My Vison:

TRACE arose out of inspiration from a few sources, most notably the game "Metal Garden" as well as the Halo franchise, and a host of aspects from a lot of 2000's games. My vision for the game is a platformer/movement shooter with a 2000's retro style that takes bits and pieces from a lot of my favorite games. I want it to have a lot of things, like a subtle and compelling story about loneliness through great distance and time, a mix of grounded and fast gameplay, and the massive scale of levels like seen in games like Titanfall 2, Metal Garden, Halo, and more. Megastructures are something that has fascinated me ever since I was a kid playing Halo:CE for the first time and being amazed at the concept of a ringworld. There's something about that scale that really draws me in, and it isnt just the physical size, but also the scale of time. Something I used to think about when I was a kid was how long would it take to walk the inner circumference of a Halo ring? Like... not days, surely. Weeks? Months? Could I spend a year or years walking in the same direction on the same structure, built by hands that thought of years like I think of minutes? Could I live here, and never run out of places to see? Something I really want to convey in the story of TRACE is how moving through a structure the size of the one in TRACE takes incredibly long and is so lonely. It's like in the manga BLAME!, where the main character is an android trying to get the edge of similar megastructure. He walks for thousands of years, encountering little pockets of civilization along the way. But by the time he's reached the next pocket of people, it's been hundreds or thounsands of years. Most of his story isn't the story... it's the gaps between. The thousands of years of loneliness he endures for the sake of finding the edge.

The World:

TRACE takes place inside a small fraction of a much larger megastructure, the region being about 1,200,000 kilometers across. The origins of the megastructure are not entirely clear, but it is ancient and the playable region is devoid of any plants or animals. Aside from the characters, the region is primarily uninhabited aside from maintenece robots. The structure is mostly made of metal and concrete, and is not built at a scale designed for humans to traverse; walls hundreds of meters tall and hallways hundreds of kilometers long are the norm, so are rooms that could fit small planets in them. The region features a few key areas and points of interest that serve as playable levels, notably being: A mining sector, busy at work dismantling a planetoid for resources. A logistics sector, millions of kilometers of warehouses and sorting machines. An active construction area. An industrial sector, being countless refineries and factories turning materials from the mining sector into useable products. A CPU sector, which houses the AI that supervises the region (more on that). And many more areas as I come up with them. The key areas of the regions are directly connected by massive hallways that serve as highways for resources, but the space between the key areas and highways is not as ordered. Those spaces are where you'll find the millions of kilometers of empty rooms and hallways that have little to no use or are simply structural.

The Characters:

Stopping here for today, unfortunately a lot of my written work is in loose notes that I can't really just copy/paste onto here and it be legible to anyone but me, so I'm kind of rewriting everything from scratch. I'm actively updating this site though, so I'll have more stuff up in a couple days :)