TRACHI – ANARCHY News

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Welcome to our first proper preview of the year.

Although I'm still busy with you-know-what, I couldn't let the game sit still. In fact: we've made great strides since August 28th! As of today, everything up to Kenovice is in. That puts us just a handful of scenes away from a playable build.

I'd like to take this opportunity and present you with a prologue you might recognize. We'll focus on the story for this one, covering about 80% of InvitAtion's events. As you'll shortly see, the prologue receives what the prologue needs.

So before I retreat into the final stages of my PhD, let's talk politics and history!

[/p][p]Our road starts where the games began. Trachi's Eastern Checkpoint was created in 2016 – making it the oldest piece of in-world content. Suffice to say: The story and the world have grown tremendously since then. Although the Checkpoint got updated countless times, the core ingredients remained the same.

A crowd, three people and an adjutant. Two differing opinions make a disagreement. Access to the barracks requires Trachian citizenship – or at least a visa. While the Customs Office is right next door, we can't help but ask ourselves: Why?

Those that played the original were satisfied with our explanations to varying degrees. Overall, we found out politics aren't everyone's cup of tea. ANARCHY's success certainly proved that person right. On the other hand, my love for matters of state is only surpassed by my proclivity for self-sabotage.

AUTONOMY (U) is a kiss on the cheek for people that adore complexity. The revised prologue will be full of acronyms, paragraphs and terminology. After all: Our first interaction has three agents of the Ionian Intelligence Service (IIS) – itself part of the Secretariat for State Security (StateSec) – being frustrated by a Sergeant of the Trachian Republican Guard (TRG).

Most of that knowledge comes from the dialogue, but the environment plays a vital part as well.

[/p][p]Compare, for example, the crowd outside to the queue inside the customs office. I'm sure some of you pondered the shape of this administrative bottleneck. In the future, I'd like to reward your investigative gaze.

Remember the application form's thirteen pages? The scene's a bit tacky, but at least the protagonists fill the forms out by themselves. – Or did they, actually? My memory's a bit fuzzy. Although I DO remember wanting to make the game more interactive.

Now I obviously can't let you short-cut your way into the city. We could give you a special ⭐ for good behavior, though. Perhaps there's even a way for you to get a visa and walk into the barracks prematurely. It'd feel like winning for about five seconds, before we remember Sergeant Samuil Rybar's words: The Lieutenant's out, anyway.

[/p][p]Among the many things we didn't do justice in AUTONOMY (R), the legal status of the DMZ is one of the top contenders. Mind you: we're talking about an area that is internationally defined as no-man's land. In technical terms, neither the TRG nor our three StateSec protagonists are allowed to act on behalf of their governments in the DMZ.

Wearing a uniform is a big no-no – restricting free passage even worse. The TRG is guilty as charged – but what about StateSec? We don't see Atlas waving around a badge, but the deals he strikes are backed by Ionia. This kind of private / official multi-hat drifting is the basis of most agreements, although it shouldn't exist in a world subscribed to institutions.

In short, the DMZ is a place where de jure and de facto come apart. Beyond that, its remained a surprisingly quiet strip of land lodged between Amryn, Trachi and Ionia. Though the latter should already give it away that the DMZ is also the perfect hub to get things in – and get things out.

[/p][p]With a bit of extra context, we understand the gravity behind Lieutenant Tanner's raids. Apprehending people in foreign countries – even your own citizens – is illegal. Yet the man is holding people hostage as he's interrogating a suspect outside his jurisdiction.

Luckily, we can look to countless similar examples in our own history. Let's hear a few justifications: Security of the state, housing international terrorists – or being a bridge-head for narcotics. Turns out there's a whole buffet of reasons to pick from!

In our case, Julius Gaston was accused of smuggling. That's a felony, alright. Though we could raise the stakes just a tiny bit. Recall that arteria aims to replace Trachi's civilian administration. That makes the leadership of the TRG – or rather its Colonel – our best bet.

But what if he doesn't come through? Who else commands the respect of the city?

[/p][p]Technically, he's still in the Republican Guard. It makes for a better picture, you see? Heinrich is the hero who stopped a terrorist attack on Fredrick Dam. Even if you account for the fact that the operation was a false flag – the explosives were as real as the fourteen people who lost their lives.

As someone who prides himself on honesty, discipline and decency, killing isn't the thing Heinrich wants to be remembered for. I'd assume part of him always wanted the truth to come out. If only someone would stand up and admit that Trachi's independence emerged from a lie.

Until that day comes, the city needs a symbol. Heinrich provides, although he doesn't live in the city anymore. His tiny cottage sits a stone-throw away from the barracks, where Guardsmen remain in awe of him. If you ask someone in Trachi, Heinrich keeps an eye on the DMZ. On the other side, Nestville's people see Heinrich as the man who keeps the TRG in line.

Should there be an escalation, both sides will look to Major Navratil.

[/p][p]As you can see, Nestville is ready to defend itself. Tilian introduces himself as leader of a militia, but we never saw his crew. The armed civilians in the later stages of the game could either be from Nestville – or Ionian sleepers.

