The Minecraft Fallout Mashup

This is another spitball that nobody will see, because I'm purposefully using no tags. I just went through some old Minecraft worlds, and tried out the Fallout mashup. It's interesting, because it doesn't play like Minecraft as much.

For one, it's on a pre-1.14 version, maybe even pre-1.12. Villager UIs are back to the old version, you have no recipe book for quick crafting, and because of the texturing, everything looks different so you can't quickly identify things in your inventory. With so many ruined buildings on the surface, you're disincentivised from mining, chopping down trees, digging into the earth, et cetera. I spent a lot of time just exploring, and because so much of the map is poorly lit, there were a lot of mobs. Juggling resources became far more important. I never thought about building a proper shelter, it was "I can probably take refuge in that big building for the night. Plus, it might have some good loot in there." I was making mental notes of things that could be important - one of my self-set objectives was to trade books for an emerald from a Diamond City villager, so I looked around for academic-looking buildings around the Capital Wasteland area, sometimes breaking in through the wall, or going in through the doors. I was constantly juggling resources too. "What will I need to explore here? What should I discard?" All the while, I was fending off dangerous mobs, building makeshift barricades and plugging holes in wrecked houses to make them safe while I cooked some steaks and crafted myself a bed for the night.

The atmosphere also added a lot to it. Everything's decaying and dead. Every building is a labyrinth of dark corridors and rooms blocked off with junk and furniture. You're barely scraping by and you're constantly reminded of that. Nobody has much of anything out here, so you need to prioritize. If it's not necessary, drop it.

This vibe could be really well harnessed in some sorta survival game. You can break some things, but it's time-consuming. The focus is less on base-building and more on looting, exploration, limited combat and hunting.

Spitballing About Open-World Resource Collection Mechanics

Yeah, TWL is finished, but that doesn't mean I can't use this account for rambling about other game-related stuff. The FPS account is for Overdeath, this is just anything game-y.

At some point I want to make an open world survival crafting type game. Now, MandaloreGaming has called the mixing of these genres "Cursed Runes", due to the fact that they start off greenlit on Steam Early Access, before never delivering on their original concept. Being an aspiring game dev wracked by hubris and naivety, I want to make one! So far, it's going to be like Hydroneer (more realistic crafting and resource extraction plus basic mechanical stuff) with the survival mechanics of Minecraft. The main thing that separates my game (the working title is AG) from Hydroneer is two things: how the game starts and how it ends. Because Hydroneer uses fancy voxel terrain, everything has to start off as dirt, which you then panhandle away until you have minerals and gems. It's not like Minecraft or other games where you tunnel into the ground to find materials, you've gotta refine the dirt if you want to get anything. For AG, I want there to be a bit more than that, perhaps finding pockets of different soil types (podzols, loamy, chalk etc.) which have different chances of having ores. Secondly, Hydroneer level progression. In AG, my plan is for you to be the only human on the continent, shaping it to your whims. In Hydroneer though, your job is a miner and that plays into the economy. The gameplay loop is "panhandle for loot, sell loot, buy machines to panhandle even more efficiently, sell even more loot", rinse repeat until you've bought every plot of land. I don't find that too engaging; I did when I was younger, in fact I plugged many hours into the various Farming Simulator games. But I prefer a drive for exploration and actual progression towards something new, not just being able to afford the new gizmo at the local store.

Next is a continuation of the resource collection problem. I want the world interactivity of Minecraft, but that's not really feasible. Minecraft runs on its own engine that can properly render all those blocks at once, using chunks and render distances and other tricks. Unreal Engine will see each block as its own actor, resulting in a spray of molten metal and plastic that was once my CPU erupting out of the side of my laptop, while a torrent of dead pixels consumes my thirty-seconds-per-frame gaming experience. So, we could do what Ark does, and have boulders, trees, shrubbery etc. destructible for materials. Or the Subnautica thing, where outcrops will randomly spawn on surfaces, keeping a random type of mineral inside. What I could do is a happy compromise of "harvesting nodes" spawning in a pre-made map, which can then be mined. This means mining can only be done in specific locations, which is more realistic than finding ores anywhere.

