T&T - Tribute and Technology

While writing posts we always want to share everything that we do. We talk about art, technology, and design. We never thought about it as a problem. Things changed recently when were writing yet another post and it hit us that there may be different ways of doing it. That is why we want to experiment with a more focused approach, where posts are focused on only a single aspect of our work. We don't know if this will work out but we are looking forward to your feedback what do you think about it :)

I would like to think about White Rabbit Engine as a project of love. When I started it 18 years ago I was young, passionate, and full of dreams. I wanted to create something awesome and this was a way for me to make these things come true. If I saw where we got with it I would be blown away by the things we achieved. I would be also terrified by how long it took to get here. 

But here we are 18 years later and I would describe my feeling more like one you can find in an old married couple. While working on the projects there were ups and downs. Successes and failures. The initial passion disappeared, and some dreams failed. This may sound grumpy but this is how things are in real life. 

But don't worry, what was lost was replaced by different things. I found pleasure in the creation process. I found joy in resolving hard problems that we encounter all the time. I had hundreds of discussions about the work that was done and what I wanted to do. I realize that even if those initial feelings are not there the project is still a project of love. Maybe even more than in the past as this love is mature.

So far we talked so much about the engine and we know that some of you may not really care about it and just waiting for the Little Big Adventure: Tribute to be done. We are painfully aware that the process of creating this game is slow. We are also aware that if we switched to Unity or Unreal we could probably achieve the same results faster. But then let's think together. 

Why do people follow us? 

Initially, we worked on the game that people love. Wish that there was a modern version of the game was probably the reason why a lot of you started following our struggle. These days we all have something we wished for, an official remake from 2.21 that looks really promising: 

What holds people to projects?

With this official remake, some lose interest but there are still some that stay with us. They may do it because they wished for a different approach to the game? We are aware that some of you do not like the direction that the official remake took. We think this is perfectly fine to have such an opinion and Tribute maybe something closer to your vision as we plan to continue the direction that we chose some time ago. 

What really defines this project?

We would say that what defines this project is our approach to its development and the custom engine is one of the aspects that make it what it is. For us Tribute is part White Rabbit Engine project and White Rabbit Engine project is part of Tribute. That is why we are glad that 2.21 does not complain about us doing what we do, if they did it we would be in big trouble.  

Of course, as we have mentioned many times this is not a competition to what they do and want to support their work. We want to give you a taste of what could be if we approach the source material differently. This is only taste as this will cover everything to leaving Citadel Island. May not sound like a lot but it still should give you a feel of what we wanted the whole thing to be: An epic adventure. 

Now the only question is did we get stuff right in what we wrote? 

Tribute and its small disclaimer.

There is this small post introducing a new logo:

Just recently we noticed a comment written a long time ago:

Shame on us for not noticing it earlier and addressing it. We will try to fix it.

For a long time, we were using the name L.B.A. Remake. This made sense as there were no signs of an official project. When this changed, we wanted to be clear to people that what we do is just a fan project and they should not expect it to be a whole remake. 

This disclaimer is also a play on the lyrics from the song Tenacious D: Tribute. Which in our heads makes sense in the context of our work. LBA is LBA and we will never be able to reproduce something like it. We should not even try and just find our own way of telling its story. 

That is why we added this small disclaimer. It may not be needed but we just like it that way :D 

Dream space

I don't know why but I thought that less time passed since the last post. Turned out that it had been almost two weeks. This is crazy how fast time flies by when you are busy and we were busy. 

L.B.A. Tribute is our reimagination of the game we all love. When I started the last iteration of the Tribute, I thought about the beginning of the game and how it feels like something is missing. To fix it I added some story which covers why we ended up in prison. This felt right, but something was still missing there.

For a longer time, I thought about the tutorial level. A place where new players could explore mechanics and thanks to that feel less lost in the world of Twinsun. I tried a few things but none of them felt right. This is how sometimes the creative process works. You try very hard and things do not work out how we want. 

Sometimes seeing what is the most oblivious is the hardest. The dream world was something like that. Talking about dreams and visions is all over the place. The initial video shows the end of the world, with dialogs mentioning it multiple times. Even the reason why we ended up in the prison. This just makes sense and we went with it. 

Dream space came to life as a place where we learn controls and how to interact with the environment. Then we decided to incorporate the content of the initial texts panel into it. This would make it more sense, story about the planet and four races could be incorporated there in visual ways. A great idea that still missed something. 

This thought that this is not what it should be has always bothered me. What this dream space really should be? Who built it?  Why everything is ruined?  Why we are brought there? I may not have all the answers but I believe that this dream space will be a place where the past, the present, and the future come together. A place that will answer a lot of questions but at the same time create new ones. 

What you see is another small spoiler for the dream space. I will still leave it only as a spoiler as the whole idea behind it still evolves. What do you imagine this place like? 

Back in the game.

Last week we discussed how things not going the way we want. This time we won't be so far from that theme. As a reminder, plans were to do Animation. A week later this is still a plan 😁But hey, I was not really in the mood for it. That is why we tackled something different problem: running the game, and oh boy this did not go well. 

 

Turned out that not testing the game for so long time resulted in multiple points of failure. Some of these failures resulted in data loss. Thank goodness we do not really need to recover it as some stuff will be just redone with new workflows. This will be a good occasion to see how far we got with content creation tools and help uncover hiding inside issues.

Let's stay positive as this week had a lot of positive moments. One of them was when we finally got to see that scene: 

Just a broken main menu, but so much happiness. The game was finally kind of running. Took just a few more moments to make it running enough😁

  

It still had issues, it uses old animations. The thing is that at this point in time, we are ok with that. Here we would want to say that we finally started to work on animations. 

But this is not necessarily the case. We still did not feel like doing that and spent some time playing around with ideas for the round room seen above. To tell the truth, results make us excited about things that will come.

  

If you are curious why this picture is so low-resolution, it is on purpose. We will have a whole post just about this location and how things came to be the way they are. I think this will be a nice topic that will serve as a break from these more technical topics. 

This will be a nice place to take a stop with this post. Nice things coming our way. If you are still not doing it we really recommend following the official remake in their attempts to recreate the game we all love https://www.littlebigadventure.com/. What we do is not a remake, it is just a tribute to the game we played as kids.