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.

Keep the lamps lit — Where every session begins — pick a lesson and step in. Menu
Keep the lamps lit Where every session begins — pick a lesson and step in.
The Corridor — Learning to read depth in the new direction. Level 1
The Corridor Learning to read depth in the new direction.
Dodgeball — Sidestepping four ways at once as the volleys come down. Level 2
Dodgeball Sidestepping four ways at once as the volleys come down.
Turn & Face — Bringing the fourth direction into view. Level 3
Turn & Face Bringing the fourth direction into view.
Third Person — Steering an avatar through 4D from outside it. Level 4
Third Person Steering an avatar through 4D from outside it.
The Leap — Gravity, footing, and a jump across the gap. Level 5
The Leap Gravity, footing, and a jump across the gap.
The Plane — Constant thrust and banking turns — flight, the familiar way. Level 6
The Plane Constant thrust and banking turns — flight, the familiar way.
The Long Course — Flight through hoops that curve in genuine 4D. Level 7
The Long Course Flight through hoops that curve in genuine 4D.
Forest Errand — Wayfinding, a neighbour, and a thing to carry back. Level 8
Forest Errand Wayfinding, a neighbour, and a thing to carry back.
The Maze — Holding a 4D place in your head until it goes quiet. Level 9
The Maze Holding a 4D place in your head until it goes quiet.
Big Vista — A wide 4D landscape of rolling hills, seen all at once. Level 10
Big Vista A wide 4D landscape of rolling hills, seen all at once.

Frames from the live build — the menu and all ten teaching levels, the renderer exactly as it stands today.

Play it now

Walk the ten levels yourself

The first public demo is out. Download the build for your system and step in — no account, no installer. Free and open source.

Linux elu4-x86_64.AppImage chmod +x it, then run — GLEW & GLFW are bundled. Download for Linux Windows elu4-windows-x64.zip Extract the folder, then run game.exe — nothing to install. Download for Windows

A working GPU with OpenGL is all you need. Every release and the full source live on GitHub.

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

    Done: the first public demo of our 4D interaction system is out — ten levels that teach your eyes and hands to move in four dimensions. Download it above.

  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?