This is a horror first-person shooter project I started years ago during a 7 day FPS game jam, and just dusted it off over the holidays to make it into a proper game. Id appreciate feedback on it!



Get the game here:
https://frankiesmileshow.itch.io/deathless-hyperion



The game is inspired of my distorted memories of playing Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold as an impressionable 6 year old, and being terrified of it.
 
Play the game today and you realize it wasnt really all that scary, it wasnt even really trying to be, but it was a lot to a 6 year old. Wanted to make a game that felt like Blake Stone did! Other elements inspired from it are the very detailed, kind of overwhelming HUD with information about items and enemies.

My game as it stands now needs some more monsters, some better monster sounds, and more atmospheric sounds especially. Design wise it also needs better ways for the player to orient themselves, its a bit too easy to get lost in the station right now. Id probably add some station maps on some walls to help the player visualize the larger scope of the game world a bit better.

This is really my very first 3d game, so id appreciate feedback on 3d-specific stuff especially, but any feedback is appreciated!

I have been working on this game a lot, but have not been updating this topic whatsoever! I'll try to update it more in the future, I'll try to maybe update it once a week at least?

I have been hard at work on Chapter 1, been making a lot of encounters and NPCs, and been working on the overall sequence of it. The goal right now is to have chapter 1's main sequence be complete and fully playable by the end of november, and then have Chapter 2 be sequence-complete by january.

Heres a few other things I've been doing:

• Better support for different languages, with the game's text taken from external spreadsheet files
• Been making lots of special "test" enemies/bosses to add much-needed features to the combat system: Enemies that protect another enemy, enemies that charge an attack over several turns, enemies that spawn other enemies, enemies that transform into another enemy, enemies that counterattack, or react to being hit by a specific damage type with a specific action, etc.
• Equipment-given status effects. Also allowed Cursed items to work, cant unequip them until uncursed.
• Made a proper auto-map, that also marks doors you haven't opened or unlocked yet.
• Improved the message boxes to have smoother text with support for in-line color changing and text effects
• Put in various special in-game languages/codes that NPCs can speak in, that get partially transl-ated if you have the right skills
• Trimmed down the use of data structures in saving the game to only use them when absolutely needed; when I save the state of some objects, it automatically figures out whether to save a full version of that objects' data or a truncated version where its just a single value (like, an empty crate doesnt save the contents of its inventory or whether its been unlocked etc, it only saves wheth-er you checked inside yet or not)
• Added little notification pop-ups for messages that are not important enough to use the main message windows which take away player control. They are a bit like desktop push notifications.
• Added a bunch of debug features to my in-game debug console: instantly build a party of a certain level, etc. Also added a "get through this instantly" button in debug mode that instantly kills all opponents in the current battle, instantly unlocks a door you are examining, identifies all carried items etc.

Drawing some more of those cockroach monsters on my twitch stream tonight.
Tune in here: https://www.twitch.tv/frankiepixelshow

Thanks and! Yeah, its good to be updating this thread again. I have a lot to talk about, the game has evolved so much over the past year.

Just made a pretty substantial change this weekend!
The player movement in the game is no longer tile-based like it used to be back in the RPG Maker version, you move around freely now. Enemies still move tile-based though, it makes the pathfinding easier to handle, and makes their movements feel a little more predictable in a somewhat fun way. Might make a few enemies that break the grid however, that might mix things up.

I have been sending versions of the game around to a few testers, and this has led to pretty substantial tweaks and improvements in the past year. The grid-based movement was one of the most common recurring criticisms, but I was wary of how complicated it could be to change the player movement this drastically, considering almost every trigger and collision in the game works by tile position. Turns out it wasn't so bad, just took a few days of hunting down a bunch of bugs the change introduced.

Alright so I think its time for me to bring this topic back!

I have not been posting publicly about this game at all, but I've been working on it quite a bit.
I have remade the whole damn game in Game Maker Studio 2, which I am much more familiar with. It also now has a new resolution and feels a lot more smooth than before.









I've been working on a little vertical slice style demo for a few months, based on the game's prologue, before you reach the city proper.
I am planning to send this to some publishers soon.

Still haven't decided on an actual name for the game, though I have a few in mind.

A few major improvements so far:

• Enemy encounters are now actually based on the enemies on the map around you at the start of a battle.
• You can now be interrupted by enemies when you are searching a treasure chest or opening a door.
• Bashing a door open or forcing a lock makes noise, which alerts nearby monsters which come to investigate.
• Enemies chase the player with much better pathfinding (now uses an A* algorithm. It used to just be the regular RPG Maker "move towards player" thing). Pathfinding also accounts for the size of monsters.
• Enemy movements in battle are now smooth, and use scaling in addition to unique frames.
• Character portraits in battle have little animations to go along with their attacks.
• Items can be randomized, and are sometimes unidentified, enchanted, cursed etc.

Work on this is still pretty slow! I'm still working on Barkley2 and doing some freelancing, but it has been very steady. If I can get some funding, I might be able to speed this up though. That's what I am hoping for!

