented people who were or still are creating it. Is AI something bad? Not really, if it works for you, use it, but in the end, this is not a tool for everything. Use it where it makes sense, and in other cases, just do not use it. 

The older I get, the fewer doubts I have about my approach to life. I just like to be flexible. When I'm working for a company, I try to do things their way. What I do need to fit the product we develop, it should also follow the workflows that are in the given company. If I use Unity, I try to approach development in a way that fits it. When I develop Unreal, I try to make stuff in the Unreal way. Finally, when I do stuff for myself, I want to do it in my own way. Want to experiment with stuff, explore possibilities. Some of them may be wrong, some of them may be stupid, but this is what defines White Rabbit Engine and differentiates it from others. This is for me a trip to the wonderland where everything is possible to achieve if I only want to invest my time and energy into it.

And what I want to invest my free time in is finishing the Tribute and making other games. Is this a return to Wonderland? Not really, as I do not think that I ever left it. I was there all the time, just a little bit preoccupied with the real world. But now I'm slowly recovering from it and the forest of the T-posed Twinsens.

You probably guessed right, I'm doing some interesting changes that broke things, but do not worry, we will recover from it. So join me in our journey across the wonderland, and how the host Escape to rural France YouTube would say: see you tomorrow!

Return to the wonderland (Pt. 2)

Part 1, ended with a rather sad premise that tech companies will bring AI to every aspect of our lives whether we want or not. This can lead to questions about the point of spending years learning how to do coding, art, or animations? What's the point of putting effort into the craft if you can just write a prompt and get stuff better than some with years of experience in given fields?

Data show that more young people depend on AI. You need some school paper? You just ask AI. You need to do some coding? Asking AI. You need a CV that will pass all automated recruitment systems? You ask AI. You need a friend's advice? Talk with AI. You need mental help? Talk with AI. You need a partner? Talk with AI.

This is a perfect situation for some tech companies, others try to catch up and put AI into everything (Toilets including). We do that because AI sells. It's a promise of the simple life where everything is within reach of your hand. Minimal effort, quick results, high return.

This even sounds like a marketing slogan: 

AI makes things that felt impossible within the reach of your hand.

I'm currently reading an interesting book about marketing by Rory Sutherland: Alchemy. 

It touches a lot of interesting problems of marketing that I never thought about. He discusses there a lot how companies are too focused on optimisations, numbers, and saving money. 

"Today, the principal activity of any publicly held company is rarely the creation of products to satisfy a market need. Management attention is instead largely directed towards the invention of plausible-sounding efficiency narratives to satisfy financial analysts, many of whom know nothing about the businesses they claim to analyse, beyond what they can read on a spreadsheet."

Alchemy, Roth Suterland  

He also points out something so oblivious that the world is not only numbers and savings, and that there is also no single solution, or in his words: "The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea", and there is something about it. If there were a single source of truth, we would already found it.

Now you can think why I mentioned all of it in the topic of AI, Technology, and White Rabbit Engine? Because what he writes can be applied outside of marketing. I believe that AI is not a solution to anything. It is just another tool. You could compare it to the invention of programming languages, which was just an evolution of assembly. 

My look at it is partially influenced by a video from a Disney 2D animator who said: 

"I think people, anytime new technology comes along they see it as a threat and they. You know you get kind of territorial about what you're doing and you think it's going to be taken away but rather than do that because you're not going to stop technology. Try to embrace it, what can it do to help you, how can you learn from it."

Arron Blaise  

His whole video you can find here, this quote you can find somewhere around 17:30. 

Still, for a lot of managers and companies, AI is another buzzword like social, blockchain, NFT, and crypto. People were forced to implement it into the product even if they did not want to. What is, in my opinion, different about AI is that it impact work of people and not necessarly the good way. People are getting fired because of the premise that AI will be capable of doing their job, even if, in a lot of cases, this is just a misunderstanding of what people do. In the case of developers, a lot of people think that we create source code. But in the university, I learned that coding is just a cherry on top of the cake. What we do is solve the problems that are put in front of us. In my case, I can solve the same problem using C++, C#, Python, Java, and with a little bit of practice in any other language, even the most archaic ones.

