Dead Hardware

Controls: Arrow Keys to Move / X to interact / Sprint

GAME MAY BE CUT OFF WHEN NOT PLAYED IN FULLSCREEN

Music Sampled:
End of Small Sanctuary - Silent HIll 3 OST
Dive into Heart - Kingdom Hearts OST

Sound Effects pulled from PS2 Main Menu and freesound.org
Textures from textures.com

Dead Hardware is a game based on my childhood experience of being terrified of the PS2's "Red Screen of Death". You play a video game charecter referred to as the traveller, whose attempt to save corrupts the playstation 2, leading them inside its hardware to attempt to restore its functionality. The primary gameplay is avoiding a large monster in a labyrinthian city attempting to find three doorways. The monster is faster than you, so look for alleyways indicated by warm light to help you hide from it. 

I began knowing I wanted to make a horror game set in a PS2, and to be honest not much else. I quickly moved into Fixed Camera, and then into there being a monster chasing you at some point, but these came from essentially a pool of ideas I dipped into as I learned what it was possible to do. Learning and creating simultaneously leads to this sort of flexible scope, but it definetly makes me want to have a better idea in mind before starting creation in the future, as older elements often clashed with newer ones as I failed to create with all of them in mind. Current events, from my computer breaking to a global pandemic, obviously got in the way. While I would like to say I was working passionately on the project to the very end, in truth I ended up just trying to get across the finish line before some new horror derailed me. That all said though, I think it turned out ok. 
My favourite parts were building the world and its ambience, from writing to modeling and texturing. I think Dead Hardware is at its best when you're walking through the city with the distant noise of the monster hunting in the background and the specific locales with their colour pallette and sounds were my favourite parts to make and the parts I think turned out best. The cameras were also really fun to use, but very challenging. My system was a little clunky and required alot of playtesting, but there are frames and movements I truly am proud of. The level design itself was maybe the hardest. I didn't even truly understand the scale of the player or monster upon first creating it, nor what worked best for my systems. The cramped upper levels work better, but the fountains and bottom level are just me struggling to find good angles in a level really not designed for them. The level design is also quite confusing, and not necessarily in the ways I had hoped, with much of it looking the same and with no clear indication of where the doorways might be. I had feared this when choosing the PS2 towers as my main building block, and I did my best to combat this with lighting and verticality, but in the future I would certainly choose more distinct locals. Finally, as for the monster itself, it works better as a piece of ambience than as an actual threat. Its not very threatening once it starts chasing you, nor is it smart, often running right past you or being stuck in walls. The monster just isn't very good, but it leaves you alone often enough to be somewhat scary once it finds you again and works as a lingering threat as you explore, like Mr X's distant footsteps in Resident Evil 2 Remake. 

Overall, I like Dead Hardware. I think it captures thematically and aesthetically alot of what I was looking for, and has alot of singular moments I really enjoy. The glue holding those pieces together is lacking and its hard to know exactly which way to push it to have it be more coherant, but as a test for making a 3D fixed camera horror game I can at least say for certain that I learned mountains from its failures. While I was able to hold myself to a week to do list to ensure the game was completed on time, and with enough time to work on other issues that arised, I do wish I had come into the project with a clearer scope, as it would have helped me build all the elements at once in unison, rather than individually and hoping they worked when I mashed them together. I can't say I love its finished state, but its also one I knew I would never truly finish in the best of circumstances, and these last couple weeks certainly did their best to get in the way. But all that said, for my first real 3D game I'm pretty proud of it.