4D golf released recently which made me think of my old game concept.
Haven't played it myself but I think it really suffers from using the slice method that almost every 4d game uses. Looks so complicated and confusing yet none of that is intrinsic to 4D geometry. I posted about it in the old thread but just imagine how needlessly complex a 3D world would feel if you could only see it like this:
(a sphere on a brown table)
I'm focused on Hapax, and the game after Hapax, and I don't even know if there is a market for this type of thing, but it would be so cool to see a 4D game that attempted to actually show a 4D image like I was doing. The fourth dimension is intuitive when you can actually see it.
I struggled with representing the 3D volume on a 2D screen, as you can see in previous posts, so I still fiddle with it from time to time. Today I think the best method is a combination of a "hologram" and reconstruction. Slice the 3D volume into a whole bunch of horizontal squares and then position the 3D camera with slightly fake parallax so when viewed from the side at a small angle, the squares fill up the view without overlapping. It's odd and artificial but very approachable with the right context.
Like this but no gaps or overlaps.
Give environmental context, like you're playing as a person who themselves is controlling a 4D avatar and is viewing it on their slice-o-matic hologram display, and I think most players' brains would embrace it in seconds. All their brainpower can be focused on the 4D content that is being displayed. Stuff to the left/right on the display is to the left/right of your avatar. Stuff that is toward/away on the display is to the ana/kata of your avatar. Stuff that is up/down on the display is above/below your avatar. Smaller appearing objects are farther away and bigger appearing objects are closer. Moving sideways would shift closer objects faster than it'd shift farther away objects. Rotations shift everything regardless of distance.
Left stick to move left/right/ana/kata. Shoulder button moves you forward. Right stick to rotate the camera left/right/ana/kata. Maybe another shoulder button to look up/down. 4D objects can rotate in 3 additional ways but 2 of those don't make sense in a game on the ground and the third could be optional.