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text = Array[String](["1/47 Hiya there - I'm Victor and I'll be your host. Throughout this game I'll be reading a lightly edited version of a journal I've kept while working on my first formal game development project. People who know me personally know that Hiraeth wasn't my first endeavour, far from it, but that silly little game was the first time I ever felt confident enough in myself to publish my work to the world - what a mistake. Now for a quick disclaimer - I am aware many games bear the title \"Hiraeth\", however I am strictly referring to the one published by myself, CAWEZ Studios. I have no connection with Jade Horse's Hiraeth, the one by Tpetrichor, Ghostline Studios, or Games Academy. I was not aware of the existence of these when the project started, which is why I've rebranded my game to \"CAWEZ's Puzzlebox\" to avoid confusion.", "2/47 Before I begin, I'll answer some immediate questions you may be having: what you are currently playing is a small collection of levels I've crafted for Hiraeth, which I've assembled in a little less than two weeks to close this chapter of my life. All assets, with the exception of the ExoThin font, are 100% self-made without any AI-like tools, (since they didn't even exist when the project began). Progress will be saved automatically, but due to time constraints I wasn't able to implement a proper level loading system - when restarting the program, you'll be put in the tutorial room, but after interacting with the objective, the game will update its internal state to the last level you were on. You may freely skip over any levels you find too difficult. I've salvaged what I could, but some parts are simply not fun. However, if you are inclined to go the completionist route, I'll have you know that every puzzle is possible.", "3/47 I begin the read: If you're thinking of getting into game dev, well don't. It sucks, for the dev, the player, the poor souls of your friends you drag along, bound to voice act out of pity for you and volunteering as community managers. Some art was never meant to be published. Your expression belongs to yourself, and need not be shared to have intrinsic value.", "4/47 Today I've started a new project, I'm not quite sure what I'll call it yet. I've been looking into Unity, learning how stuff works. I managed to make a player controller who's gravity conforms to the last surface it touched - perhaps I could make some interesting puzzles with this. I still need to finish Emergence first, I don't want to abandon it like Alienaterra.", "5/47 I'm not quite sure what I'll make the game about - currently I'm building it as a portal clone with the gravity puzzle mechanic, and a placeholder narration. My friends keep complaining that my microphone quality is terrible - maybe the prize at the end of that game will be to hear me shut up?", "6/47 I've got a few levels nailed down, but the game has some performance issues. I'm used to programming in QB64, a DOS-era language. I still haven't figured out how the physics engine works, so I'm currently using a ported version of my own. Everything is so jittery, and the player can phase through walls in some angles. I hear that Unity's physics engine is pretty good, but I'm not seeing that yet. Maybe the wall phasing mechanic can be a puzzle type if I make it consistent instead of patching it out.", "7/47 I'm temporarily calling the game \"Another Spatial Dimension\". I was able to reuse some old code that allows automatic level wrapping. It's very interesting to look at in first-person 3D; I like how you can walk in a direction and never stop. Maybe this could be the secondary mechanic, now that I've figured out how to patch the jitter?", "8/47 I got my music friend to join the project. He saw me working on the cinematic intro and offered to make it for me since he's much better at Blender. I'm very glad to have him around; he helped me out with textures on AlienaTerra. Oh, and I've introduced a very interesting glitch in my level wrapping engine - I wanted to dynamically change the size of the looping area but used local coordinates instead of world coordinates, resulting in every object becoming some sort of fractal. I've noticed that only the centers of these formations behave as rigid bodies, and the outer projections only allow for forward interaction. I can imagine this being very cool and trippy. I'll integrate it as a feature in the next build.", "9/47 Right, well my friend is now helping me out with all the assets - this has considerably sped up development. I think I can make this into a big thing. For the story, I reckon I'll do an alien abduction in some sort of testing facility. I'm still discussing names, but we might go with HIRAETH. I made a tile-pushing mechanic that opens a ton of possibilities for levels. What I think I'll do is have the game divided into 4 concepts: regular, gravity, fractal, and something else I'll figure out later. Each section should have about 100 unique levels. I'm pretty excited.", "10/47 Right, so I've built 50 levels and showed off the game to some strangers; overall, they seem to think it's pretty cool. I'll create a Discord server. I'm probably going to publish under the name CAWEZ, since it's the closest word to COW that hasn't been trademarked yet. I'm nailing down the plot a bit more, but I'm having a lot of trouble writing for the narrator. It's really difficult to make a 400-level monologue since I want a silent protagonist. I'm running out of things to talk about. Maybe I'm stretching the game