#immersive simulation

J(a)SON Post #2

Interfacing:

Games like Deus Ex, VtM:B, Prey 2017, etc. include interesting interfaces for things like computers, security terminals, etc. Rather than just simply showing the player the information they need to see and then moving on, they opt to allow the player to explore an interface with a degree of control closer to that of a real device or an operating system. The first time I saw the interface for controlling cameras in Deus Ex, all of the synapsis in my brain fired at once when I realized you can just manually rotate the cameras and enable /disable them individually. It doesn't take that much extra effort to include this degree of interactivity, and it baffles me as to why so few big budget games do so. At a certain point in development, I realized I needed a system like this, so I set it up so that I could easily create and assign an interface to any device that needs one. As you can see in the photos above, each interface has its own pre-render that depicts a closeup of whatever the player is interacting with. This allows me the freedom to basically do whatever I want with them, and it opens up the door to some pretty fun possibilities. On a surface level it allows a higher degree of player freedom as they can do things like manually set the timer on the c4, but it will also allow me to do some more ambitious stuff like create a micro-os for the computers that lets you check email, mess with a pseudo-code terminal, and play picross. This week I've been working on the ATM, which will allow you to enter any bank account information that you come across and drain whatever amount of money you want from the account. I'm looking forward to sharing more of the interfaces as I develop them, so I guess you'll see them then.

Conclusion:

Deathloop

Developer: Arkane Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Steam Deck Compatibility?: Verified Rrp: £49.99 (Humble, Steam and Epic) Released: 14th September 2021 Available on: Humble, Steam and Epic Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard and Steam Deck Approximate game length: 20+ Hours

With a gasp you wake up on the beach again. What was it this time? A sniper, gotta stay in cover next time. With a gasp you wake up on the beach again. What was it this time? Machete, got me from behind while I was shooting her friends. With a gasp you wake up on the beach again. What was it this time? Damn, cooked the grenade too long. With a gasp you wake up on the beach again. And again. And again. And again. Eventually, you’ll get it right. With each loop a clue and another step closer.

Deathloop is a FPS from the developers of the Dishonored series Arkane Studios (yes, they also made Redfall but that’s a whole saga unto itself). The game is set on the small Isle of Blackreef, where a strange group of people have somehow set up a time loop that resets itself at the end of each day. For most people, when the day loops they forget everything that happened. You play as Colt a man who for some reason retains his memories between the loops and has decided he’s had enough, it’s time the loop was destroyed.

The problem is, destroying the loop is not as simple as smashing a machine, you have to kill a specific group of people who call themselves Visionaries. Complicating this is the fact that they all have to die within the same loop, which is harder than it sounds because they’re all scattered around the isle. A second problem is Julianna, a skilled assassin who also retains her memories from loop to loop and wants to protect the loop.

In order to kill those Visionaries you’re going to need the one thing that can never be taken from you. Information. With each loop you learn something new, maybe even several things, such as where people are going to be and when. Perhaps that will allow you to lay out a trap, or at least find a time when they are at their most vulnerable. Of course, even if you fail and only kill one Visionary in a loop that’s still no bad thing. The Visionaries carry special items called ‘slabs’ which grant you an ability such as being able to go invisible or teleport short distances. The more of these abilities you can gain the easier the whole affair will be.

Of course, the Visionaries aren’t the only ones on this isle with something worth taking. You see the various enemies on the isle all carry weapons and sometimes items called ‘trinkets’. All trinkets fall into one of two types; personal or weapon. Weapon trinkets can be applied to a weapon and will have a passive effect such as increasing the damage or reducing recoil.  Personal trinkets work similarly to weapon trinkets but instead will give a passive benefit to your character or in some cases grant an ability such as double jump. Both weapons and trinkets come in one of four rarities, crude (black), sleek (blue), exemplar (purple) and unique (orange). In the case of weapons the higher the level of rarity the more weapon trinkets can be applied to it, and with trinkets the higher its level the more potent it is.

A loop lasts from morning til night, then you wake up on the beach again and all your equipment is reset and all enemies respawn (yes, even the Visionaries). The game splits the ever looping day into four parts; morning, noon, afternoon and evening. Each of the districts have different opportunities that arise at different times of day, meaning that you will likely spend multiple loops exploring a single district to work out how to do your perfect final run. There are only two ways to progress time which is either travelling between the districts or choosing to wait in the district select screen. Yes, this does mean that you could spend twelve hours exploring a district and when you leave it will still be ‘morning’.

As you might have noticed I mentioned that once a loop restarts everything is reset, so you might wonder what the point in gathering weapons and items would be since they all get reset back to zero at the start of each loop. There is an answer and the answer is ‘Residuum’. Residuum is a resource that can be spent to allow you to carry specific weapons, trinkets and slabs between loops. You can find residuum while exploring the districts but your main source will be through sacrificing weapons and trinkets you don’t need. Of course, you don’t have this power right away, nope. You need to find and complete a specific quest to gain it. I recommend prioritising that quest over anything else in the game, because without it the game is near impossible to beat.