Its probably going to be like, an ATARI MINI, with like 40 atari games on it.
Why wouldnt they get dollar signs in their eyes looking at how much the NES mini sold?
Not sure its gonna work as well tho.

From what I understand, Warren Ellis wasn't really involved other than writing a script for a movie a while back, that this series is based on. Its probably barely recognizable from the original script other than some dialogue and the basic outline of the season's story.
The series creator, Adi Shankar, is indeed a giant nerd though. He seems single-minded with the idea of making fun or faithful adaptations of nerdy shit. He made that kind-of famous Punisher "Dirty Laundry" short a few years back (and a bunch more shorts like it), and he directed that Dredd movie I really liked.

Just binged the whole thing, its actually really short, just 4 episodes.
Overall it was pretty good.
The tone was a bit more serious than my taste, but not as serious as I feared. Like, my ideal take on a Castlevania cartoon would be a slightly less humorous Korgoth of Barbaria... But this was fine too.
First episode is mostly backstory, and then the show settles on a kind of slow-ish pace. The final, fourth episode of the season felt a bit rushed in comparison, especially the final third of it, it felt like it was cut from scenes of a fifth episode. The rest of the show did not have this problem at all, so it really stood out that way.

Theres some funny moments in this. Not all the jokes are winners obviously, but its funny enough.

Trevor Belmont doesn't have the personality I imagined of him, being the first slayer of Dracula in the series, I kind of imagined him as a Conan-like legendary hero. What we got instead is a snarky, bumbling, slightly brooding antihero type.
But obviously, legendary hero types work better as a backstory character than an actual protagonist. For a series with a tone like this and for what they are going for, I think it works pretty well. Hes likable enough.

I hope that we get more seasons, it felt more like an introduction to a series than a proper first season in a way. Like this was a sort of pilot season.
I am very pleased to see that Castlevania 3, my favorite game of the series and favorite NES game, is basically what this whole thing is based on, with extra cues and bits taken from Symphony Of The Night.

About the humor, theres also some weird meta-humor going on, thats not quite "ha ha" jokes, but like references going on throughout. It was also way closer to the games than I expected, and has a lot of dumb little references. Its not too cringy with em or anything either, not too bad.
There was a weird scene of Trevor "platforming" early on, and several scenes of people falling into pits. Like they wanted to have some kind of acknowledgement of how the games play in the show. More a little recurring joke/nod about the games than something that the show is about though, obviously.

Alucard literally used his SOTN Alucard Sword's secret ability in the show. You know, the thing where doing a hadoken motion forward + attack triggers special moves with some weapons, and the game never tells you about them, so a lot of people beat the game yet don't even know about these moves? The Alucard Sword's secret ability teleports you behind an enemy to attack, and Alucard literally does this in the show in the season's final scene. They even replicate the little visual effect from the game. I am embarrassed that this is something I noticed, that it made me somehow happy, and that I felt the need to bring it up here. Pandering to nerds works, guys. I am trash, I belong in a trash can

It is really inspiring to scroll through! A really eclectic selection of games, all sorts of stuff in there. So many weird visual styles and colors and genres. As I scroll through, I haven't recognized a single game I've seen before, I wonder what moshboy was doing to find these. Gives an impression of how much of the indie game iceberg is hidden under the water surface.
Playing through all of those games will take years. Good luck...

Two games I worked on in jams ended up in it!
Neither of them are really "complete", pretty flawed in their own ways.
One was #460, "Tiny Adventure", a zelda-ish sort of game played on one screen at a large resolution, made on a Ludum Dare. The other was #971, Can of Worms, a fishing game I made with several friends for the global game jam.

Tiny adventure was really strange and was probably a terrible idea, but im still pretty happy with it. The result is obviously terrible but also kind of cute.

Can Of Worms turned out really, really well, I think that was one of the best game jams we did, everything went really smoothly, though its got some weird design issues we'll have to figure out if we ever want to "finish" it.

I tend to go for more lengthy video essays, theyre great to watch while I work.

I really like Noah Gervais' videos. They're very thorough and have an enjoyable tone and some great nuance.
But they're really long though, several hours sometimes.
He made a 2-hour long video looking at Baldur's Gate, and 1-hour video about the Wolfenstein series.
He also made a great video about Postal, Hatred and "asshole simulators". Here's that one:



Also, there is a still-in-progress video series about Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night, which is structured like an annotated Lets Play series. Maybe this is a bit what Derek said he was looking for, a lets play with some insight about the game? Its pretty thorough, goes into both game-specific trivia, development history and into cultural or historical inspirations of the developers. Its a complete playthrough of the game with written narration and stuff displayed to the side, as opposed to someone just improvising tidbits about the game that they remember as they play. Here is the first part of the series:



At the time I post this, the series is about halfway through the game. New videos come about once a week. Kind of a slow paced compared to Let's Play videos, but its understandable considering all the editing involved.