out a bit. But on the other hand, I've worked really hard on these levels and wouldn't want to just throw them away... Not sure what I'll do.", "11/47 Great, the server is up, and I've already got a few people coming by from my school. I think I'll release the first public build this weekend. Right now, I'm having trouble keeping everything organized with my friend. We're using Google Drive for version control, but it isn't really working. I think it's better if we just pass around files in direct message attachments like we did on Alienaterra; that way, I can keep everything ordered how I like. Right now, I've got about 200 levels done. The first 50 are regular first-person platformers; then we've got 50 tile puzzles, 50 platforming levels with the gravity gimmick, and another 50 as gravity puzzles. After that, there are about 50 unfinished fractal levels that the playtesters can preview.", "12/47 I've released the first build, and it isn't going the way I was hoping. The playtesters stop at like level 35 and don't even get to see the gravity and fractal stuff. I guess they just aren't my target audience. I'm asking them why they're stopping, but they just tell me they're going to continue later and then never do. Geez, if the game is bad, just tell me; that's the point of playtesting. I've set up a form to see if this was the case, but nobody is filling it out!! It's only like 20 short development questions; I don't see what the big deal is.", "13/47 I've talked to my friend, and we think the problem is the story. So we're going to spice it up. We added this character called Axel; he was abducted by the aliens as well and tries to help you escape, and you have to help him as well. We aren't quite sure how that'll work, though - the levels are already built, and I don't want to change them because they're great as-is. I think I'm going to add short sequence breaks every 10 levels or so where you'll do story-related stuff. It should keep the game engaging.", "14/47 Well that didn't seem to work. I got a game dev friend to try it out, and he actually filled out the form. He says the game feels boring, but I don't understand how that's possible since there are so many different levels to play! Maybe instead of having all of them bunched up, I should vary them. One parkour, one puzzle, one gravity, etc., etc. On the story side, it isn't better. It's mostly unengaging since you don't really interact with Axel. Maybe I'll do a thing where his family is held hostage by the aliens or something to add emotional connection -- that should do the trick.", "15/47 All right, nothing is working. Another one of my friends volunteered to write for the game. I personally don't really like her writing, but I'm all out of options, so we'll give it a go. She sees an Independence-Day-style intrigue, with the aliens attacking Earth and you saving the day from the inside of the ship. I don't really know how that'll mesh with the puzzles though: we'll see.", "16/47 Nothing is working. I really dislike her writing but don't have the heart to tell her upfront. I feel like I'm wasting her time. I guess that's what the playtesters were doing with me a month ago. I'll tell her to stop and see what I can do to save the project. Even my co-dev is losing interest. I gotta save this.", "17/47 Ok well, heated argument with my music/Blender friend. We agreed to let the writing friend go, but we just can't agree on anything. I conceded. The game is trash, I'm wrong. What started out as a quick Unity first-person test has gone way out of control. This needs a massive rewrite, story and code. I'll start tomorrow. Exams are starting soon, and there might be a lockdown because of the new virus. So much stuff is going on in my life right now. I just don't have the energy.", "18/47 I stripped most of the levels. There are now 100 in total. I got my game-dev friend to try it out. He played through the whole thing this time, and it looked like he was having fun for the first half. I know what I need to do. The plan: everything needs to be high quality; if it's bad, I don't fix it, I remove it. I have enough content already to just toss most of it away and still have a big enough project. I wish the playtesters had been honest with me. I understand that we were friends and they didn't want to hurt me, but in the long run, it did much more harm to my self-confidence. I feel like everything I made is bad.", "19/47 I'm back on good terms with my co-dev. I had a really weird dream last night, I think I know how the story is going to go. I'm thinking of doing something with meta-narrative time travel, where at the end of the game you are given information that recontextualizes what you've previously played. Each completion cycle is like 20 levels, and every time you go through the same puzzle but with a different mechanic you learn. The same level can be entered three times, but give different results if solved with the gravity or fractal mechanic, like in puzzle metroidvanias. I really need to nail down that third gimmick before I make the puzzles.", "20/47 Doing it this way is pretty encouraging, since I can release the game in chapters for each cycle. I'm also bringing back Axel for the story. I've just started getting into the Star Wars Legends novels and I'm loving it. I think I'll pivot the game towards more hard sci-fi genre. My idea for the intrigue is that the alien abductors are aware they exist in a simulation, i.e. a video game, and want to contact the player somehow. This idea is inspired by a thought experiment in the third book of Les Fourmis