Hello and Working Title TBA - Pak & Paid Action Psychological Horror Game (pre-announcement1)

[LOSS404]

Hi, sigma infj lol jk (but not rilly) & people kinda make me nervous haha
actually not big into labels, so describing this passion project game ive been putting my soul into, isnt particularly easy while keeping all the original IP details omitted from said descriptions. heh

i was playing sega's sonic & mortal kombat at the age of 5, & competing in CS tournaments from 12 to 18, but then moved towards healing or support role or strategy based games, before kinda loosing a lot of interest in the direction of modern gaming (where you dont play to win & must pay to win. ex) ... and i used to be two different types of modding, the 1p game modding community as well as some in game or forum moderation. etc.

okay, so skipping the straw that basically forced me to stop modding for predatory thieving big monopoly game corporations...
I took up the fun but semi-foolish goal, to make an entire game by myself instead of through some corrupt company thats probably 1 of a billion subsidiaries of really disturbed individuals set on abusing their powers on secret blacklists & other tactics...

So, I looked back over games I enjoyed, games others enjoyed, many well known classics plus those games i considered gems, although some did take time to remember or come across. as well a lot of anime, lots of that.

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Game Design Below / Bit About Me Above
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I really want/ed to make something, else. what i mean is that, formulaic makes a lot of sense and i understand the comfort in repetitions... 90s cartoon Batman & StarTrek's saga have their own formulas and they work great for what appears to be their goal. but they arent precisely mimicing the others' formula, its different. so thats what i had to do, is look at game design and consider all the systems more intimately than a great bug reporter or casual modder. i even looked into TTRPG TCG & many others, because ultimately the goal for the project is to craft an experience that someone will find some form(s) of enjoyment from it. ill skip the philosophy stuff, but i essentially asked myself, why do i play games, what do i like or feel is just bloat in the games i wish were a thing in reality...

So be forewarned now, game design is not so simple that one or several of the ideas (for this game project) will be good to apply in any form of "one size fits all" type of formula. this is all intentional and serves the game mechanics and primary system loops, with empasis on intrinsic motivators and avoiding extrinsic motivators in the game's design.

i've regularly had a laugh at how distant this project is from many modern games, so incompatible, a lot would break if they went down a rabbit hole of uninspired corporate mimicry.

without further wait, this is a horror action rpg-lite beatemup-like with CYOA elements (some more apparent others more mysterious) that effect gameplay in addition to a few different endings for the different ends the player can find. it will be released with both free and paid versions, a lot more details on that but the point of note is that it will be released specifically available for OpenBOR community to facilitate learning/knowledge & users right to modify their (purchased/demo)games. the almost sole ownership dispute would primarily only arise in regards to IP such as characters and story, as well as the art medium release in and of itself. ie 'the game'. but at time of full release the legal note will be included with something similar to but obviously different than D&D's old content creator agreement. It's worth me bringing up now that this idea is big enough to franchise from the start. & makes the most sense to do it this way. something less closed off than modern corporate content. However the product will begin and likely (or potentially) thrive mostly via more underground channels, as this game will be self labeled for Mature Audiences Only, as it is not marketed to any other audience. Its cartoons & violence, a war horror theme, an artistic passion to offer something original and unique to experience for a moment, whenever someone has their own mind to do it.

This is a game for "honers" or people who enjoy honing their skillset in some manner.
This is why for the time being, this first game will focus on a single player and 1 companion NPC (tba)
& if this game were to do well enough to afford the hiring of a whole team (y'all get in with first picks?) then we could expand the scope to crafting the experience of worthwhile long-term content that breaks the cursed design of serving evergreen players with content that is compatible with vetern content.

