Devlog 006: Gabriel Arrives, and We Find Our Limit

Tonight Gabriel’s flight got its ending, in grey box: simple shapes, before any final art.

Gabriel arrives

“Just then an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah, standing at the right side of the altar of incense” (Luke 1:11).

Zechariah now stands in the Holy Place, east of the altar of incense. When Gabriel reaches his mark at the right side of the altar, a soft light comes up over two seconds and stays. That he appeared is scripture. How the light looks is ours, and it’s labeled as art. There’s no figure yet, and no wings: scripture never gives Gabriel any.

The gold stream leads the way in

In Playtest 2 we followed Zechariah’s gold prayer stream down from the sky, and it led us straight into the roof of the house. We hit the wall and had to come around to find the porch.

So the stream now rises from Zechariah, leaves through the doorway and the porch, and only then climbs into the sky. In Playtest 3 we followed it down out of the light, through the porch opening and the doorway, and reached the mark beside Zechariah. How the prayer looks rising is art, labeled as art. That prayer rises like incense comes from Psalm 141:2 and Revelation 8:3–4.

Controller first

Our input rule is controller first, keyboard and mouse at full parity, and every key remappable. For Gabriel’s own flying controls we’ve planned:

Left stick to move, right stick to look.
Right trigger to rise, left trigger to sink, so height is analog while your thumbs stay on the sticks.
RB held to boost, for his swift flight (Daniel 9:21).
A to appear, live only at the mark. You choose when; what happens is what Luke 1:11 says.
The same actions on keyboard and mouse, all remappable, through Steam Input, with button prompts that match your controller.

For now, a playtest-only card shows the flying controls, keyboard and Xbox, for the first seconds of Play. It’s left out of every packaged build.

A broken build, and a one-line fix

Compile broke tonight before any of our code ran. The engine’s Fab plugin updated itself with a new module that the installed engine has no build rules for. We don’t use Fab, so we turned it off for this project, one line that’s easy to undo, and Compile works again. We’ll turn it back on once the engine is verified.

The honest part: we found our limit

The build machine is a laptop with 16 GB of memory. With everything open, it had 421 MB free. Play ran at “Memory Pressure Critical” with 0.14 GB left, and one file took 222 seconds to compile.

The bottleneck is the machine, not the project. It matters because the full Holy Place, the crowds and our first screenshots all need more room than this. So before the screenshot sprint on November 2, we’re upgrading the hardware, starting with the specs of our desktop tower.

Tonight’s passage

Luke 1:39–56: Mary hurries to the hill country of Judah to visit Elizabeth, and Mary’s song.

The hardware upgrade, then Fab back on after a verify. Then Playtest 4: flying to the mark to see the arrival light come up and the controls card on screen.