Background

On 5 January 2024, I published a YouTube video (see my YouTube archive) showcasing a prototype of a 3D platformer with hyperbolic geometry. I also announced that I intended to make a full game from this, with working title Guidebeams, and said that I would publish progress updates once a year. The next year, in early 2025, I made a YouTube post (not a video) about my (limited) progress in 2024; the content of this post is mirrored in an appendix to this blog post.

End-of-2025 Update

Since last year's update, I've made only two commits to the Git repository: fixing a minor runtime bug, and adding pausing. At this point, it's tempting to consider the project abandoned, at which point I could release the code for others to benefit from; I don't fancy keeping that private forever. On the other hand, I do still have vague ambitions of finishing the full game, and I don't want to release anything before I do finish the game. (To be clear, if I do release the game, it will be free/libre software.)

To resolve this dilemma, I have decided the following: I will give myself this one more year to make significant progress on Guidebeams, and if I still have not done so by the end of the year, I will formally abandon the project and publish my code. Namely, "significant progress" constitutes completion of all of the following milestones:

1. Migration from SDL2 to SDL3.
2. A collision system for the player that can handle level geometry at any orientation (walls, floors, and ceilings).
3. A world editor, as described in last year's update.

If I do complete these, I will continue developing the game.

Appendix: Guidebeams End-of-2024 YouTube Post

So last year I promised you yearly progress updates on my game project, Guidebeams. Well, here's this year's update in text form (I couldn't be bothered making a video): I haven't worked very much on it this year, and have accordingly made less progress than I had hoped. Indeed, much of the progress I've made happened just in two weeks around the new year, when I've been off work. What I have done in that time is to add

• normals and normal shading
• textures and texture mapping (including hyperbolic texture tiling without mesh subdivision)
• a build process for importing models from Blender,

all of which are illustrated in this screenshot. Hopefully I can keep *some* of the momentum from these past few weeks going into the next year as a whole, and achieve more than I did in the previous year.

My main next goal is to make a proper world editor, so that I can leave the "technical development" phase and enter the "game design" phase proper. I'm planning to have this be a "mode" within the game executable itself (likely only included in dev builds) rather than a standalone project, both so that I can reuse game code rather than rewriting a lot of basic hyperbolic geometry stuff, and so that I can quickly switch between editing and playing for testing (like in Super Mario Maker). Another goal is to finally replace this placeholder player cylinder with something more proper, which includes both the technical aspect of implementing animations in my game code and the artistic aspect of modelling and animating a player.