To me, the player will have a lot of interest in the mechanics how they are a bit different from fighting game moves or beatemups in execution, but has a familiar feel and its easy enough to intuit for someone completely new to fighting games or competitive gaming in general.

in the begining, I'd really desired to offer the player a story & id tried to make a book out of a sequence of disjointed events haha but instead (learned a lot, & then) chose to put the story somewhat more as a background or, optional feature. this is why there's branching CYOA elements, so some could chose to just slam A or FWD or whatever, or they could make choices, or just do stuff different and accidently find that new game run is oddly different from the last. so its not procedurally generated like the cool rougelikes & etc, but it can have the feeling of dynamic choices and how they impact the gameplay in different ways.

basically thats my summary of it for today. thought about writing this for a long time, and maybe theres a 6 year old post somewhere that survived where i said some of this already before. this has been a very fun, and at times rewarding endeavor, even tho great misfortune has followed me like a dark rainy cloud for many years and id keep losing even my prototypes from extremely unlucky hardware failure or other such unexpected life occurences. its mostly done, within the mind, but not in code or with perfect sprites. i've lived a very humbling life and my intention for this project weighs more towards somewhat intrinsic goals rather than purely for profit. However, aside for donating a portion of the sales to Chronocrash & affiliates who've taken care of this community & our beloved 2D game engines, I'm currently open to help with this project & feel I'm fair in negotiations if one or a few people were interested in getting in on the ground floor of this endeavor.


i've got lots more details to share in time. however this was already starting to grow & i should run to the store before they've closed for the day. cheers~
(ps maybe ill do my next post about why i love openBOR, maybe thats post 3...?)

 

[LOSS404]

haha that night i made some mistakes, likely with python & AI tinkering... even though i try to be careful hah i seem to have locked myself out of accessing the files on part of my partition. i dont think its gone forever, but still a bit too stressed & feeling a bit too stupid (or confused) to try recovering that quite yet. but im trying to let it serve as a fresh reminder to me to save stuff often, backups backups backups haha

in that regard i still have some things i can use that are almost just as good, & if nothing else ill just remake it.
(i seem to not be able to access a lot of the original concept art, however i did use a legal AI game art gen service for verifying the concept [to be final final] and still have access to those)

okay so, there are a few things i've hoped to share here, at some point ^_^ however I'd like to keep this somewhat organized when that might be possible
so today i think i'll keep it a bit behind the scenes as to how I believe/plan to start the development process. "start" being a bit subjective in terms of chronology & things i may include to mention right here.

in the past i've made a few prototypes to test out if i could manage to implement features and mechanics correctly, which gave me a better idea of the effort involved and if my mediocre skills could possible manage such tasks. hah & personally its much simpler to implement and check one feature at a time, & probably safer for your coding to implement and test things individually... so for building and testing, i think this time i'll take from what i've learned to try making a sort of two different dev rooms for testing. one can have the new thing im testing for (pre)implementation and another level file/mode that allows me to test most or all of what can be tested in one sitting, as in attacks, animations, damage, visuals and feel of mechanics (cohesive), etc, as well various enemy or faction types to be spawned for testing.

if there is a better way to go about this, or is similar but better, i am very open to hearing about that.
but when i finally begin showing stuff, that's likely my route of putting the (battle) mechanics into the game. i will likely develop the actual game levels quite separately (in between doing the battle mechanics & model animations, etc) due to the design choice of using things like level branching paths to allow for entire portions of the game to be skipped or even quite dramatically change the way the game is played.

there are lots of cool things that should 99% all be pretty feasible (i hope! haha) and i really wanted the player to at least have the chance/choice to play it blind (no guides) & discover some of these things themselves. so if uninterested in mechanics & want to preserve that element of mystery
here is one or more minor spoilers :

Spoiler

So this is a fictional game which is quite loosely based on real events, loosely to make it more about entertainment (as that is the point of the medium) rather than about torture, because its about 'MKUltra", although it has next to nothing to do with the government abducting orphans for LSD experiments, which is what most people probably think of when they hear the term. however, its quite a prod term for those who are more well read on such subjects. but the point is that the game has a lot of thematic inclusion of such categorical concepts and ideas. this will never be hidden at any point from the audience/prospective.

that said ^_^ you want to hear about a cool mechanic without too much backstory first. the tldr is transhumanism or more accurately posthumanism.
so the player progression through the branching paths has a few different conditions for being on which path is loaded as the next level... and by default the game gives ample time to faff about with the controls and begin combat before steadily increasing the difficulty among other player choosen events, & i wont spoil it all here but one of a few big challenges that are option to the player is an alternative harder route which allows them to destroy cloning depots. or warehouse rooms filled with clones of themself still unwrapped from the tubes they were mass produced inside of.