We'll maintain the ambiguity until the end, but the relationship between Ionia and Nestville deserves clarification. Recall that Nestville is a village formed by Trachian exiles. More precisely: Trachians (mostly from Rondham) that refused to give up their Ionian citizenship. It's reasonable to assume that these people want to return to the city. This would require a change of constitution – which in turn requires a change of government.

From a foreign policy perspective, Nestville's value to Ionia is hard to overstate. It stands to reason that Ionia would funnel a tremendous amount of resources – food, building materials, utilities and perhaps even weapons – into their pseudo-colony. Nestville is not just Ionia's base in the DMZ, but a bridge-head into Trachi actual.

[/p][p]On the civilian side of the village, we remember Kristofor De Bloom. He used to be Rondham's administrator, before being voted out – largely due to changed demographics (caused by the Ionian exodus). Although not a natural Ionian, Nestville's people naturally accepted their former administrator as head-councilor.

You can imagine that De Bloom has been in constant contact with Ionia. Beyond the management of goods and people from Trachi to Nestville to Ionia and back, he also supervised the flow of information. That includes the collation of reports on the strength, composition and movements of the TRG – and the insight provided by a long-term sleeper close to the Trachian government.

A particularly relevant piece of information arrived in spring 1923: One of the agents involved in Ionia's first attempt at the city – operation effigy – was spotted in Trachi. Contrary to earlier reports, De Bloom confirmed the sighting.

Although we can't say for sure if this triggered the Secretary for State Security's (Teron Pravoskos) decision to go ahead with arteria, it undoubtedly served as extra motivation. Even if Ionia failed to take the city, it could at least snatch / cut one or several loose ends.

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Here's where AUTONOMY (R) got good. The scene holds up incredibly well – even by today's standards. And for good reason! Marina De Bloom is one of the characters that write themselves.

Granted, she's a bit pushy. Yet there's a sense of highborn politeness – not to speak of an expertly-crafted meal. Given that our StateSec detachment has been frustrated half-a-dozen times at this point, there's really no reason not to dig in.

Besides: Marina's portrait and lines expose her as extraordinary. Perhaps our (planned) venture across the DMZ is not just a public broadcast that arteria is underway, but an encounter with a person we've been looking for. That would explain why Marina poses a question to Atlas specifically.

Whether you played AUTONOMY or not: I'd like to confirm that this scene is AUTONOMY's overture. There will be references to historical events – from Calpoli to Fredrick Dam to Kenovice. The latter is especially important, as that's exactly where we're going next time.

[/p][p]To sum up, there's two things I'd like for you to take home. First and foremost: I broke my promise and already revised a couple of things. I hope the improvements make up for the fact that we'll ship AUTONOMY (U) as a remake straight away.

Secondly: The primary threads (trying to get into the city, Tanner, Julius, Heinrich, Tilian, Eury, De Bloom et al.) remain completely intact. We're replacing fillers and fluff within the existing conversations with a bigger focus on the politics in the DMZ – bolstered by historical references and foreshadowing. By the time you see the boat, you won't just be curious, but also informed to a much larger degree.

Most of all, I hope it's clear that I've finally started to appreciate AUTONOMY's prologue. I've more or less cried in detail about it for four years – now it's time to man up and polish until it shines. Which brings us to our most important question!

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To be honest, I still can't say. The next months will see me run double-shifts finalizing my thesis – and apply for jobs that allow me to work on the game consistently. Either way: I'll try to get InvitAtion wrapped up towards the end of the year.

Given that I published the original during my Bachelor's in 2019 – and AUTONOMY 1.5 while writing my Master's in 2021 – it'd be great to bring you the first bit of AUTONOMY (U) as I'm handing in my dissertation, right? At the very least, it would be a small consolation for your troubles.

That is to say: I want to express my immense gratitude for your continued patience and trust. It's been a rough 18 months, where I fluctuated between big visions and few results. But at the base of it all – neither TRACHI nor you ever left my heart. ❤️

See you in December, friends!

much love
nory

I just fell over my calendar.

To my shock, I realized: it's August 28th! TRACHI's turning six, AUTONOMY hits four and ANARCHY lights a second candle. This would be the perfect time to reflect and ponder. But four months of absence aren't free.

So before we dive into content – l'd like to put a thesis to my BFFs.


Remember my rant about art the other day? I recall being against the term. My key argument was: it's a colorful way to say good or bad. Yet as I looked back at the last 16 months, reality caught up to me. I make big promises, struggle with perfectionism – and by god – am I behind my schedule.

Yes, I've dragged the brand to hell and back. From fictional history to InvAsion's meta splat. Rainy days for people that don't stay dead! And yet: we're on our way to the city, again. Now who in their right mind would come up with something like that?

Hello. My name is nory. I'm artist-brained!


TRACHI went with me across the peaks and valleys. It's a chronology of a person trying to find themselves. The fact that the project likes to overextend is not (just) a matter of incoherent planning – it's the reason why we're talking.

Yet there's a catch to everything. Exploration can be entertaining, but it doesn't make a product. That is to say: A product that's worth your time. So what's the key ingredient we're missing? Well – nory needs to stop playing around. Given that I've so far refused to compromise, there's only two paths going forward.

