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Routine Game Thread  "Discussion about Lunar Software's unreleased game Routine"

User is offline   deuxsonic 

#1



So I've been waiting to play this game for years now, which has 4 people now working on it, a team that has not developed a game before, headed by a guy named Aaron Foster. For those who haven't heard of it, it's a first-person horror survival game using Unreal Engine 3's UDK set on an abandoned Russian moon base with an 80's technology look. You are there to investigate what happened to the inhabitants of the base after their suspicious disappearance. You carry around a device called a Cosmonaut Assistance Tool, or CAT, that has it's functionality changed via a 3.5" floppy disk drive, the disks of which you can find around the base and can download things to. It can function as a weapon, but doing so completely drains the tool's battery leaving you unable to use it further until you can find power for it again. The game will have no health, permadeath, no HUD, your CAT being your main source of information away from computer terminals, and some small elements of the game are randomized, like hazards.

I'm curious what others think about Routine.

http://routinegame.com/
http://www.lunar-software.com/
5

User is offline   MusicallyInspired 

  • The Sarien Encounter

#2

At first glance I'm getting a big Alien: Isolation vibe from it. Which is cool.
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User is offline   Malgon 

#3

I've had my eye on this one for a while now. After finishing Alien Isolation I was dying to play this (the two look remarkably similar, but I know this has been in the works for years). The permadeath idea scares the hell out of me, but I'm sure that is just going to add to the intense nature of the game even more. Looking forward to getting some more info about the game, and hope they mention a possible release date for this.
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User is offline   Daedolon 

  • Ancient Blood God

#4

Does this still exist? I saw it like 10 years ago somewhere and started following one of their accounts, but they never did updates.
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User is offline   deuxsonic 

#5

Yes, as far as I can tell. Their last message was posted last December. I think they originally thought they were going to release in 2013 but they've admitted to it being more work than they initially thought it would be. Since it's such a small team I can kind of understand it going on for a while. I waited 7 years for the UT2004 TC "Out of Hell" which was in development originally for UT2003 which was finally released in 2009 because it was the work of 1 guy.
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User is offline   Mr. Tibbs 

#6

Oh man, I loved Out of Hell! Mod or not, it's one of the scariest games I've ever played. It can be pretty janky in places, but there's something so unnerving about the world he built. Insane that one guy made the whole thing. I guess it kind of flew under the radar because UT 2004 was getting a little long in the tooth in 2009 (kind of like the Dark Mod).

I hope Routine surfaces one day. Have they gone into much detail about what the moment-to-moment gameplay is? Is there combat or is it a stealth-puzzle deal? Everything they've shown looks incredible. I'm kind of worried their such visual and audio perfectionists that it won't happen.
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User is offline   deuxsonic 

#7

View PostMr. Tibbs, on 07 May 2016 - 02:37 AM, said:

Oh man, I loved Out of Hell! Mod or not, it's one of the scariest games I've ever played. It can be pretty janky in places, but there's something so unnerving about the world he built. Insane that one guy made the whole thing. I guess it kind of flew under the radar because UT 2004 was getting a little long in the tooth in 2009 (kind of like the Dark Mod).

I hope Routine surfaces one day. Have they gone into much detail about what the moment-to-moment gameplay is? Is there combat or is it a stealth-puzzle deal? Everything they've shown looks incredible. I'm kind of worried their such visual and audio perfectionists that it won't happen.


Yeah, Out of Hell is amazing. There are very memorable moments in it where it scared me good, like when you encounter the first manipulator. You're fighting your own resistance to want to continue. The main problem it had came from such heavy use of static meshes where you'd get stuck. The patch added a key to try and jar yourself loose but it kind of made me not explore as much as I normally would in a game because the game worked on auto-saves so I didn't want to get stuck on something, be unable to get loose, and lose that progress when ammo was so scarce. Traveling behind that neighborhood it's one manipulator after another, groups of them sometimes, and I would have had no ammo if I tried to kill all of them with the guns, so I was running around with my melee weapon at that time killing them by quickly hitting them, moving away, and doing this repeatedly until I got through them.

Routine is very much a stealth puzzle as the weapon ability of the CAT drains the battery and as it is used to interact with certain things in the world, is kind of a last-resort option as you can only fire a single time (as far as I can tell) and it might not stop what you're shooting at. I think psychological horror games are most effective in first-person (I thought the first 2 F.E.A.R. games were fantastic even though they kind of jump back and forth between "scare" sections and "action" sections) and Routine's lack of a HUD and permadeath and no health and no music and other things work to make it as immersive as possible. The tool was widely used by the human inhabitants of the base before something bad seems to have happened between them and the robots so there are seem to be floppy disks in a lot of places which are used to change the CAT's abilities and a supply of extra batteries. I think they do realize that they have to finish what they have now as it seems the idea of changing to Unreal Engine 4 was mentioned to them as in the FAQ they say that the game is too far into development with the UDK to switch now (which at the time they started was their best option for having a free engine to use.) If something like the UDK had existed when Long Nguyen started development on Out of Hell I'm sure it would have been standalone rather than a mod as well.
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User is offline   Mr. Tibbs 

#8

Releasing March 2017.

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User is offline   HulkNukem 

#9

Looks pretty good, much higher quality than the average survival horror indie game and much better than the average first game too.
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User is offline   Malgon 

#10

Sweet, can't wait!
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