Blackwell was a weekly horror webshow set in a 1600s-era village of the same name. A quaint, cozy little town in the pine mountains, the villagers go about their daily lives, oblivious to the troubles about to beset them.
Between the nomadic Vagabonds, the ever-encroaching plague of the Devil’s Fever, and the town’s mysterious benefactor Lady Blackwell, the denizens of the town come to realize that things are not as they seem.
Blackwell started in October of 2022 and ended in May of 2023. It utilized the VRChat platform in order to tell its story. This show ran for a total of 15 episodes, and served as a testbed for a lot of experimental mechanics, features, and ideas that can be utilized in future projects. Much like the Actium Knights project, I served as the project’s Development Lead for Blackwell. In this position, I managed release builds, milestone goals, and ensured we didn’t overrun our scope and bandwidth to meet our weekly episodic schedule.
This show was run by Sprixer, Haven_Kendrick, and Magic8BallSaysNo. The development crew consisted of myself, Esarai, Sentinel, and Phasedragon taking the role of Senior Developer this time around. To round it out, Blackwell’s episodes would not be possible without the support of our DMs Noble and OakOfIron.
Some of my favorite experimental features that I worked on for this show involved environmental effects. The most prominent module I worked on for this was my Day Night Cycler, which allowed for the passage of time in the show to be automated and displayed in a smooth and believable manner. Most of the sister shows on the platform that implement something similar usually either snap the time of day between “day”, “evening”, and “night”, and usually only serve to bookend the episode. In Blackwell, the Day Night Cycle served as both a visual representation and a game mechanic! As the spookies tend to come out at night, sundown served as a moment of panic as everyone tried to get what they needed done and get back to town before nightfall.
Other than that, my main efforts outside of DevOps primarily consisted of getting our myriad trees to render at a decent framerate. And because this is a VR-based web show, a high framerate is paramount. Over my Christmas Vacation of 2022, I managed to nearly double the FPS while also quadrupling the render distance.