At one end lies a bunch of ideas from a person who tried everything. At the other end, there's a story about people that won't stop asking questions. Although I can't predict where we'll settle in, our next step is crystal clear. I'll say it out loud once we get to the conclusion. Knowing you – and the way you know me – I'm sure you'll have it all figured out by then. For now, let's go back to the place where it all began!


Since June 27th, all outdoor tiles are done. This includes the Prologue (Checkpoint, DMZ, Nestville) – and Trachi actual. From Clarin Square to Rondham, Trenton Plaza to Filmore Avenue, Anderson Park and Sigmund Plaza – the city is complete.

Next up are Transfers, Spawners and Events. All the while I'm fixing AUTONOwhoopsies here and there. Most of these weren't too bad, but the connections between scenes took a lot of work. Thanks to our new Hypermap, we can spot and fix inconsistencies with ease. Take Anderson Park, for example. It sits right in the middle of five other maps.

In numbers: 4 hours of tiling – and three hours of alignment. Why? Because it's important that the city appears natural. Every alley, plaza and street should tell a story. ''I wonder what it's like to live here. How does a citizen go about their day? What's Trachi's tax policy? Is this a place worth protecting?"

The answer's a resounding yes! After scratching at the edge of fiction and reality for two years – I think we earned ourselves a holiday. Some place in the Balkans – not far from where Montenegro is today. A cute town tucked into the mountains, close to the Adriatic sea. Let T be a Mediterranean curiosity.


As soon as I saw the maps ordered like that, a thought occurred to me. If the Editor loads the districts additively, could we do the same thing at runtime? The theoretical bits of my brain nodded in agreement – the empirical side broke into a sweat. ANARCHY's performance is questionable as it is. Loading and unloading scenes dynamically won't help.

I.e.: If we're serious about this, we'll need a proper plan. Optimization is one concern, but there's much bigger challenges. Most of AUTONOMY's logic goes like this: Enter scene -> launch event. Can you see how that wouldn't work anymore? In effect, we'd stop treating scenes as isolated worlds. We'd have to call them areas – or zones – instead. On the other hand: we'd get a seamless city.

Given the ongoing time-constraints I'm facing – I'd rather focus on the meat of the game. Although that doesn't mean we can't make it future-proof! To recall our earlier example: As I'm rolling AUTONOMY's logic into ANARCHY, I'll forgo OnSceneLoaded() and check the player's location through colliders instead.

It'll feel the same on your end – but you'll know that our systems are ready for anything.


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I've been working through the quests since early July. So far, around half the prologue is sorted out. All in all, ANARCHY handles AUTONOMY like a champ. We just had to extend a couple of scripts. For example: We needed a plug-and-play way to convey meta-stuff. I hope you'll find it a relief that messages like '15 minutes later' make a triumphant return.

By far the biggest challenge was the Companion system. As a reminder, our old system worked like this: Whenever we load a scene, Combatant Spawners spawn their Combatant(s) – provided the Spawner's conditions (quests, equipment, etc.) are met. This meant we had to place Spawners for every companion in every scene.

Nowadays, we tie Companions to the player. Whenever you load a scene, there's a check for a blocking flag. If it returns false, the game scans for walkable spots and spawns our Friends. In essence, we flipped the logic from spawning on-demand to spawning by default. Turns out a list, a check and a pinch of geometry is all we need.

That is: If we restrict the entire system to party members. But what if we wanted every Combatant to be a potential companion? It would take a good bit of tinkering, but we'd cover every contingency:

I know It's early – but we just passed a major tipping-point.

In one sentence: AUTONOMY to ANARCHY. After handling tiles, cameras and Transformers previously, we're back in our habitat! Today we'll talk about the story. Not just any part of it! We'll put our eyes on detailed issues very, very soon. For now, let's tell a tale about two games and two engines.

AUTONOMY's duality, order in ANARCHY – and TRACHI's 12.000 lines of dialogue.


I admit it: AUTONOMY's true scale eluded me. My general expectation was something between six and seven thousand lines. Turns out we're much closer to 8.000. For comparison: ANARCHY – including InvAsion – sits at roundabout four.

I'm sure you can see the implication. If our goal is to transpose AUTONOMY's words into ANARCHY, we need a solid strategy. The how and when were subject to intense speculation until around two weeks ago. Alas, one truth was always clear as day: We're not copy-pasting line-by line.

The dialogue would enter ANARCHY in a single swoop. We'd parse a whole lot of JSONs and translate the data into a format fit for Unity. One process, three construction-sites: extraction, transformation, integration.

Let's start at what we'd call the source of truth!


Any RPG Maker (MV) project follows a given structure. A project holds a database. It defines actors, items, stats, tilesets and many other things. While the fact that Gotcha Gotcha Games wrote all of that in Javscr*pt is as absurd as it is impressive – our focus lies somewhere else.

The actual content is stored within the Maps. Each Map is a rectangle-shaped grid composed of two primary elements: Tiles and Events. Since we're reconstructing the tilemaps manually, we're only concerned with Events. But what's an Event anyway?

Each cell within the Grid can hold exactly one Event. We can supply a name and a note – but the real sauce is in the Pages. There's Conditions, an Image (Sprite) and a bunch of minor options. The most important part is the 'Contents' section: A list of Commands that span everything from 'Control Switch' through 'Play BGM' or 'Fadeout/Fadein Screen'.

