It was Friday the 13th at some point this month. I watched EVIL DEAD (it was pretty good) and I played RESIDENT EVIL 8 (it was also good). Happy Mini-Halloween everyone!
This month I have for you: HAUNTED HOUSES, CATS and DANTE FROM THE DEVIL MAY CRY SERIES
Earlier this year I spent an evening making mockups of a more ambitious HAUNTED HOUSE. To briefly summarise, I made a small, online haunted house for my friends back in 2020 using the LIKELIKE framework and tried to follow it up a year later with three more. Despite having fun and making great progress, I ran into some difficulties with this second batch of houses due to the finicky and time-consuming process of uploading and testing assets, logic and network stuff. Additionally, while I was committed to keeping the houses small, I kept coming back to the third house with an idea that required a bit more depth.
The first two houses were based on sharks/ghost ships and occult/slashers and I still love them
Enter the mockups – a couple of rough screens to help me figure out what I wanted from this mysterious third house. I knew that I wanted to keep the feel of the original haunted houses in regards to the limited point-and-click mechanics and my neon-bright pixels, but key additions – a dialogue system and inventory – threatened to intrude on the extremely limited space, so I…added a smartphone. It works perfectly.
I actually ignored this project for a while because I had mixed feelings about abandoning my LIKELIKE haunted houses in favour a significantly more detailed haunted project, but at the start of this month I was in need of a break from various other creative endeavours and figured it wouldn’t hurt to spend a couple of days prototyping. If I could build a more Caspar-friendly system for implementing this style of project then it would be worth it!
✨ PROTOTYPING IN THE UNITY ENGINE ✨
I braced myself for the consequences of asking Unity to play nice with pixel graphics and was delighted to discover that the engine has improved immensely in this aspect since my last attempt several years ago. I still had a brief fight to the death over some blurry TextMeshPro font assets but most of the week was a breeze.
All the basics up and running! (90% of the basics are UI elements)
With a basic framework sorted I moved onto fleshing out the dialogue and inventory systems. I deliberated and settled on YarnSpinner for the dialogue, integrating it easily before spending several days painstakingly setting up UI elements in order to mimic a chat app. Setting up anchors, resizing text boxes and having it scroll nicely was a huge pain and a headache but now I know. I know not to do this again. It looks good though.
The inventory is still in-progress but coming along nicely, so after that I’ll probably take a break and then see about making a basic demo zone, maybe some puzzles? We’ll see! I’m having fun.
I spent most of this month working on an OC piece and then bit off more than I could chew, so it’s not finished yet. Oops! Instead, here’s some cats. I made them for the BIOME GALLERY as there was a distinct lack of cat-related content. As usual, I started with a replica of my favourite orange creature ‘Merlin’ but couldn’t resist making more, so here is a small parade of cats for you to enjoy. Enjoy!
Did you know: Dante? From the DEVIL MAY CRY series? I’ve wanted a good figurine of him for a while and I fell in love with the wonderful DMC5 version that ASMUS released a few years ago. Mostly because his face does not look scary. Anyway, I had to wait a while but he finally arrived, which means I got to spend some time playing with action figures and taking photos. Here’s some photos!
[Dante voice] IT’S COOL !
What I loved about this figure in particular (aside from having a face that was not scary) was the huge array of accessories and, delightfully, the inclusion of Rebellion AND Devil Sword Dante. I love Dante’s cool new gamer sword, but I’m still very attached to Rebellion and miss it dearly. I mean, come on, it’s got a funny little skeleton on it! What do you expect from me.
Additional inclusions are: Devil Sword Sparda (very cool, a little too heavy for most poses), Balrog (I love punch kick devil arms so this is great) and Cerberus (actually made of metal). Accessories I wish had been included were Coyote-A and Faust…guns always get the short straw with these figures, and I’m so sad that there has been no DMC5 merch that has acknowledged the funny demon-killing hat. (Maybe I will make one for him?)
‘is it Halloween already?’
Overall though he is a 10/10: super detailed, well made, great articulation, huge accessory pool…truly a dream figurine for me. He sits proudly on my shelf next to his small sibling, Nendoroid Dante.
RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE - My initial impression of VILLAGE was, ‘this is not as scary as RESIDENT EVIL 7’ and then the power went out, plunging me into irl darkness immediately after a tense and stressful section of the game. I don’t know how the team at CAPCOM managed it, but kudos for getting my energy supplier in on the action. Mercifully the rest of my playthough went unchallenged and I enjoyed the action-packed adventures of Ethan Winters, Man Who Cannot Stop Whining.
I was a little apprehensive – but open-minded – about VILLAGE because it riffs off of RESIDENT EVIL 4, a game that neither my brother or I particularly like or enjoy. And sure, it leans on the action a lot more (shoutout to the Robot Wars → Call of Duty → Dark Souls sequence of events) but I was relieved that there were still some pockets of horror and the pseudo-metroidvania world layout that lets you backtrack for extra goodies and lore.
VILLAGE also contains the worst moment a video game has put me through, which involved me hiding in a locker for an hour while my brother talked about his reading list in an attempt to distract me. It was very scary, very funny, and yes it was an hour because I timed it. What a good piece of game design.
the subtitles captured my thought process pretty well I think
That’s all for now! See you all after Pride Month…!
Caspar 👻