Some companies are in some way forced to replace people with AI. Investors seen news about other companies saving money using AI, and they demand the same from their company. Others do it on their own as managers want to show savings, and the most costly resource in the majority of companies is people. This sadly led to cuts in the staff and often juniors, whose jobs can often be more easily replaced by AI. There is only one problem with this approach: there would be no Seniors without Juniors.

In the end, all of that adds up and leads to the feeling of misery and pointlessness. I don't know how you feel about it, but I have more than 15 years of experience in programming, and it sometimes hits me hard. What's the point of doing what I do? What is even more terrifying is the fact that if this is how I feel, I can only imagine what young people feel ...

 

Return to the wonderland (Pt. 1)

Long time no posting, I could tell a lot of excuses why, but in the end, all of that leads to me. There were so many stimulants outside of the White Rabbit Engine that I just never found time or energy to do it. In the era of AI this may sound ridiculous. With one simple prompt, you can get almost production-ready posts, but somehow, here I'm still writing everything by hand.

And those who done it at least once know that for the majority of people this is not an easy task. When you are finally done, you start to redact what you write, changing, throwing away big chunks that feel wrong, and before you notice, a lot of time has passed, the text is not perfect, and you feel like a noob in all of that. 

You still do not know how people will receive what you wrote. Some may like it, others may laugh at it, as your language is now BBC English. In other cases, they may decide that you do not even know what you are writing about. If only there way to avoid this and make it easier ....  

And here we are. In the world of generative AI where people without experience can "code" or how people call it, Vibe Code. The same people can, in matters of seconds, be 2D artists who create concept art (and if you're curious, the picture above is generated using AI from Gemini). Then the same people can do 3D models in a few clicks thanks to the same technology. Level design, no worries, we have AI-generated environments, and AI armature animations have been developed for years. The only thing that I did not hear about are Particle Systems, FX, and shaders.... But this means nothing, as they may already exist. With that, we have all the pieces to create almost the whole game. We can also take a shortcut and generate the whole gameplay right away (I know about https://oasis-ai.org/ and https://gamengen.github.io/ which are probably not the only ones).

I already seen ads selling that idea: we do not know anything about games/software development, but we still can create a product.  This sounds like my childhood imagination of what creating software looks like. You need to do some clicking, describe how things should work, and have a character moving around the screen or app, performing some cool actions. Then you can simply sell this game or app, collect a substantial amount of money, and lead a carefree life with it. 

This is still not there. But some companies already reached a point where we are expected to use AI to generate nice-sounding content, which is then processed by AI to give a summary of what we tried to write. Which sounds like a telephone game where some information just gets lost. We could, in the end, resolve it easily by just sending a short summary with bullet points we want to share. But this would lead to questioning why some positions are needed while at the same time colliding with some overgrown ego. 

In the entertainment area is not much better. Shorts these days feel repetitive and like there is more AI content in there. This flood of AI content is nice to watch, but most of the time content is empty and probably incorrect. In case of renovations timelipse they do not make sense, and if one time they will be good enough to do life hacks, they will compete with 5-minute craft. At the same time, it will open for them the opportunity to do debunking of something other than their own bulshit. 

Still, AI is here. We may like it or not, but we can do nothing about it. As you can see by the image, I'm using it, and there are high chances you or someone you know is using it too. If you are not using it, you will probably start doing it soon, as it is pushed everywhere by tech companies. This sounds like a sad ending...

Just another update.

I initially planned to write something new for the blog, but the FB post came out so well that I think we will go with it:

This was a long time of silence :( As you know I'm always struggling with finding topics that I think are interesting. The last six months were interesting ones. They were full of surprises, tough decisions, and some easy ones but in the last 19 years, the project is still pretty much a constant in my life. I'm also one of the lucky ones whose family supports me in what I do even if sometimes I do not understand my motivation behind this project. I'm also happy that I do not need to work on this project alone and some people still follow it even if sometimes I'm lazy with posting new stuff.

The project like always moving forward but at the same time not moving as fast as I would want it to move. Still, there is some stuff that we managed to do. Created SDF text built into the engine that will give us nicer UI, decal support, text in the scene support, improvement for lighting in the level, and improvements in the animation system (this one came with some funny screenshots, guess which ones :D), tools improvements, and a lot more things that I not necessarily remember.