That's great and all – but we're after one thing particular.


'Show Text' holds a reference to a texture (resolved as a Portrait) and a field for the Text. Since RPGMaker MV doesn't have a dedicated name field, we also wrote the content for the name box (e.g. \n) into the Text.

Even this top-level overview should give you a good idea of what we need to do. We have to traverse the Maps, loop over every single Event Page and extract the properties of a Command code that corresponds to 'Show Text'.

We previously extracted Dialogue to extend our Dataset for training LLMs. Back then, the script only included bare-bone data – namely: Map, Event, Page, Speaker and Dialogue. To minimize the amount of manual post-processing, we'd also need the Portrait, Sprite, Conditions and several commands that affect the logic of the game.

Furthermore, AUTONOMY's event data wasn't exactly structured. Even before we transform the data into ANARCHY's lingo, we want to handle certain aspects during extraction. To understand why, we'll have to revisit some of ANARCHY's systems.


At the risk of sounding self-indulgent: I'm proud of where we are. I often voiced concerns at how much time I spent on ANARCHY's infrastructure. While it undoubtedly came at the cost of content, its also paid off tremendously.

For example: In AUTONOMY, every portrait is a hard-coded reference to a cell in a sliced texture-sheet. There is no formal connection between who's talking and which portrait we're showing. We could have a line where the Speaker is Atlas, but the Portrait points to the texture 'Icarus1', index '5'. That combination wouldn't make any sense – which is why we streamlined the entire process in ANARCHY.

What if I told you we just need a single tag? We can describe a Combatant's expression ([Eyebrows|Mouth|Eyes]) by a three-letter acronym: [N] stands for neutral, [NSC] would be Neutral, Smile, Closed – and so forth and so on. Everything else is handled programmatically. Since a Combatant has exactly one set of portraits per Variation, we can always resolve a tag through the Combatant and their active Variation.

So far the easy part. Now let's get to some of the more complex prep we had to do in ANARCHY!


Not all of AUTONOMY's characters made it into ANARCHY. This goes for unique characters (DeBloom, Tanner, Solka etc.), but also for a couple of missing generics (Amrynian Armed Forces, Trachian Guardsmen et al.). Before we imported the Dialogue, we manually created at least one Prefab and one Combatant per Sprite.

It's a perfect opportunity to implement a crucial piece of automation. As pointed out here, we're using Sprite Libraries to run all Combatants on a single set of animations. As of March 2025, we still built these Libraries by dragging individual subTextures into predefined slots. With our new script, we just drag in a Texture and the Library assembles itself.

That's great and all, but there's a much bigger problem! Generic characters are called generics because they share a sprite – and thus a Sprite Library. For better or worse, AUTONOMY had around 430 characters of that type. Without peeking at the next paragraph: Can you guess what my first initial thought was?

'I'm not creating these by hand!' Turns out I didn't have to. We just need a template Prefab for every Sprite Library! Like the portraits, we mapped AUTONOMY's sprite-sheets to their ANARCHY counterparts. In this case: we injected the name of the corresponding template Prefab.

We'll talk more about how we're utilizing that in a bit. For now, there's one more aspect of ANARCHY I want to show.


A couple of paragraphs ago, I mentioned (Self-)Switches and Variables. These are conditions that enable/disable Event Pages. Here's an example from the Prologue: You could only move from the Eastern Checkpoint to the Outskirts after completing the Customs Office shenanigans.

If you played both AUTONOMY and ANARCHY, you might spot a structural resemblance. ANARCHY (for the most part) doesn't rely on Switches – it uses Quest(Task)s. While translating Switches to Quests isn't too hard, we'd still need to set up the Quests.

More concretely: Put AUTONOMY's ~300 Switches into a sequence and assign them to their Acts. We could've immediately loaded that into Unity and generate Quests (Acts) and corresponding Tasks (Switches). There was just one problem: AUTONOMY's nory was neither consistent nor descriptive in the way he named the Switches.

So I decided to replace the Switch labels with something else. You know the saying: 'There's a time and place'? AUTONOMY's main story takes part in Trachi, so that's no good for distinction. Time – on the other hand – is the perfect denotation to describe how far we are into our 3 1/2 day trip.

That being said: It could just be a placeholder. I do want to keep time and date as a property for every Quest Task, but it doesn't necessarily need to be the Task's actual name. The important thing is: when we import AUTONOMY into ANARCHY, we can directly reference Quests and Quest Tasks by an indistinguishable name.

Speaking of the import, let's talk a word or two about that as well!


In our script, we need to handle three separate sections. The most trivial would be the Dialogue Actors: We run through our list of Speakers and add them one by one. In addition, every Actor gets a 'Prefab' property that points to a 'Prefab' Template.

Secondly, the Conversations. ANARCHY distinguishes between Interaction-triggered (e.g. talking to NPCs) and scene-driven conversations (e.g. when entering a scene). The category is important, since every character has their own unique conversation tree. Thankfully, RPGMaker has a 'Trigger' property which separates 'Interact' from 'Autorun' conversations.

