UPDATE 10/30: It's done!UPDATE 10/8: Ready for people to try the final release! Help me out and check
this post for download links.
Heyo. I haven't posted in a while. Like nearly a decade. I originally set up these forum with Derek. If you remember me please reference some 2005 era in-joke. Or tell me if this looks at all familiar:
I'm making games again! Or starting to. Actually I've never finished any to be honest. But THATS ABOUT TO CHANGE. For the last year I've been working on an editor/tool for Unity that lets me build sector-based level environments like mid 90s shooters. Mainly modeled after Ken Silverman's build engine and editor.
Here's an old Tumblr with some screenshots and a video about it towards the bottom. I've rebuilt it since then to work inside the Unity editor so you can actually do things the Unity way.
So one of my demos was rebuilding the first floor of the visitor center from the 1993 SNES Jurassic Park game. Because I loved that game. Even if it were rushed and has its problems, as a kid it was easy to see it for what it could have been. But even for what it was it was pretty cool. It was the only Jurassic Park game of the originals that had an FPS mode for interiors. Of course, unlike a PC game, there's no easy way to get at the level data or even the art data (I tried going through a ROM save dump and found nothing, perhaps because of the hacks they did to do FPS natively on SNES with Mode 7?)... so I had to map out the floor plan and wall textures by hand and then screenshot every texture and fix up in Photoshop. If this sound laborious it's worse than that because of the way it would unevenly re-pixelate anything inside interiors from every position. ANYWAY, I did enough to rebuild the first level using my tool. Over a year ago. I took a screenshot and then actually stopped working on the tool entirely.
Then a few months ago I started working on the tool again, porting it to run as a Unity editor. I wanted to use it for something totally different from FPS's, outdoor areas for maybe a top down adventure game?
Here was one experiment with that.But those projects were rather ambitious. Not necessarily ideal for a first completed project. I started playing around with the Jurassic Park interior more and made it actually playable. And even though the environments were way simpler than my tool allowed, it covered a lot of basics I needed to make sure it did right. So I kept going. Then a friend suggested I submit it to a festival. It's not even an original game! But I guess he saw the love in it, and I started looking at it like a "cover" ... something we don't see that often in indie games outside of demakes. Here I was trying to capture the spirit of the game, but adapted to modern playability standards.
I decided to go for the festival submission, even if it was going to be rejected, just to have a deadline. And it worked! It's now a (nearly) complete, playable game. It's short, and still (intentionally) has some of the issues of the original, but it's a game! I'm posting here because I do have some cool making-of material to share with my first and favorite indie game making community. And I have a little bit more to go before final release.
Here's how it looks now (not sure whats up with the Youtube mangled colors):
You can even download and try the beta (more screenshots too):
https://progrium.itch.io/visitor-centerTHOUGHTS??
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