Imagine, you collect a sizeable amount of clay from a riverbank. You return to your camp, fashioning a kiln and a crucible. Next, you go to to the swamp downstream, looking for withered grass on reddish soil. You dig through the peat to harvest nodules of bog iron, fueling your kiln with some sticks you collected and smelting the bog iron down in your crucible. After several in-game hours, it's molten, so you pour it into a blade mould also made out of clay. Now, you have an iron sword. The idea is for your character to go through natural stages of civilization and primitive technology like this. Eh, it's just an idea.

~Quick message to followers~

I'm moving to a new blog, so if you want to continue to see my games develop, please go to NitroSodium's Epic FPS.

Music Games Investigation

This time, I have broader genres. Any game that uses music or sound in an interesting way, for my purposes, is a "music game".

Friday Night Funkin - This is a game I was obsessed with back in 2021. It's a prototypical falling-arrows rhythm game, with the funky counterculture aesthetic of late 2000s Newgrounds. You know, Madness Combat, Pico's School, all of that. Mechanically, it's nothing special, but a few of the tracks really stand out, and the levels have interesting gimmicks - Week 3 has a rushing train to throw you off, and Week 7 takes place in an active warzone, with soldiers running about and tanks rumbling across the screen, further blocking your arrows. The fanbase is... difficult, it seems they can't go a week without ending up with a mod cancellation or some new drama. But, mechanically, it's fine. I'm no way near as good as I used to be at it, but sometimes I still open it up and play a round or so.

Metal Hellsinger - I've only seen a little of this game, but it looks really sick. You enter Hell with a cool sword, and then you kill demons to the beat of heavy metal, starring actual metal singers. I don't know what else to say; it's pretty distilled, no real bloat or feature creep. You can do combos and executions, and the longer you kill on beat for, the more your combo meter increases. Interestingly, unlike a lot of music games, the focus isn't on going at ludicrous speeds, it's about staying on beat, so the character is actually pretty slow.

Hi-Fi Rush - I've heard of this game, but I honestly knew nothing about it until today. All I know is it's a rhythm game and possibly a JRPG, and it stars a cat, and it's all really stylised and cel-shaded. After watching a few videos, I've found it's pretty cool! It's some sort of third-person action game, where everything in the world is tied to the beat - screens flash, trees bob, and enemies move according to the music's BPM. You also have to attack, using elaborate combos and moves to the game's alt-rock soundtrack. Everything in the environment just pops with colour; it's a very bright game, taking you from lava pools to gigantic robot factories. It seems like something I'd actually enjoy, to be honest.

Also, here's a quick look at dynamic soundtracks. The first one I'll look at is the hi-tech hack n' slash Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Apart from having some of the best music in the Metal Gear series, the music is sort of dynamic. In boss fights, it loops the bridge of the song until you get to a point where you can critically wound the boss, at which point, the chorus flares up, perfectly timed with you slicing a chunk off your current cybernetic foe. Once you've cut them down to low health, the lyrics kick in. It's so amazing. Doom 2016 had a similar system, where the music would fast-forward to a high-octane segment when you got into combat, and the beat would loop until you were at a point in combat where the beat would drop. The earliest dynamic soundtrack I know of is System Shock. Different parts of the soundtrack would be louder/quieter, higher/lower pitch based on your current health, SHODAN's grip on the floor you were on, whether you were in combat, and a bunch of other features. Thing is, nobody noticed it, and so they removed it for System Shock 2.

First Person Games Investigation

Simply put, a first-person game is a game where you see through the eyes of your player character. Let's look at some.

Call of Duty/Battlefield - I'm putting these together because, in my eyes, they're basically the same game. A prototypical modern military shooter franchise with limited innovative mechanics, usually moving towards a multiplayer service model as it's easier to squeeze money out of users that way. I'm not sure exactly what I could say that I'd take from these games, since any mechanics you can really call "innovative" were just holdovers from Halo - two-weapon limits, grenade buttons, aim-down-sights, et cetera.

F.E.A.R. - Now this is a shooter. I don't know how many people actually still play this 2005 gem, but I do know that people used it to benchmark their systems before Crysis came out. It's a tactical action horror, where you dive around in bullet-time, gunning down screaming clone soldiers with anything from dual pistols to an experimental particle gun. The effects are amazing, and the Replica AI holds up to this day. They talk amongst each other, giving audio callouts to relay your position. They can take cover and sneak around, meaning that using your bullet time your best chance for survival. The first person viewpoint shows your fully-rendered body in all its glory, and the devs at Monolith put this to good use, having you drop-kick Replicas at point blank range. It's a lot of fun to play, like an interactive version of Woo's Hard Boiled.