by Bernard Werber, but since I'm targeting an English audience it'll seem more original since it would surprise me if anyone read that as well.", "21/47 The overall plan for the story is pretty final. I'm using general anxiety around Nuclear War as a main theme: there are many alien factions that share the galaxy, and the two big ones are on the verge of conflict. Like during the Cold War, if there was confrontation they would immediately destroy the entire galaxy with their weapons of mass destruction. When the player character dies in a video game and reloads a save, the characters within that game never get to experience the universe in which the player was killed since they get reset - well, the idea here is that one of the factions captures the human who's the player character, and if the weapons of mass destruction are deployed by their enemy, they simply kill the player and force them to restart the level. In the alien's referential, the timeline in which the weapons were used never happens due to the reset, and they can therefore win any conflict by abusing the player's quicksave system.", "22/47 I'm not really sure how I'm going to communicate all that. It's complicated enough when said out loud, and I'm not the best writer. What I think I'll do is have two characters explain it to each other in sequence breaks. The game dev friend said he'd be interested in voice acting. We're now three in total, one for Axel, and two for the new characters. I might make it so all three know each other. Maybe Axel sold Sarah (which is the name of the in-universe player) to the aliens.", "23/47 I've got the plot nailed down. The aliens contacted Earth to be given Sarah. Axel, who was in charge of SETI, agreed and volunteered to go on-ship and translate for the aliens. His end goal is to smuggle some alien tech offboard the ship to help Earth. He makes Sarah exit the holding area sporadically to go collect these alien items throughout the puzzle chambers, which is where the player will find the radio logs between those two other characters. It's through them that the player will discover they were sold to the aliens by Axel, which will act as the 2nd act twist. Voilà.", "24/47 My co-dev seems pretty enthusiastic about this new story, although I'm not sure if he fully grasps it. I had to spend 2 hours in MSPaint on a call with him to explain it. The entire game's story will be built like a puzzle, just like the levels. To make the whole thing more cinematic, we're going to make it so the aliens destroy earth as a quicksave reload trigger. You'll get the generic video game text saying you lose, and then you'll reload to the start of the game with the new context needed to progress through the second batch of levels, and so on until the ending.", "25/47 I still haven't figured out how to end it though. I'm still missing a puzzle type and I have 0 clues how to conclude the story. Maybe I should just leave it as a strange, open-ended finale like some high-concept sci-fi films do. Not sure. My friend just finished the Earth explosion animation, and it is incredible. I can't wait to show this to the world!", "26/47 It's not going very well for me lately. Secondary school is ending soon. I'm having my exam period and I haven't studied at all because of the stupid game. Personal life has been pretty tough as well, with some family drama. My crush just started going out with this guy I hate. I can't swallow food without half-throwing up. I've had panic attacks every day for the past 4 days. I just hide in a corner and hope nobody hears me. This isn't working. I have to slow down. I'm going to split the game into 4 chapters, release what I have as the demo, and it'll take as much time as it'll need. It's already been two years and a half. Sometimes I wonder if I should just stop.", "27/47 But I know I won't get closure until I'm done - I have a story which I feel is worth telling, puzzles which are worth sharing. No, who am I kidding? When has this become about sharing? This game was never about others; it was about me. I like gimmicky puzzles. I like trippy video games. I like high-concept sci-fi. This whole time I've been making this game for myself and acting like it was for others. I don't want to publish this. I don't want to show it to the world. I want to put it in a little box and laugh at myself in 10 years. I don't want the world to laugh at me in 10 years. It's too late. My friend just finished the Itch.io page. Alea Iacta Est.", "28/47 It's out. The demo is done. And I never thought I'd be happy to say this, but nobody played it. I am at peace. I'm still going to finish it, but I don't want it to be grandiose or anything. I don't want to force myself to make something that I never intended to share.", "29/47 Well, I've been asked about doing a Steam release. My friend wants to. I said I wanted to. I do not. The fee has been paid. The page is under construction. And the game? In 3 years, it's less than a quarter finished. CEGEP is starting in a month. What am I doing? Steam stuff is under NDA, and I don't want to get sued, so I'm not going to speak more about it.", "30/47 I've stopped caring for a bit. Met a nice girl; not sure if anything is going to happen. I finally feel like somebody cares about what I think, more so than what I do. I can tell her about all these crazy ideas stuck in my head without needing to actually make them. She isn't into video games, so I don't speak much about Hiraeth. I tried to get her to play Superliminal, but she wasn't able to get into it. I didn't get her to play my own game because