THE INSANITY REMAKE: ProjectK Stalking the grounds outside WishingTree P...

Still alive!

Sorry for being so incommunicado lately! Lot's of background stuff going on with the game and not much to show for it, as with building a house we are reaching the point where many of the foundations have been laid down and soon every update will have something appealing to see. 

I'll admit I took a brief respite from hard dev'ing in order to play The Last of Us 2 recently, which was the sequel to my favourite game of all time. I had been highly excited to play it for the 7 long years Naughty Dog took to make it, but found the game to be ..well...sadly quite dissatisfying. Graphics, audio, gameplay etc all setting the bar for other PS4 games to match, but I wasn't happy with the 'brave' direction they took the story in at all. I always feel that at the end of the day making games- even horror games, is certainly about giving the player pause for rumination and provoking them into questioning the meaning and justifications for someone's actions under a given set of circumstances-- but boy oh boy does that game takes a deep and highly questionable dive into misery for the sake of subverting expectations, and almost approaches a snuff-movie level of distastefulness with the excessive gore and cheap shock deaths. The fanbase seems divided which was something the writers said they were expecting and saw from their focus tests prior to release. I think dividing your fanbase in order to stand out from the crowd is absolutely bananapants- from a business perspective if nothing else, but also- why the hell wouldn't you want all your poor fans to enjoy all the fruits of your labour? And why is merely giving the fans what they want such a crime these days? Anyway, label it the cost of high art or reinventing the whell or whatever, but I know I'm not alone in thinking the game was a bit of a catastrophe. A damn shame. Anyway, the newly releaseed Ghosts of Tsushima is looking like a nice palatte cleanser and here in Japan where -funnily enough- I'm roughly only 60km from Tsushima, the promo bandwagon is in full swing. Seeing people gush over the game's pretty aesthetics has given me a renewed love for the beauty of the countryside I live in over here with my Japanese wifey, and I can't help but think what a good life decision it was for me to come over here 15 years back.   

Ok back to the game. As I've said, sorry for the lack of updates, but it takes forever to get anywhere in Unity development as a one-man team, and so much more work to put in than a simple Flash Point'n'Click. Hurdles every step of the way. This time it's appropriating bones and their weighting for the armatures of some of the characters in Blender that's giving me headaches, plus coding some of the activation events/triggers such as a doors opening and camera angles.  I'm working on some simple cinematics, one at the moment where The Bandaged Man looks out of the window of his makeshift prison to see Project K patrolling the estate. In Flash that would be a couple of measly hours of artwork but in three-dimensions I have to rig Project K and The Bandaged Man properly, keyframe some animations, create forest terrain, rain pouring, fog, baked lighting, mipmaps...ugh...

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Sometimes I wonder if I'm not nuts doing all this, but you know, what the hell right? It's a hobby.     

THE INSANITY REMAKE - ADDITIONS

How's it going fam? 

Whew, game is starting to take a little more form, but still a long way off from being a yummy splatter dish that people can't wait to get their teeth into. Still, seems to be running well so far. Everything is very low poly and most of the textures are only 256x256.Amazing how things look with careful unwrapping and normapping. That's about as optimized as I can get away with before it starts to look like a PS1 game.

This is a lot of work for one guy to handle, I've been busting my arse over it for months now. Thankfully I don't have kids nor a ton of responsibilities and can afford a few hours a week to manufacture this puppy. It is very much a hobbyist piece of work though, and there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to complete this entire game by myself in short duration and so - what I'm thinking of doing is releasing it in episodes. This will have the benefits of a) giving the fans something b) garnering interest in the project from sponsors and new fans alike and c) catching the eye of other potential devs that might want to jump on board and give me a hand getting this game out for a taste of the rev share. 

Of course around the same time I'll open up a Patreon and itch.io Name Your Price to try to secure some funding through purchaseable downloads, and if that does well it'll have a tremendous impact on the dev time of the game, essentially freeing me up from some of my day jobs-- which revolve around hourly contracts anyway. Every hour I can cover the salary I'd get through doing my day job online is and hour I can stay at home and devote to the game.

THE INSANITY REMAKE- PHYSICS

MORE OF THE INSANITY REMAKE...

a) The first room you start in. Got a bit of moody lighting going on now. The new game has physics, and getting through locations will usually involve searching up and down to find the appropriate items to move on. The new game will also make use of a VIGOUR meter, which increases when you find food. As it goes up you'll be able to move heavier furniture and break doors to get access to new areas. You'll also use items to throw at and slow down enemies so that you can make an escape when they're after you.
b) Testing Lawrence Elk. Got the IK on his creepy little 'nose' working to my satisfaction. Smooth sailing with the coding so far, but I know down the road there will be some near-insurmountable issues- the ones that always come up when you're as lame at coding as I am. Still looking for a real Unity c# programmer btw- hey if you're out there, mail me?

More of the game environment...

Just another run through the first few rooms with some more added visuals. Unpolished. Lighting is almost non-existent. Some normal mapping applied to textures now. No characters in there yet but there will be on the next update.

Google drive archive


Getting there...looking for new team members soon.

How's it going duders? Been a while. 

One good point about the rampant COVID pandemic is that it's given me plenty of time to work on the game, and I've been working on it pretty much full time as of last week. I'm not unemployed exactly, but as I've probably mentioned before- I'm a private ESL teacher in Japan, and most of the classes were group lessons, senior citizens and such and they'll all bailed on me (understandably) until this thing blows over. I even had to cancel a trip back to the UK. Bit bummed about that. But tbh it could be a blessing in disguise as I now get to put a solid eight or nine hours into the game each day, and progress has been constant.

I've been mostly working on the graphics using Blender. I only started Blender last winter but thanks to my knowledge of other similar software, I've been picking it up fast.

Anyway, here a bit of a prototype: 

Don't get too excited - very early days yet. There's not even lighting in this scene and the textures are placeholder. I'm still weighing up whether to make the game first person or third, or perhaps a mix? I'd love to have Hitchcockian fixed cam shots that bewilder the player and add tension. We'll see.  

It would be great to find a collaborator or two to speed up this process, but man, without offering cash upfront it's like asking someone to sell their kid. 
Obviously, most people want to work on their own dream projects, not another's. 
If you can code in Unity, why not come on board? I'm not fussed about people having a ton of past experience, but you'll need a portfolio of course. 

Guess I have to keep plugging away until the game looks juicy enough that people don't mind a rev share deal. Later ;)