A strange level designed for Escape Simulator in the "Build a Room' contest.
Made by the completely deranged Matthew L. Hornbostel.
WALKTHROUGH HERE:
Realistically the odds of it winning anything even in Rookie category are essentially zero, but it was a worthwhile experience nonetheless making this escape room level. I learned a lot. Hopefully it'll be the start of something?
Even if that something's just making more levels that gradually accumulate better feedback and player response than this one has so far. I really liked ES's editor as I suck at coding but am sort of half decent with quickly modeling, texturing.
I mean, I am bad at that too but not quite as bad?
A lot of what appears in the level is custom, about 80% of it. 24mb of custom assets [including] 48 custom 3d models.
Could say it was done in 3 weeks but realistically this was done in two as about five days were wasted due to a strange editor glitch making all the loaded models transparent. I had to re-export them all trying various things until I devised a pipeline that worked, then re-exporting all the objects, attaching all logic to the new ones vs. the originals that were not displaying right. That five day distraction alone absorbed 30 hours. The rest of the level work upwards of 50.
Immense time sink but it's obvious my time has no value to the world anyway so might as well have a little fun with it. See: 60 cents an hour worked on mTurk back in the first year of that and I was fine with it. Made $3-5 a day then and donated it.
And even having done this the inefficiency is obvious: Lots of learning how to do things in editor and make the logic work at all, so knowing what I know now I could definitely do a level like this again in ten days, not three weeks.
The textures will raise questions. How I lit them, for one - the lighting is baked into the diffuse outside of ES. Not to obfuscate anything but because that's the only way I could get the lighting to look this realistic. The textures under that lighting bake all came from my own personal libraries, as seen on matthornb.itch.io, literally thousands of seamless texture maps built off of photos of real world surfaces I took myself over the past decade and then some.
Clearly this contest entry was a project that I expected would lead nowhere just like most everything I do.
(I'm kind of used to pouring dozens, hundreds, even thousands of hours into efforts that lose money and go nowhere.)
If I can find something that pays even a dollar or two per hour reliably - it doesn't need to be to me even - just to somewhere that matters and helps people [donated] that would be life-changing. It would make me feel like my life was worth something, sort of?
Maybe one of the best moments in my life recently was realizing that my participation in itch's Palestine Aid Bundle actually helped and that I was contributing to something that succeeded and helped refugees and assisted people who really needed help. That raised $500k+ for people whose lives were ruined in Gaza. I was so happy I actually was a part of a thing that mattered. That helped those who were suffering. I still do not understand people who are not moved by other peoples' suffering.
But maybe that's because I know what it's like to hurt so much emotionally that you start punching your fists against a wall til they bleed and then slam yourself through a glass window. It's not that I weant to hurt myself. It's that the physical trauma distracts from the emotional pain for a few minutes.
Right now am blacklisted by basically the entire US job-market system seemingly due to mental illness and actual honesty.
Nobody will, maybe nobody should, hire me as the truth is I am a messed up person with autism, clinical depression, and anxiety disorder issues on top of sexual function and health issues... so of course nobody in their right mind would hire a person who is up front about any of this and actively shoots themselves in the foot by offering objective upsides and risks of hiring them. Honesty is actually not a non answer in a job interview, it's why I have never been hired. It's a REAL flaw.
I also have another weird pathology: I want to donate money, a lot of money. I strongly believe I am inferior to other people and do not value myself much so that leads to a terrified bout of impostor syndrome and self-destructive patterns whenever I hit on a success of any kind. I know I don't deserve or need that success, so I donate like crazy. I figure it's the only path forward that makes any sense. If $200 to, say, the Against Malaria Foundation can save a human life, it's hard to think of a better way to allocate finances. I mean, what else would I do? Invest in a stock market that's about to hit the downward side of the bell curve, and crash in the direction of zero? Because I realize climate change and resource overshoot will have major economic downsides and likely mean the past growth trends are over for good.
Looking at this as a 38-yr old I will be surprised to live to anywhere near age 50. I doubt civilization makes it another seven years, much less ten or twelve. And the sad part is I'm genuinely fine with that. I kind of look forward to killing myself. I fantasize about it. Mostly I just... want to do some things that matter before I end my life, and help a few people who really need and quite frankly deserve help more than I do.
Incidentally: I have thought through the scenario where the stupid level I submitted wins in this contest in any capacity. I mean, I'll tend to self sabotage and do not expect to win, which is basically the entire point of this page, but then again I see this as a huge opportunity for impact. I want to give the proceeds in some capacity to an effective cause. I will ask Pine Studios to donate them if I win anything due to some unanticipated mistake. I don't want the money if I win, but I do want to know it went somewhere that will successfully help people.
Others have helped me over the years and my family even knowing my mental illness issues, still support me. They cover my basic living expenses pretty fully. So anything I earn basically I can give or use to pay them back a bit, lower the extent to which I'm a burden on them. It's important to me that I not be a net loss to the world, that my existence is of value to society and not just a drain. I really hope that works out though I strongly doubt it.
I do self mutilate and do have aggressive tendencies toward self hate but also... I know objectively that while I am not a stable person I do have valid skill as an artist. I have found people who will take the risk of hiring me on a freelance basis below minimumum wage and I'm grateful for that.
If you see this insanity and for some reason still wish to hire me, I'll agree to work at under half min. wage doing things like:
-traditional still art [painting, drawing scanned and sent digitally]
-3d models made efficiently
-texture processing from photos
-basic web design
-realtime 3d level development, environment art
-online advertising and promotion
-photographing, videography of events
-digital recreation of real world settings
-visual effects, compositing and video editing
... or basically all the same stuff I've already been doing unpaid.
As one of my old friends put it, I'm one of the most intrinsically motivated people he knows. I'll be creative by nature and sheer obsession regardless of pay rate. While others pour hundreds, thousands of hours watching videos and playing video games, I've spent thousands making each of those things. Even spending thousands of hours working for $1-2 per hour just so I can self finance those creative projects and pushing them past the finish line. Because I believe in them, whether or not anyone else does.