Our Human Experience

Warning there are pictures that included hate speech and Nazi imagery. This cannot be avoided in educational projects like this.

I have continued to work on the look and feel of the Experience. We already did the hands for Walter and now I am starting to work on the design styles for the environment. I learned a lot making this building, UDIMs, to making my own smart Materials. I feel like in the next few updates you will really start to see an environment look like a city.

After the last update I just could not look at how bad everything was graphics wise. I have started exploring art style for the experience. I think I found one. Also I am bad a math. I think I want to release this on the 85th (not 75th) anniversary of Kristallnacht. So 18ish months from now. I still have a lot of work to do but I think it’s possible by then.

So, the graphics are not any better than last time we looked at this, but I am developing all the systems we will need for the experience. Right now, I am working on items and info panels. Normally in game dev you don’t start making things look nice till after you get all the systems working. For me as an artist it’s really hard for me not to just start making things look nice. But I don’t want to build assets that I may not need.

Being Sick Sucks
Sorry to be MIA, I got a chest cold last month and it caused a lot of other breathing issues (Bronchitis and Pneumonia). This 1 2 punch kept me sick longer than when I had covid last year. I have done very little art since I got sick. But I am starting to feel better. I needed to warm up a little on UE5 so I did a small prototype of a side scroller. I should have another update soon on my grandfathers project.

A lot has happened since I launched the site.
1. I have reached out to the Florida Holocaust Musem (FHM) for any info they have.
2. I have been posting on Reddit about the project and have a bunch of leads. I plan to follow up on them after I am done with what the FHM.
3. I got the quest 2 running with Unreal Engine. I am able to build apks so they run natively on the headset. Sorry for the bad audio I’ll do better next time.

Welcome to my dev blog.
What am I developing you might ask?

Well to tell you that I need to tell you a little story.

My name is Kenneth Loebenberg, I am the oldest grandson of Edith and Walter Loebenberg. Edith and Walter were Holocaust survivors. Not to long after my parents and brothers moved back to Florida my grandparents started the Florida Holocaust Musuem. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time there growing up.

When I was about 14 my Grandfather took a large group of people on the Ashes to Life tour of the camps of Poland. I was really too young to go, but my grandfather pulled some strings. While on that tour I got to stand in the Gas chambers of Auschwitz, see the Warehouses of Shoes and the Memorial full of human ash in Majdanek, see the gravestones for towns that were emptied by the Genocide of their residents in the spot where Treblinka was. This gave me a new view of the Atrocities of the Holocaust. It made me sad not only for the victims and survivors but for the people that could only learn about this in books and museums. I always wanted to find a way to bring this to people so they can see it the way I did on that trip.

This stayed with me as I went to art school. While I was there, I had an idea, why could we not tell the stories of the Holocaust as a video game. I brought this up with my grandmother and she was horrified by the idea. In her eyes I was asking to make Mario but with Nazis. I did not have the words then to explain what I was trying to do. But I do now.

What I am trying to create is an interactive narrative of my grandfather’s day/night of Kristallnacht. We will get to see these events from his point of view and interact with the places and people he saw that day. I fully understand I can’t get all the details right, for instance I will never know the color of his bike, or what was really said between him and the photographer that was taking the photos of his Synagogue that was burning down. I will not get all the facts correct about that day, but I will get the truth correct.

How much will this cost to play/experience?
I will not be charging for this; I feel like stories like this belong to all of Humanity. I will not gate keep people’s history for money.

How can I play/experience this?
This is going to be a VR first game/experience, but I am hoping to also have it playable on a pc without a VR headset.

Will you be making any money on this?
No, I am doing all this in my own free time with my own resources.

How long will this take?
I am hoping to be done next year. But you can always check here for my progress.

You can watch my grandfather tell his story here.