Stage 01
Segment
The painted views are lifted off the sheet and squared up — each angle isolated, cleaned, and aligned into a montage the reconstruction can read.
Altered Perspective Studios — the engine room
The engines behind the art.
We build the machines that let a two-person studio make worlds.
Parallax runs on tools we wrote ourselves — a neural pipeline that turns paintings into 3D, a real-time engine that makes them move, generators that grow whole labyrinths. All locally-run, all owned, all pointed at one goal: give the hand a longer reach. The craft leads; the machine follows.
What runs under the hood
Five engines, one pipeline, one hand at the wheel.
Neural asset pipeline
Real-time renderer
Procedural worlds
Movement & physics
Creative-assist tools
The pipeline
A painting goes in. A game asset comes out.
Owen paints a creature by hand — a few clean views on a sheet. From there the pipeline takes over, entirely on our own GPU.
Stage 02
Reconstruct
A locally-run neural model rebuilds the volume in three dimensions — best-of-many, scored and re-rolled, so nothing advances until the mesh is right.
Stage 03
Texture & choose
Physically-based textures bake back onto the model — then the artist picks the winner. What took a 3D artist a week takes minutes, and the human still makes the call.
The engine
Hand-painted, made to move.
Our real-time renderer turns flat paintings into a place you can run through — mosaic-tiled walls that age and shift, headlights that throw real shadows down the corridors, a curved rear-view that shows what’s chasing you. Written from scratch, tuned to our art, no off-the-shelf game engine in sight.
The worlds
Labyrinths that build — and turn — themselves.
A generator grows every maze: braided, solvable, symmetric, different every run. On top of it sits the mechanic the game is named for — the labyrinth twists a quarter-turn as you play, re-deriving every path, always leaving a way through for the player who finds the turn that opens it.
The mechanics
From a steel ball in a box to a drone race — same engine, different dials.
How you move through a world isn’t hard-coded — it’s a set of dials. Weight, momentum, grip, gravity, point of view. Turn them one way and you’re a marble rolling a labyrinth; turn them the other and you’re flying. One movement system, an enormous range of feel.
Movement
Grip to glide
Hold-to-speed arcade at one end; true Newtonian momentum at the other — thrust, drift, and a tap-to-accelerate kick. Everything between is live-tunable: how much speed you carry through a corner, how long the ice lasts when you let go.
Physics
Gravity that turns
Down is wherever the surface says it is. Cross an edge and gravity re-aligns to the new face; rotate a whole slab of the maze and down moves with it. Keep gravity and roll like a ball in a box — or cut it loose and fly.
Point of view
Your eyes, your rules
True first-person with full free-look — pitch, yaw, and roll — plus reorient-or-barrel-roll and carry-look that holds your aim through a turn, so you never lose the thread of where you were going.
Controls
However you play
Keyboard, on-screen sticks, or tilt-the-device — every control remappable, stick or button-pad, left- or right-handed. The scheme bends to the player, not the other way around.
Where it’s headed
One dial short of a race
The same knobs that make today’s labyrinth roll are built to run tomorrow’s: crank the momentum up, gravity down, add players, and the maze becomes a drone circuit. One engine — from marble to multiplayer race.
Heads-up
Read the whole maze without ever leaving first person.
Being inside the world shouldn’t mean flying blind. A light instrument layer floats over the view — there when you want a hand, gone when you want the hunt.
HUD
Everything at a glance
Score, lives, and level up top; live threat-lines that trace each hunter’s path straight to you; a fold-out gizmo that shows which way the world just turned. It stays out of the art until the moment you need it.
Rear-view
Eyes in the back of your head
A convex mirror bubble in the corner — a genuine second render of the world behind you, curved wide like a car’s fisheye — so you can watch what’s gaining without ever turning around.
GPS
The way out, live
A circular medallion that pulses toward the exit — a route solved through the maze exactly as it stands, re-solved the instant a slab rotates and the path changes. On when you want the help, dark when you want to earn it.
The assistant
The machine sweeps the floor. The artist makes the art.
Behind the scenes, local tools do the un-glamorous work — proposing level variations for the artist to react to, keeping thousands of hand-made assets consistent, catching the continuity errors that eat a small team’s week. It never autopilots.
Owned outright
On our hardware
No cloud middleman, no per-seat API, no black box. The models run on machines we own, so the pipeline is ours to tune — and can’t be pulled out from under us.
Human-authored
Nothing from a prompt
Every asset starts as a physical painting or a sculpt. The tools give that art dimension and motion; they never invent it. The hand stays the author, start to finish.
Amplify, not replace
A longer reach
The point isn’t fewer artists — it’s two people making what used to take twenty. The engine clears the busywork so the day is spent making, not filing.
See the engines in motion.
Everything on this page is running, right now, in Parallax — free to play in your browser.