Post-Mortem CREY – Part One
As promised, here's some post-mortem CREY content!
I have so many things to show that I decided to cut this into 3 roughly equal-sized articles. The first two focuses on games that I have successfully published before CREY's demise.
Obviously, you won't be able to play the games (except for Pepitautomat), but I have screenshots, gameplay videos, as well as some insights on how I tackled certain problems while making the game. This is not strictly CREY related and can be interesting to anyone who's interested in game development in general. Also, some of these games weren't even interactive in the first place, so they work perfectly in the form of a video.
Table of Contents
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part One ← this article
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part Two
- Lunar Lander
- Pepitautomat
- It's Raining Cats, Hallelujah!
- The Backrooms
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part Three
- Voxel Planet
- Compilations
- Chill Falls
- Final thoughts
No Time For Caution
This one is just a looping animation, but I kinda liked it because of the physics part. I did not dare to put copyrighted music under it, so if you want the full experience, search for "Hans Zimmer - No Time For Caution", seek to 2 minutes, and play it in the background.
No Time For Caution.
The space station in the scene is only rotating, but not moving anywhere. To make the debris fall like that I used two tricks:
There is a magnet at the center of the station, pushing any physics object away from the platform to imitate centrifugal force. Then there is another one in front of it (to the right, from the camera's point of view), also pushing things away, to imitate the direction of motion that the station and the small ship is taking.
The second trick was to spawn the debris inside the mesh of the station. It's a quirk of any physics engine that when an object gets inside another object, they try to get out as quickly as possible, completely defying their normal physical parameters. This is the most typical thing you see in games when physics are "glitching out". Because of the erratic nature of this "penetration recovery", it added the random spin and push I needed for the debris.
Space Frighter
This was my first published game on CREY. You play as a freighter ship captain and your ship is being boarded by an alien life form. You must save yourself and run to the escape pod!
Space Frighter gameplay, with some behind the scenes footage at the end, demonstrating how the AI follows you.
The game has two major features: an AI enemy that actually follows in your footsteps, trying to catch up, and a randomly generated maze, making the layout of the ship different for each playthrough. You must go quickly, so the alien won't corner you when you're backtracking from a dead end! The maze features some loops, allowing to go back to previously visited places without having to come face to face with the creature.
Gameplay screenshot gallery.
The AI is super simple, you're constantly spawning breadcrumbs as you move, and the alien is just going for the nearest one and removes it as it gets close. The only reason the AI is not going through walls is because it's literally taking the same path that you walked. You can see this visualized at the end of the video above.
As for the maze, I used the recursive division method, with the limitation that I always divide in the middle. This adds a level of predictability to the maze, which is not that good for gameplay, but this was the only way to do it with the no-code editor in CREY, using only spawners and random generators. This method created a perfect maze (meaning there's always a path, and only one path between any two points), and all the randomizations are localized, with no awareness of the rest of the maze's state.
Behind the scenes shots. See image captions for more info.
Lava Pit Guys
This was my first and only multiplayer game on CREY. Also, the only one with an actual trailer.
Lava Pit Guys trailer.
The game features an arena, the Lava Pit, where the players must survive for 2 minutes. Sounds easy enough, but!
The two biggest platforms are actually part of a scale, that starts tipping one way or the other depending on the weight of the players standing on it. This weight is calculated by having a sensor on each platform counting the number of players, and from this, with a uniform weight for each player, it can calculate the speed and direction of the tipping.
When there is an even number of players in the arena, the players could spread out on the platforms evenly, keeping it in balance and making the game boring. To force them to constantly keep moving, one of the platforms receive an extra weight. You can see this in the video, when the chains and sandbags appear.
When the platforms are balanced for more than a few seconds, a sweeper appears, trying to push the idle players off. The smaller platforms will also submerge a few seconds after stepping on them. And to make things harder, the lava is constantly rising, making the scale dip into the lava much sooner.
After the 2 minutes are up, the remaining players get teleported to the upper level of the spectator platform, where they received their chicken dinner. This area also features a selection of free avatars, with 3 hidden ones, to replace the default one that you started with.
Screenshot gallery. See image captions for more info.
Where Money Comes From
Have you ever wondered where money comes from? Well look no further, the mystery is about to be unraveled! You can watch as I get all the money in this prerecorded video:
Where Money Comes From.
If you played the game long enough, your PC would suffer, but I haven't seen a crash, even though one guy made it go up to 8 million. That's one physics object for every $1000, totaling in 8000 individually simulated objects, all colliding with each other. That's a lot!