Then there's the Dialogue Entries. We need to assign each line to a Conversation. Furthermore, we also reference an Actor. This defines the position of the Dialogue Bubble, the name in the name box – and the portrait in combination with the portrait-tag.

If you recall, Events have Pages. Events themselves point to a conversation. Pages constitute the branches. We need to arrange the lines (nodes) like a tree and set up connections (edges) between the nodes. Lastly, the Conditions manage which branch of the conversation we're activating at a given point.

And that's – basically – it. We imported AUTONOMY's 650 conversations, created roundabout 350 actors, prefabs and just as many combatants.


As we were preparing ANARCHY, we also changed a couple of things in the back-end. You probably won't notice a difference, but the way we're referencing stuff has changed. The key takeaway is: Next time we change the name of a Conversation, Quest(Task) or Scene, we won't break references anymore.

The last thing on my immediate To-Do is a rewrite of the Companion system. I like the way it works in general, but we're still manually placing things. I'll take a deeper look into how Larian and Bioware make sure that your party automatically spawns around you whenever you change scenes.

Once that's done, the real work begins! We imported around 95% of the in-conversation logic, but there's a lot of gaps. Pathfinding, Music and Sfx are better done by hand – especially since we want to rework some of it anyway. More importantly: we also need to set up the overarching scene logic for every scene.

Then there's the tilemaps for Trachi, Kenovice and all the one-off intermissions. I'd like to have it done within weeks, but months sounds more appropriate. Nevertheless, Importing the dialogue was a massive leap forward.


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I took two weeks off work and made it my most productive vacation – ever! In the span of fourteen days, ANARCHY's dialogue multiplied itself. We integrated AUTONOMY's Dialogue Text, the Speakers, the Portraits, the Sprites and most of the in-conversation logic.

We transformed a semi-structured mess from an obsolete engine into our own words. Thanks to our efforts in the past, ANARCHY just needed a couple of adjustments. All in all, we extended our system to incorporate a whopping 450 characters engaging in 750 conversations.

I never doubted that we'd make it. The question was: How much manual work would be left afterwards. Turns out, it's much less than I thought! As a bonus, I also learned tons about Editor scripting. If you recall, one of my main complaints in game-development was the amount of clicking around.

We'll hopefully be able to use our newfound expertise and automate workflows even beyond this little sub-project. Since I learned how to manipulate Unity Assets programmatically, it should turn ANARCHY – or rather: TRACHI – into a much more polished and coherent product.


Whether that translates into more content remains to be seen. On the other hand, we're on the verge of turning ANARCHY into 200% of what it was. If the stars align, we might reach parity this Summer. Then we'll tackle the narrative inconsistencies and – if we're still around – extend AUTONOMY.

More on that in AUTONOMY's next announcement. As for this place here: Let's see if we can't have something cool by June.

Until then, I remain an ardent admirer – and your biggest fan! 😊

much love
nory

Welcome to 2025! Our first announcement of this year tackles two topics in particular.

First, a SITREP on AUTONOMY+. Technical aspects are the main ingredient of this post, since we already handled the narrative dimension here. Secondly, I want to introduce and discuss a paradigm with massive implications for our project.

It's a technology with a good amount controversy – so I'm incredibly eager to hear what you think. First, though: Let's start with something unproblematic!


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AUTONOMY has around 120 maps, 18 characters and 9000 lines of dialogue. AUTONOMY+ will have to have as much – if not more. I knew what was coming, but I didn't have a clear-cut strategy. Just a broad guideline: Whatever I'm able to produce in the daily aftermath of writing a 250-page book on verbalized attribution of causality in German environmental discourse is fine by me.

Considering the state of 2025 (as of Season 3, Episode 13), I think we're hungry for good news! A large part of prologue's maps are in. I just finished Nestville, including the tiles, spawns and transfers. All the maps before that (DMZ and indoor places) are also done.

The next step will be to set up quests, event-specific logic and – most importantly: the dialogue. It's hard to say how many lines belong to the prologue specifically, but I got a script to extract and post-process RPGMaker data. If we can import the lines (including speaker and conversation ID), we'd save ourselves tens, if not hundreds of hours.!

I'm getting hot and bothered by the sheer scale of it. Partially due to the process – but also because I'm looking forward to the result. Once we reach parity with AUTONOMY, we can optimize 1923 from a 7/10 sequence-of-events towards a narrative masterpiece.


My new year's resolution still holds: focus on what I we have. Information warfare is the ice in TRACHI's iceberg. For better or worse, it's also the defining feature of the early 20th-century.

Who believes what? And why should I believe them? If they want me to believe something, should I believe them more or less? These are the type of questions that should run through a postmodern human mind. If not, that's okay! There's plenty of time and places to learn.

One such place is TRACHI's DIscord (👋). I've recently tried to involve both myself and its people. We conducted two surveys – one about general expectations and one regarding a specific issue. Thankfully, I received detailed answers about what they expect from the game, the server and me. Above everything else, there's a high demand to peek behind the curtain.

Incidentally, that's exactly where we're going next!


Barring a short stint in 2022 (InvAsion/AUTHORITY), our point-of-view is tied to a top-down angle. It's rather unfortunate, given that we have the means for so much more! In fact: Unity's camera is made with 3D in mind.

