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Hypertension: Harmony of Darkness  "My indie debut with some history"

#1

Hey PROD, I will take us through the early days until present, so get comfortable!

Posted Image
Hypertension is a psychological first-person shooter by my team Isotope Softworks and being published by Goat Store Publishing, LLC, for the Sega Dreamcast and PC. They are also publishing a game I am producing called SLaVE, using the same engine I maintain and program for (3DGE).

It was based on Blood and actually started its life as a remake project in 2008. The game has gone through a dozen rewrites since its inception, each time moving further from Blood, until we are where we are at now.

Take a look at the original 2008 trailer that debuted on Joystiq, etc

All of the publicity we received, negative or positive (even Game Informer covered it) led to a publishing deal for the game.


(This trailer was released by Diehard GameFAN.)

But two years later we were burned out by it (and Atari seizing the game too hampered our efforts) and decided to start fresh with a different project called SCOURGE. That happened in 2011. That project was going great until we were ordered to halt and move back to Hypertension by GSP (no deal with Atari went through as expected). Since 2013 we have been reworking the project and it's now completely original, only related to the previous version by program code left in from so long ago, and all of the levels (which we were allowed to keep since they were original designs).

We were flown to the Midwest Gaming Classic to show off the project early in the year (I did not attend because my flight got delayed past the point of the presentation, so that's why my team member is so nervous and holds a clipboard in the video). The game, at the time, was chosen at the last minute because of technical problems we were having with SCOURGE. As such, the MGC trailer looks very rushed/incomplete and still has Blood placeholder content in it, but it was clear we were moving to replace everything (storyline, characters, enemies, etc). It was received well but people were still a bit confused since we halted the project for so long, and brought it back with almost no explanation.

Midwest Gaming Classic trailer from earlier this year

So, present day...I just released a new teaser trailer to our fanbase showing off some of the stuff we've been working on, which is what I'm going to show below. The game has been in development since 2008 (that's 6 years) and has come a long way since the early days, but this is what it looks like now. I'd love to hear constructive comments about it.



My team and I are working hard to get it finished by next year, also, David Firth (who created Salad Fingers) gave us his explicit permission to include SF after playing the publisher demo of Hypertension in 2012, and he's designing the section of the game where he will be most prominently featured in (and doing all of the voice work). You play as a mentally scarred woman who watches her lover get murdered, and goes into a deep depression while battling demons from her past (and the present, stopping an occult leader).

You guys are also free to check out the Corbachu Youtube channel to look at various builds of the game through the years (we even planned to have live-action cutscenes which are shown a few times in the trailers).
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#2

I thought the dreamcast died out years ago... apparently not. Looks like a good game though.
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User is online   zykov eddy 

#3

It's very nice to see a game being developed for good old Dreamcast, but I'm gonna be honest, the jumpscares in preview video look awful. It also doesn't help that there's also overused stock "scary" sounds playing in the video. I've seen Doom wads doing a better job at being scary than this.

On the other hand, the music's pretty nice and the graphics look decent. Just get rid of the stock sounds and silly jumpscares.
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User is offline   Person of Color 

  • Senior Unpaid Intern at Viceland

#4

Bro it's called an alpha. None of the sounds are final in those.

Now if only Doom 3 kept the alpha versions sounds Reznor did...
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User is offline   The Commander 

  • I used to be a Brown Fuzzy Fruit, but I've changed bro...

#5

This needs A LOT of work done to it if you really are planning to sell this...
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#6

View PostThe Commander, on 18 November 2014 - 06:33 AM, said:

This needs A LOT of work done to it if you really are planning to sell this...

Absolutely. The initial problem with the unfinished feeling is that the game was practically "finished" before we had to take all of the assets out of the engine. So what you are seeing is a lot of "new", uncompleted stuff. The level design has essentially remained the same (rather, we were allowed to take the levels with us) and you can view the past trailers to get an idea of how they look and functioned, but everything is pretty much being reworked, and only the base code is largely untouched. Because of this, it has a very incomplete feel to it, but the concepts are there and working.

That's the big kicker for this project though are level designers (we really need some that are able to understand DOOM-based mapping and our scripting language). Another thing is that we're still in the middle of big "feature" additions such as MD5 models, interpolation for the framerate, STRIFE-based scripting system, RtCW-based camera system, Q3-based ROQ cinematics, among other things. Since the move from Blood we've been allowed much more freedom but we've essentially had to start from scratch, so this can all be interpreted in "real-time" to a few months of work.

