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[CANCELLED] - Part. 25/16/2019 Yes, this is a continuation to the first of my little series about cancelled games. I still have a few Unity projects left to talk about, so we're going to start with The Mist, which I briefly mentioned in the first post. In this game, a priest from a small English village is sent out to perform an exorcism on some strange red-mist spewing obelisks that have cropped up in the forest. Of course, it turns out the occupying force isn't the devil, but a long lost goddess of meat that has returned to perform what is essentially the rapture on every living creature. The Mist originally featured the microphone as its sole means of fighting enemies. There was a proper menu and internal structure that would help the player get their mic set up and functioning in gameplay. At this point in development, I realized I didn't really want to make a gimmick game where you just scream into the mic to kill ghouls, so I went for a more jokey route and had it so the player would just pummel enemies by mashing the space bar. Unfortunately, I can't show anything from that stage in development. The .gif above is the only surviving content from this version of the game because I forgot to back it up when I was transferring computers. All that's left is the microphone system, which can't function in a game where there are no enemies to kill. It's hard to say what I really learned from The Mist. This was around the time where I started trying to use normal maps, and that's about all it has going for it. Well, I guess the microphone system was definitely new to me at the time, but ultimately it didn't really mean much seeing as it got scrapped a few days into development. I wish I had finished the punch-em-up version of The Mist, though I don't think it would've really related to The Door that much in terms of tone. On one hand, you have a post-apocalyptic horror game where a man tries to piece together the disappearance of his neighbor, and on the other you have a game where Pope Francis punches the shit out of a ghost. Not exactly Bioshock-tier material. Continuing on with the trend of pushing that 320x240 resolution is Home Sweet Home. That name wasn't meant to be final, but ultimately I just stopped caring about the project and bailed after months of adding a random crap to small parts of the house. I never took it seriously, and it honestly didn't need that kind of attention. It was originally supposed to be an environment test. I was bored, made a small kit of particles, and then I decided I wanted lightbulb trees that rained down glowing crap all over the yard. After a bit of work I started to, once again, think it would be a great idea to expand it into something larger. I wanted a game similar to #21: The World where you would explore different environments tethered together by unique objects in the world, but as you can probably guess it never left the first level. Hell, the first level barely had anything in it. A bench, a fountain and a shelf with some miscellaneous models on it. Not much of a house, all things considered. I didn't really learn anything from this project. It was nice to poke around in once in a while, and developing a pipeline for level design in Blender definitely helped down the road, but this project didn't contribute anything significant by itself. It's just nice to look at once in a while. The next project to meet its fate in the shadow realm was Dead Weight. This began development somewhere earlier this year, but barely saw much attention before disappearing into the mist like the rest of these projects. Essentially, the sun becomes corrupted and decides to bleach the entire planet, killing most life in the process. The moon is deposed and left on a cliff, leaving the world in a constant state of incineration. One of the few survivors is a stocky little guy named Jakob who finds the moon and is accidentally chained to it by magic. As a result, Jakob has no other option than to carry his unwanted companion to the highest peak of the planet and kill the sun. Dead Weight had a few things going for it at the time. It focused on a neat little idea that didn't feel too derivative, a plot that could actually be scaled beyond a few minutes of gameplay and a pair of characters who didn't want to be around each other but ended up having to bond as they worked together to undo some cataclysm. For the first time, there was a project that would have been dead simple to expand on and actually finish for once. This time, the thing that ended up dragging a project to the archive was Unity itself. I ended up with broken seams on tiles that looked so horrible I had to give up. I spent hour after hour trying to patch the seams, but nothing worked. Hell, I ended up trying a strategy I used to use while working on Blip that compressed the tiles together by a small amount to cover seams, but it completely flopped. At this point, I'm guessing the tile sprites were sampling too far out of their boundaries and grabbing the outlines of other tiles in the tilesheet, but I honestly don't feel motivated to peel back through that right now to fix it. Maybe someday I'll come back to Dead Weight to correct these issues and finish the full game, but god only knows if I'll remember it by then. Dead Weight definitely gave me some hope that I didn't completely lose the ability to make pixel art, but beyond that I didn't really gain any helpful skills from the project itself. It was sort of fun to make a game around ball-and-chain physics, and there were even segments where you could hoop the