Untitled Space Game
Destroy All Humans (2005) of Pandemic Studios (Brisbane!) is in my top 3 games of all time. As a kid I really enjoyed everything about it, and to this day, even though my PS2 and physical copy are long gone, I will play it to completion on a PS2 emulator from time to time. A real underrated gem.
The untitled space game was born as a complete joke that I made in an afternoon in 2018-ish where I was idling a game called Fidget Spinner in Space to get my hours up on Steam. I decided to combine this with the Destroy All Humans itch kicking around in my head, and out came Fidget Spinner FROM Space.
The joke was short lived. Some years later I began playing around with some UFO designs inspired by Destroy All Humans, and from there Fidget Spinner From Space became Untitled Space Game.
The idea for this game was that you play as an alien who has a terrible habit of texting and flying. Unfortunately, you look away for a little too long and slam into earth at full speed, wiping out the dinosaurs and parts of your spaceship and phone are scattered across the planet. Not long before the player wakes up, human civilisation acquires some of the alien technology, and all of modern technology is created from it—specifically, cell phones.
To call for help and get off earth, the player must repair the broken or missing parts of the phone by rampaging across earth and collecting all the cell phones. I didn’t think much further than that, but I greatly enjoyed programming this game. In terms of graphics, it was my first time using real GPU primitives like vertex buffers, instead of relying on gamemaker’s integrated batching. From working on CerebroID, my shader writing skills had improved, allowing me to write some neat effects to stylize the environment.
The little human enemies in the game were a fun experiment too. As this was effectively my first not-a-sidescroller game, I had to re-learn what it meant to control an NPC character by moving from the 1-dimensional side-to-side movement, to 2-dimensional plane movement. I worked on line of sight, pathfinding, state machines and fear mechanics. All around a great experience and fun to play with.
Toward the end of the project I had what I feel was a decently fun-to-play but slightly ugly environment that was hard to fill out. My art skills were not quite up to the task I set up in my head, which led to me implementing cars again and getting distracted. I believe I was also studying at this time, so my time was becoming fairly restricted.
The cars then led me to an idea for another ‘2-week side project’, called Group Z. A game about rally racing in a zombie apocalypse.