The Website is Down Adventure Game
What's this?A comedy adventure game where you solve problems using retro technology and deal with the timeless shenanigans of human to computer to human interaction!
Visit my GameJolt page with a tech demo:
The Website is DownBackgroundMy name is Josh Weinberg and a long time ago I made a web-series called The Website is Down (see
Sales Guy vs Web Dude). This project started out as an “interactive episode” of the web-series and over time morphed into an adventure game. At the moment there is no “game” in this game however, it’s mostly just a big proof-of-concept!
Photographic realism!
Currently I am working on completing the prelude - the first short segment of the game which will also function as a playable demo. In it you find yourself locked in your parents’ basement in their sad attempt at some kind of intervention. “We’ll let you out when you get off drugs and get a job!” they yell through the door. “I’m not on drugs!” you yell back. “Well just find a job then!” Your mother is nice enough to slip a fruit-roll-up under the door. So caring! But how are you supposed to find a job locked in a basement? Too bad you don’t have a cell phone. It’s 1983, remember! You find your dad’s IBM XT computer and manage to put it together and boot it. You also discover a modem and your old list of BBS numbers. SKRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE AIYEEEOHHHNNCHEEEE. Now for the job part!
Bubble CamYou can see that while the interface is 3D first-person, the environment is built with panoramic photography. I call this the “Bubble Cam” and it basically consists of showing the player a picture of my parent's actual basement from anywhere they can go. I will make a separate devblog post on how this is achieved.
Collisions with the background. Like when you walk into a wall drunk.
Since I wanted the real feel of the 80's of course we need a big ol honkin' desktop computer to work with. Here you see the IBM PC 5160 "XT" which was the Cadillac model of the day. I actually found one of these (working!) and used it as a reference to make the models and the text mode simulation as accurate as possible.
Let's put this bad boy together.
Well now that we've got our computer assembled let's take this bad boy out on the freeway. I made up some terminal software and called it Brocomm I don't know why but this is your ticket to the world of dial-up networking. Have fun and watch out for those long-distance charges!
Luckily we have a hacked version!
The game currently is in a very early tech-demo state. Some things you can see in the videos above:
- The "Bubble Cam" panoramic 3D visuals.
- Object occlusion and shadows on panoramic background.
- Basic game stuff - pickup, drop, inspect.
- Compose parts to build computer.
- IBM XT text mode simulator.
- Turn on computer - boot to BROCOMM.
- See the BALZE hack page!
Some other things which are working but you can’t see are:
- VT100 terminal emulation
- Telnet and SSH to internet BBSes via in-game computer
- QEmu integration - run virtual PC via in-game computer
And this will be done when?Probably never! I've been working on this thing in my spare time for a few years now. Will it ever be done? No idea. As I mentioned, it's all a major work in progress and there is no real “game” part yet but I wanted to get the current state up on the blog so I can share what there is to share. I will post more about some of the above technical stuff later. Thanks for reading!
-josh
I didn't expect to like the game so much, I've already recommended it to my friends.
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