I was ashamed of what I had made. Hiraeth wasn't good, and I knew it. But my co-dev didn't know this - I'd always tell him everything is fine, and everything is almost done, and to build hype, and so on. But I wasn't actually working on anything.", "31/47 Completely blew it with the girl. Not socializing with neurotypical people for the first 17 years of your life sure has its consequences. At first, I blamed her; then myself; then her again. Today, I'm not even sure who's fault it is. I don't do depressions. I don't do panic attacks. I got back into the code; in less than two weeks, the game was now 50% finished. Then I had a burnout and flunked a course. But we don't talk about that - the official reason is that it's the teacher's fault if I failed, duh.", "32/47 Met another guy in CEGEP. Completely nuts, no social awareness, brutally honest. I had him play Hiraeth; he called it a glorified Roblox game. He was correct. I stopped working on it for a few months.", "33/47 I got a stable job at a pharmacy near my home for my second year of CEGEP. I changed my workflow and got massive productivity boosts. I was able to cram about 1 hour of development every day. I started to get sick of staring at my screen, so I continued development on pen and paper, telling myself I'd build the levels in the editor when I'd finally figure out what to do for that fourth section. I'm glad I didn't waste time building them, because in the following month I was completely radicalized by a guy who I can only describe as an Internet Person. Proud Arch user, best developer I'd ever met, he made me look like a complete joke.", "34/47 I looked up to him dearly, even though he gave me terrible imposter syndrome. But when he heard of Hiraeth, he told me that even if the game was pretty mid, I had one-upped him by having the confidence and passion to actually publish something I'd made. This gave me huge hope and motivation. I resumed development, but it wasn't without problems. I'd been running Windows 10 LTSC for a while on a school laptop I kept after Secondary, but after incorrectly installing the Xbox Live service to play a game that just came out, my system half-bricked itself - enough was enough, from that point on I was a full-on GNU/Linux user.", "35/47 That's when everything got much harder. Unity has terrible Linux support, and I had to re-code about half of the game to get everything working correctly. The editor would brick itself randomly and keep the mouse captured even though it was no longer in playmode, forcing a restart. After fixing most of the issues in time for the new year, I was ready to resume development. I got the game to maybe 66% completion before I had to take a break again. My goal thereafter was to ship something, anything, before the end of 2024. If you're hearing this now, I guess I somewhat succeeded, in a way I would have never imagined.", "36/47 I started distro-hopping a bit, fell in love with the open-source community and decided to make the game's code public under a mixed license since I didn't own some of the assets my friend made. It can still be found if you search the internet hard enough. In the meantime, my friend was still doing promotion for the game in the background on Instagram and Facebook, however I was not aware of this since I had deleted my account on both platforms for philosophical reasons.", "37/47 During all of this I was also working on a Minecraft mod: CAWEZ's Mantle to Stratus. It was mostly an afterthought for me, a mod that would add dimensions above and below the overworld, tailored for low-end systems. A lightweight version of Immersive Portals if you will. I made this mod for my personal SMP, but decided to share it online in case anyone else was interested. It was an overnight success. A small project I'd had worked on for less than three months was getting exponentially more attention than my 4-year passion project. I'd say that this broke me.", "38/47 People were joining my Discord left and right, to interact with me, ask questions, thank me, congratulate me on the mod, a mod I mostly didn't care about. This is what success was. Hiraeth was a failure. I was destroyed, completely demotivated. I don't usually share my feelings, but this time it was too much for me. I shared my thoughts with my friends and they seemed sympathetic. There was nothing they could do about it, though - they couldn't make my game good, just like they couldn't make my mod bad. Somewhere inside me, I wished my mod had been bad.", "39/47 My outlook had changed, it was no longer about the quality of my game, it was about getting it done. I started to speedrun development, cutting corners, but this felt wrong, this felt horrible. I didn't understand why - why doesn't turning the page fill the void? What was I missing? I had forgotten why I had done this whole thing in the first place. I had forgotten this was a silly side project to the side project of my side project. I had forgotten how my game was nothing more than an excuse to spend time and bond with my friends. The me who had begun the project seemed to have been lost.", "40/47 This leads us to two weeks ago, or at the very least two weeks before I wrote this script. The funny thing about being stuck in a game, about being stuck in a simulation, is that it's like time travel - I'm in the past and you're in the future. Sadly, I'm not as clever as the Hiraeth aliens. You, as the player of this future game, that to me is only a script, cannot inform me of what Hiraeth has become. Why can't I restart my level, go back 5 years, take back the 