I’m a 27 year old man who experiences many symptoms found in C-PTSD. Due to my dysfunctional home and life circumstances, I felt trapped and as though I couldn’t speak, so I did nothing with my life. The only thing I really find meaning in at the moment, aside from sorting myself out, is the importance of art games and how they could genuinely, positively impact people like me if there was a wider variety of higher quality works made accessible to the mainstream.

I spent an unhealthy amount of time playing games, time that would have gone to better use being productive, but the problem wasn’t necessarily with how I spent my time, but rather with the entertainment I was receiving. I did not care about books. I barely cared about tv and movies. If there were more games with the kinds of life lessons you learn in real, good art, I might have been able to sort myself out earlier in life. Games with interesting ideas and stories like Silent Hill always had me feeling like there could be so much more to life that I wasn’t understanding. Playing Firewatch to completion was the first time I felt what it must be like to read and fully take in a good novel.

I can have a wild imagination and could so easily see myself becoming the kind of toxic person on the internet we all know so well. In some ways I already was. I think good, meaningful art in games could help lead people like that, like me, on a better path.

I have a lot of ideas, too much to say, and have not been good at following things through, so I’m ending this here. But I hope my perspective can contribute to the discussion of art in video games in some way – because I feel like that discussion is stagnating.

(Also the irony that our only released title is Falling Slime is not lost on me)

Falling Slime is an arcadey physics puzzle game that combines matching puzzlers with falling sand style games.

We’re releasing now into Steam early access with the hopes of using player feedback to shape our focus for future content. We will be delivering regular updates here over the course of the game’s development, and will strive to keep the community involved in the evolution of Falling Slime! Thank you for your investment in us!

So for our Unreal Engine 4 project, we’ve been working on a gameplay mechanic involving microphone input. This is something that hasn’t been very well documented in the community so far. We started an Answer Hub thread about it and have since figured it out, but have seen some others still asking. So, sorry for the delay but here are the relevant excerpts for our implementation.