(I'm not making a video to go alongside this one, my apologies)

Well, this is awkward. During my first game project of mine, XXXTentacion dies, and during my second game project, Juice Wrld dies. Just in advance, for anyone reading this, if Ski Mask the Slump God dies during my third game project, I'm so, so sorry. Nah, for real though, rest in peace Juice Wrld, I only really listened to your more popular songs, your Tim Westwood freestyles whenever they very first came out, and your collaborations with other people (i.e. "Nuketown"), but wow, from what I've seen, you seemed like a really, really freaking wholesome guy. I fully intend on listening to a playlist with all of your music with it sometime in the near future, RIP, lil' dude.

Anyways, if you're reading this, I either chose to go more public with this project, or you're just somebody who has been sneaking and peeking around, seeing what's up, but regardless, you may have noticed that there is not a whole lot of attention surrounding this project. Initially, I planned on making posts and whatnot about it on Reddit, Twitter, whatever else, and it wasn't until very, very shortly after I wrote that first blog post that I decided that I wouldn't do it, and not gonna lie, I am extremely glad that I chose not to do that.

I initially did it just out of my own personal curiosity to see how many people would see it had I not made it more public, and as per the 64 views and only 3 expands that the first blog post got with 0 non-me likes, and the game page itself only having 7 views (I don't know how that works) and 0 non-me followers, the answer was very obviously not that many. I don't blame anybody though, Gamejolt isn't exactly a bustling social media platform that you'd use to get attention to your game out there, so that didn't surprise me too much, although the melodramatic side of me was a little bit disappointed to realize that, as of right now, people only really care about me for PT for PC, sob sob.

However, I know that I could change that very easily by, again, just making more posts. Heck, I didn't even have to make any posts on Twitter or Reddit or whatever else, all I would probably have to do is make another post on the PT for PC page saying that I came out with a new game and boom, I'd see a lot more popularity, but still, I've yet to do literally any of that, so what gives? Well, I think after experiencing the huge amount of publicity from PT for PC, I think I kinda figured that, after seeing that not many people saw it, I'd kinda like the change of pace. My initial goal for Elevator: Unity coming out was on my 19th birthday, 12/26/2019. However, since Elevator: Unity didn't gain basically any popularity, which means that basically nobody read that first blog post (and I'm sure that, with only 3 expands, the odds of at least 1 of those people reading that entire freakin' post are basically zero), which means that nobody knows that I intended for this to come out 12/26/2019, then in the wise words of Uncle Kracker, "as long as no-one knows, then nobody can care."

So, what, am I just using the lack of popularity as an excuse of being lazy and not releasing it when I thought I would? Well, I was on the last stage of asset development, which was animating. As of the last time of me touching the project (12/13/2019), I felt like I didn't know enough about animating to be able to make decent-looking animations. However, that still gave me 13 days to spare in order to learn about animating, and then to actually animate, so I was just going to push through and all of that, but I thought back through the entire time of me making this game, and I began thinking of my 60 hour work weeks and all of that and I realized that I am stupidly burnt out right now. Like, as of right now, I don't have a desire to finish this project, even though I'm so close, because, honestly, why should I? I've thought about this a lot (probably a lot more than I should have been thinking about it), but as of 12/13/2019 (and again, I haven't touched the project in a bit), I've spent 570 hours on this project since 8/7/2019. Maybe, instead of spending 570 hours on this, maybe it would've been better if I spent 570 hours watching course videos? With that much time, I could have watched every single Pluralsight course I have saved almost 5 times over, and with that much time, I could have watched every single Pluralsight and Udemy course I have like 2 times over. Just think, after 570 hours of just straight-up watching courses, I could be an actual beast, right? Well, in the real-world, boredom plays a huge factor, and I found myself getting bored after a whole lot longer of doing hands-on stuff instead of just watching, but regardless, I'd be a freakin' monster, right? And to be honest, I don't know. I don't know if it would've been better for me to spend more time watching courses than doing this project, maybe it would've, maybe it wouldn't've (I hope y'all like that one).

