Introducing Albedrío Vista

A few years ago I started building a 2D visual novel called "Elena's Love Saga", inspired by Summertime Saga but with a different universe I'd been writing both in my head and also using an actual text document, for a long time. I worked on it for months, mostly at night and on weekends because I had a full-time job as a software engineer back then. Eventually I burned out.

This is from that old project. You can see the Spine2D rigging on top of the image. Patreon does not allow explicit content on public posts, so I'll share the sample animation on a separate, patron-only post. It looked good. It also took an enormous amount of time per scene, and that scaling problem killed the project.

The problem was simple: 2D art was too slow and too expensive for the scale I wanted. Dozens of characters, branching paths, multiple locations... every new scene required new art, and there was never enough time.

One, no, two years passed. Maybe a bit more. The idea didn't leave me. I kept thinking about it differently: what if every character was a 3D model that could exist in the world permanently, doing their own thing, walking their own routines? What if the player could just be there, in a place where life was happening with or without them?

Then, last November, I got laid off. Instead of immediately diving back into job hunting, I decided to enjoy christmas with my family and spend whatever time I have before I need to be employed again on this project, finishing what I started years ago, properly this time. The stack: Godot + a lot of custom code.

That's how Albedrío Vista started.

What it is

Albedrío Vista is a first-person 3D open-world adult life sim set in *Albedrío Vista*, a small fictional suburban community. I wanted a different, elegant name for my game, and the name I choose for the neighborhood/universe was good enough.

The hook: More than two hundred people live in Albedrío Vista. All of them are already there. From day one, you can walk past any of them on the street. Some you'll never speak to. Some will become important. Some will surprise you.

It's an eternal summer. The days pass on their own schedule (about 2-4x real time, still deciding about this). Characters follow routines, they go to work, they come home, they visit the park. You can actually see them walking to their jobs.

There is no main quest. There are no objectives screens. You walk around. You meet people. You decide what to care about.

There's also the adult side of the game, of course (the most important for some, including me sometimes), which I'll talk about more in future posts. For now I'll just say this: it's about real adult lives. People have partners, affairs, routines, secrets. If you spend enough time in the right places, you start to notice things, and to experience things.

Why this approach

The thing I learned from the "Elena's Love Saga" attempt: branching narrative in 2D doesn't scale. Every additional character is exponentially more work.

But once you build a 3D pipeline, characters scale almost linearly. A new character is mostly:

• Generate the base model (a tool I'm building handles this)

• Customize appearance, clothes, hair

• Define their routine

• Write their dialogue and interactions

The math finally works, in theory. Not easily though, 265 characters is still enormous, but possible for one person with the right tools, knowledge and inspiration.

That's been the last few weeks of work: building the tooling that makes the scale possible. The world, the characters, the routines, the dialogue system. None of it is finished, but most of it is getting real soon. I'm building a town. I have residents. They walk around. Soon they'll have stories.

Where I am

I estimate that I'm about a few months away from a pre-alpha demo. It will be small:

• Albedrío Vista, the neiighborhood, partially built

• At least 5 of all the residents will be "awake" with short storylines

• The rest will exist as ambient population, you can see them walking, but interactions are generic

• A couple of explicit interactive scenes to demonstrate that side of the game exists

• Rough edges everywhere

The point of the demo isn't to be polished. It's to show what the foundation actually feels like, and to start a conversation with the people who'd be interested in this kind of game.

About me

I'm Emma. I've been a software developer for a long time and I am a 3D artist wannabe. If you see profile photos on my X, Bluesky or other accounts, then it's a real photo of me but edited with Photoshop/AI just enough to anonymize me. Emma is actually my real name, but other than that, I'm staying anonymous. Separating this project from my professional identity is just cleaner and safer for now.

I'll be posting here regularly. Devlogs about the world, the characters, the systems behind it. Less about me, more about the game. Soon will start posting on social media as well.

More soon.

- Emma