While exploring the island you’ll get ‘invaded’ (to use Dark Souls terminology) by Julianna, or rather, a player controlling her. This player will lock down your tunnels for escape and hunt you relentlessly. If you do manage to kill them then you can get some residuim, a weapon, trinkets and sometimes a slab (or slab upgrade). You can’t avoid being invaded by changing the setting to single player or friends only because the game will instead invade you with an AI controlled version.

Verticality is the word that comes to mind when I think of this games level design. The developers clearly wanted to give the players as many options on how to approach a scenario. Do you go in guns blazing? Maybe sneaking through the vents or over the rooftops? Perhaps a mix of the two. The fact that the districts change depending on what time of day you enter them is great too, some windows are now closed, others open, perhaps a passage has appeared that wasn’t there before. So many options.

I love this game, it really scratches an itch that Dishonored left behind. One of the many things I love about it is that it’s really just one big puzzle. Admittedly, a very violent puzzle but still a puzzle.

If this appeals to you perhaps try;

The Dishonored Series The Sexy Brutal Thief 2: The Metal Age

For anyone that doesn’t know the reference, here u go!

Home Safety Hotline

Have you heard of analogue horror? For those unaware, all three of you by this point, it’s a style of horror that purposefully uses the look of VHS tapes and old technology to make a strong, haunting atmosphere. It’s been a huge thing online for a few years now, helped by the popularity of works like Local58 and Gemini Home Entertainment. It was only a matter of time before this style would wind up in games, and we have a game here directly inspired by those two series (as revealed in the art book you can unlock after finishing the game). Heck, there’s even a handful of youtube style analogue horror videos you can unlock in the game itself, where the Gemini Home Entertainment influence shines through incredibly strong.

J(a)SON Post #3

Stealing Money For Fun & Profit:

Most of my week was spent playing dark souls 2 again, but aside from that I spent most of my time working on the ATM's functionality. The ATM is heavily inspired by the ATMs in Deus Ex, and just like in that game you can input an account's information and then drain it. In the gif above you can see an example of me sneaking into the nefarious Doctor Spider's evil bank account and stealing 200 bucks. You can also blow up the ATM to get 75 bucks worth of wads of money to come out of it, or you can try to hack the ATM and get it to lock up like a dummy. Pretty simple stuff, but it always feels amazing to sneak into someone's bank account and steal all their money, and in the game as well! For those interested, I used jwildfire for the background fractal textures on the ATM UI. That program is amazing and I'd highly recommended checking it out (especially if you have an affinity for y2k visuals).

Building a Gas Station:

After a while spent purely implementing devices and mechanics, I was really itchin' to make an environment. I decided to start putting together a gas station since it's the smallest environment segment I have planned for the main map. In the images above you can probably get a good feel for my process on an environment like this. I haven't ever really done whiteboxing before this project, but I've found it to be very helpful when having to make more detailed environments. I actually hate having to litter an environment with smaller details and objects, which is the main reason why most of the environments in my previous games feel pretty sparse. I can't just get away with broad strokes this time around though, so I started to employ "words" that dictate where a planned object should go. Texturing all of the products in the gas station is easily the most tedious part, and it burns me out pretty quickly. So far, I've only textured 4 chip bag variants and 4 cereal box variants, and most of the products are yet untextured. These environments always look pretty terrible before I get them in engine and all lit up, so I have to trust that it's gonna look and feel a lot better once that is done.

Conclusion:

Deathloop

After Prey (2017) underperformed, Arkane mainly focused on an expansion for Dishonered 2 and helping MachineGames with some Wolfenstein projects. As for the next big project, that turned out to be Deathloop, a game subtly set in the Dishonored universe in an alternate history style Cold War era, and it turned out to be very, very different from any other project they’ve done tonally. Not necessarily in the design, mind you. 

Prey (2017)

By all accounts, Arkane Studios decided on the name Prey not because they wanted to reboot the old game, but just because the name was a good title for what their game was going for. You could argue the name “Psycho Shock” would be more appropriate overall, but that could have created some friction with Take Two. There still seems to be some shared DNA, like starting the game with the lead looking in a mirror, using a wrench as your melee weapon, and the use of mirrors to create impossible sights, facing down powerful aliens, but the real foundational stuff come from the classic System Shock games, down to anti-grav elevators and being stuck on a space station overrun with an inhuman menace that can even weaponize humans though mind control. It also has very, VERY similar gameplay, ultimately a sort of sci-fi dungeon crawler that rewards outside the box thinking.