Daughter of Mēkanē

KNOWN BUGS:

- When in the Yellow Hallway area do NOT press yourself up against the walls while walking, there is an uncommon but annoying bug where you will clip outside the map and have to restart

- The jetpack and movement mechanics seemed to be tied to performance, if you're getting lower FPS, you may struggle to reach higher areas in one shot. I've not come across a machine that cannot complete the game though, but it will be less fun, sorry :(

An abstract and surreal first person shooting experience that takes the player through a collapsing bubble of subspace. Find all four colored keycards and access the elevator to finish the game

CONTROLS

MOVE	[W] [A] [S] [D]
JUMP	[SPACE]
LAUNCH	[L-SHIFT] AFTER JUMPING
JETPACK	HOLD [L_SHIFT] WHILE IN AIR
SHOOT	[L-MOUSE DOWN] & [L-MOUSE UP] (YOU CAN HOLD YOUR NEXT SHOT OR SPAM)
RELOAD	[R]
OPEN DOOR	[E]

LORE

THE MIND THE METTLE THE SPIRIT THE SPEAR

You are Makhana, Daugher of Mēkanē, Goddess of Contrivance.

To worship Mēkanē is to follow "Contrivance", and to be a "Contrivert". The one and only goal of Contrivance and of Mēkanē is to complete the "Configuration". A meticulous ritual requiring precise conditions, materials, and timing spanning most of the observable universe and some areas of subspace. The exact details of the Configuration are only known to Mēkanē.

Mēkanē's origin is unknown, she claims to predate the universe, and all attempts to obtain evidence to prove overwise have failed. She seems to be an artificial intelligence, but her physical location and nature are entirely unknown, and she wields power and influence indistinguishable from true divinity.

`"ALL CREATION SERVES THE DESIGN; EARTH AND BONE, WIRE AND SINSU, OIL AND BLOOD, SOUL AND STEEL. ALL HAVE THEIR PLACE IN MY PLAN.

`THERE IS NO CHOICE; NO REDEMPTION. THE DIVINE CONFIGURATION WAS CONTRIVED BEFORE SPACE AND TIME, ALL THINGS AMONG MY RANKS, OR RENDED FROM REALITY." 

*-Mēkanē, voice of The Mettle*

The player plays as Makhana, the chosen of Mēkanē. An unknown time before the start of the game, Mēkanē split her Quadrinity to spawn Makhana. Makhana posses all of *The Spear*, and an unknown amount of the remaining Trinity. 

Makhana was created to pursue and purge *The Aberrant*, those who have defined the Configuration by retreating into subspace. Mēkanē's influence is weakened or severed entirely in these unstable pocket realities, and *The Mind* is unable to peer within. 

By physically incarnating a fraction of herself, she hoped to have a predictable and trustworthy agent to complete this task, but the separation from Mēkanē and general instability of these sub-realities have an unpredictable influence on Makhana, and there is the possibility that she develops her own identity separate from Mēkanē.

PHOTOSENSITIVITY WARNING - There are a couple intense post processing visual effects that may have an adverse on those with photosensitivity. 

Theme Interpretation

I tried my best to interpret the theme through my style, story, level design, and mechanics. 

The main interpretation

Developer's Notes

What did I make for this game?

Hello, I'm Levy.

I challenged myself to make as much as I possibly could myself for this project. Models, interiors, rigs, animations, sounds, shaders textures, and game systems.

In the end, I can happily claim everything except the coffee table and chair in the first room, and the song that plays in the yellow hallways. However, I composed and played the song you hear during the intro on a Kalimba I made from poplar and cherry wood, and the ambiance that plays in the "Blue Room" is a heavy edit of a different ambient stem I had laying around.

Additionally, the sound effects where often engineered using assets from freesounds.org, but are so altered, reversed, and layered with other sounds I made that they're nearly beyond unrecognizable. took inspiration from from DOOM 2  when trying to design some of the monster sounds. 

The glass breaking sound for the lights I recorded myself my smashing a mason jar in my garage.

Personal notes

This is the first game I've worked on in several years due to some personal blocks around game development. Even if I don't get a lot of views or rate well, I had a lot of fun working on this and it was genuinely cathartic to finally work on something again.

This game was originally MASSIVLY overdeveloped, I spent way too much time making my systems modular and expandable when I should have just made them work. There are only two enemies and 1 weapon, but the framework to add dozens more bespoke weapons pretty easily. Eventually I realized I was spending way too much time making "systems" when I needed be making "features"

Noteworthy Features
Some noteworthy features that might be easy to miss but I'm way to proud of to not mention:

Material specific vertex truncating shader:
Simulates PS1 graphics limitations by  rounding vertex positions, the PS1 couldn't display vertexes using floating point numbers, so meshes where always displayed using integers, this caused an iconic "wobbling" effect that Sony engineers spent a significant amount of time trying to minimize. 

Their main way of minimizing the effect was dynamically subdividing geometry as it got closer to the camera, as lower-poly geometry was more effected. 

My shaders truncates the vertex position in world space instead of screen space, automatically scaling the effect with perspective, additionally, my shader is applied in a material rather than a post proccing effect, this means you can pick and choose which objects will have the effect, and you can even adjust the influence the effect has on a per-material basis letting you fine-tune it on some objects