gamesthatdontexist
A collection of epistolary fiction about video games that don't exist
170 posts
Latest Posts by gamesthatdontexist
DD #45: “Lucasarts presents: True Detective”
Anyone play Day of the Tentacle or Grim Fandango? Tim Schafer is the man. Oh, and True Detective was good too.
I'm back!
This concept happened somewhat by accident. I was in the process of updating some old mockups. While looking at my original pitch mockups for Ducktales Remastered, I came across an old revamp of Chip & Dale on the NES back in 2014. Given that I had to isolate all the elements to apply the changes, I suddenly had workable game assets and some extra time on my hands. Things just snowballed from there.
One thing I did want to address from the original was to properly show the scale of things. The NES game was all over the place (mouse sized rhinos for example.) So making sure the big robot dogs from the first level where actually appropriately imposing was important. The game also implied you travel to locations by plane, but you never got to see it.
While the mockup is scaled for modern systems, I've composed the music and sound effects using SNES limitations to give it that old Capcom home-console flair.
This video is not endorsed or licensed by CAPCOM CO., LTD or THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY and is not a game under development. This is made only for fun.
Another old concept. Wanted to experiment with a re-imagined Sparkster / RocketKnightAdventures.
Always fun to imagine what a potential sequel could look like, mixing elements from all the old games. I've always found the series mechanics really fascinating.
return to bird world a sequel to my first album~ rediscover bird world and meet some new friends and foes includes pdf game manual with game info, store, lore, characters, locations, tracklist, and thanks
lost property control organization (samidare/hoshibackyard)
lost property control organization (samidare/hoshibackyard)
Warhammer 40,000 / Souls-like by Márton Kapoli
NEW ALBUM: BOSS RUSH
OOPS! ALL BOSS THEMES (with accompanying 3d scene for each track!)
(bandcamp) (spotify) (youtube)
Let's talk about Mario Nights, what was once just a blurb in an unassuming Creepypasta, brought to life in an obscure analog horror video, as we talk about everything that fascinates me about it, and everything about it that disappoints me to no end.
Learned about this video through @transistor-rhythm-909, who pointed out that this very blog gets briefly featured in the intro!
Fumie Saso - Gethsemane (Battle with The Agony) [from "Barnbellow's Estate"]
It's been a while since the last Barnbellow's Estate track; feels good to return to the project. It was actually a little off the cuff, though- I've got a few things on the backburner at the moment and whilst flitting through sample packs for inspo, I remembered I recently stumbled upon the second Methods of Madness sample pack (discovering that there even *was* a second one in the process- I had no idea), and things just kind of went from there- almost all the guitar loops and effects in this are from Methods of Mayhem 2 - Damage Control (and one set of loops in particular may sound familiar to people who've played Devil May Cry 3). There's still plenty of samples from the original Methods of Mayhem - Industrial Toolkit in here too, though- it wouldn't be a Pursuer related Barnbellow's Estate track if there wasn't. I'm mostly pleased with the song- I hit a major stumbling block with the original idea for the ending section, so the song's shorter then initially planned, and I definitely brushed up against the limitations of mixing in both Music 2000 and Wavepad, so the mix is a little bit muddy (though between that and taking tons of the reverb out + leaving the song sounding flat and sterile, I'll take the slightly muddy mix; if anything, that just makes it more era appropriate for a song styled to sound like it came from a 90s horror game). I did, however, reinterpret the melody used in "it cries. it cries. it cries. it cries." (henceforth considered The Agony's musical motif) + finagle the melody from Transformation (Ashes of Grief) (henceforth considered Yuna's musical motif) into that first proper section as sort of duelling melodies, cos It's Neat innit.
Speaking of Pursuers, the song's context; were Barnbellow's Estate a real game you could actually play, this tune would be used for the one and only direct fight in the main game, against the story's main antagonist; an eldritch being that serves as the avatar of suffering for life, known simply as The Agony. You only actually fight it like a traditional boss on a couple of the ending routes- on others, you escape from it like you would the other Pursuers- and neither of the endings where you fight it are good (one in particular is one of the game's planned two Bad Ends). This theme is specifically for the "fight" encounter and not the "escape" one. The title is taken from the Agony in the Garden oportion of The Life of Jesus Christ; Gethsemane is the most common name put forward for the garden Jesus retreated to following The Last Supper, just before his arrest and crucifiction, where he spent his time Having A Normal One, Praying, and generally being a complete mess. So there's your hackneyed hoity toity Biblical Reference of the project.
Below the readmore are excerpts from the Barnbellow's Estate Design Document, which covers The Agony + the "fight" encounter with it + the endings that can be achieved by taking that route.
***
Final Encounter/Pursuer #5: The Agony
Fury. Terror. Despair. These are feelings and sensations that transcend sapience and higher brain function; they are something even the most basic forms of life can know and understand, intimately, even if they don't have the words for them that we do. And my, are they powerful emotions, so severe and savage that they can scar the very land itself with wounds that will never heal. And It... well. It knows pain. It knows suffering. It knows despair. Some say that that is all It knows. It was not so much “born” as it was “formed”; spawned at the very beginning of this vast universe, billions of years before the Earth on which we live would come into being, in response to life's very first shed tear. And ever since, with each successive cry, it took greater form, forced to wallow and steep in an increasingly widening and deep pool of anguish. For longer then you or I can comprehend, this is how It lived.