see, initially the game is meant to be challenging by default, but still doable for speedrunners or people with difference in high cieling game skill. part of how this game works is the theme of death, and that by default that 1P (&by ext 2CP) is very likely to die and that has to have some sort of impact and meaning, yet to portray the mood, of being immortal with virtually infinite respawns is different from being mortal, in ways that words and art seldom can portray for a human mind to grasp because it is so foreign or alien.

there is more to death in the game than just this alone, and again, i've tried to leave a bit out where i could for mystery.

but yes, the player could essentially play through and still find it challenging while being more than fair in what most people would perceive as fair or better treatment.

ill say that the battle mechanics are different per attack/button, including close and ranged attacks, magic, healing, shield, & grenade projectile abilities... so the player choice of a moderately diverse arsenal to choose from, and in contrast the lower type of enemies will have 3 or 4 simple attacks, doing damage in the single digits, the tens, hundreds, or thousands in some cases.

a way of describing the combat experience is
-that the player can virtually always OneShot (many/most) enemies, in large droves, but the player may not always choose one of the most optimal strategies (super effective) against individual enemies. So the player should be hitting multiple enemies at a time when they can, and not every hit may do the highest damge to all the different mobs in that group.
-most enemies are relatively easy to dispatch, and tend to do very low chip damage, but multiple enemies can hit the P1 & CP2 simultaneously, and there are chances of medium or large bursts of damage. this is PART of building tension and anxiety for the transhumanist war horror elements, since the P1 & CP2 should strive to replenish eachother endlessly, without the need for item health pickups.
-the item pickups are a whole thing in themselves lol another time, hopefully, eventually.

APMA this has elements of beatemups but so far what i have described is some more contrasting in it's pacing.
However, not all enemies will be designed with 3 attacks, there will be a modest catelog of named (and less developed, unnamed) characters, which will be unlockable as playable characters, and have their own encounters and rules for engagement. so the game will include humanoid fights with 2v2(etc) with 'boss characters' that have comparable stats and abilities with the player character. however its worth noting these are not the only bosses in the game, nor are humanoids only boss class enemies. but for scope, the number will be limited and organized but it largely makes sense and doesnt hinder the project so that's the course.

I'm not sure where to end this time, if anyone is interested in being involved with the project I may have to make a post more specifically for that at some point in the near future ^_^ but that's a reasonable taste for some of it. I'm open to questions too.
(oh, right... there is still a bit of creative room left open, if someone were interested, but majority of the story system is pretty solid, but i am open to creative input and ideas of some additions if somebody was interested in being a partner on the project.)

its a dark and gritty world, but more so portrayed as cute & eerie or uncanny (for cartoons) while making a point to avoid (most) body horror (gross out).

hope you enjoyed the read, maybe next time ill go more into the combat? or is it silly, since i can't demonstrate how cool the combat mechanics are yet? ^_^
(there are still examples of different, but similar enough, mechanics in games from different time periods)

i dont know if anyone played GunZ (the duel) or GunZOnline, GunZ has a weird life as an online game. when i found it was THE DAY when it was the best. it has a ridiculous amount of animation cancels that allowed some players to fly through the air with a sword and gun alternating back and forth as the characters wizzed around and even had something akin to anime parkor back in the early 2000s. anyway, skipping the history that the devs thought those were bugs not features and removed them all from the game OMEGALULZ & as far as i know none of the public servers around now use a version where weight effects your character (old secret to ceiling flying & dive/swooop attacks)
where the controls basically functioned similarly to in CS scoutzKnivez (wtf.e) but i bring it up because, its very fun, and was a wild experience in it's day, and anyone could go do a lot of the old moves of that game in a server today. however, such dexterity is extremely high demand especially compared to modern crap games haha im also older now and have experienced the dreaded damage of too much keyboard use. couldnt even use it for a year. so, its very important that when designing the mechanics i kept in mind of finding a design lesson to overcome with a tradeoff of animation cancels being allowed, with contrasted meaningful choices for why that should not be always viable or necessary. having mechanics which reward deliberate button presses, while also allowing button mashing styles to have a little fun of their own. thats kinda the experience im trying to craft for the player with this project, i forgot to mention its more "Dark Satire" than it is entirely a "horror" but War Horror is also pretty accurate in my opinion.

