Post-Mortem CREY – Part Two
This is the second part of my post-mortem CREY series, featuring games that I managed to finish and publish 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. Be prepared for even more advanced games than in the previous article!
Table of Contents
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part One
- No Time For Caution
- Space Frighter
- Lava Pit Guys
- Where Money Comes From
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part Two ← this article
- Post-Mortem CREY – Part Three
- Voxel Planet
- Compilations
- Chill Falls
- Final thoughts
Lunar Lander
The classic Moon landing arcade game of the late 70's. The goal is to gently land the ship on a flat surface, but if you land with too much speed, the spacecraft will explode. Also, need to watch your angle, it needs to land on its feet, not sideways.
If you want to score big, you need to cut it close. If you make your spacecraft go slow, you're burning all your fuel just to constantly fight against gravity. The highest score in theory is 1000 points, done by 4 successful landings with a 5x multiplier each time.
See how I mess up all the time.
I really liked the stylistic approach that I took here with the CRT television screen aesthetic. I shaded the entire screen with a white rectangle that is almost completely transparent to make the dark parts look gray. Then I added the round screen corners using several black rectangles at different angles. You can see, that because of this, it's not a perfect curve.
The terrain is all hand-crafted, using a bunch of square primitives, both for the outline, and to cover up the area with black underneath. I wanted to make it random generated, but this turned out to be impossible.
As for the ship, it is a kinematic object, all the physics are calculated with simple math using gameplay props. It casts 3 rays to measure the distance of the terrain, one down, and two at 45 degrees on each side. This is for detecting collision, but also to control when the camera needs to zoom in when you're close to the ground.
Screenshot gallery. See image captions for more info.
Pepitautomat
I remade this game entirely in Unity, you can play it right now in your browser! I also wrote article about it earlier.
In the CREY editor, it took me ages just to wire up a single level. Watch, as the horrors unfold in the video below. Don't worry, it has been sped up. And to give you some context on what's happening, I have put captions to the lower part of the video.
Timelapse on adding a new level to the game. I put captions on the video to give you some context on what is happening.
This video you just saw was 19 minutes long in real time. Instead of making the system once, and just define the raw data for each level, I had to duplicate part of the system as well every time. This is what the definition for one level looks like in the Unity version's code:
One element of the list that contains all the levels in the Unity version of the game. There are 8 rows, each one is a text with 8 letters, where "O" refers to black tiles, and space to white tiles.
It's Raining Cats, Hallelujah!
This is the most pointless thing I have ever made. You get to see giant cat heads falling over a valley for 20 minutes.
The original version of this was just a physics test to see how non-physical objects glued to one dynamic object would behave. I guess I went a bit overboard with the cat heads. And then later I added the valley and made it a full feature "game" with a fixed camera. If you look closely, you might be able to spot how only the main sphere of the head has collision, but the rest of the features, like the ears, does not.
Get ready to waste your time.
The Backrooms
Are you brave enough to venture into... The Backrooms? And are you lucky enough to make it out alive?
The Backrooms full walkthrough.
"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."
Anonymous, 4chan (May 13, 2019)
This is the original creepy-pasta that serves as the basis for The Backrooms, and it has inspired countless adaptations, be it movie or videogame.
I first heard about it from an article about a young aspiring movie director going by his stage-name "Kane Pixels", who has a YouTube mini-series about The Backrooms, and has recently been asked to direct a feature length version of it.
I was immediately hooked, and I knew I had to create a game about it on CREY. It took me a week and a half to make. The game features a randomly generated maze of corridors, and a creature that constantly stalks you. You can escape from the creature, and there is also a way to win the game, but this is no easy task.
Some boundary breaking to see how the game looks like behind the scenes.
The maze got slightly simplified since Space Frighters. I have 6 big hand-made chunks that will be spawned randomly at each possible position of the maze, with a random rotation. There's no guarantee that the maze will be traversable, but the way I constructed those chunks, each feature lots of hallways and doorways, so there's a 99% chance of what you get will work.
As for the AI, that one is much more advanced this time around. The creature can roam freely (usually ending up in a loop). But then if it gets too far from the player, it teleports to a closer location, one that is not in the sight of the player at the moment. This essentially gives the illusion that the creature is stalking you, and ensures that you get to bump into it from time to time.
When it sees you it goes into chase mode, and just goes straight for player. When it loses sight of the player, first, it will go to the last known location, and if still can't spot the player then goes back to roaming. When the enemy is giving chase, it's only slightly slower than you, so you can't afford to be indecisive.
Screenshot gallery. Check out the image captions for some narrative!