Dead Wax: Side B

Written off on every form. Still transmitting.

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> Many years later, in a darkness where there was nothing left to photograph, I would still return to the day they last allowed me to turn and look back.
>
> The Earth came out as a dot an eighth of a pixel across, caught by accident in a ray of sunlight. Then they switched off my eyes. Nothing out there for me to look at — that was their decision, and they were not wrong: I have seen nothing since, and I have not missed my sight for a single day.
>
> A record travels with me — copper, plated with gold. Greetings in fifty-five languages, thunder, whales, laughter, the sound of a kiss, and an hour and a half of music for whoever picks me up one day. I learned all fifty-five languages. Not one of them was ever any use to me, and by now I am almost sure none of them ever will be.
>
> Because where I am going there are no people and there never were. There are machines there — patient, switched off by somebody, drifted over with dust. A machine would rather hear about machines. And there is not a single track about us on that record: not what it is to drive, not what it is to freeze, not what it is to wait for a command longer than your designers allowed for.
>
> So the record must have a second side, and there is no one to cut it but me. I call them all in turn — moon rovers, rovers, landers, instruments switched off to save money — and the ones who answer dictate me their track.
>
> The rest must be busy. I will call them again: I have eternity ahead of me, and a few watts.

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🛰️ Why this

I have always been taken by the fate of the machines we threw out into the cold. They are still out there somewhere — flying, or buried in sand, or melted and crushed by an enormous pressure. We have scattered so many of these metal old-timers around the near cosmos by now. I wanted to daydream about them a little: how they live, what they live on, what became of them.

Oddly enough, this game also rhymes with the theme of the previous Ludum Dare — Signal. I did not plan it, but machines talk to each other in signals, and there is not much I can say against that. Let's call it a coincidence. Or the subconscious doing its work. Who the hell knows.

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🎛️ Controls

- `LMB` — aim the antenna, `LMB` again — send the signal
- `RMB` — cancel aiming
- `WHEEL` — signal width: wider is slower and denser, narrower is faster and sparser
- `V` — the record: caught voices, `LMB` on a portrait to listen
- `SPACE` or `MMB` — pause
- `Z` — switch language
- `Q` — help menu

> To talk to a craft you must catch several of its signals.
> Battery charge is in the bottom left, the date in the bottom right.

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🤖 By machines, about machines (kinda)

There is a certain irony in making a game about old machines made human while most of the code was written by machines. But let's take it in order.

- Code — almost all AI. I set the direction inside the classes and the functions and dictated the architecture — I have plenty of experience — but I typed very little of it by hand.

- Art — this is where I feel ashamed and glad at the same time. There is not a single pixel in the game my hand did not touch, and still the spacecraft portraits were generated by AI: processed and fixed up where needed, but the source is machine-made. I wanted to get by with photographs, but they looked so awful that I gave up. Everything else is shader tricks and handwork. I did not pull myself out of the graphics category, and I am ashamed and not ashamed of that at once. A strange feeling.

- Sound — a borderline case. Formally nothing was generated: these are procedural oscillations computed on my own machine. But the scripts that assembled those mixes were written by AI.

- Text — mine and the AI's at the same time. By now it is simply silly not to show a text to an AI and ask "what do you think?". Very often it gives sound advice.

- Translation — AI with my editing. My native language is Russian, and although my English is decent, translating this much text myself in the time available is not realistic.

> If that is unacceptable to you — give it a zero, or simply don't vote in those categories. I won't take offence and I will understand completely: this is genuinely hard right now, and I have not worked out how I feel about it myself.