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[Tuba]

Cool ideas, love the animations. Following this 

[Jay Tholen]

Cool ideas, love the animations. Following this 

Thanks! I should clarify that those spinning crappy gifs are stand-in assets. I've decided to make my own stuff instead of use REAL geocities gifs. I did convert them to the game's palette, which you can see here:



Here are some random royalty free gifs I converted to the palette. Again, these will be replaced by my own work (or work from someone I hire maybe since I'm garbage at 3D). They're just to give an idea of what I'm shooting for.

 

[Jay Tholen]

Haven't added anything new, but I figured I'd recap what stuff looks like at this point.

This will kinda be the core game loop for the OS parts:

1: check email


2: check web pages or chat. investigate suspicious stuff


3: look at the Scumbag Tracker to see more info on perp, and your reward (WIP)


4: go nab those Scumbags on the Highway (VERY temporary/WIP)

[rj]

so is all the music general midi

[Jay Tholen]

nah, it's sliightly better. i made a sequencer for the web music and all of my samples are a bit Soundblaster-y, so it's a teeny tiny bit cooler sounding than old fashioned MIDI, but stiff enough to sound like it could be from bizarro web world

[rj]

ah nice.

other question: have you played westwood's blade runner game

[Jay Tholen]

I did for like 2 minutes as a young lad but was too dumb to progress. I did watch a stream of it though. Pendleton Ward was twitching it, of all people. Ha. There may be a subconscious influence. :D

[rj]

yeah!  the core loop and aesthetic def echo that in a hugely positive way, so. anyway COOL

[Jay Tholen]

Just a tiny update. Added popup ads today. Going to script soundfx for them next.

CYBERWORLDZ is a Hypnospace competitor and love to entice the younger crowd away from HS.

[rj]

please tell me we can enter the cyberworldz

[Jay Tholen]

I'm experimenting with the idea.

Anyway, got random popups spawning properly.

[Jay Tholen]

Listing out all of the features I want to add for future reference.

HypnOS Stuff

• Scripting and dialogue box for HYPII - HYPII is the robot-skull 'helper' provided by Hypnospace to help and spy on you. I think I'll do this today. Going to add a "help" system where he explains what something is if you click on it.
• Toolbars - At least one useless toolbar that gives you popup ads every now and then. The ads are already in.
• Losing Money When an Investigation Fails - Coins flying out and a notification that you've just lost some cash. Otherwise you could just investigate all the data until you find something that works
• Desktop Pets - Stroke, punish, and feed them. Maybe treats cost money? I'm trying to think of lots of tempting purchases users can irresponsibly make. Not sure if I want these to be pre-rendered 3D or pixel art yet. Probably pixel since that's what I'm good at.
• Clickable Links in Popup Ads - Yeah.
• Download Manager - To track your downloads and exemplify how unbearably slow your hypnospace conneciton is.
• Cursors - Bleeding cursor, fairy magic cursor, flame cursor, rainbow, etc etc
• Display Settings - Most of this is implemented in code, just no UI for it yet. Screen size, scanlines, etc

The Hypnospace Highway part of the game is very early in development, so this list will be more broad and all-encompassing. Though I haven't shown much of it, I'm far more excited about the highway bits than I am the OS bits.

• Infinite Looping, but with Landmarks - Each Zone will loop infinitely.
• Citizen Vehicles - Each citizen currently online will be represented by a vehicle on the Highway. We already have different AI archetypes (Grandpa, Hotrod, etc.) that impact their driving behavior. Also implemented is a siren that will cause innocent vehicles to pull over when activated. Outlaws will act as normal citizens until you start messing with them, then they become:
• Outlaw Vehicles (on the run) - The game will swap out the normal citizen vehicle for a more dynamic Outlaw Vehicle. Depending on the severity of their crime and their stress level, they'll weave into oncoming lanes and/or employ weapons to throw you off. You stop them by interrupting their connection via pew pews and then apprehending them with a Lasso.
• "Destroying" Vehicles - Destroying a citizen's vehicle will disconnect them temporarily. They'll return to the highway after a short delay. I didn't want to make enemies defeated by just eradicating them - so I'm framing the game's weapons as "dirtying up" the citizen's connection, resulting in a disconnect when it's too dirty. More on that later.
• The Lasso & Apprehending Outlaws/Vehicles - You start with a Lasso that'll allow you to wrangle cars in front of you for a short period of time. The more their connection is interrupted/dirtied, the longer you'll be able to hold them. While in holding, you can ram them into other vehicles to dirty their connection up more. If you successfully hold them for more than ~6 seconds, they'll be Apprehended and you'll get your reward.
• Weapons (AKA Connection Interruptors) - Remotely detonated mines, remote controlled bomb cars, and a shotgun type weapon.
• Warp Areas - Sections of the highway that allow you to warp back to the safety of the OS, or to adjacent zones.
• Mobility Enhancements - Rocket jump, underground ~surfing~, etc. Fun stuff to make maneuvering highways and avoiding obstacles more fun.
• Adware/Virii - Adware and viruses will have the same effects on the highway as in the OS. Closing pop-ups while driving is not fun. :0) You contract them by either clicking on dumb links, or bumping into cars that also have them.
• Desktop Pets - I want them to run behind your car and follow you around and stuff. We'll see on this one.
• Pickups - Occasionally you'll find a file floating around on the highway. Maybe they're deployed by trucks? I don't know. Anyway, this is another way to obtain cursors, desktop backgrounds, etc etc.
• Anomalies - I want both Rogue AI and hackers to cause crazy things to happen on some highways. Perhaps a lane breaks apart, or starts rapidly sine-waving, or sandworms come out. I want all of this to look very digital and and glitchy and polygonal.

I'm also thing about adding Hypnospace's competitor, Cyberworldz. Perhaps not traditionally accessible. Maybe you have to access a command prompt and launch it in some very Arcane Kids esque way. Not sure yet. Depends on funding I'd say.

[rj]

i feel like having cyberworldz accessable thru the popups makes the most sense since...they're everywhere, it's a very game world thing. but this would definitely favor some arcane kidz bullshit.

maybe hypii doesn't let you access cyberworldz and command line is how you get around him.

i want to annoy hypii ala clippy. hypii should talk with a microsoft sam voice, or at least he does in my head

if the official website for this isnt a faux angelfire site with web 1.0 bullshit idk what i'll do

what if the trailer was a 2mb overcompressed mpeg,


between this and frog days i'm so into making OS games and i might have to do one myself

[KaiTheSpy]

This aesthetic is amazing!

[jamesprimate]

this is gonna be so fun

[oldblood]

I have no idea how I missed this devlog, this is an amazing concept. Will be following!

[Jay Tholen]

thanks guys!

@rj, yeah I've gotta figure that Cyberworldz stuff out still. yeah, HYPII blocking access to things is going to be a recurring happening I think. It'd be cool for players to wonder if that's just a design limitation, or if they can actually get around him somehow and access the forbidden stuff.

Fiddling with Search. Added the ability to click the "Search Results" tab to go back and see the list again. Before it'd just take you to the zone listing.


Having a bit of an issue because it doesn't show results consistently. Not really sure what's causing it. Hopefully not a limitation in Fusion or that's gonna suck.

[rj]

holy fuck are you actually using mmf

christ almighty in heaven oh my that is perfect for this



edit: yeah duh you said that in the op and i missed it.

[ashtonmorris]

Still looks awesome

[Jay Tholen]

holy fuck are you actually using mmf

aha, yeah. i've been using Clickteam stuff since the late nineties so I have a strange loyalty to it.