But, regardless, I still feel kinda embarrassed about the state of the game as it is right now. I mean, yeah, it's basically fully gameplay-accurate as it stands, but I still just don't really like the texture assets and whatnot too much. And also, I feel kinda stupid for this one, but I think I messed up planning for polygon-counts? I made a lot of my stuff intentionally low-poly because I didn't want to run into any performance troubles, so if I just low-poly everything, then performance should be fine. As it turns out though, all modern GPUs pretty much have 0 trouble with polygon counts, it's basically all related to shader complexity that hurts performance. Since I've been using PBR stuff basically everywhere, my performance should've been totally fine, and I stupidly-underestimated polygon constraints of modern GPUs lol, Infamous: Second Son pushes 11 million polygons per frame while Elevator: Unity only pushes about 40 thousand, which is about the same as it did originally when it was on Garry's Mod. Soooooo yyeeeaaaahhhh, I thought that was kinda funny lol.

So, what do I do for my assets (even for the models which are obviously unnecessarily low-poly)? Do I just remake them all? What I'm currently looking at doing is, I'm going to take a bit of time off to just watch courses and crap, get myself to that beast-mode state that I was thinking of, and then start that other project. By the time I'm done modeling and all of that, I think I will have built up enough of a portfolio of assets that I can literally just replace all of the ones in Elevator: Unity with them. And with me not putting any publicity into this game, guess what? Everybody will be none the wiser because pretty much nobody knew about this game before, so by the time I basically remake the whole game (again lol), me not hyping anything up will actually be great to the benefit of the players (i.e. you all). So fellas, thank me later for choosing not to bring a lot of publicity to this project earlier, and I'll be thanking myself right now for it (quote me on that, that sentence was beautiful).

Now, for the people who previously did know about this project that were interested in playing it... fortunately, because of me putting up the Google Drive with everything in it, feel free to poke and prod as much as your heart desires at v0.8.5 (as it stands right now at least) or anything before or whatever, and as time goes on, I'll update all of the assets in there to their better ones as the months go on. If you want to play it early, go to the scene called "Elevator," click the "Elevator" asset in there and in the Inspector on the right, change the "Minimum Floor" to 2 and the "Maximum Floor" to 28, build it, and boom, the whole game should be playable with VR and all as of right now, although lacking some sounds, and most of the NPCs being giant capsules for the time being.

I'm gonna talk about some of the more technical aspects of the game here. So, in the last post, I talked about having an 'epiphany on texture making in Blender' or something like that, but I didn't go into what that was. Basically, it was the importance of the "Mix Shader" in Blender. Before Blender 2.81 came out and the performance on the Bump node were fine, I just used Eevee to do all of my texture making, which meant that I couldn't use the Geometry node for the Pointiness value, because I figured I could just do everything in Eevee faster, which, until 2.81, I could. However, with 2.81, performance on the Bump node dropped so freaking much (https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.81/Eevee "Bump mapping was changed to give more accurate results closer to Cycles. In particular it makes bump mapping with procedural textures work much better than before, at the cost of some performance." In my opinion, 'at the cost of some performance' was a bit of an understatement lol), that now, it's faster for me to use Cycles for procedural texture-making, and with that, I can also use the Geometry node to its full extent. However, the other part of that epiphany was a few theoretical examples I gave to myself. So, if I had something metallic, and I wanted a rust coating over it, what I did previously was I made the rust into its own NodeGroup, and I would just do tedious MixRGB stuff to combine the metal and the rust and get the metallic values right (because rust is actually not a metal because rust cannot conduct electricity, interestingly enough). It was very annoying and very tedious, and that was the way that I used to do it. However, I gave myself some other examples, like say if I had a metal, and I wanted some dirt on it. What would I do there? Where there's any speck of dirt, do I set the Metallic value to 0, or what if there's a thin layer of dirt, do I use a point half-way, or what? It was all very confusing to me until it hit me: use the Mix Shader, and that crap literally will do all of that for you, and in addition, it's all totally physically accurate! So, what I would do now, after having reached that epiphany, is that I would make a NodeGroup for the dirt, and the NodeGroup for the metal (even including the Principled BSDF or whatever in there). Then, I would take those two NodeGroups and connect them to a mix shader and literally the only thing I have to worry about now is what to make the factor and boom, it's done. I bake that out onto a texture and there's my fully physically accurate PBR metal with some dirt on top of it or whatever else, and that same theory applies to the rust too. Soooooo much simpler than what I was doing, it's more accurate, and it's so much faster as well. I feel like an absolute idiot for not thinking of it earlier but oh well. Another example I thought of is pencil-writing on a paper. With the mix shader, now, all I have to do is make a Paper shader, and make a Graphite shader, and use the Mix Shader node (with me putting whatever into the factor) and again, BAM, perfectly physically accurate PBR shader where the graphite actually has a shine to it that the paper doesn't because the graphite is less rough than the paper itself. So yeah, I feel absolutely stupid for not thinking of using the Mix Shader earlier but oh well I'm remaking basically all of the assets so get off my case about it please and thank you <3. Also, seeing Nodevember made me realize that I have literally only scratched the surface of Blender nodes and to be honest, I don't know if I want to dig any deeper, Nodevember was freaking insane beyond insane, that crap absolutely boggled my mind, I actually almost shed a tear watching Simon Thommes' video on Nodevember because I realized that, after all the work I put into everything related to the shader editor, I didn't know jack, like, at all. Fortunately, because of PBR, I don't think I'll ever have to worry about that type of stuff in any sort of game development career, those shaders are waaaaaaaaay too complicated to be done in real-time... I think... I hope. Look, I think I'll just stick to modeling, that crap was way too much for me lol