FNAF - Modern horror wouldn't be where it is today without FNAF, but similarly, FNAF wouldn't work without a first-person perspective. A lot of horror - especially jumpscare-based like FNAF - requires you to see the scares as they stumble towards you. The subgenre that FNAF spawned, mascot horror, relies on twisting narratives and recognisable characters to stand out, and borrowing ideas from the archaic pre-FNAF days of Unity walking simulators, they're all first person - often having no real protagonist, as mascot horror is propped up by its recognisable characters, and having a voiced protagonist would likely take away from the antagonist's appeal.

The Stanley Parable - I definitetely want to talk about a good old fashioned narrative-based walking simulator. I usually don't like to play them, the 4th-wall-breaking trick has been done to death, and most walking simulators fall into the niche of "Annoying a British narrator until he forcibly closes the game", and then it's revealed the game is all about the struggles of a developer, and it's actually very intellectual on a super-post-meta-ironic-level, or whatever. But, the Stanley Parable is a classic. Considering it asks questions about choice and freedom in video games, a silent first-person protagonist was a good choice. I don't think we even see Stanley's face - in fact, in the original Source version, Stanley was played by Half Life 2's very own male_07 - which lets us insert ourselves into Stanley's position. First person is always an amazing choice for immersion and player/world interactivity, and considering that's often what I look for in games, it's no wonder I like this viewpoint so much.

Superliminal - Now here's a game that uses its first-person perspective to its advantage. You can take objects and move them closer or further away from you to change their size, just like the Portal 2 concept of "F-stop". This is used in puzzles where you must bridge gaps, if I recall correctly, and there is a lot of trickery within the game space itself, with some Truman Show-esque fake scenery towards the end.

Here it is. A comprehensive walkthrough of Toxic Waters. I have to admit, the game is a little unpolished. You can get stuck under some elevators, buttons occasionally show up on the foreground, and there is no background. However, for my first foray into Unreal, it didn't turn out terribly. The puzzle mechanics are there, bolstered by admittedly tough platforming. There is a definite difficulty spike around Level 3 and 4, due to my rush to get them playable in time. However, the game works; you can win, you can lose, there's a bit of replayability with a drive to get a high PDA score, and the various components bring the Hydromorph Research Facility to life.

Curiously, when I tried to bring a copy home (I wanted to get my brother to playtest it) everything went odd. The colours became horrible and psychedelic, everything was covered in a grain effect like the shaders had broken, Drains moved at super speeds but barrels dropped like they were on the moon. I couldn't make it past level 2, and I think the answer is my laptop's AMD drivers, installed in late 2021 so I could play Serious Sam. Since then, all Unity games have had their colours inverted, and it seems it also affects Unreal games. I'm tempted to just delete the Radeon stuff at this point, for all the trouble it's cost me.

Last minute HUD research

HUD means heads-up display.

Chrono Trigger has a pretty generic RPG display, showing the characters in your party and their HP.

The Cuphead HUD is pretty simplistic, just displaying HP and your cards, which activate a Super when you have all five.

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Curse shows your characters' HP, and your collectibles, in the basic style of a Mario game.

(this video might have uploaded twice, blame tumblr lol)

Here is a demo of the dynamic music system. As you can see, the tempo changes with health, creating a different game atmosphere as your health drains.

This took way too long to put together. The gameplay is Doom and the music is from Deus Ex. As is demonstrated here, the music's tempo changes in accordance with player HP.

Predictions

I think the next project is a first person game based on music. This could mean a lot, but my mind immediately goes to some sort of BPM/Bullets Per Minute-esque shooter where you have to fire your guns on time with the music. However, I feel like that's kinda been done to death, and also doesn't let you play at your own pace, literally. My next thought is some kind of dynamic music system. Basically, the better you're doing in combat, the quicker and louder the background music will be. The more damage you take, the slower the music gets, until shutting off completely. Story-wise, perhaps you're some sort of cyborg that needs to keep their adrenaline high to survive, sort of like that action film Crank. This has been done with other games, but those led themselves to the hyper-fast movement shooters like Samurai Mad Jack, where you have to keep things interesting for your virtual audience, otherwise your supervisors terminate the stream - and your blood stream. So, doing the music as an indicator of health seems a cool idea.