Also hoping that after it's done (or MVP demo) maybe it'll help attract someone out there into checking out OpenBOR for development, not just as an awesome potential modding implementation for games that want to facilitate their audience to customize their own games if they are so inclined. get to tinkering & stuff. but yeah, i believe in this engine, and this project, i left out tons of info here and kept a lot of the details to themes or setting, in addition to some of the important mechanics that (most) wouldn't remain a mystery for too long into showing off screenshots and video clips. this is not the entire game, but what i felt today was a modest description without spoiling too much (or providing the entire big picture) so, i think that's all for now at the moment.

i may also check if the hellova boss (fan game) game maker on here would like anything for their project, i've seen soo many really cool projects on this site over the years, and admittedly i have a fondness for that InvaderZim/Burten/Johnny/VivziePop type of linework, and when i did drawings & painting more, I used to have a similar thing going on. (I got more into abstract art, logos and fonts lol not as interesting probably...) So it pops out at me for sure. lots of cool stuff on here, maybe ill come say hello & leave my opinion or something somewhere soon.

till next time & take care~

 

[LOSS404]

Spoiler: concept of 1 boss that has 3 other characters with same base, aprox size for scale reference, <~1/6th screen height at 1080p

while this had some loss from the LoRA/SD, its a good aprox range of one of the smaller game characters, which is one of the bosses but it's base model is reused for 3 other bosses with other differences. I'm avoiding spoiling the story & about who the characters are, for now anyway. in this game, scale is quite approximate and also cartoon with loose respect to realism.

Spoiler: some story and scale stuff

from the player's perspective, player character aprox height is the standard measure for the POV of the game & it's scale. meaning, there are (mostly non enemy) characters which are 1/3rd the height of this character. so this character is actually approximately two-stories tall, about eye or forehead level, (however it does depend on the world/level) so is likely about 15-20 feet tall or so, but it's easier math wise to simplify this down to about 18 feet or 9, but again, this is to represent a wide range of massive creatures and humanoids..

basically this character takes up about 1/6th the height of the screen, & in the POV scale is roughly 3-4ft height range. among the smallest combative models, with some of the robotisized anthro/animals as the exceptions to that. many civilian NPC are about 1ft from this POV, (which may total aprox 4-6ft range) and their are a few enemies/boss which encompass almost the entire height of the screen with the aprox height of 18-20ft in the POV, compared to this char being apox 1/6th the max height (that will fit), this is bending from the "realism" so things like 40 or 80ft etc creatures would either be fictionalized into a blend with the 18-20ft enemies which are the absolute max that's even a bit comical in its own way in addition to how some of them are these looming threats that takes up almost 1/3 of the screen horizontally (or more).

since this game won't have "leveling" in the sense of an RPG, & by large wont force the player to earn 'the final weapon' to be used only for 5minutes. one of the visual aspects of progression in the game comes from enemy types, they'll have a grade to show their est difficulty. but also the player should be able to dynamically feel their own sense of accomplishments from the variety of skills they decided on their journey. what im saying is that sometimes defeating a big monster with more hp & dmg than most others, it can shake things up. again, it sounds a little silly, and thats fine, its kinda better in a way that it has that sort of ice breaker emotion for what would actually be quite heart racing in actuality.

also, the choice to scale things this way is because mechanically this shares qualities of beatemup and shootemup, plus run&gun, lots of other inspirations too. an MMO even is pretty optimal with fully zoomed out perspective, and i was really big into Syndicate (DOS) & the DOS MegaRace type era of graphics, Syndicate has a lot going on the screen and allots a specific amount of detail for everything on screen. its some really astonishing semi-realistic scifi industrial pixel art, in my opinion. (its like X-Com) but this is action oriented and i wanted the game to take advantage of the side portion of the screen in ways that a lot of retro beatemups didnt really have the chance to do very often. (since 5:4 & etc was more the norm.) basically its designed for a lot of horizontal play with some verticality being more optional (which is more standard for old competitive FPS lmao) but still having effect for skill ceiling playthroughs.

also the character above, which i'll reference here as (sketch template of) "05", has a horizontal spacing of roughly 10-12 of the model width plus the wide melee range. aproximately.

maybe you played one of those handheld games? with the calculator screens where "sprites" were more like shapes arranged in specific places, that lit up to show a finite amount of actions you could take... anyway, i took inspiration from the arcade & mini arcade era haha to design with awareness of how much breathingroom all the playable and non playable characters will have on screen.

