Happy New Year everybody! Gosh, so much has happened since I last wrote here. Please excuse our absence, I’ll try to make it up for you! So, first thing first. Our team is constantly evolving AND growing! Our two main collaborators, Blos International and University of Portland State, make it possible for us to expand on our play-as-you-sleep ideas without feeling too large a pressure to push a commercial product on the market.
I know I know, this might sound disappointing to our eager fans, but I mean, let’s be frank here: None of us would feel satisfied with releasing an unfinished game, and even if we were to release Tumbleweed to the public, it is extremely hard to come across a sleep-cell with enough processor clock-speed and voltage consistency to be able to play the game safely.
Having that said, our “procedural guessing” subroutines have been heavily expanded since last time I wrote about them! We are now calling it “brain-wave extrapolation”. One current difficulty is that in order to extrapolate thoughts and emotions into a REM sleeping state, we need to properly seed the procedural algorithms first. Therefore, we are tinkering with different input forms that feed our procedural engine. Do we let the player fill out a survey in a waking state? Do we induce hypnosis before doing so? Do we let the player answer through instinctive reactions in a sleeping state? (such as knee-jerks, the saliva test, or even tooth-clenching)?
All options are on the table! Currently exploring!