Quite ironic, isn't it? Most of the (successful) products Made-With-Unity are 2D mobile games. Maybe that's why Unity's developers have vastly improved the camera with Unity 6. Although I wouldn't have upgraded the entire engine just for that, it's absolutely nice to have!

You might've seen tiles jittering – or even tear a bit sometimes. It's a well-known problem. We have to force Vsync, avoid seamless zooms and conduct any camera transition with great care. However: The camera movement feels vastly more stable – and I'm hoping to enable buttons for zooming in and out.

Beyond the camera's stability, there is another difficulty. As mentioned, the camera is locked in a 75° angle towards the ground. Compared to 'true' top-down games (see GTA 1 and 2), we need to project depth into a 2D space. Some part of that is handled by the sprites. Our job is to manage the arrangement – aka which sprite is rendered 'on-top' of other sprites.


Both the old (FSM) and new (Szadi) tiles can partially cover characters. There's an inverse relationship between collision and sprite-stacking: The more you allow things to be behind other things (less collision), the more you'll have to worry about getting the layers wrong.

Take for example the larger trees in ParAdise. Even regular-sized characters can be completely hidden. Thus we implemented a second collider to fade the sprite by decreasing the Alpha (less opacity, more transparency). Admittedly, it's not exactly pretty. But it's one of those issues where I prioritize visibility over aesthetics.

That is: aesthetics in its modern sense. Originally, the term simply referred to perception. At some point in time, humans smuggled a positive evaluation (pretty) in. Semantic changes like that are one of my guilty-pleasures – which is why I have a passionate love/hate relationship with the term art.

I remember the discussion: Are video-games art? It's one of those time-wasters like: Do we call human decision trees 'free will'? We can translate both questions into plain English: Is that object more important than another? Once we answer that, we'll just have to ask it again until we compared each object with all the other ones.

We'd transform an object into a vector with as many dimensions as there are combinations. If we then reduce the dimensions and apply a clustering algorithm with two preset clusters, we arrive at a dichotomy. Life, Death. Good, bad. Good (!), evil. Pretty, ugly. Humans, animals. Intelligent, dumb. Natural, cultural. Organic-


If someone draws a bunch of pictures and I assemble them – who made the final image? What if I took that image and ran it through a model until I decide on a result? Maybe I'd even hand-draw individual masks to get the details right.

You see, whether something is art or not is irrelevant to me. I look at the world as a system defined by causality. One thing happens because other things happened before. No output if I didn't initiate it. No output without the Stella portraits. No output without a model. No model without a dataset.

Let's hear another example. Last year, I wrote a dataset for TRACHI's discord model. We also extended it with ingame dialogue. Someone could extract the dialogue and reenact TRACHI's story word by word. Would that be possible if I didn't upload the dataset? What if I never published the game? Unlikely, sure! Not impossible, though.

The good news is: It wouldn't be a problem. Unless the other guy came first and tried to push me out. I for one am not scared of competition. Whatever I do today, I'll do better tomorrow. If there's another entity on earth that could write what I write – please be so kind and bring them to me.

So far my thoughts. Now I'd love to hear yours! Ideally, before I take off the safety and wrap the whole AI-debate into what I believe to be the underlying problem.


I'm used to dealing with 3rd Party material. From Unity, ORK, DS, Steam, FSM, Szadi, Holder, Visustella and several hundred pieces of BGM and SFX. I ranted in depth about PROs, half-baked EULAs and the world's obsession to put numbers in chains.

Yes, I know! I'm crying about things I can't have. But there is a deeper, much more justified rage. Once upon a time, we called the internet a market of ideas. Nowadays, it's a market for things. Blogs turned into monolithic microblogs filled with grifters of all kinds. Websites became click-sucking cookie spreaders that bombard you with ads and DSVGO-forms.

The only thing missing is the sound of an eager chatbot poking you when your eye glances over the thirteenth SEO-oozing mention of AI. I know – It's everywhere. The rate of slop contra content is rising at a rapid rate. Ten years after a short-lived outrage about the misuse of personal information, the data finally talks back.

In 2025, we can create content through regression. Decades of engagement-driven algorithms encouraged quantity over quality. To make it, you have to say it – over and over again. Worst of all, the system works like a bank: The more money (reach) you have, the more interest (engagement) you get.

Take it from me, because it's exactly what I'm doing right now! In fact: Fighting the fight for attention was one of the reasons for me to prototype image generation. Whether you're reading this post out of loyalty – because or despite the cover – I'll probably never know. Although I'm pretty confident there's a question on your mind.

Will TRACHI go AI?


Let's run the numbers. We extrapolate our prototype to roundabout a thousand portraits. Obviously I wouldn't need 20 hours per portrait. On the other hand, neural networks are fuzzy by design. And I happen to be more of a rule-based algorithm guy.

To be blunt: The effort involved demands a really good reason. The 2025 versions would need to be a significant upgrade. That is – if you forego the controversy around intellectual property. There's voices that said they would stop supporting the game. The SDXL front would have to bring numbers and make themselves heard.

That being said, let's talk about overall options. Someone suggested commissioning artists. Last year, I spent around a hundred hours and a thousand USD on that. Could we commission a thousand portraits and receive the results in an affordable, timely and reliable way?

