Known Mysteries Teaser and Server Mysteries Tales

A teaser video for Solar Server's first videogame

Happy new year and happy depths of winter to you all. 

I’m very excited to share the teaser for Solar Server’s first video game made for it, Known Mysteries. Please go to www.solarserver.games to view it as the video there is running off solar energy, like the final game will be. PARTYGIRL lends their voice to the main character Sorrow and Amateur Painter is creating the other-worldly music. 

Known Mysteries is a mix between FMV and visual novel, with the images and video greatly compressed to keep the file sizing more low-energy for uploading and downloading. The teaser should give a hint of the project’s aesthetics, mood, and theme. I look forward to sharing more with you when the time comes! 

Known Mysteries is my first foray into writing mystery and deduction. When I started thinking it up I was on a kick where I believed mystery games are the epitome of games due to their player involvement in finding clues, choosing different leads to follow, and their unfolding stories. (Now, I currently think deck-building games are the epitome of games but I’ll hold onto that thought until my next project). As everyone ever could guess, writing satisfying mystery that keeps a balance between too easily solvable and too frustratingly opaque is very, very difficult. I’m trying to think of it more as a slowly unfolding world, à la Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. 

While writing a story of mysteries I also encountered some real-life mysteries to do with the workings of the server. In December, Calgary, the city where both I and the server are located, had about 3 weeks at -30° Celsius. This started off a few problems with the website. The battery and the panel were running fine but the raspberry pi started having issues. The pi’s CPU can run between -40°C to 85°C, and runs 20-30° higher than the outside temperature—but the LAN runs from 0°C to 70°C. Even factoring in the CPU’s generated heat, I suspect that the LAN was having difficulty, resulting in some corrupted data when updating the website and streaming the teaser. The issues continued past the cold snap, but miraculously resolved when I re-tried something that previously did not work. I think the website is working well enough now that I am sharing the teaser with you, but if the site does crash please understand that it is a work in progress :)

I want to shout out my dad who has been guiding me through this mysterious world of web development and helping troubleshoot all the silly little issues that are arising. 

If it is the case that the cold weather makes the server not able to run perfectly smoothly, truthfully I’m fine with that. This project is about the climate and about our unrealistic expectations for energy consumption, so if I have to put a notice on the website that says “if you see it is colder than -20°C in Calgary, things might not work well,” then great. The effects of the climate should be noticeable.