moon around a platform above and roll yourself over gaps. It has the potential to be expanded into a larger game, but for now it's going to sit down in the corner while I work on cancelling more projects. This is a big one to unpack, not only because was it directly responsible for the Waltz and Glide player controllers, but it had a really strange history and troubled development cycle behind it. Casey Simulator: Resnorted was just supposed to be a test to see how fast I could remake of my friend's first game, Casey Simulator. That was it. As you've probably guessed from the pattern so far, I ended up expanding it so far that it just exploded into tiny little pieces of flaming shrapnel. Here goes the story of CS:R, possibly the most ill-advised project I've ever tried to tackle. The original Casey Simulator was mechanically simple and hardly had as much detail packed into it as some of the other games in the series, so back in the Summer of 2017 I decided to sit down and try my hand at replicating an Unreal Engine 4 game in Unity with no consideration for a linear colorscape or any form of HDR color correction. Disregarding how little it looked like the game it was shamelessly aping, things were going smooth until I got to the second level. I really didn't want to recycle the skybox from the first level, so I just scrambled the Crack House level up and ended up with some really weird abomination of a level where it looked like you were platforming in a diseased wasteland. After adding the new skybox, it felt weird just leaving the level empty, so as a joke I added a giant freak that made a creepy moan at the player when they looked at it. Then I decided to add a secret bridge into that freak's mouth that took you to a secret level and at that point I decided to just go apeshit and make the game into a spinoff. Idea after idea just kept coming in. I decided I would merge some characters and ideas from Casey Simulator: Coke or Treat into the mix to add some flavor to parts of the remake. Then I decided I would have the graphics drastically improve in a sort of meta joke about the game's budget getting a boost about a sixth of the way in. Then I realized I wanted to add some more mobility mechanics in to certain parts, so now areas had a jetpack pickup that just lasted for the duration of the level. Then I decided I would add Prey 2016 inspired abilities into the game. Then there was an ENTIRE lineup of guns planned for the player, and then it just kept getting hit with feature creep again and again until it was a pulverized wreck. What started as a dumb test turned into a massive undertaking just to impress the friend who made Casey Simulator, and at that point there was no telling how far CS:R would expand. Of course, the first portion of the game would remain faithful to the original. Level designs were largely recreated from walking around the first game (and cutting out levels that sucked to navigate), the UI was done as close as possible to the original down to the font size and weird placeholder white backdrops, and cocaine could be snorted and lost as expected. This didn't last long, because I started implementing those aforementioned Prey powers right after I got to the Oasis level. Only three of the powers effectively did anything before the whole system was cut entirely. From left-to-right, there was the Zoom power that let the player scope in to far away areas, the Psy Wave power that fired a wave of psychic energy that knocked rigidbodies around, and the debug teleport ability that was implemented to save travel time. The Cooling Bomb power was never implemented, and relied on enemies to exist for it to have any purpose. There were entire upgrade trees being planned, and as far as I remember there were somewhere around 9 - 12 different upgrade trees for the player to unlock (I say 9 - 12 because I think I had a secret set of 3 upgrade trees planned that the player wouldn't find normally). There were 18 different weapons planned. They behaved similarly to Serious Sam, essentially having 2 weapons per ammo type and one being the economic version to the costlier heavy-damage version. There was no point having any weapons in the game, given how little planning was done to explain how the player got each one or what purpose they served in gameplay. CS:R didn't last long whatsoever. About 2-3 months went into it before I lost interest entirely and went on to make some other dumb project that would expand too far and fall into the abyss. Overall, it was definitely worthwhile. It was the beginning of the player controllers I still use today, and there was a hefty learning process in developing most of the game's hardly functional mechanics. CS:R is more than just a benchmark, because it holds a lot of inside jokes and mentalities from 2017 that would have been lost otherwise. If you're remotely interested, the project was scaled back and finished as it was supposed to be: a remake of the original game. If you do play it, don't get your hopes up. It's a trainwreck through-and-through. That's it for now. I don't really have any other significant projects to go over at the moment, but if I manage to recover any of my REALLY old Unity projects from my laptop, I'll be back to go through it. If not, Part 3 will probably be about my GameMaker: Studio projects. There were a lot of large-scale GM:S projects that died off, trust me.
Aight. See yer.
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Leave a Reply.John E.Game developer and college student. Owner of Conceri Games (if you can call it ownership, more like sole PR manager). ArchivesCategories |