Totally unrelated, but I had an amazing idea for a puzzle gimmick that came to me in a dream yesterday. I'm keeping it under wraps until it can be utilized, but the code-name is Project Lamprey. If I can implement it into this game, I will, but it's the sort of gimmick that requires an entire game made around it rather than being shoehorned in.

Toxic Waters Lite: After The Crunch

During today's session, Toxic Waters Lite went from a buggy, unfinished beta to a nearly-complete game. I'm sorry for a lack of updates; I've been working with my nose ridiculously close to the grindstone. I didn't even stop for lunch, I just crammed a few slices of cold pizza outside between sessions of programming. I snapped my pen in half out of sheer stress. But, was it worth it? Yes.

I've made two extra levels, created a win and loss system, and cut most of my loose ends - anything that didn't work has been neatly tied off, or cut from the game altogether. The third level takes you through some small domes filled with patrolling Drains, before becoming a platforming segment over some water. The fourth and final level takes place in a system of drained-out concrete reservoirs, where you must juggle moving platforms, hordes of enemies, and the tightest platforming thus far. As previously mentioned, combat is entirely cut, and Nicolas dies in one hit, negating the need for a health bar. It's about 10 minutes long if you know the levels inside out; most won't, and the game is geared towards replay, with an end score encouraging players to try no-death runs.

I tried to package the game, or whatever the term is - turning it to an .exe and making it properly playable. I didn't have time for that, which is ok; it gives me time to add music and perhaps sound effects next session. In the meantime, though, while I may not be able to tell the story through the game, I can pull the retro tactic and package it in a manual alongside the game.

Toxic Waters Lite: Trimming The Fat

Today is the last day of development for the project. No more feature creep, no more deliberation. I'm finishing TWL today.

Firstly, Nicolas has no more gun. Enemies (there is only one type, the Drain) act as roving hazards, which must be avoided by jumping over them, or studying their patrol routes and ducking in and out of them.

Secondly, no more healthbar. One hit from anything and you're dead.

Thirdly, no more metroidvania and RPG mechanics. The upgrade station is removed, as is every health pickup and ammo pickup. All you've got is your wits and agility to survive.

This creates a tighter, slicker experience in my eyes. Perhaps, it's even closer to the original idea, without the tacked-on combat mechanics. I'm keeping this short too, since I need to build level 3, and I can't find a version that I like. A small lobby with a security door seems nice, after which you dodge (or don't) enemies to get to the next floor. I also want to add:

A level where the crane is at the top, meaning you have to climb all the way up and then down again.

A horizontal level where you traverse waterways using platforms.

Something with moving floors.

Or I won't. Three levels might be enough. Hopefully.

The UI!!! The UI is real!!!

Yup, I finally got a functioning UI. It displays the number of PDAs collected, resets when you die, and nothing more.

Fonts

DS-Digital.

Alien Encounters.

Computerfont.

Capture It.

East Border.

I've gone with a split of gritty, military stencil fonts and sci fi fonts. I'm really liking Capture It, it's chunky while still being very round, and also looks like it's partially corroded. Computerfont and DS Digital barely fit at all, and Alien Encounters bridges the gap with an overall inoffensive scan-line aesthetic. East Border is good too.

In the end, I've gone with Capture It.