If you know the one, get him to contact me. It would not only be much appreciated, but also morally sound. Said artist would support a small, free indie game, after all! Until that someone special knocks on my door, we'll have to make due with what we have.

Which would in fact be my personal favourite: We leave things as they are. I'll keep fuming about Visustella's Character Generator never getting its long promised update – and put my efforts into something else. Not that TRACHI wouldn't profit from a visual upgrade! However, the games' core strength lies somewhere else.

You see, there's a much better way to incorporate my love for Transformers. One that's nowhere near as morally ambiguous and much closer to my expertise. Something that strikes directly into the name, message and point of TRACHI.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
During the first round of playtesting in 2021, someone asked me whether I considered voice-overs a possibility. Of course! It's dialogue, after all. The text is just an abstraction of someone saying something out loud. Which begs the question: Why hasn't it happened yet?

Two reasons: Time and money. Hiring professional VAs is expensive. The more expensive, the less micromanagement I have to do. If I'd ask my friends (of which a lot have expressed interest), I'd expect double-digit hours with each of them just to rope them in. If one decides it's not for them at any point in the next ten years, it's back to start for that specific role.

You see, it's the same problem everywhere. My dreams are as large as the number of (current) characters. Be it portraits or VA, solutions need to be scalable and sustainable. More importantly, there is a moral issue here as well: If TRACHI's people are artificial, would it be right to push organic voices up their throats?

They deserve better. A voice not directly generated by vocal chords, but the result of artificial weights and biases. Thanks to the best sides of humanity, we even got the data in this case!


To generate voices for a lot of people, we need – you guessed it – the voices of a lot of people. Mozilla Common Voice dataset is one of sources I'm already experimenting with. Just like the LibriSpeech Corpus, people donate their voice to humanity.

I could write a dozen paragraphs about how this is exactly what the internet should be. For the sake of the reader, I'll save it for another day. The key point is: I'll continue prototyping Text-To-Speech. Not just for days, or weeks, but as part of my professional goal to comprehend the future of language.

And if it should conspire that all available models are derived from questionable data – I'll train my own. I got 300GB of audio, much of the linguistic / CS expertise and some recently formed friendships with colleagues from the field of acoustics to help me out.

I try to manage my excitement, but it's outright magical to think about. Let's put our hands together and pray that the next announcement includes at least part of the prologue and – maybe – a bunch of artificial people with an artificial voice.

Thank you, Humanity! And thank YOU – for listening! 😊

much love
nory

Look! There goes another one!

Time to reminisce – and whatever the future equivalent is. A trip up and down the memory lane in two announcements: AUTONOMY handled the ideological end – now we'll focus our full attention on this game right here.

Let's kick it off with a chronology!


The start of the year was crazy. We just released Rendevous and settled the relationship between exploration and combat. ANARCHY grew from a tactical to a CRPG and joined the ranks of games such as Baldur's Gate, Knight's of the Old Republic, Divinity: Original Sin or Dragon Age (back when that name meant something).

Player numbers, engagement and overall excitement was off the charts. I reached out to several artists (like zuddi) and commissioned pieces left and right. On the whole, I probably worked 70-80 hours per week organising and prepping Silhoutte.

On January 13th, we published the preview. Flagship features included NPC locomotion and pathfdinging. Friends and enemies learned to walk the map, spot players through line-of-sight and react accordingly. Battles could escalate through social aggro, Daphne broke into ParAdise and – last but not least – we shipped the second piece of ImmigrAtion.


Following January's release, I took two days off to conceptualise. Silhouette was the frame, Merci would have to fill it. Content, content, content. More precisely: The final piece of ImmigrAtion, new indoor areas, skills, Variations and a Tree.

In addition to ingame-goodies, pataypusa delivered a ground-breaking piece of artistry. A masterwork that condensed the idea of ParAdise, Lorna and her arc to a symphony in RGB. If January was any indication of where we're headed, we'd be on track to make the next big indie thing.

My expectation climbed to Mount Olympus – and tumbled all the way down. For reasons unclear to this day, we lost a major chunk of people. Maybe it's because Steam's launch visibility wore off. Maybe the game straight up wasn't good enough.

Either way, I had to reset myself. February was my final coup before a month filled with work. Come March, dreams couldn't sustain me anymore. In retrospect, I got a much needed wake-up call.


While I was away at work, I composed an exit strategy. Café would be the last of eight consecutive monthly releases. My mind was fully occupied by my day job, but I couldn't let the people down. If I had to make the reputation of Early-Access even worse, I better have a good explanation.

More importantly: An update to sweeten the deal. I threw together some content and published it. The corresponding announcement was: It'll have to last for a while. At least I kept that promise, right? So while I'm on a roll: I think it's high-time for me to be a bit more honest overall.

Let's say ANARCHY would've boomed. I'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, there's a video-game as ambitious as it is demanding. On the other hand, I'm in the second year of my PhD. This wasn't a problem per se, as long as I kept side-lining one for the other.

For the first sixteen months or so, I went all in TRACHI. The thought of telling a story – or rather: building a world – was so compelling, I sacrificed nigh-on everything for it. Even IF ANARCHY's exposure was not up to my expectation, I would've pushed for more. Sure, I'd be snarky as hell about it! But I picked it up because I wanted to, which means I dropped it out of my own volition.