5 years I've wasted?", "41/47 Three weeks ago my friend sent me a direct message on Discord, asking me if I wanted to be part of the newest Steam fest or event or whatever - I wasn't very enthusiastic, but he sure was. He wanted to know if I was up for a live stream, I agreed under the condition that he'd take care of everything, and that I'd only need to show up. Communication is hard. To me, my mind is crystal clear, and so it is to you since I am telling you my story. My friend also has his own story which I am not aware of, which I hope he one day shares with me and yourself. You see, this buggy mess isn't really a way for me to get to you, but for me to get to my friend once he plays it, if he does.", "42/47 Days go by and I have no news of the event beyond a date and a time. One of my coworkers, a mutual friend of the both of us asks me, unprompted, \"who the surprise guest will be?\" I'm confused: \"Surprise guest?? What the hell are you talking about?\" She then goes on to pull out her cell phone and show me an Instagram announcement by CAWEZ Studio's joint account. Apparently, my friend had planned two streams, one with me and one with a \"surprise guest\" which would take place two days before. I was not aware of this at all and found it quite annoying. He refused to tell me who they were when prompted, which made me unreasonably frustrated. I wouldn't be able to monitor that previous stream since I was working that day, so I just hoped everything would go well.", "43/47 It did not go well. Due to a mistake my supervisor made in my schedule, I was let free two hours earlier than usual and was able to catch the stream. I hopped on a voice channel with the no-social-awareness friend and a few others, and got ready to watch when the stream would start in 5 minutes. It did not start in 5 minutes. In fact, it did not start for 30 minutes after it was meant to. I was already nervous enough, and now there was a technical difficulty, I felt almost humiliated. And then, suddenly, on the screen popped a VTuber avatar.", "44/47 When that happened, the silent voice call with my friends erupted in laughter, while I was frozen in my chair. Then, the stream got stuck on the first frame, and after a short spike the quality became so terrible that it was impossible to make out anything on screen. Thankfully, there were only 8 people watching. Then, to my dismay, as my friend and his guest started the playthrough, a fatal issue occurred, effectively softlocking them in the tutorial. Had the game been shipped like this 5 months ago when it had been released on Steam?? Was this just bad luck?? Did I think of testing the FBX animation codex on a Windows 11 machine? I generally dislike the use of strong language, but in that moment, I wanted to fucking kill myself.", "45/47 I messaged my friend, who was not aware I was watching, telling him to cancel the stream. After a short back-and-forth, he did so, and we engaged in a concise conversation about the future of the game. I simply asked: \"Am I allowed to give up?\". He replied: \"Yes\". That was all I needed. Within the following 10 minutes all future events were cancelled or put on perpetual standby. I then told him I needed to spend some time with myself, to leave the internet behind for about two weeks, and that I'd return with a final answer. I did not have the time to read his response before I had already disabled the network on my device. I closed my computer, and went outside to touch some grass.", "46/47 I sat down for a while, looked at the birds and passersby. I don't know when I'll return to the internet. Living offline is strangely therapeutic. I've been getting back into woodworking, papercraft and cooking. But then, I got the itch once again. I simply cannot leave a thing undone, I cannot abandon my work. Not this time, at least. At least, I learned from mistakes past: I knew what I needed to do. Unity was out of the question. I installed Godot and got to work.", "47/47 In less than those two weeks, I had rebuilt and remade the entire game from scratch. This time, however, I know what the story will be. My game's story will be my story. I said I'd return with an answer, well my game will be the answer. I don't care if it's good or bad, I don't care if people play it or not, I don't care if people like it or not. Because you must understand: I didn't make this game for you, whoever you are. I made it for my friend and myself. And now I understand, that that's everything that it ever needed to be."])

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text = "The overall plan for the story is pretty final. I'm using general anxiety around Nuclear War as a main theme: there are many alien factions that share the galaxy, and the two big ones are on the verge of conflict. Like during the Cold War, if there was confrontation they would immediatly destroy the entire galaxy with their weapons of mass destruction. When the player character dies in a video game and reloads a save, the characters within that game never get to experience the universe in which the player was killed since they get reset - well the idea here is that one of the factions captures the human who's the player character, and if the weapons of mass destruction are deployed by their ennemy they simply kill the player and force them to restart the level. In the alien's referential, the timeline in which the weapons were used never happens due to the reset, and they can therefore win any conflict by abusing the player's quicksave system."
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