Toxic Waters Lite: Sprite Refinements

I know that in previous blog posts, I went on and on about not giving Nicolas a machine gun, but now, I do think the layout of his weapons needs to be altered. The current pistol sprite looks weird; Nicolas fires with his non-dominant hand, making him either look ridiculously inept or additionally, like he's attempting a cowboy-esque hip fire. Nicolas may not be a Pistol Pete-esque gunslinger, but he knows his way around a firearm. Therefore, I'm cutting the pistol and making Nicolas start with the shotgun. Its properties will be slightly altered, giving it medium damage and a cooldown after firing, as Nicolas needs to pump another shell into the chamber. His newest weapon, the machine pistol, will bridge the gap a little, firing quicker at the cost of a smaller projectile and less damage. I think the main thing that made the pistol sprite suck was that it was too small. It only took up a sliver of the sprite, meaning Nicolas barely moved the rest of his body. With the shotgun or bio-mine launcher, Nicolas uses the full breadth of his body to hold the gun, wrapping his hands around the grip and barrel. To create a similar wide-aiming effect, the machine pistol will be extended across Nicolas' chest, with a folding stock and large silencer/muzzle brake to make it longer in the front. One thought I have, however, is if the machine pistol will be able to hit shorter enemies like the flowdogs - after all, Nicolas holds it up to his chest, and you can't aim vertically. This could mean people fall into a rhythm of using the shotgun for Flowdogs and Snapsprouts, while using the machine pistol for everything else. Not only does this dumb down the combat, but it makes the bio-mine launcher useless. I might add some sort of projectile spread feature to the machine pistol, making it less unreliable and more like a "first strike" tool, allowing you to chip away at an enemy from a distance, while disallowing over-reliance on the tool. Then, the shotgun is for single enemies and the bio-mine launcher is for groups and armoured foes, with a bit of variation induced by combat puzzles and creative enemy placement - for example, you might have to take an elevator up to an infested floor, but stick a bio-mine launcher on it and you've got yourself an explosive payload.

I'm also considering changing the touchscreen level-load sprite into an evacuation flume, as was previously planned. I'm ditching the sprawling metroidvania gameplay for a series of Hexen-like, interconnected hub worlds, with short levels peppered between large maps to keep things interesting. You restrict your game design if you're forced to have every setpiece and puzzle area connect into each other - at that point, you're not building a platformer, you're building a network of hamster tubes, and if you don't, you're sacrificing the playability of your one big magnum opus level. This is why level-to-level is going to work better, with each exit and entrance maching up - for example, if you check my beta footage, you'll see you exit Level 1 in a yellow-plated corridor with hanging wires, and enter Level 2 via the same sort of corridor. Older games like Blood did a similar thing, giving the illusion of an interconnected world, right before Half Life actually did it. As much as I'm inspired by the 1998 GoldSrc gem, TWL isn't Half Life. The pacing, both literal gameplay speed and story-wise, is radically different, and as mentioned above, one big map would be a pain to play and develop. So, I'll probably make a flume sprite, a machine pistol pickup, and a sprite of Nicolas holding it tomorrow. Although, I've got to fix the current shooting issue too. As of my last build, Nicolas launches valve handles straight out of his chest, either blocking his path or getting stuck in his body and making him freeze. It's absolutely busted, and why you don't actually encounter any Drains head-on in the beta footage.

(self log) things that need doing

Make Score go back to 0 when you die

Create new HP widget that shows each health level as a "pip" or utilize existing sprites

Make Drain take 2 HP away each time it hits

Make gun actually shoot bullets

Create ammo variable and make it so you can't fire if bullets < 0

Create ammo and health collectible

Create upgrade station (i've been calling it an upgrade station this whole time but it's more like a generic vending machine) and let you exchange PDAs for bullets n health

somehow convey to the player that it is a Hydromorph Port-A-Shop and not a heavy-duty toilet

create more levels with fun puzzle stuffs

add win condition and sounds

ship it!

/unselflog Mostly, do the short term stuff. Shop will be in Level 3, the first "big" level that's currently the size of L1. Scratch that, I have a lot to do. Damn.

Here's a new showcase of my level. A lot has changed around here since my last video. There are now elevators and horizontally moving platforms, toggled with small buttons. You can see a Drain lurking beneath the bridge in the first level, and Snapsprouts rear their heads out of coral reefs. You can also operate cranes, dropping buoyant air-filled barrels over water to create a rudimentary bridge. The combination of action-oriented platforming and puzzle gameplay strikes a perfect medium in my opinion, though I'm yet to add enemies. They'll start being a true threat around Level 3, I'd imagine.

Behind the scenes, there are some loose ends I hope to fix. Buttons will sometimes appear floating in front of Nicolas, and if you press spacebar, he appears to throw bullets rightward, bouncing around the screen or getting stuck in his torso. Eventually these will be turned into proper projectiles, that fly a straight line before stopping when they hit an obstacle. On puzzle elements, I think I'll modify what I've already got in interesting ways. Dropping a barrel onto a platform to create an impromptu scaffold is definitely something I can see obstructing Nicolas' journey in the later stages, not to mention the implementation of large Metroidvania-esque hub levels with an emphasis on exploration.