Elua

An open-source game · in the making

Elua

Tessara is an immense, half-understood country, and not all of it runs smoothly. As one of its keepers, your work is to set it right again — to walk the round, read the land, mend what has drifted, and keep the lamp lit one more night. Your aunt is teaching you the craft, before her workshop becomes yours.

Step into the world Build it with us →

Tessara simply runs in four dimensions — and no one who lives there ever thinks to mention it.

The world

A vast country that has started to falter

Tessara is an immense, intricate place — and lately, not everything runs smoothly.

That is why there are keepers. Night’s keepers such as yourself are mandated to walk their stretch, find what has slipped out of true, and set it running smoothly again. It is honest, humble, civic work: lamps lit against a big quiet, a place to be kept rather than a frontier to be conquered.

Your aunt is teaching you her craft, before her workshop becomes yours. But the deeper you learn it — fault by fault, repair by repair — the more you start to wonder whether all these small failures aren’t really one larger thing, and whether anyone has noticed but you…

An experiment

This game is an experiment, in 4D

Tessara is a four-dimensional world, and your screen is flat. So Elua renders it the way a camera flattens our own world — only with one more step.

4D scene 3D view 2D screen

Every frame, the live four-dimensional scene is projected down into a three-dimensional view, and that view is drawn onto your two-dimensional screen — in real time, as you move. The whole game is really a way of looking.

And here is our honest wager: our hypothesis is that by playing enough, you can rewire your brain and build a genuine intuition for four-dimensional space — the way you already have one for three. We don’t yet know whether it’s true. Finding out is a good part of why we’re building this.

Level 1
The Corridor Learning to read depth in the new direction.
Level 3
Turn & Face Bringing the fourth direction into view.
Level 5
The Leap Gravity, footing, and a jump across the gap.
Level 7
The Long Course Flight through hoops that curve in genuine 4D.
Level 8
Forest Errand Wayfinding, a neighbour, and a thing to carry back.
Level 9
The Maze Holding a 4D place in your head until it goes quiet.

Frames from the live build — the renderer as it stands today. A handful are still being staged, and those tiles fill in as we go.

Where we’re headed

The road from here

Our roadmap as the people building this — what we’re making next, in roughly the order we mean to make it.

  1. 01

    A first demo

    Soon: the first public demo of our 4D interaction system — ten levels that teach your eyes and hands to move in four dimensions.

  2. 02

    Sharpen the tools

    Harden the renderer and the camera and interaction systems with everything we learn from how those first levels actually feel to play.

  3. 03

    Begin building Tessara

    With the technique in hand, start raising the world itself — the cottage, the round, the aunt’s workshop, the country you’re mandated to keep.

  4. 04

    Open the workshop

    Release the toolkit so other menders can build places inside Tessara alongside us, and the single-author world becomes a shared one.

Join us in the adventure

Elua is an open source project, maintained and fixed by a few motivated menders. Feel free to contact us, or join us in the adventure.

How it’s being built → Four dimensions?