And finally, Hbomberguy makes lengthy videos about games sometimes, though its not his main thing. Hes got a great self-deprecating sense of humor, good comedic timing, that really help make those lengthier videos work. Those are often over one hour long too. Heres his 1h30m video about Fallout 3's failure on engaging the player as an RPG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ1gyIzg78

I agree with the video that Demon's Souls was a bit more comfortable with doing weird things, while the other games have been relatively more safe as they settle into certain kinds of designs through the series' evolution, focusing on the parts they felt worked best, but somewhat at the detriment of the games feeling more predictable in gameplay terms.

But I think he overstates how samey the boss battles have gotten. You have to describe those battles in very obtuse terms to make them sound similar (dodge attacks and then punish), a lot of the content's resemblances are only skin-deep. I think the general movement of boss battles and setpieces throughout the series has been to move away from battles that have specific "solutions" to them, so players deal with these situations based on their setup and their available options, instead of just figuring out that main strategy they're "meant" to be using.
Basically, if you play the game as a hammer, every boss looks like a nail. If you play the game slightly less focused on one specific strategy, the boss battles feel more different from one another, as you switch up your strategies depending on your strengths and weaknesses, and how those interact with that specific boss.

(also, they still have some puzzle-bosses. those have never gone away, theyre just a bit more sparse, as theyve developped a liking to some specific kinds of showdowns)

The combat feels really good to me. Those optional bosses at the end are super intense fights, theres a really good learning curve throughout the game as you get extra offensive and defensive options, and the game properly increases your need to learn to make use of them throughout. The games' various equippable accessories also give great options for changing up your play, with some fun synergies to experiment with.

I think its pretty hard to judge a game like this before having played it, their main attraction is the maze you explore, its scope and design, not really the sort of thing that shows up on screenshots. Everything else about the game seems pretty competent at least, I dont really get the negativity around this one. Not really seeing any red flags here at all.

I think the game has very clear landmarking. The rooms feel very distinct, especially with the detailed backgrounds. I never really had problems finding my way.

haha cmon smartass
Its a pretty good base system if you need to make such an extreme edge case to show a flaw in it imo!
Its pretty rare that a great cover art takes one hour to do like ProgramGamer said. Normally there would be a lot of time sketching concepts. Also, lots of other stuff than covers and trailers can end up drawing a big crowd, like a really solid soundtrack, or striking visual style, or inventive concept.

And it takes a lot more than a sweet cover to draw in millions of people nowadays. A better edge case might be having a really famous person on the team or related to the project, whose involvement guarantees a huge audience. That sort of thing could probably have enough leverage to let em negotiate a bigger cut.

But I dont think stuff like this is really relevant or the kind of situation we are talking about here. OP is clearly talking about collaborators working on the game, not advertising stuff.

I think a reasonable way to figure out profit sharing is to ask the contributors to count the time they spend working on the game, and in the end figure out a revenue split based on the ratio of time everyone spent on it.

Whats good about this, is that its flexible: a contributor that was planned not to be doing much work at first, but who ends up doing a lot more, wont need to "re-negotiate" the contract to get a fair share. Same thing for the other way around: if the team grows and some people end up with a lighter work load no re-negotiation should be needed.  Things can change around fast over the course of a project, so a flexible deal like that is useful.
The time keeping can be based on mutually-agreed upon time blocks per asset or groups of assets they make, to minimize the risk of a contributor inflating their recorded times to maximize their share etc, that might be a good idea if you are dealing with someone new.

One inconvenient part of this is that different people work at different speeds, and that kind of deal doesnt take the amount or quality or value of the work into account, only gives value to peoples' time, which is only "fair" if everyone working on the project is of roughly comparable experience. So yeah, not perfect, but I think its a good starting point.

Ugh, why do so many people here sound like very cranky old men?
The kinds of games you are whining about were not made by some committee of businessmen in suits cynically looking for the easiest way to cash in on the latest trends, they were made by individuals who are sometimes working from similar sets of inspirations, exploring genres and themes that speak to them, however they please. I find this dismissive attitude boring and a little gross. Shallow, worthless negativity. The kind of shit I normally expect to hear from outsiders to a genre, who might have a naive critical position based on ignorance, to whom it all "looks really similar" just because of a lack of familiarity with the subject matter. It feels kind of weird to see this sort of garbage here, in what I normally see as a mostly supportive creative community.

Oh yeah I saw a pic of Uurnog on twitter, gives some good vibes of Lyle in Cube sector, real colorful. Havent tried it yet, but I probably will. Its a Nifflas game, right, so could maybe expect some nice chill exploration.

Rainworld doesnt seem quite as chill, heard its real tough, but seems to be right in my bag.

Mediterannean Sundance, by Al Di Meola and Paco De Lucia. Amazing mix of jazz and flamenco.

About all of this, have we started to see some numbers on the effects of Steam's discovery update? It was supposed to help discovery of games on the platform, its been out for a couple months now. Discovery is the real underlying problem behind a lot of the issues people are talking about here I think. I heard some enthusiastic comments early back in January, but we probably have more numbers to look at by now. Anyone here with a some games out noticed an uptick in the last few months?