Containment Facility - a new Cleve Blakemore game

I bet Cleve considers himself to be a keter-level SCP

 

When the first semidestructive investigation of Lascaux was authorized by the French government in over a century, archaeologists were permitted to scrap tentatively at the pristine paintings on the walls to determine what was underneath. That's when they began to realize that in many instances, the artwork had been painted over dozens or in some cases hundreds of times.

They began to sense somewhat the character of the people who were responsible for these caves. Acting on a hunch, they excavated the mud beneath their feet, revealing every square inch of the floor had been carved with designs and amazing reliefs. A brand new picture began to emerge of people with radically different psychology than Homo Sapiens, minds so foreign they could be considered the opposite in most regards.

They tried to grasp how somebody with the strength of six ordinary human beings and a 1900 cc brain could spend hours by candlelight painting over their own work obsessively, compulsively, repeatedly as if they were in the grip of some terrible madness which Sapiens could never understand. They were never happy with their own work and were constantly in the process of redoing it over and over again.

What were they painting? Hunting scenes, tribal magic, ritual symbols? No, incredible as it seems, there was almost none of this at Lascaux. What these supermen enjoyed painting to perfection were pastoral scenes of aurochs and other animals at leisure in the fields with anthropomorphic herp-derp features similar to a Far Side cartoon.

Slowly, agonizingly the paleontologists came to the mind blowing conclusion that the Neanderthal people were possible the most severely, appallingly retarded race of hominids that has ever existed on the planet - and they were our direct line ancestors in Europe.

 

outstanding

 

Awesome

 

Cleve!!!!

 

This is what I am talking about by "minimalist UI." Maybe a bit too minimal at the moment. We have a single bottle of Synapsyn with 12 capsules in our inventory we find on the sink in our cell when we start. I think I will at least put borders on the inventory cells and perhaps a halftone box around this inventory UI when it appears, but I am striving not to ruin the atmosphere with intrusive "game" visuals.

I am only developing it and it is scaring me just to walk around in at the moment. Added a dark ambient low key soundtrack that makes my skin crawl at night when I am testing alone in my study.



Needs more bloom, obviously. This is running in real time in the play window and the quality settings are all turned off.

The heart beats light green / red and changes when you are dangerously terrified. The brain starts to throb with a weird veiny pattern when you are in danger of losing your mind from something you have seen, which is what the Synapsyn is for. The Synapsyn will start to have side effects when used too much. The guy in the cell across from you is a felon named Shamal Johnson who is in lockdown because he has already started to tweak out on Synapsyn and is no longer a trusted resource to send to the lower levels for research.

 

But will the game cause me to believe that a baby can fly, and that I too can enjoy delicious flying baby deli meats in the near future?

 

Hey Cleve, what did you think of the way Amnesia handled its monsters? Was it too heavily scripted? Do you think it was lame that they would disappear if they killed you?

Can you tell us what kind of monsters we'll be avoiding in this game?

 

Flying aborted fetuses.

Mr. Blakemore, I recently wrote a short story based on true facts of your life. Give it a read and tell me what you think of it.

 

So that's where they stored all those old POLYBIUS machines ...

 

A friendly reminder on the flip marquee from facility staff that you have been declared legally dead in the outside world ... just sayin' is all.

Government officials filled out your death certificate for execution by lethal injection before you were drugged and brought to the facility. As far as anyone else knows, you don't even exist any more.

 

There are pretty hideous creatures roaming around, I would put them up against Amnesia any day of the week for raw monstrosity. Unfortunately these critters are like girl scouts selling jamboree tickets compared to the "entities" you deal with to complete many of your primary tasks. They are usually dangerous to even think about, much less look at. Thus the ongoing need for Synapsyn.

