World Annihilation Operations: Space Manipulation

Important: This game requires a GPU with hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing capabilities (e.g. RTX, RX...). Ray traced rendering cannot be fully turned off!

Summary

The series:

World Annihilation Operations is a series of short experimental games examining the impact of audiovisual and narrative contradictions with fictional worlds. Each game showcases a vastly different world, employs varied mechanics, and is the result of a research-creation process aiming at discovering technical operations. Each game is inspired by a unique creative gesture able to generate contradictions within initially logically "possible" worlds.  

The previous 4 games are currently available on Steam within a compilation, though they are not necessary to play at all before experiencing this game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2282630/World_Annihilation_Operations_Parts_I...

In this game:

World Annihilation Operations: Space Manipulation showcases various sci-fi and surreal environments in which space seems unstable. From impossible objects, to teleportation portals, or multiple depths of reflections, explore 5 levels of content while occasionally solving various environmental puzzles. Contradictions may emerge from space being disjoint, twisted or annihilated. This game further examines world annihilation operations as a way to generate multiple puzzles, and is the first game in the series for which a creation tool was made previous to its development (in this case, a ray-traced space manipulation tool for the Unity engine). 

In the future:

This series of games is done in the context of a PhD research on the integration of logical contradictions in video game fiction. It is expected that more similar experiments emerge from this research. Following the publication of these works, the operations developed through the creation process should lead to the development of one much larger adventure game in the coming years.

Requirements (approximative)

MINIMUM: 
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10/11
Processor: 3.0 GHz Intel Core i5 processor
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: DX12 Graphics capable of accelerated real-time ray tracing
DirectX: Version 12
Storage: 2.53 GB available space
Additional Notes: With all around good hardware, the game's performance is by far GPU-bound.

Other

• The game is meant to be played with a keyboard and a mouse.
• I strongly recommend playing the game at high settings or better, but if that doesn't do, trying to lower graphics options in this order:
  • DLSS rescaling factor
  • Screen Resolution (if in 4k or more)
  • Overall Ray Tracing Quality (for levels 1 to 4 mostly)
  • Recursive Rendering Depth (for levels 3 to 5 mostly)