I also intend on making this project almost like my little testing ground for things now. With this other project of mine that I'm going to take a bit of time off before starting, whenever I get to something that I'm not entirely sure how to do or I just want something to test it out on, this gives me the freedom to test it out on this project instead. So, for instance, say I got this new texturing workflow and I want to try it out on something. Instead of risking me screwing up a ton of assets on the other project, I can try it on Elevator: Unity instead, and if I like it, then yay, I can keep doing it, but if I don't like it, then I didn't end up harming anything too badly. Or, something like music or sounds, if I ever want to experiment with making my own music or sounds for a project, I can use them in here and replace the totally-asking-for-a-DMCA songs that are currently in this game lol. Idk, I'm rambling right now, I'm sorry, but I think you all get my point.

But yeah, me not putting much publicity into this has been hugely relieving to me. Like, in this blog post, I feel like I can talk about whatever the heck I want to, and whenever I'm ready to let others know about it, I can just make a post here and there on Twitter and Reddit and whatever else, and I can let it be known to more vast of an audience. And now, I don't have to worry about that time constraint on myself anymore and I feel comfortable with just giving myself a break because, again, as long as no-one knows, then nobody can care. And man-oh-man, I can't describe how great it feels to me right now, it's amazing. And if anybody asks me what I've been working on or if I've been slacking the past few months, I can just drop the link to Elevator: Unity because it's still a tangible product, I've released the project files and all of that, so yeah, very nice imo.

I don't have much else to talk about, but I also wanted to say that I think I was overly critical of a few things about Unity and whatever else in the last post. I jocked on Unity for becoming way too overly-modular for its own good, and right now, yeah, I think that's the case, it's having a freaking ton of growing pains as it's going through its modular-revolution right now, and in the end, I'm sure it'll be very nice, but right now, holy crap it's actually really bad. For example, whenever adding VR support, I downloaded the new Input System that Unity has, and I downloaded their example project, I open it to see how everything works, and wouldn't you know it, all I saw was pink because they haven't updated to their new render pipeline yet despite having come out after the render pipeline. So yeah, that's annoying as crap, Unity breaking compatibility with a HUGE amount of things, including their very own Standard Assets and whatnot, in this revolution of theirs, but in the end, I'm sure it'll be very gucci. But right now it sucks really, really bad, I can't stress that crap enough lol, it's awful as it stands right now, Unity is having like a civil war with itself it feels like with how compatibility is with their own assets, it's really bad rn, but whatever.