It's no wonder that It would lash out in response. That It, too, would seek to hurt.
Without due cause.
Without an end goal.
Without any mercy.
Very few have encountered It directly. Fewer still have survived to tell It's story. Those that have know it by a single name;
The Agony.
The Agony serves as the “final boss” of Barnbellow's Estate, an avatar of it's form resting in the deepest part of a nightmarish, fleshy cave at the centremost point of the titular estate. Every horrible thing that has happened here has, in some way, been it's fault- a direct consequence of it's unending desire to inflict as much pain on every living thing as possible. Depending on a variety of factors throughout the game- the most important being how much the player has discovered and learned of each successive tragedy- Yuna's response to The Agony will fall one of two ways:
Her horror and anger overwhelm her, forcing her into a defensive position as a direct fight- the only direct fight in the game- between her and The Agony unfolds. This is what The Agony knows, and what The Agony wants, as this is how it can maximize Yuna's pain for it's own satisfaction.
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In the Fight route, The Agony's room expands into a larger, circular arena, in which it- via a humanoid form- can traverse effortlessly, attacking either directly with abilities of its own or summoning fleshy proxies of prior Pursuers to use their abilities instead. Yuna's stress meter doesn't just max out here- the actual stress meter in the HUD completely breaks, disappearing as she goes into a manic, catatonic state. However, Yuna doesn't stumble or trip here; if anything, her movement speed (which has defaulted to sprint) has increased, and she doesn't tire. Though it might not be noticeable at first, when used on the proxies (which have the exact same stats as whatever Pursuer they've formed into), her cameras damage output has also shot way up in addition. All of this comes at the cost of Yuna's own durability taking a massive hit- anything that hits her does a considerable amount of damage, and the fight can end very quickly if the player isn't careful. They must make use of Yuna's massively boosted stats to play as carefully as possible to overcome the fight.
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Endings
As briefly mentioned above, many of your actions throughout the game will determine what ending you get once the game concludes. Here's how that would work, roughly;
Yuna's main goal is to survive the night, but your actions as a player can influence the degree to which that takes precedence. If you, too, value escaping with your life, and thus play the game as a series of tense cat and mouse changes without doing much investigating, you will wind up with the most straightforward ending; Yuna fights The Agony, barely ekes out a win, and is forever haunted by what transpired in the estate. It is left ambiguous as to what, exactly, her life looked like afterwards, but it is at the very least made clear that she dropped out of her parapsychology program entirely and moved out-of-state, entirely uprooting her life and disappearing somewhere in the American Midwest to start anew, making no attempt to contact her family or anyone she knew back home ever again. Not the most rewarding of endings, but playing this way generally involves a higher degree of interaction with the various Pursuers throughout the game, as you're not taking detours to engage with anything else; to this end, the game itself becomes the reward, as the player takes repeated gambles on hiding from and escaping the Pursuers from start to finish and ends the adventure on an extremely tough boss fight that they can only just barely overcome.
However, Yuna may be terrified, but she is also curious; she has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that persists even in life-or-death moments, and the players can lean into that. The Investigation Phase massively opens up to the player the more they choose to poke around in every nook and cranny, overturn as many stones as possible to find out what, exactly, happened in each layer of the estate- and indeed, there is much more to each Pursuer and their circumstances than is divulged above. The issue, of course, is parsing what information is useful, and what isn't, though there is at least one general rule the player can follow;
Maintain a healthy balance between Notes and Hauntings for the most “complete” outcome. Notes, by and large, contain most of the factual information; many of them were written by people who knew or encountered the Pursuers before and after their demise, and a good deal were written by the Pursuers when they were still human. If you want to learn the details, that's where you turn. But details are static, un-emotive things. To actually experience even a vague idea of what the Pursuers were going through, and gain a greater perspective on each of them, you will want to seek out Hauntings, as many of them relate directly to those experiences in some manner. Of course, not all of them do, and at least a few are unreliable in terms of their factual accuracy, distorted by time and by pain.
If you rely too heavily on the notes, Yuna gains understanding, but can't fully put herself in the shoes of the beings trying to hurt her. This leads to Yuna's fear, anger, and sadness to override her capacity for empathy. This plays out, in game, with the note count increasing and the haunting count decreasing; you learn more, but feel less, in practice. This also sets Yuna on the path to fighting The Agony at the end, though this time, she does not overcome it; no matter how hard you fight, you will fall to it. Her emotions at their absolute peak, entirely out of control, is the exact key The Agony needs to sink it's influence into her, tearing her apart and reshaping her as it sees fit, just like it did to all the Pursuers before her. Yuna never returns from her trip; she, too, becomes a denizen wandering the layers of the estate. Another scary story woven into the fabric of history; the tale of an overzealous ghost hunter who in way over her head, and joined the ranks of the very things she sought out. An ending that's a touch on the nose, given it's the conclusion to a route likely chosen by the most lore-hungry player, but similarly to the above, that wealth of information is it's own reward. And, for those looking to try out every possible permutation, the knowledge learned here can be used to fill in the gaps in other routes.
HOSHIBACKYARD | “Game idea about investigating a school that has gone crazy”