I spent a lot of time modifying a shader I found to do something very special to the view - when some of these things are nearby, the environment begins to distort and exhibit twisted non-euclidean geometry all around you. This is your cue to run. Fast. Except in some situations where running will absolutely cause them to kill you in nanoseconds. Knowing the difference is part of completing tasks in the game. Certain entities can only be evaded by turning off your flashlight, crouching down in a corner and holding your breath without looking at them. Even then, depends how they felt when they woke up that morning and how much attention you have already drawn.

 

the ending twist will be that once you finally escape you are caught by SCP agents and classified as an abnormal survivor who can get through any statistically lethal situation

 

Spoiler :

... except it is a much more M. Night Shymalayan ending. Much more. That ending would be a twist but this is the twistiest twist of them all.

 

Cleve is back!

Your last "I'm leaving forever" did last, though. Some people even thought you meant it this time.

 

Sort of hammering out inventory / status HUD at present. Books at right side are notes on top, reference documents on bottom.

Obviously there is heavy influence from Penumbra here, plus some of my own ideas mixed in freely.

May add flashlight battery bar beneath the body silhouette, would this be starting to crowd it?



As you have probably guessed from the preliminary screen shots, most of the levels are not incredible achievements in 3D architecture. I have been importing most of the levels from Sketchup models originally built for CORPSE CREW for what was originally going to be the "Patient Zero" research center. I am doing every single thing in the game including modeling of all the environments.

 

The battery indicator wouldn't be a problem.

I'm guessing the game doesn't pause when you enter inventory?

 

No, at present I am just running around the starting level debugging the basic game mechanics : inventory management, game menu, save/load, basic physics for doors and drawers, basic lock-unlock state changes with cursor inventory objects and turning lights on/off, interacting with the environment.

I will probably start implementing some pause functionality for the HUD tomorrow night.

I have several great professor models standing in the lab but they do not move at present. I am going to base them off a generic character controller that will be flexible and can be assigned a path, behaviors, etc. Most of this exists as code now in Unity left over from the former game CORPSE CREW it just needs to be attached to the characters.

I figure if I solve all the basic game mechanics problems in the first starting level, the rest will be easy. I probably covered the distance it took me a year in Grimoire in about two weeks with this game in terms of engine functionality. The GUI system is super powerful, I just needed to get comfortable with it and learn how to respond to it and maintain it as an asynchronous series of state changes. An experienced programmer in C# can make some very fast time using the Unity engine.

I have the object pick up/drop working and a good adventure game style feel like PENUMBRA with item puzzles.

 

If you can stick to the development and not politics or other GD content, then I will support this

If you intend to complete it then you should put a 1:1 representation of your bunker into the game world

 

Good to know you are posting here again, Cleve.

I don't think it would be crowding (but then again, I always preferred heftier GUIs). But wouldn't it be possible in your current set up to put this indicator on the flashlight itself? This way the concerned player will have to take time to examine/rotate/whatever the object itself, stopping to pay attention to the environment and possibly opening himself up to an enemy or threat.

 

Looks p. cool

 

Damned good suggestions in that 10 point list and I really like horror. Hmmm...

 

+20 internets for the polybius reference.

 

That guy at Frictional is light years intellectually ahead of anybody else in the game industry including me in seeing a really fresh new direction to take the adventure game to. Since Penumbra you would think he would have spawned a million imitators but the truth is that the game industry is run by dense, cashed-up morons. They were taking everything in the direction of hummery like Resident Evil 5, which is survival horror for people who have suffered a brain injury in an industrial accident. R5 was the kind of lowbrow rubbish that the games industry was moving towards but the guy at Frictional is going the other direction 180 degrees.

If this makes me a sort of eccentric groupie and a scavenger indie following along picking up crumbs behind Frictional Games on a lower budget, then I'm proud to be a Roger-Corman style imitator of games like Penumbra and Amnesia. At least give me credit for recognizing real brilliance when I see it and having the sense to follow along in the wake of his kind of leadership.

Everybody is tempted to think that if people have money, they must be bright. Mostly they are just cunning and vicious in many cases. Real brains like you see at Frictional is rare in all human endeavour and it usually influences everyone else to a degree they won't admit to.