I used the jam as a chance to dive into the IDtech4 engine, a close cousin of the source engine. Its code was released under GPL-3.0 after a petition by John Carmack to id’s parent company at the time. In other words the source code is available for commercial projects given you release your own project’s source code. Assets are not covered by this license so every texture/sound you see in my submission is my own creation. The engine has a per pixel lighting renderer which surpasses the source engine’s in some ways and which was ahead of the curve in its time. What drew me to it was the stark shadows cast by occluding objects. Most every commercially tuned engine for the last decades has erred on the side of readability as a brighter environment has more application across the medium.
You can play ‘periodical.’ using the link below. If you’re interested in the engine, check out the dhewm3 repository on github. Also check out blendogames.com, which was where I found out about the engine. Don’t forget to follow my itch.io account since I will definitely be putting something more fully formed out using the same tech soon!