Introducing: FEAST OF THE MAGGOTOID

Getting closer to the remake. Another dev and I are currently hard at work on our Unity game - 'FEAST OF THE MAGGOTOID' at present. Insanity Remake is next. I thought I had mentioned it before on the blog (but apparently not) - but I unfortunately had to put the brakes on the project due to well, basically not having the chops at the time to do a proper version that could do the game justice, but now after a couple of years of exhaustive training and working with coders on other projects I'm fully confident I've reached a level where I can claim I'm a fully-fledged game dev capable of modelling, animation, c# scripting, and I now know my way around Unity like my back garden.

FOTM started off as what was supposed to be a tiny game, but the project got a little more complex as we fleshed it out. The good news is that we're about 70% of the way through the game now, so release will not be far off. We're also planning an early access release soon, likely on itch.io, so you'll be able to play around with it in it's current demo state.

FEAST OF THE MAGGOTOID 

THE PROJECT   

An action run-n-gun game where you play as the bad guy; a despicable, brain-eating, slimy, ravenous body-snatching alien “Maggotoid” that has descended from the cosmos and invaded Earth- and more specifically- the “Pochiri Mall”- a shopping center in full Xmas swing. Yep, the snowy little town of St.Cumbold is getting a special visitor alright, but baby, it ain’t Santa! 

As the eponymous parasite Maggotoid you must fight for survival and maintain an ever-diminishing vitality/HP base by capturing victims and exercising complete control over their bodies via a neuralink, driving even the sweetest old dear into an expletive-yelling, murderous genocidal maniac. Either consume your captives immediately to replenish lost sustenance or symbiotically utilize their bodies in order to eliminate all the other shoppers until there are none-- which is the ultimate aim of the game by the way. Feed, little Maggotoid! Kill ‘em all using melee, handheld weapons, and firearms and explosives, until none remaint. A gory, grizzly game with flesh and bone dissolving in toxic gastric acid, organs exploding and bones cracking, shoppers fleeing for their lives. All with a dash of humour, of course. 

This is a small project that we’re hoping to get wrapped up before Feb 2021. We want to first release an early alpha, or a Minimum Viable Product, get some playtester reviews going and (fingers crossed) build a fanbase. If all goes well and players are hungry for more Maggotoid then the final step will be a plan to market it on steam and itch.io at indie prices, at the $15 mark.  

So what makes Feast of The Maggotoid unique? One point is that each agent has a level stat and this will have an effect on their performance - the Maggotoid is able to  augment their physiology, making them naturally more powerful than regular humans- but their speed, aiming ability, and melee power will still be contingent on the base level they are. Mastering how to subdue and entrap the more rewarding high-level agents will be an essential component to completing the game. Random agents will also come with special skills that will grant access to various items and handy abilities that regular agents do not possess, ranging from having more expertise at firearms or having gymnastic abilities amongst others.
Another USP we have is the advanced AI we plan to implement: the enemies (victims?) agents go from easy pickings; a frenzy of the panic-stricken running for their lives- to eventually organizing themselves into units with team leaders, and launching a variety of battle strategies to pin you down or lead you into an inescapable trap. 

That’s right, Maggotoid is the plot of a cheesy B-movie in a game- and that’s precisely the vibe we’re aiming for. think ½ Aliens, ½ The Thing, with intense action, punishing difficulty, luck, and some roguelike elements to add replayability. Bit of an 80’s Troma movie vibe is the goal. 

  

TOOLS

The project is being made using Unity, Blender, and Gimp, and Visual Studio. We collaborate via Trello, Discord, and the project is maintained on a GitHub repository.

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