 

There is sadly one common theme in all of this work. There is some "deposit" that we need to put before we would be able to work on some new stuff. Currently, we are trying to use some resources from other people NatureManufacture, and Rokoko to make them usable in our technology. To achieve this we need to make importers, add shaders, and make some changes and fixes in our pipeline. This will save us time later but for now, pay the price in time and changes in technology (which is not necessarily bad).

So we put the visual part of the work on the game for now on hold and focused on the way Twinsen will behave in the game and the tooling that will allow us to make it the best we can. We also still following our quest to bring the new Twinsen model to the game in all its glory.

As you can see there is a lot of stuff happening and even more will be coming soon. We just need some more time.

Doubts

We always forget how time flies by. Here we are in the second month of 2025 and there is no update regards Tribute. For this worrying that we gave up, we can guarantee that we did not. There is still a lot of progress in the project even if doubts are sneaking into our minds.

We mostly dig through code and try to make something usable from what we have but it is not easy. Balancing life and work on this personal project is challenging at times. This is not only because of lack of time but also because of motivation.

These days more and more we catch ourselves being lost in what we do, and that is why we started writing down the final version of the story with dialog and all the events. This is to gain more focus on what we do. The whole thing starts with:

Every story has a beginning and the good ones hardly ever start in the prison. That is why ours starts at home with the warm sound of cracking wood in the fireplace. In the background, a TV set plays on some news channel reporting on a lively speech given by the Fun Frock. He speaks about people who call themselves "the rebels" and are a threat to the peace on the planet. (...)

 L.B.A. : Tribute - story

While writing down the stuff we try to catch thoughts that sneak around our heads. This is not always easy as they sometimes hard well. There are days when things look like TV series about making games and there are these other days when nothing goes right. 

Still, we preserve and try to do what we can. We switch to different tasks, trying to approach things from different angles but this is not always helpful. We are just humans and humans are flawed. This is also what is so impressive about us. We are flawed but at the same time, we can reforge these flaws into our strengths and create impressive creations.

We want to believe that this will be the case with Tribute. What we learn by resolving our current problems will become the foundation that will make the final product better. In this place, we want to congratulate the team of the official remake of L.B.A. for succeeding in shipping the game. This is not an easy task.

And this is all for now, We are getting back to working on the project as the game will not make itself. 

  

Free-talk

I feel like I should write about something to show that we still work on the project but there is not really a lot to write about this time. In such a moment I always feel lost with the direction of the post, so let's not have a direction and drift across different topics. Project related and not. Give me info on how you like this kind of content.

Getting older for some is scary. I discovered that over time I'm more and more satisfied with what I have and what I achieved. I feel like I'm getting wiser, partially because I realize how stupid some of my decisions are. This is somehow normal, we are all humans (I do not include bots parsing this text) and because of that, there is more than just logic behind our decisions.

This applies to everyday decisions and work-related ones. Some mistakes are easy to solve. Have a chat, apologize, repair something. Others are just impossible to resolve or have long-term consequences that we do not want to fix.

My decision to start Tribute on custom technology is one of them. I somehow cannot give up on this idea as it influenced my personal and professional life. This is a big thing for me to make a reality but times fly by and there are these frustrated friends who I meet only because I working on Tribute :

This whole journey is awesome and at the same time a terrifying one because you alway think what would happen if you decide to quit? What this all years of work would mean? In the end you just push it aside and do stuff.

Of course I talk a lot about how we do this stuff, and you need to believe that we do them. For example, the last few weeks have brought so many good things that only people working with technology would really appreciate. But I'm one of them and I want to do this cool stuff but at the same time I want to make the game but I'm not always in the mood for it.

Thinking about the reasons, there is a lot of them. There is my day job which occupies 8 hours of my life and pay for it. There is time spent with family that is needed to preserve sanity, but there are also other everyday tasks. This way before we notice I am tired or do not have enough energy or time to really dig into the world of the Twinsen. When this happens I prefer to work on more technical aspects of the game as they just require less involvement. There is a problem, and you trying to solve it.

There are also these moments when I am finally able to enter THE ZONE, and it is an awesome experience. It's just you and the world of Twinsen. The only limitations are my skills and imagination. This does not happen a lot but when it is it is a time when the locations you seen are born, where untold lore is created and everything takes shape. But as I started this is just a moment and before anyone notices things bring me back to reality and it is time to once again pick some more technical aspects that require less involvement but move the project forward.

And I believe that there are things to look forward to.