You see, there's a real, real reason why I went on a break. From the moment I left RPGMaker in January 2022 to my hiatus starting March 2024, I learned at a rapid pace. Game-development was my entry into coding, writing, vector and raster image manipulation, video-editing – and general PR.

It made me understand the thing that drives me. I'm a slut for personal improvement. Give me something to grow and you won't see me for months. Between the end of March and May, work excited me more than ANARCHY. The fact that I was drowned with appreciation – and that it paid – was just the icing on the cake.

At that point, I was ready to let the game sit in development hell. My mind was 100% on NLP and absorbing everything I could about neural networks. I got big into transformers and LLMs, when TRACHI whispered a seductive thought into my head: Wouldn't it be cool if there was a model fed with ingame dialogue?

Two weeks later, the setup was complete: Extracting and preprocessing ingame conversations, training and locally host an LLM, that can be interacted with through character-based Discord bots. Mission accomplished, but what's next?


For about 36 hours, I entertained the idea of remaking AUTONOMY in RPGMaker MZ. Proper fullscreen, new music, rewritten dialogue and overall performance optimisations. I would've honestly committed myself – if it wasn't for the fact that MZ's plugin infrastructure couldn't be any worse.

I'll spare you the details, since I've covered that topic in AUTONOMY's post. Here's a tl;dr: Convenience has a price called dependency. People with a lack of technical knowledge are open season.

In sum: I'm glad that I don't have to deal with RPGMaker anymore. The only remnant is a character generator whose update was due in December 2023. Remember how I seethed about that? Nowadays, it's a relief to know that I'm not the only one making things up. And hey: At least my promises are free.

Once in a while, the things I say come true. June 28th saw the release of Renaissance. The first update in three months shipped ExplanAtion's second chapter, Companions, Paradise's Glade, a new Variation system and many other things. Most importantly: It proved that ANARCHY lived in my head rent-free.


Well, at least for a time. In my defense, September to November was chock-full of work. August, too, actually. The undeniable highlight was pataypusa elevating TRACHI art to its current peak. As for me: I backtracked my way through months of technical debt.

The main motivation for my short-lived relapse into RPGMaker was to check how my improved technical proficiency held up. Funnily enough, that's exactly what happened with ANARCHY! I ripped open every framework and made a conscious effort to understand as much as I can.

Not because I had to. A good game is not the result of deep understanding. On the contrary! Production means to cover things with tape. It's the art of taking shortcuts, so players have something to play. That's the rule I lived by from August 2023 to March 2024. That's what almost killed ANARCHY for me.

ExtrapolAtion was meant to be a counterpoint. Months spent on resolving issues that held me back since the game came out. Both in technical and narrative terms. I had a face-off with the point, the motive, the foundation of ANARCHY. ExplanAtion became the game's prologue, upping the average total playtime to roundabout five hours.


Two and a half weeks ago ExtrapolAtion graduated to the live branch. Since it's relatively fresh, we can leave it at that. Instead, I'd like to roll out all the things that didn't fit into the corresponding announcement.

First of all: I'm sorry it took so long! It could've been out way sooner and bigger! The second half of the year was a painful reminder that ANARCHY won't take four or five years, but ten or more. Sixty characters (currently), two worlds and a conflict between ideology and history. Add to that the tension between gameplay and narrative.

We got our work cut out for us. And frankly: I wouldn't have it any other way. Some of my esteemed colleagues have pushed out several VNs while I'm spending double-digit hours to make a skip button work. Some people (i.e. a harsh voice in my head) would call it a waste of time.

But it's also the exact thing I enjoy. Four stats, no RNG. Manipulation-capabilities that put pathfinding algorithms to shame. One-liners that take me months to get right. Music that adds up to thousands of dollars in license fees. A story that combines authenticity with epic theatre to demand rights for fictional life.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
How's that going so far? Let's evaluate the data! Steam says ANARCHY had 277 players overall. About 1/3 of those reached the three-hour mark. Now compare that to AUTONOMY: 118 players out of 1180 fulfill the same criteria.

In absolute numbers, AUTONOMY (release) smashes ANARCHY (early-access). Relatively speaking, ANARCHY keeps 3x as many players engaged. Either what we're doing works, or we've successfully grown 'brand loyalty'. One way or the other, I'm sold on one thing: A friend of TRACHI is a friend of mine.

We'll continue the ExtrapolAtion blueprint in 2025. A big focus on old-world scenarios – especially the city. Trachi deserves to be part of ANARCHY, so we might as well port AUTONOMY. Everybody will have an opportunity to revisit 1923, I get to polish, extend and experiment while I grab my PhD.

As a bonus, we'll bring the whole family under a single roof. AUTONOMY becomes LEGACY – and ANARCHY gets a new name:


2025 will be all about consolidation. I'll focus on the things we have, manage my expectations and keep my eyes where they belong: LaTeX, Unity and you.

Thank you – so much – for your trust and your support! Next time I try reach for the stars, I'll make sure to remember that I got a whole bunch of them right here! 🤗

Have a wonderful 2025, Friends! 🥂

much love
nory