Okay, I think I've ranted about everything enough, version 0.8.5 is up right now, but if you're reading this near the time it was released, don't expect to see an update to the version in a long while, but when you do see that update, it should be substantial. I'll probably add tons of unique floors and whatnot again, just for the sake of trying stuff out, and also alleviating that one issue I had with the last post where Elevator: Unity lacks any reason for being played over the original. Hopefully, I'll be able to change that which should be cool. But for right now, I've pretty much made Elevator: Unity my testing grounds for everything, and hopefully, in the end, that'll be a very good thing, and with me choosing to not go public with this, for the very, very vast majority of people, they won't even be aware of this little revolution that this project is going through, and at the end of the day, that should mean a much better end result. Sorry if this post seems rushed, it kinda was (at least compared to the first one), my apologies, but thanks for reading :)

(EDIT 12/19/2019): Oh, whoops, there was some other things that I wanted to talk about that I kinda forgot to talk about.

I think I also criticized Blender for that bump change in Eevee, and not gonna lie, it does look very good. I think what Blender used to do prior to 2.81 is what Unity has for their Normal-From-Height node thing in their current node editor. I believe prior to 2.81, Blender's bump node only worked in half-resolution in order to help performance, but because of that, the bump looked very harsh and pixelated. For Unity's node editor with HDRP, that Normal-From-Height node or whatever it's called also works in half-resolution, so right now, Unity's node looks the same as what Blender's bump node used to look like. Right now, Blender's bump node, now working at full resolution, does look very, very good, although, again, it kills performance really badly. I suppose that's the same reason why Unity's equivalent to the bump-node also currently works in half-resolution, because of the performance issue, but I wish that Blender maybe gave an option to go back down to half resolution for texture-making and previewing purposes? Maybe just in Material Preview work in half resolution, but on the actual Rendered mode in Eevee, work in full resolution? I'm not sure, but yeah, just throwing my two cents out there but I'm not a programmer for Blender, maybe that's a whole lot harder than it sounds, I don't know.

Another thing is that, on the last post, I talk about my intent on making everything on my next project CC0. I think CC0 specifically wasn't the right term, because looking on Sketchfab, most things are actually "Creative Commons Attribute" which means you can use them to your heart's content so long as you give them credit. And I intended on giving everybody credit. CC0 I think is basically public domain and you don't have to give anyone credit if you don't want to (correct me if I'm wrong), but I have no qualms with giving credit to people, so, uhh, I don't really know what to call it then, maybe I'll just say that I'm making everything "open source-y" and then I won't have to worry about weird licensing things? I don't know, I never really thought about it, but yeah, CC0 wasn't the right term to describe what I intended on making it. Licensing and copyright terms are confusing so, again, just to generalize everything, I'll just make everything "open source-y" with some things being CC0/Public Domain, some things being CC Attribute, some things being my own, idk lol, y'all get what I'm saying though, the end goal of everything being able to be used should still stand but wording it just very iffy I guess.

Given that I chose to keep this project on the down-low, that obviously means that my chances of anybody donating to me drops a freakin' huge amount, right? And that's right, despite that little rant that I gave in the last blog post, yeah, the chances of me getting anything are slim-to-none as it stands right now. There really isn't anything else I should need to say about that, I just accept that I won't really be making any money off of this any time in the foreseeable future, and that's okay. My financial situation right now isn't great by any means (I have actually no source of income whatsoever apart from doing occasional work for people, something that I can very, very easily change just by, oh I don't know, getting a job), but I'm content, and fortunately I have family that I can live with that aren't asking me for any sort of rent or anything like that so I can devote my time to stuff like this. I'd imagine I could make a few dollars by, again, publicizing this, but I recently watched a video by BlackySpeakz talking about how easy it is for one to sell their soul, in relation to Lil Uzi Vert. In that video, he says that, in order to sell your soul, all you need to do is put aside any of your morals in exchange for something. So, as an example (not one that he gave), probably telemarketers. They probably feel that it's not right to lie and scam people in exchange for money, but hey, it's what keeps the lights on or whatever, so telemarketers are good examples of people who have 'sold their soul.' I feel like making my game more mainstream, despite the position that it's in right now where I'm not really satisfied with it in exchange for popularity or whatever would be a solid way of selling my soul or something along those lines. Maybe I'm putting way too much thought into all of this, but I feel like I'd be almost in the same boat as those crowdfunding campaigns that put a lot of hype into their game only to release a seriously half-baked product or at least something that the developers clearly aren't happy with (or even the scam-artists who just take the money and run with no game in the end). Alright, now I think I'm done talking about stuff. Thanks for reading, again :)