Decan Walk in UE5: Aries II and III Post-Mortem
30 days into my 365-day-long esoteric game jam.
In Decan Walk — Aries I, I broke down my plan: perform a Decan Walk (following along with Susan T. Chang’s 36 Secrets) as a 365-day-long game jam, creating a new “platform” for each Decan every ten days.
I know myself well: I possess myriad methods for screwing up. I knew going in that at some point, I would either run out of steam or run out of time. (I’m sure I’ll run out of steam around Cancer, get a second wind at Libra, and then crawl to the finish line from Capricorn onwards.)
Rather than splitting the technical postmortem from the conceptual and magical ones, I’ll weave them together for Aries II and III.
You can watch the video playthroughs of Aries here:
Aries II
I was still goofing around with Stable Diffusion-generated height maps, but I eventually decided it wasn’t worth the time. I appreciated my own magical intentionality in prompt creation, but at the end of the day, platforms are just platforms. They’re the picture frame in which I populate the iconography of the decan, but there’s no time for more.
In principle, I want to create all my own models. In reality, I’m trying to learn UE5. I know I can make a decent model (including one with rigging and animation). But I’m in this to learn new things, both about the Decans as well as Unreal. So I’m allowing myself to continue with Blendswap, Sketchfab, and TurboSquid models.
In The Picatrix, Aries II is described as a “woman dressed in green clothes, lacking one leg,” which is a beautiful contra-ableist image. Once I found a free model, I edited the albedo and mesh. My original plan was to give her a rad prosthetic (I have a soft spot for the Bespoke Innovations digitally fabricated prosthetics and the Alternative Limb Project). But, again, I ran out of time. Instead, I focused on figuring out simple physics (kicking over traffic cones) and continued working on the sun so that it transitioned properly from one decan to the next. I also continued with cinematic sequences, getting the cargo ships to move around the scene. I had plans for swapping them out with steam engines and adding smoke, but sound took precedence.
Aries III
With Aries III, I obsessed early and hard over the garden wedding imagery in the Four of Wands. I made my own trellis (quickly, so it doesn’t have the hard surface details I would have liked) and ended up spending an excessive amount of time fighting with foliage.
I had perfectly usable vines and flowers from Megascans, but their weird planar randomization looks — well, weird and planar. I’m sure there’s a way I can adjust the randomization of the angle so that they’re perpendicular to the surface, but my Google searches (and ChatGPT queries) all hit dead ends. It was one of those moments where I was, like, “Come on, Epic, please invest in better documentation!” I’d blame this on my noob status, but I saw a lot of other smarter, more experienced people complaining about gaps in the documentation as well. It was solace.
There’s also an element of, well, literal time to this. The first two days of this decan were fairly normal’ Busy, yes, between work and family, but manageable. But the last 8 days included a bachelorette party (heeey, grrrlz!) and a conference (heeey, ECGC!). I did a little work on the decan each morning of the bachelorette party as folks sobered up, but somehow, the idea of recreating what’s effectively a wedding scene when I had a literal, physical (drunken and debauched) pre-wedding scene right before me…. Well, meat space fun won out over digital fun. And ECGC was a work event for me, so I was busy attending presentations, networking, talking with colleagues, recruiting students. There was little time for actual game-making.
Suddenly, it was the last night of the decan walk, and I didn’t even have my “man in red with a gold cuff” in the scene.
So I hastily threw him in and spent (again) too much time revising and troubleshooting the lighting trigger. It seems completely reasonable to me that I should be able to say, “Hey blueprints, here’s the timeline start, here’s the timeline end, play it from beginning to end, unless it’s not at the beginning, then play it in reverse to the beginning.” But for the life of me, I could not get this working. And once again, the documentation was so distilled and simple as to be, well, completely opaque to a noob.
I made multiple level animations, one for each lighting shift, but the inefficiency really irritates me. I mean, I remember doing stuff like this in ActionScript, for crying out loud, I’m sure it’s possible in Blueprints if I could only de-occult the documentation. I just admire efficient and elegant code to no end, and I know I’m not a good programmer because my code is incredibly inefficient. I also appreciate simplicity. Having multiple timelines feels incredibly inefficient, but I need to be realistic about my skills and triage.
End Results
I’m definitely not happy with Aries III, not just because I ran out of time, but because the few things I learned through making it aren’t really evident in the final product. My timeline hack was solid and works, and I’ll likely end up using it for the rest of the project (barring help from the forums). But I’m interested in visible progress.
The other disappointment is — there’s a lot to the Four of Wands I didn’t get across. I feel like there are subtle, understated things I got across in the Three of Wands — the traffic cones, the fact that you can knock them over — yes, some of this was just learning software — except none of it was just learning software.
But in the Four of Wands, I literally ran out of time, both in the game engine and in terms of contemplating this decan in a meaningful way.
There’s so much depth and nuance to the Four of Wands. I also wanted to animate the young man, to get across his effusive love and lust, and well, helplessness. I wanted that to be both endearing and alluring, but also a reminder of the instability of that combination, the temporary quality of it, the fleetingness of happiness.
But isn’t that also just the nature of being human? In many ways, I was living the Four of Wands during its decan. I was in the moment, enjoying the company of people I love, care about, and/or deeply appreciate. But you can’t multitask and be “in the moment” at the same time.
Going forward, I’ll reuse platforms, level animations, and assets as much as possible to carve out more time for contemplating each decan. The end-of-semester crunch is going to hurt, but this exercise is smarter, not harder, for sure.
Next up: Taurus. Bring on the bulls, bitches.
