elevator pitch: it's like an extremely simplified version of minecraft but you're playing in a 3-dimensional cross section of a 4-dimensional world and you can rotate your cross-section in the 4th dimension at will

like this but +1 dimension

anyways quinn mentioned in zer plurk that you could build a house but enemies could theoretically just, walk around the walls in the 4th dimension and get in anyway. so i came in thinking, how feasible is it to build a 4-dimensional house that would prevent such a situation.

i freely admit: i vastly underestimated the complexity of this notion before undertaking it

I imagine you'd need a lot of wood

i started out by leveling off the top of a hill close to spawn to build the house on, because if you wander too far from spawn, this game has no tools to help you find your previous base again if you die and respawn

which, on my first attempt, i did. i never found my second house again

but choosing to start by terraforming was my first mistake

because i only leveled off the top of that hill in one 3-dimensional cross section

there are an unknown number of additional 3-dimensional cross-sections where that hill is not leveled off

if you imagine building a house in a similar situation in a 2d game and then trying to extrude it into 3d, you can start to imagine how much more complex this is than it seems at first blush

the biggest limitation is the fact that you can only rotate your current slice of the world; you cannot slide it

so the notion of building something out into the 4th dimension becomes a bit... challenged

this game makes a valiant attempt to be a game, but for the above reason i think it ultimately feels like more of a proof of concept than anything else

because actually planning out and assembling a 4-dimensional build seems nearly impossible with the tools that are available currently

the two tools you can get to simplify navigating 4d space are: the alidade, which is a placeable object which, when right clicked, snaps you back into whatever 3d cross-section of the world you were in when you placed it

and the 4D glasses, which let you see the outlines of enemies, dropped items, chests, alidades, and presumably other entities, that are outside your current slice but, like, near it i guess?? i dont fully understand the mechanics of this

oh there's also a compass. it shows you your current location and orientation in 4d space, but it's really only useful on paper. if you're not like, memorizing coordinates or whatever, then it's not doing a lot to help you tbh

how hard would it be to rotate 90 degrees with the compass, then move one space ana, then rotate back

extremely difficult, actually! that ties directly into my biggest pet peeve as it happens

you can't... really...... rotate precise amounts

i tried to be precise with my rotations, but you get offset really easily

dang

and that makes the block grid get all weird and wobbly, which makes building and terraforming weird and wobbly

if you look at the 2d-3d example animation, you can see that the plane rotates such that it partially intersects some cubes and makes them like, wider and thinner in ways that are hard to predict

and you can see this happening 4D-wise if you look at footage of the game where they're using that function

there is like... a key combination that snaps you to a straight grid alignment, but i did not figure out how it worked and how to use it correctly before i had to go to bed

mostly it either had an unpredictable result or it snapped me back to where i started accidentally

which leads me to the other big limitation: the difficulty of getting and keeping an accurate mental map of the 4d space in the first place

i didn't really manage to get a feel for it in my first session, as you might intuit from this plurk

i leveled the hill and built the house in the default slice, placed an alidade in the house to make it easier to get back into the default slice, then set about trying to level the hill 4d-ways as well

the latter task took the entire rest of the session and still isn't complete

i discovered that you can use placed alidades + 4D glasses to kind of vaguely visualize your current space's relation to the one where you started, so i wound up placing 4 of them, one at each corner of the original house

in theory that might make building out the house a little easier going forward, since you can sort of "see" the layout of the original house from elsewhere in the 4d-space that way

but. this might be too complicated for me. i havent decided yet if i'm going back to it or not

i'm really bothered when the block grid is not a grid. and if you're doing freeform rotations (which you kind of have to, most of the time), then 99.9% of the time the block grid stops being a grid and becomes some other nonsensical thing i dont have a word for

but it's still in development, so maybe they plan to make it easier to do precise rotations at some point

oh i forgot to mention the most important difference between the 2d/3d example they use to explain the concept and the actual 3d/4d gameplay

in both instances you cannot rotate the y axis; up is always up and down is always down. however. while in the 2d/3d demo you have only one axis to rotate (along the y axis, clockwise or counterclockwise), in the actual game, there is one additional axis, meaning you can rotate along two axes

and which axis you rotate along depends on which direction you are facing

this gets difficult to keep track of rather quickly

unless you are facing exactly along one axis, you are probably rotating partially on one and partially on another simultaneously

and i can almost guarantee you are not facing exactly along one axis