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Post-Mortem CREY – Part Three

This is the final part of my post-mortem CREY series, featuring games that I did not get to finish before CREY's demise. I have two bigger ones here, and a compilation to showcase the rest.

Table of Contents

Voxel Planet

This is by far my favorite, and I might revisit this concept later. Spherical terrains have always fascinated me, Outer Wilds is a great example where this idea was executed perfectly. But to be honest, what I'm really longing for is a game like GTA or Just Cause to be put on the surface of a sphere. You wouldn't be able to leave the planet, but there would be no boundaries on the ground either, so instead of having an island surrounded by an endless sea, you could just travel around indefinitely.

That, or a Tasty Planet-like game, where you get to eat everything and grow huge. At the start, you wouldn't even notice you're one a sphere, but as you grow bigger, it becomes more apparent, with the final act being when you're big enough to eat the entire planet. This is something I might do sometime in the future, but also, if you want to steal my idea, please notify me, because I just want to play it.

Walk around the voxel planet.

CREY had a pretty cool terrain tool, using voxels instead of a simple height-map. This made me think, what if I created a sphere? I placed a sphere primitive shape as a guide and started sculpting the voxels to match the shape.

Since in CREY you can only have one direction for gravity, I cheated a bit. I disabled global gravity and placed a magnet prop at the center of the planet to create a downward pull on the surface for all dynamic physics objects.

The player avatar was a bit trickier: since I couldn't change the gravity on them, I had to use a custom avatar instead, which was built from a set of primitive shapes. The avatar was placed on the surface, but its point of origin was at the core of the planet. I made it walk by rotating around that origin.

It could also get on the train! This was done by having a second rotator that rotates the avatar on the same axis as the train, but it is only enabled when the avatar gets inside a trigger area that the train carries around with itself.

Placing the roads and tracks on the surface was quite tricky. There's no way I could have placed and rotated them perfectly on the surface by hand. Instead, I used a similar technique as with the avatar: I moved their point of origin to the planet core and rotated it there by manually inputting the rotation angle. To make it consistent, I calculated how many pieces it would take to cover the surface, and based on that, how much I must increment the angle for each piece.

Screenshot gallery. Some images have captions to give some context.

Compilations

Most of these stuff are so small and incomplete, they are hardly worth more mention than a few seconds in a video compilation.

Compilation on my unfinished games.

And of course there's more, but they are even more incomplete than these. Mostly a bunch of failed attempts at making anything with the CREY editor, and I feel like they would only be interesting to me.

Chill Falls

This was meant to be a sort of "hangout" game, where people can gather and talk to each other while exploring a nice map. I never got to finish it, but it had some interesting ideas. My basic idea was that trains are super cool, and I want a train that goes back and forth, and you can hop on and off.

The train goes on a U-shaped track, which means there must be a turn. CREY had a linear and an angular mover prop that can do back and forth motion, so I used the linear one to make the train reach the curve, and then activated the rotator prop to make it traverse the curve. Once the rotation was done, the linear prop went backwards, and thus the train continued on its path.

You can see this in the video below, where I show the early test. The moving and rotating props are at the center of the map, and the red guiding lines show the connection between the props and the train cars.

Early tests of the train idea.

This game was my first attempt at doing a sort-of open world map. I got a chance to experiment with making impassable boundaries, while maintaining the illusion that this area is not completely isolated from the rest of the world, which was fun.

This included placing assets in the background, so you can see that there's more stuff far away, but you will never be able to actually walk there, so these can have lower level of detail.

Screenshot gallery. Some shots have captions to give some context.

Final thoughts

And that's it.

I'm a bit sad, because CREY had a lot of potential in it to become a gateway to professional game development. It could have been a great way for kids to discover game creation and have some sense of success early on, one that will drive them, before they spend years learning more professional tools like Unreal, Unity, or just programming in general.

When I was young, my gateway to game development was making levels for Jazz Jackrabbit 2, way before I could write any code. Compared to making your own game, level editors are the next best thing, since they let you get creative without getting too technical, and you can make something playable very quickly. CREY could have been something between these two.

Older article
Post-Mortem CREY – Part Two