so things like astroids or geometry wars can objectively have a fairly busy screen. but because the important things are conveyed to the player well, games can avoid overloading the player. starcraft, jeeze, there's a lot going on with the screen and entire moveable map, command and conquer, anyway. ^_^

also the character side / verticality allows for quite a bit of range for terrain of the level, narrow choke-points right on up to wider battlefields.

the max player character height range is likely going to be somewhere around 9-10ft (at POV) height area. for a playable character...
that is

Spoiler

a "Tall White Alien", which physically resemble "The Gray Aliens" (Zeta Ret. ~10ft) for the exception of height, longer limbs, and another hue.
and a reptillian soldier (smaller scale is ~9-11ft)

there are a few other 'non humanoid' characters that ideally would be unlockable playable 'boss' characters, at final version.
there are robots, lots of hybrid monstrosities and things similar to zombies, choices for the player to try and make sense of their violence or to choose the route of senselessness.

lastly, for some of the RPG-lite factors, i had been inspired by adventures like TLoZ and their use of puzzles, for sure, but also the point and click puzzlers. theres a ton of types of RPG, one of my favs was Fallout1 & 2, but NV & 3 were cool in their own ways. but there was a difference for those who've played the fallout series would likely know, regarding linearity. So one of the ideas involves an optional dialog sysem with a few NPC via a context sensitive trigger/events, and some intersting things that can be done instead of offering '4 choices that all lead to the same place' type of thing. i don't think all of its entirely brand new, but i hadn't really found a game that had much reason for the players to perform these specific interactions with NPCs. but im fairly sure this and other ideas were done in other games, just not in this blend. thus, dialog with choices in the game will give some players pause for what it may or may not affect.

ever played Chronotrigger? probably, its one of the best games ever made that ive found. wow. always stuck with me.
so i should probably stop right now and say, the length of this game. and it is not anywhere near as long or grand in scope as chronotrigger LMAO so please relax, i am not THAT ambitious haha.

So in full seriousness, the game should be do-able in 15-20minutes if someone is crazy good at games and/or has 'got good' at this game, and ran through the game without the extra objectives being fulfilled. to get the "perfect ending" it should average closer to the 30-45minute timeframe if considering the added caution needed. but could be more, or less. but it's in the ballpark of ARCADE times, just wouldn't really work (the same as arcades) monetarily in quarter arcades for the reason of infinite lives being on by default.

the replayability factor comes with the optional routes with their own endings, some are technically shorter than the "normal/easy mode" run that i just said was 15min.
however even some of the "dead ends" will include things like dramatic diffulty spikes, which encourage the player to decide to either try harder or consider going a different way. ^_^

I'm pretty sure that last i checked, OpenBOR can handle about 99 levels through the branching path feature. I'm probably saying that a bit wrong, but I scaled the game to about 9-12 levels for the average playthrough, & a few other paths less than 9, or above 12, most likely 15 max. (i did all this math, multiple times, just dont have a recent sheet of math in front of me) All this should allow for about 8 different main endings and variations in the game. also with bonus hidden content on top of already hidden bonus content. gotta keep the boss rush in the pocket for somewhere, right?

well, didn't originally intend for this to be as long, i dissociated & eventually this is where i am haha. wanted to share some of the game's details though, before I probably get wrapped up in an animation or something this week. & been thinking about all this for a long time is another likely factor.

aurevoir~

oh, female faction costume.

Spoiler: bonus 1

& 05 is the one with this eye color & relative skin tone ranges.
a lot of creatures like zombies or insectoids will have glowing magenta eyes, certain bosses have their own individual glow, robots or mechas, a lot but i'm not certain if it'll be everything literally.

05's female dark faction outfit (the male version has long shorts that go beyond the lower knee) ignore nekomimis & the LoRA flaws. hair bangs bunch to her right, and i think its a pretty interesting representation outfit that'll work on different characters to convey NPC factions or subtext about the characters. yeah i hadn't mentioned the factions much yet, but lol...

TLDWY on factions is it'll impact the branching paths & game-play. but thats just some concepts, got lots more. going to get to making some 2D paperdoll cutouts.