Alright, let me tell you about this thing I was tinkering with, which I ended up calling ‘hell below stars above’. Sounds pretty dramatic, I know, but it kinda fit by the time I was done with it, or rather, when it was done with me.
The Big Idea
So, the initial spark, the whole “stars above” part, was this vision of a game. You’d be in these really dark, oppressive, almost nightmarish caverns – that’s the “hell below” bit. But then, you could look up, or find these rare openings, and see this absolutely stunning, vast, and hopeful starscape. The contrast was key. I really wanted to nail that feeling of despair and hope, all in one screen.
I imagined players really feeling that. The squeeze of the tight, dangerous tunnels, and then the release, the sheer awe of the cosmos. I even had some fancy ideas about how the starlight could affect the dungeons, maybe certain constellations empowering you, or changing the layout. Ambitious, right?
Then Reality Hit
And then I actually started building it. That’s when the “hell” part really took over. I chose a game engine I thought I knew pretty well. Famous last words. Everything that looked so shiny in the tutorials, so easy on paper, turned into a proper fight.
Those “stars above”? Getting a dynamic skybox that looked halfway decent and didn’t tank my frame rate to slideshow levels was week one’s nightmare. Then, trying to make that pretty sky interact with the “hell below” – the lighting, the atmosphere? Forget about it. One system would break the other. It was like they were actively fighting each other on my screen.
I spent, and I kid you not, probably three solid days just trying to get a single goddamn beam of “star” light to shine into a cave entrance correctly. It either looked like a laser beam from a cheap sci-fi flick or just… wasn’t there. I was messing with light probes, baking settings, render pipelines – you name it. Most of the time, it felt like I was just randomly flipping switches hoping for a miracle.
And the procedural generation for the “hell below”? I wanted endless, twisting, unique caverns. What I got was an endless stream of bugs. Players falling through floors, getting stuck in walls, spawning into solid rock. Debugging that stuff is its own special kind of misery. You fix one thing, two more pop up. It’s like whack-a-mole with code.
It’s Always Something, Isn’t It?
It really made me think, you know? It’s like a lot of these tools and platforms we use. They show you the glossy brochure, the “stars above” – all the amazing things you could do. But then you get into the nitty-gritty, the “hell below,” and you find the documentation is missing crucial bits, or the cool feature you want is marked ‘experimental’ and breaks everything else, or the community support is just a bunch of other confused people.
You end up stitching things together. A bit from this asset, a workaround from an old forum post, a lot of crossed fingers. The grand vision starts to get very, very muddy when you’re deep in those trenches. It’s not just this project; I’ve seen it happen on bigger teams, with bigger budgets. Everyone’s chasing the stars, but we’re all slogging through the same kind of hell to get there, or not get there, as the case may be.
A Bit Personal, This One
Funny thing is, I started ‘hell below stars above’ right after I got canned from my old job. They called it “departmental restructuring,” which is just fancy talk for “your paycheck stops next week.” So, I had all this time, and this project was supposed to be my grand statement, my way of building something purely mine, something to feel good about. Maybe even something to show off if I ever needed to find another gig.
But mostly, it just felt like swapping one kind of frustrating grind for another. I’d be up late, staring at the screen, trying to figure out why my shadows were flickering like a haunted house, and my wife would pop her head in. “Still battling the demons of the underworld?” she’d ask. And I’d just grunt. Because, yeah, I was. And it wasn’t always the fun kind of battle.
It’s that feeling, right? When you pour yourself into something, hoping for the stars, and all you get is more hell. A bit like that job, come to think of it. Promised a lot, delivered a lot of headaches.
So, Where Did It Land?
So, what became of ‘hell below stars above’? Well, it’s on a backup drive somewhere. A collection of beautiful, serene skyboxes and a bunch of buggy, half-baked cavern systems. The “stars” are definitely there, looking pretty. And the “hell” is well and truly implemented, I can tell you that much.
I did learn a few things. Mostly about how easy it is to bite off more than you can chew. And that the real “hell” sometimes isn’t just the tricky code, but the pressure you put on yourself. Especially when other parts of your life are a bit rocky.
Maybe I’ll dust it off one day. Or maybe I’ll just extract those starry skies and make a nice, peaceful wallpaper generator. Less hell in that, for sure. Definitely less hell.