And, of course, we have a whole year and some months before we have to worry about release dates. Also, that level was thrown together in one day (I'm not much of a level designer) but I programmed all the rest of it (and fixed the weather scripts as they broke sometime in 2009).The jump scares were indeed very last minute but it's an idea we are toying with (less about the scares and more about the sanity).

If anyone is indeed interested in designing levels (or anything else), please let me know anyways. :)
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User is offline   Person of Color 

  • Senior Unpaid Intern at Viceland

#7

I had the old version kicking around until a hard drive crash. It was the shit.
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#8

View PostProtected by Viper, on 19 November 2014 - 06:35 PM, said:

I had the old version kicking around until a hard drive crash. It was the shit.

I think I might have that build somewhere on my machine, I can send it to you if/when I find it.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#9

What's the deal with all the Dreamcast mentions? Surely you don't expect to sell any games on the Dreamcast do you? I mean I still have my old Dreamcast but it's not like it's a commercially viable system.
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#10

You'd be surprised, but we're hoping it generates enough interest that we can do a "high-res" version via Steam or another platform like Android/Ouya.

Sega's system is still really big, especially overseas. Hucast has been making games for the system for YEARS, as have other developers. One team recently got like 200K for their game's Kickstarter.
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User is offline   OpenMaw 

  • Judge Mental

#11

I know the Quake 3 community is still pretty strong for DC as well. There were several people in the Quake 1 modding community making "games" for Dreamcast.

It's actually amazing how long that little system has lasted. I miss mine.
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User is offline   Micky C 

  • Honored Donor

#12

My mum wanted to throw mine away but I protested. It continues its humble life in the cupboard.
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User is offline   The Commander 

  • I used to be a Brown Fuzzy Fruit, but I've changed bro...

#13

Trying to make games for old platforms is a waste of time and money that could be better spent targeting the latest mediums that people actually use.

Unless you are releasing this for free or something then I could see why you would go for something older.

But commercial it's a bad idea.
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#14

No, the dreamcast has actually become the sort of oldschool hip indie thing that people still pay top dollar for new games to play on it. regardless of the quality.
It's also one of the absolute easiest of the reverse engineered consoles to dev for, mostly because it just uses Windows CE as the development platform. The only other thing still getting commercial indie releases is the NeoGeo, and that's only because one group of assholes (NG:DevTeam) is milking it and producing totally new cartridges. The Sega Saturn has alot of stuff that people understand about it, but it's an absolute bitch to code for so nobody's bothered to make anything for it.

This post has been edited by Carl Winslow: 25 November 2014 - 10:57 PM

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User is offline   Person of Color 

  • Senior Unpaid Intern at Viceland

#15

The Saturn isn't super hard for 2D, but for 3D it's a nightmare.

But you have better 2D capabilities on modern hardware, and you can replicate the look if you like, so what's the point? On top of that, all Dreamcasts made before September 2000 will read burned discs, but all Saturns need a modchip...and honestly, most people don't want to solder. The security ring on the Saturn can't be duplicated.

Oh, and if that isn't enough, even though Saturn modchips are easy to install, that's a whole 'nother bag of worms I ain't going into...

This post has been edited by Protected by Viper: 26 November 2014 - 11:20 PM

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#16

View PostCarl Winslow, on 25 November 2014 - 10:56 PM, said:

It's also one of the absolute easiest of the reverse engineered consoles to dev for, mostly because it just uses Windows CE as the development platform.

Close, actually has (almost) nothing to do with WinCE (even though it's displayed on the console), it has more to do with KallistiOS, which is a GPL-toolkit for the Dreamcast that's still in active development. Katana Devkits are available but they are discouraged because SEGA never licensed them for public use. I can only think of a handful of things that actually used WinCE (I think it had an awful implementation of DirectX).

So, technically based on this knowledge, anything can be ported to it that can be converted to use KallistiOS (GL calls, etc). ;-)
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#17



Just released this short video of our engine caustic water effect (still heavily in development), but hopefully this small snipplet is an improvement to what we had ready in November. Been working our asses off :-)

Sorry for the bump!
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